Thomas Kuhn coined the modern definition of the word “paradigm” in The Structure
of Scientific Revolutions, published in 1962. A paradigm, according to
Kuhn's definition, is a conceptual model that explains a set of scientific observations,
which creates a framework to fit the observations. Paradigms are structures
that scientists use to order information and are similar to what we call “worldviews.”
Kuhn described how paradigms changed. Scientists perform “normal science,”
staying within their paradigm, as they perform experiments. When observations
occur that fail to fit into their paradigm, those stray observations are often
discarded as experimental error or the prevailing paradigm is patched up to
account for them. When the prevailing paradigm becomes increasingly unable
to explain the strange observations that pile up, eventually somebody would
see that those stray observations pointed to a different paradigm. Kuhn presented
several instances of that happening, and the most famous was the paradigm shift
that Einstein's relativity ushered in.
The oddity of the Michelson-Morley experiment’s results - that the speed of light was independent of the speed of the light’s source - was a classic instance of an anomalous result while pursuing normal science. Physicists wrestled with the meaning of the Michelson-Morley experiment for a generation. Then a young clerk in the Swiss patent office proposed a theory that accounted for the experimental results, although Einstein said that he was only indirectly aware of them. He proposed his relativity theory, the Newtonian paradigm was overturned by the Einsteinian paradigm, and 20th century physics was born. Einstein challenged Newton’s assumptions of absolute time and absolute space, and instead saw them as relative. Previous assumptions were challenged and replaced, which overturned the paradigm.
Einstein realized that his theories would fall by the wayside one day, and stated that every theory is eventually killed by a fact. Einstein also realized the limitations of scientific theories. He wrote that a theory “determines what we can observe.”[1] A paradigm can illuminate, but it can also blind. The trick is keeping one’s eyes and mind open, and not become captive to one’s point of view. In science, unfortunately, scientists are rarely able to see beyond the paradigm that they were inculcated with. Max Planck best put it when he wrote:
“a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”[2]
It is no accident that the greatest theoretical breakthroughs in scientific history were usually made by men less than 30 years of age, such as Newton, Einstein, Heisenberg, Maxwell, and Bohr. They saw the old paradigms with fresh eyes, and proposed new ones. Even Einstein could become dogmatic late in his life, as he “reproached” Heisenberg, saying that he surely could not believe that “God plays at dice.”[3]
Kuhn argued that scientists adopt new paradigms not necessarily because the new one is more accurate, but because it becomes something that they believe in. Kuhn’s observations inflamed raging controversies about science, truth, and reality. Those debates will not end anytime soon. Today, a materialistic paradigm rules the scientific establishment. Everything is seen as a mechanism. There is no role for consciousness to play.
Ironically, the very men whose shoulders modern physics rides on – Einstein, Heisenberg, Schroedinger, Bohr, and others - did not subscribe to the scientific establishment’s framework. They were all, to one degree or another, mystics.[4] That has not stopped the various “skeptical” societies from mounting holy wars against anything not conforming to scientific materialism. There are striking similarities between the views of the scientific fundamentalists and the religious fundamentalists, as their worldviews have little to do with the visions of their prophets and can be inversions of it. The members of skeptical societies often operate from a faith, a faith known today as scientism, which is the worship of science, believing its methods to be the only valid path to knowledge. Einstein wrote that “cosmic religious feeling” motivated the greatest religious and scientific geniuses of history.[5]
Near the turn of the millennium, paradigms were being challenged across the entire spectrum of human thought. Mark Woodhouse’s Paradigm Wars is an introduction and review of the current state of paradigm challenge and defense. Woodhouse discussed paradigm challenges in the areas of: environment, education, society, patriarchy, economics, religion, personal identity, science, and extraterrestrials.[6] The paradigms often center around dualities, such as patriarchy/matriarchy, but there is also seen a third way that attempts to integrate the polarities, such as Riane Eisler’s conception of gylany, which posits a harmonious co-existence of male and female principles.[7] Dualities being examined these days include: male/female, fear/love, destroy/create, objectivity/subjectivity, control/freedom, victim/creator, competition/cooperation and materialism/spiritualism.
One trap can be falling into the either/or false dichotomy regarding the dualities. One can be for neither patriarchy nor matriarchy, but gylany, which honors both genders. During the Cold War, Americans were fed the false dichotomy of choosing capitalism or communism, with capitalism falsely called the “free” system and communism the one that imprisons people. When the USA overthrew the elected Marxist government of Chile (and many others like it), the false dichotomy that the USA purveyed of free/unfree about capitalism/communism was laid bare. Any attempt by the colonized peoples to shed Western domination was rubber-stamped “communism,” thus demonized, then subjected to military and covert attack by the USA, and millions of people died in the colonized world. Some dichotomies appear to have little middle ground, such as love/fear. Various paradigms have become entrenched, with great economic, political, and sociological consequences attending the adherence to paradigms, or challenging them. Each of the prevailing ideologies, whether it is capitalism, nationalism, materialism or consumerism, has its foot soldiers that defend the paradigm that puts food on their table.
In medicine, there is a broad picture to see, which has numerous facets, some of which will be presented in this essay.
Masculine, Feminine and "Modern" Medicine
As Riane Eisler and others have made clear, two powers have been worshipped throughout human history: the power to make life, and the power to take it. Their correspondence to female and male principles is obvious. There is substantial evidence of goddess-based religions in the past, and evidence that the male, sky-god Judeo-Christian religions are ideological successors to a time when male-based religion wiped out female-based religion.[8] Although feminists write about that issue at length, so did Joseph Campbell, the USA's greatest mythologist.[9] Campbell wrote that ancient mythology in west Asia (today’s Middle East, Fertile Crescent region, etc.) evolved from female-dominated creation myths to male-dominated creation myths. It reflected the power struggles of the day, when herd-tending warrior societies, with their violent, male, sky-god deities conquered the agricultural societies with their feminine, earth-based, life-giving deities. The mythology eventually reflected who was in charge.
A prominent instance of the male-based corruption of feminine mythology was the evolution of the snake in symbology. Snakes were associated with women, healing, and the regeneration of life (related to how snakes shed their skin) in ancient times. The Adam and Eve story in the Book of Genesis turned feminine mythology upside down. Instead of being the source of life, Eve and the serpent were relegated to inferior, even malevolent, roles as they ruined the paradise arrangement that the Jewish god dictated to humankind.[10] Even though such refashioning of ancient myths to favor men persists to this day, the feminine symbolism persists in less obvious ways. Asclepius was the Greek god of medicine. His staff was entwined with a serpent, and the serpent-entwined caduceus is the symbol of today’s American Medical Association ("AMA"). Among Asclepius’s offspring were Hygeia and Panacea, the goddesses of health and healing. The word hygiene derives from the same word that Hygeia does. Hygeia represented the principles of prevention, sanitation, nutrition, and healthy living. Hygeia represented the gentle principles of feminine-oriented medicine. They have largely been denigrated or ignored by male-dominated medicine for thousands of years, beginning to come back into vogue only recently. They are largely minimized in medical circles even today, as there is little money in preventing disease. The current paradigm provides funding for treating diseases, not for preventing them. “Cure” can be sold by the pound, while prevention is only needed by the ounce, as Ben Franklin observed.
Below are some images related to the evolution of the serpent in Western mythology and iconography.
The West has engaged in a war against women for thousands of years; women are the most consistently oppressed group in the human journey. The power to give life is a decidedly feminine undertaking, but in the war against women, men have dominated and have exalted the power to take life as the ultimate power, hence our wars against each other, Mother Earth, our bodies, etc. Healing the human body is the province of the feminine principle, but men dominated the field. In a might-makes-right world, the mightiest rule.
Historically, women have dispensed most health care, but it was usually done for family members and those women were not financially compensated. Even when saint-like figures such as Florence Nightingale brought women into the modern healing profession, along with the principle of sanitation, they initially had to work for free and had to be completely subservient to the male doctors. In the standard, male-written histories of medicine, women are so scarce that they stand out as remarkable when mentioned.[11] There are debates about how many women died in the witch hunts (likely several tens of thousands, at least – and about 75% of all witch executions); how many were healers and midwives is also a source of debate, but what is not debatable is that when the Catholic Church’s ideological dominance eventually gave way to the rise of Western science, the baton passed from one male-dominated establishment to another. When science rose in the West, generally considered to have begun with Copernicus's heliocentric theory, women were conspicuously absent. That was partly due to women often being forbidden formal education. Western religion and science were united in their misogyny. The conquest-of-nature attitude that still dominates Western thinking also reflected the denigration of all things feminine.
The witch-hunting centuries nearly wiped out herbal medicine in Western Europe, even though Paracelsus, the great Renaissance medical iconoclast, claimed that the best medicines that he had seen came from women healers.[12] Medicine evolved from the gentle medicine of women healers to the leeches, purgatives, bleedings, mercury, and other barbarities of male-based medicine. Even men of the day knew that women's medicine worked vastly better than the male-based tortures that masqueraded as medicine, but that did not stop the burning of "witches" and other suppressions of women healers. The archbishop of Saint Andrews summoned a woman healer to cure him, which she did. He then had her burned to death for practicing "witchcraft" on him, partly to avoid paying her bill.[13]
Feminine medicine operates from the principle that prevention is best, that well treated bodies take care of themselves, and are their own best medicine. When the body needs healing, feminine medicine is gentle. Remedies such as herbs and nutrition coax the body back to health.
Masculine medicine sees the body as a soldier on a battlefield. Not gentle, masculine medicine does not see the body as able to care for itself. As in cowboy movies, it is always riding to the rescue. It is the body versus the hostile world, or even against itself. The body becomes a battlefield that needs the intervention of medical violence.[14] It is life-taking, instead of life-giving. It uses antibiotics to kill off "invading" microorganisms. It violates the body with knives. It uses powerful drugs that violently manipulate the body's chemistry. It does not give the body what it needs to heal itself. It does not trust the body's wisdom, certain that it is clever and powerful enough to manipulate the body into health. It operates from the victim principle.
In the case of cancer and vascular disease, masculine medicine sees the body itself as the enemy. With cancer, parts of the body "turn traitor" and the goal of masculine medicine is annihilation. Surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation all operate under the paradigm of attacking the body while asserting that it is discerning enough to kill the "bad guys" and spare the "good guys."
The issue of masculine versus feminine medicine is a conflict between paradigms. That mentality can be seen throughout Western Medicine, from childbirth interventions (and even before, as with amniocentesis) until a patient's deathbed.
The masculine medical paradigm has waged war specifically against women's bodies. Women used to give birth in a squatting position, which is by far the most effective method. Louis XIV changed the practice from women squatting to them lying on their backs. It was done so that he could have a good look at one of his mistresses giving birth. The birthing stools of the day did not afford him a clear and salacious view, and he had the practice changed so that he could peek from behind a curtain at the festivities. Giving birth on one's back is much harder on the mother than letting gravity help. Fortunately, that practice is waning somewhat. It has taken "medicine" three centuries to begin undoing the damage of a perverse king.
Changing the childbirth position is the least of it. Male, Western doctors devised fiendish methods of "treating" women's problems. Clitoridectomy was used in the nineteenth century, prescribed for maladies such as hysteria. The Greek word hysterikós meant womb, and is the root of the word hysteria, a decidedly misogynistic word. If a woman was insufficiently obedient to her husband, a diagnosis of hysteria could be obtained and a clitoridectomy was performed. In the 1870s, a London doctor specialized in performing clitoridectomies without obtaining informed consent from his patients, which got him kicked out of the business, not for performing the operations, but for doing them without consent, and also because he was a self-promoter. He simply moved to the lax regulatory atmosphere of the USA and continued practicing his treatments. Suspicion of the vile behavior of masturbation was grounds for the operation. If a woman was too orgasmic during sexual intercourse, the operation was also the recommended "cure."[15] Part of that practice's justification was contraception, as the day’s prevailing theory stated that if a woman did not attain orgasm, she could not conceive. Male Western doctors have never advocated castration or penisectomies for "curing" male maladies.
In the 20th century, lobotomy was one method of "curing" many maladies, prominently used on women. Hysterectomy and mastectomy have been very "popular" over the past century, invented and performed almost exclusively by male doctors. They operate from the principle of “when in doubt, cut it out.” From foot binding in China to Suttee in India to hunting witches in Europe to clitoridectomy in Africa to the "enlightened" practices of modern medicine, the record is long and grim.[16]
In America in the early 21st century, Caesarean section "childbirth" was performed in about a quarter of all births. In Europe, where they did not wipe out all the midwives, the rate was half of America's, and in Japan, the rate was only 7%. In profit-making hospitals, the rate in America was more than a third, and some doctors warned that it would go over 50% in the day's legal climate, in which the "when in doubt, cut it out" philosophy guides hospital doctors. It already was 50% in some hospitals, if the woman was white with medical insurance. In 2010, the USA's rate rose to 33%. As America’s Caesarian rate has gone up, its infant mortality ranking among the world’s nations has correspondingly dropped. The Caesarian rate in the USA is more than three times Japan’s, and its infant mortality rate is nearly twice as high, and is higher than that of any nation in Western Europe.
When a Kansas insurance company began paying doctors the same amount for delivering a child, whether the birth was Caesarean or not, Caesarean sections declined by over half within one year. In a hospital in Pithiviers, France, supervised for many years by an enlightened male obstetrician, where they do not induce labor or unduly interfere, the Caesarian rate is less than 7%, substantially less than nearly any Western hospital. At a home birth community in Tennessee known as The Farm, the Caesarean rate was less than 2%. The stress on the infant and mother is enormously higher with Caesarean birth, as well as "complications" that risk their lives. Even with “normal” births, the episiotomy rate in American hospitals approaches 100%, while it is about 6% in Scandinavian hospitals.[17] Episiotomy is a painful and dangerous practice that causes severe complications with mothers, but in the rush to cut, the practice is standard in American hospitals. Midwifed births have a far lower infant mortality rate than doctor-supervised hospital births. Women report far more satisfaction with the childbirth process if they can deliver it outside of a hospital environment, particularly in America, where women are often seen as little more than packages to be opened to remove the prize. A mother's complication rate is many times higher with Caesarian section births than vaginal delivery, and their death rate is much higher.[18]
There have been some victories in the area of childbirth. After the medical profession nearly rendered them extinct, midwives have staged a comeback in America. In Washington State in the year 2000, House Bill 2031 was passed, and my medical insurance company was forced to provide coverage for midwifed births.
Western medicine is a money machine. America spends trillions of dollars a year ($2.7 trillion in 2011, double that of a decade earlier, and nearly the highest medical bill on Earth, as a percent of gross national product, at more than 16% in 2013) on health care. A tiny fraction is spent on prevention, and the prevention is worse than the disease in many instances, and even causes disease.[19] Instead, nearly all the money goes to dramatic interventions, dominated by drugs and surgery. Dr. Julian Whitaker once challenged his readers to try naming a common mainstream medical treatment in America that was not a drug or surgical procedure. Whitaker bet that they could not.[20] The entire Western medical paradigm may be built on a shaky foundation.
Lessons in Reversing Heart Disease
During my father’s career, he gradually gained weight. He was an exceptional athlete in his youth, but by age 34 the American diet combined with his desk job took its toll. He went from about 155 muscular pounds in his youth to more than 200. He also drank heavily. Early in 1970, he began having kidney problems, quit drinking cold turkey, and has not had a drop since. He quit smoking around 1960 the same way.
In June of 1970, although he had stopped drinking, he weighed about 200 pounds and had high blood pressure and incipient angina. He was developing arthritis. His father had similar problems, and soon had a string of heart attacks that forced him into retirement. The naval base where my father worked was a high-stress environment, and the coronary care unit in nearby Oxnard was filled with professionals from the base. My father was obviously heading for a heart attack and he wanted to prevent it.
My father was suffering from arteriosclerosis. Arteriosclerosis, like atherosclerosis, is a disease of the blood vessels. Those and related diseases killed more than 700,000 Americans in 2013. What happens is that the blood becomes “polluted” with matter that helps form deposits on the blood vessel walls. A deposit breaks off from the wall, or the turbulence created by the rough cell walls allows a blood clot to form, which eventually lodges in a blood vessel supplying the heart, brain, or other vital organ, which often kills the person. The process of arterial clogging and hardening begins very early with Americans. Research has found that the process can even begin in the womb. In 1970, Western medicine considered hardening of the arteries to be a normal aging process. The blood pressure tables of the day had the ideal blood pressure steadily increasing as one got older. When I told that to an uncle, he said, “Yes, the formula we were taught was 80 plus your age.” I found that advice in The Book of Health, published in 1973.[21]
Since arteriosclerosis was considered a normal part of the aging process, my father was told that the hardening and clogging of his arteries was normal and that the only hope of avoiding a future heart attack was taking some pills. That was the best that “medicine” could do. Essentially, my father was given his death sentence, to be executed at some future date, perhaps before long. In those days, medical doctors in America were a short step below God in the hierarchy of existence, yet my father sought a second opinion, and not from another physician.
He obtained a booklet titled Stale Food vs. Fresh Food: The Cause and Cure of Arteriosclerosis. It was the result of research by American scientists from Mississippi. It argued that arteriosclerosis was a disease of civilization, particularly the consumption of “civilized” food. Wild animals and “primitive” humankind had virtually no hardening of the arteries. Only modern man “preserves” his food. The booklet stated that the process of “preserving” food robbed it of its nutritional value. More than that, the process of “preserving” food created the substances responsible for hardening the arteries.
According to Stale Food vs. Fresh Food, dead food, particularly flour products, caused hardening of the arteries, and live food was its cure. The vast majority of Americans are so addicted to processed food that they cannot imagine changing their diets. I have seen only a few people significantly change their diets, even when their eating habits were killing them and they knew it. I have never seen an adult change his/her diet when his/her spouse and/or family did not support it. People are creatures of habit, and the eating habit is perhaps the most ingrained one we have, but my father was trying to save his life. When he stopped smoking and drinking, and when he decided to eat live food, he just did it. Nobody else in the family smoked or drank, but we ate like the average American family. In California, there was more fresh produce available than in other states, so we already ate more fresh food than most Americans, but our family diet was not otherwise remarkable.
At that time, my breakfast consisted of a huge bowl of Cornflakes, drowned in sugar. My culinary specialty was making inch-thick peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, eaten with a soft drink. Twelve-year-old boys can eat like there is no tomorrow. I was the average American kid, diet-wise. One memorable day in June 1970, as I sat at the kitchen counter, eating my bowl of Cornflakes, my mother walked into the kitchen and said, “Do you know that those Cornflakes are bad for you?”
My father embraced Stale Food vs. Fresh Food’s findings and was determined to try it, and decided the family would follow suit. I read Stale Food vs. Fresh Food and was impressed. The booklet laid out its thesis and research clearly. It presented numerous case histories of health miracles attending the change of diet from processed food to live food. Old people suddenly began acting and looking 20 years younger when put onto live-food diets.
The booklet had photos of cadavers' arteries sliced open and laid flat. The photos were of arteries at various ages, from age 10 to 60, of average Americans. At age 10, the plaque began to finely coat the artery wall. By age 25, the process had begun in earnest. As the person aged, the artery became distorted, no longer running straight. The artery walls got thicker and thicker with the deposits, and instead of running straight they began looking serpentine, like question marks. By age 60, the artery was almost unrecognizable. They were some of the most obscene pictures I have ever seen, and those were average American arteries.
My entire family changed eating habits, and I was a willing participant. It was not a complete change to live food with no looking back, but it was radical. We ate junk food from time to time, and I know firsthand how hard it is to swim against the current of society in something as fundamental as eating. My father was trying to save his life, however, and followed it to the letter. It worked. Results were seen almost immediately, and in two years my father’s health made a complete turnaround. He lost 40 pounds. The angina and arthritis disappeared. His blood pressure went from abnormally high to “abnormally” low. It was not really abnormally low, but according to the inflated blood pressure tables of the day, in which arteriosclerosis was considered normal, it was. He turned himself into a superman. He later said that it was the healthiest he had ever felt. He spread the news of his cure to all who would listen. He began preaching the virtues of live food to relatives, friends and coworkers.
That was 1970, and it was radical talk to state that your diet could make you well. This is an area where I have actually seen true progress since 1970. In 2014, the Mayo Clinic's website mentioned diet and lifestyle changes as the first line of defense against heart disease. The Mayo Clinic CD that I have from 1996 did not mention that at all, but was all about drugs and surgeries. Artery disease deaths have declined from a million a year in the 1990s to "only" about 750,000 in 2013. The mainstream medical doctrine in 1970 stated that hardening of the arteries was irreversible. The medical establishment now admits that when they said that hardening of the arteries was a normal aging process and that it was irreversible, they did not know what they were talking about. Some progress has been made, and it is nice to see.
To date, I know of nobody who radically changed their diet to live food and did not benefit immensely from it. The problem is that very few people do it. Hardening of the arteries is indeed reversible. Dr. Dean Ornish had success in reversing heart disease with his health regimen, which is mainly about eating a live food diet.[22]
My father convinced some of his coworkers to try out a live food diet, and one man lost more than 50 pounds while eating more than ever, and reversed his health problems. A few coworkers and his immediate family were about the only people that my father ever persuaded to change their diets. The most common reaction was to call it all “crazy.” The term “health nut” came into use around that time. That my father was living proof that it worked made no difference to people addicted to processed food. They looked to the pronouncements of the medical establishment for guidance, and there was nearly complete silence on the issue of diet. I talked to people about it, and was amazed at the hostile reactions that I received. At age 12, I learned that few want to hear that their addictions are harmful, and it was no different with processed food.
I learned to be cautious about voicing unpopular opinions. I only give health advice to those around me when it appears it will be received, which is rarely. I have watched many people die at the hands of Western medicine over the years, and it has not been easy to watch. American physicians received almost zero nutritional training, and what little they did receive was propaganda from the food processing industry. Consequently, they could not have an informed opinion on the issue. Again, that has been changing in the just the past generation.
When I was 17, my father brought home Paul Bragg’s The Miracle of Fasting, which was his magnum opus. Today, evidence points to Bragg lying about his age and other things. I present the evidence in this essay, and the background at this footnote.[23] With the fraudulent misrepresentations aside, Jack LaLanne was one of Bragg’s pupils (he was the classic 98-pound weakling when he met Bragg as a teenager), and Jack lived to be 96, working out daily to the day before he died. Bragg promoted other health ideas such as regular fasting, which has been part of my health regimen since 1975. His charlatanry aside, Bragg’s advice is about all I have ever needed, and I doubt that anybody will come along and improve on it much. The ways of health are quite simple: eat as much live food as possible (at least half of the diet), exercise, fast, drink pure water, have pure thoughts, get out in nature. That is about all that anybody needs to know. It is the essence of Hygeia’s role in medicine. There is nothing of significance to add, except perhaps realizing that humans are poorly suited for eating animal flesh. I have been a vegetarian for many years, with no ill effects and many positive ones. Prevention is the only answer worth talking about, and what prevents heart disease also cures it.
The same kind of gangsterism that we encountered in the energy industry is possibly worse in medicine. In 1990, I obtained a book titled Medical Dark Ages, by Ralph Hovnanian.[24] The book chronicled the studies that have been performed with alternative cancer treatments, and their success rates. They nearly all had higher success rates than surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation. They were, nearly without exception, harmless. They were nearly all vastly cheaper than mainstream methods, and they are all illegal in the United States. In many states, doctors have gone to prison for prescribing them to their patients. Medical Dark Ages listed the results of hundreds of studies that covered dozens of treatments. I had already been obtaining other material about alternative cancer treatments, but Medical Dark Ages was my wake-up call.
For all the information involving alternative cancer treatments, what bowled me over in Medical Dark Ages were the more than 100 pages of quotations. I would read the quotes for an hour or so and get a kind of intellectual vertigo. With Ralph's enthusiastic permission, I reproduced many of them on this web site, organized slightly more than Ralph had. Ralph spent years collecting a vast array of quotes from various sources about the medical industry, the cancer industry in particular. Before I deal with the cancer industry, here is a quote that lays out another aspect of the medical establishment. Here it is.
"Although I found that the booklet (Stale Food vs. Fresh Food) contained some helpful suggestions and its author, Mr. Robert Ford, is a knowledgeable and sincere person (i.e. no intent to defraud), I found the representations in the Respondent's booklet to be unproven and contrary to the weight of informed medical and scientific opinion. As indicated by Dr.___, (the only U.S. Post Office medical witness) a danger of this publication is that it will deceive people who have arterio-sclerotic problems into believing that they can cure these problems by diet alone instead of seeking medical (AMA) help. Because the ads and this booklet contain materially false representations, they violate the provisions of 39 US Code Section 3005. Therefore...a mail stop order...should be issued..." - E.S. Bernstein, Administrative Law Judge, (1982).
That booklet saved my father's life. The mail stop order made it illegal to send it through the USA's mail system, effectively banning it in America. In effect, it was similar to the Nazi/Catholic book burnings. Using the USA's Post office is an effective tactic to wipe out alternative health practitioners. It is only one weapon in the medical establishment’s arsenal, but it is an effective one. Here is a link to a full account of the banning of Stale Food vs. Fresh Food.
Vast numbers of people per year in America die of vascular disease, and our dietary and health habits are nearly solely responsible for it. The most obvious factors are things such as smoking tobacco and drinking alcohol, but diet may be responsible for most of it.
In short, our bodies ideally consume live food, as with all animals. We are the only animal that eats dead food, and the diseases that we fall prey to are almost unique in the animal kingdom, particularly in their frequency. Living processes provide the nutrition that we get from food. When food is killed, those life processes cease and it begins decomposing. Vitamins and other vital nutrients can rapidly decompose. When humanity ventured out of its natural range in the tropics, we eventually learned to domesticate plants and animals and preserve food in order to survive the seasons. We have done it so long that it is taken for granted, yet it is not a natural or ideal process. Humans have adapted to cooked food, and cooked food may have even led to the appearance of humans. Cooking gave humans an energy advantage, but it also created toxins, and the cumulative effect of the toxins of processed foods catch up with people as they age. When people only lived to be 30 or so, the cumulative harm of cooked food did not matter, but because industrialization greatly improved human life expectancy, those effects now contribute to the degenerative diseases that most industrialized people die from. If people only ate immediately cooked food (such as boiled or steamed), that would likely lead to few health issues, but the many ways that foods are processed in today's industrialized world takes the natural food and removes it far from its live state, such as potato chips, bread, and cake. That is where the damage from the industrialized diet primarily comes from, not from boiling and steaming.
Huge industries are based upon food processing, and through their wealth and power they have largely obscured the issue of how harmful processed food is to human biology. It is related to the corruption of medical science discussed in this site’s fluoridation essay. In the materialistic and reductionistic way that modern science has defined nutrition, a bowl of shredded cardboard sprayed with vitamins (which is close to describing most breakfast cereals) can be more nutritious than a bowl of fresh strawberries.
Pets also suffer from the degenerative diseases that humans manifest, because they are the only non-human animals to eat processed food. It can be argued that we get degenerative disease because we live so long, but the experiences with the Hunzas and other "primitive" societies demonstrate that age may have little to do with it.
Degenerative diseases are cumulative chronic conditions, so they largely appear in later ages, although there has recently been a great increase in cancers in American children, for instance.
In the 1970s and 1980s, three major studies were published on the effects of coronary bypass surgery, and they are the only studies published to date. None of them demonstrated a significantly higher survival rate for the group that had bypass surgery versus those who did not.[25] Even the angiogram that supposedly diagnoses people who “need” bypass surgery is virtually worthless, as attested to by all the studies published to date.[26] Even though the diagnosis and treatment are worthless, the coronary bypass business is among Earth’s most lucrative, raking in more than $50 billion per year in America. When Dr. Henry McIntosh at the Baylor College of Medicine, where the first bypass surgery was performed, published an assessment of the first ten years of bypass surgery results, he stated that there were virtually no measurable benefits from bypass surgery. Soon after publishing his paper, he was forced to leave Baylor.[27] His is not an unusual fate. People with private insurance are 80% more likely to have an angiogram than a Medicaid (welfare) patient, and are 40% more likely to have bypass surgery.[28] In his book, Heart Frauds, after Charles T. McGee, M.D. exposed the scam that American medicine is regarding artery and heart disease, he then recommended what people should do to prevent those diseases. His advice was almost all about eating live food, just as in Stale Food vs. Fresh Food.[29] Fortunately, his book has not yet been banned.
The medical profession is not alone in its anti-scientific methods. The food processors, similar to the fluoride polluters, have been busily buying up scientists who will tell Americans that processed food is good for them. The food processors, chemical companies, and agribusiness companies all have a mutual self-interest in making their products appear safe and beneficial in the public eye. They are not really safe or beneficial, but people such Frederick Stare, Elizabeth Whelan, and Steve Milloy, who are scientists in their employ, will tell us that most of what they produce is healthy. Tobacco company front man Milloy then had the gall to turn around and state that, “One in three Americans develops cancer as a function of being alive.”[30] Those overlapping areas of self-interest form what can be variously called a "power structure," an "industrial complex," or an "establishment."
Anthropology impinges directly on medicine. As a science, anthropology is multifaceted, multidisciplinary, and has come a long way from its Victorian-era roots. The aspect of anthropology that deals with the distant human past is fascinating, replete with controversy, competing theories, new tools (such as DNA testing of fossils), and varying degrees of agreement regarding the human past. Again, as Kuhn observed, agreement does not mean that anthropologists as a whole are “right,” but that they agree. Nevertheless, there are areas of general agreement that appear to conform to the evidence adduced thus far, when evidence is not suppressed. Suppression of anomalous data is far more common in the sciences than most think. Dr. Phyllis Mullenix had her career destroyed when she discovered that the fluorine ion damaged the brain. Reintroducing a creator and consciousness into the framework is necessary if humankind is to escape the materialistic orientation that threatens it with self-extinction.[31] Anthropology has a long way to go, but with all those caveats, there is a generally agreed upon story of the human past that I consider close to reality.
According to today’s prevailing theories, humanity evolved in Africa long ago, as an evolutionary offshoot of the tropical apes that lived there. Homo erectus, the first erect, large-brained protohuman, appeared on the evolutionary scene about two million years ago and soon migrated beyond Africa. Homo sapiens also first appeared in Africa and eventually displaced all other hominid species. As Homo erectus migrated beyond the tropics, where seasons existed, the year-round supply of fruits, blossoms and seeds that make up about 80% of today’s great-ape diet could not be found. Homo erectus had poor plant-scavenging prospects beyond the tropics for much of the year, mainly because they could not digest cellulose the way that ruminant animals can. Cellulose makes up the majority of edible plant structure (it forms the cell walls), and most animals cannot digest it. Gorillas have that ability, to a degree (chimpanzees also, to a lesser extent), and can thus adapt to leafier diets. Dormant plants cannot provide much of the starch, sugar, and fat that hominids use to fuel their bodies in their native habitats. In order to survive beyond the tropics, early humans adapted their behavior. They hunted and ate animals, and wore their prey's fur. They sought shelter from the elements. They developed tools to help them hunt and eat, made of stone, wood, and bone. Early humans learned how to control and use fire. Some of those behaviors originated in Africa, but they were refined to an art form in order to survive beyond the tropics.
Life was far from easy, and early humans died from injuries, starvation, infections, parasites, and some diseases. Also, those hunter-gatherer humans invented a new behavior, nearly unknown in the animal world but common in monkeys and apes, and chimpanzees plan their murders: as humans learned to kill large animals, they also killed each other. Behaviorally modern humans appeared on the evolutionary scene perhaps around 70,000 years ago. They learned other adaptive behaviors, such as building dwellings and boats. Those innovations enabled humankind to migrate further than before. The arrival of humans to the continents known today as Australia and the Americas coincided with the extinction of large animals. Eating meat was an adaptation to new environments, but humans are poorly designed to eat flesh. True carnivores have high acid concentrations in their stomachs, which not only digest the rotting flesh rapidly, but the high concentrations kill parasites and deadly bacteria in the meat. Carnivores produce ten times as much hydrochloric acid as humans, cows, horses, and other herbivorous species do, at twice the concentration, for 20 times the amount. A carnivore has a stomach pH of between one and two when the stomach is full, while a human stomach has a pH of between four and five. Humans do not enjoy the carnivorous stomach’s protection, and parasitic and bacterial infection was one effect of eating flesh, particularly in the large quantities that early hunter-gatherers could ingest.
As humans pursued the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, their numbers grew as they migrated across the planet. What led humans to domesticate plants and animals? The Victorian era’s dominant hypothesis was that the domestication revolution of about 11 thousand years ago (in the Fertile Crescent, and about 10 thousand years ago in Mesoamerica) was merely part of humankind’s endless progress. Today, it is more generally thought that population pressures forced the issue, in Malthusian fashion.[32] The big, easily killed game was extinct, hunter-gatherer methods cannot sustain dense human populations, and domestication was likely more a child of necessity than progressive invention. Beginning around 11 thousand years ago, most earthly animals and plants that could be effectively domesticated were. There have been few species of plants or animals domesticated in recorded history. The last large mammal productively domesticated was the camel, about 5,000 years ago. In modern times, moose, bison, and other large mammals have been subjected to domestication attempts, with limited success.[33] Strawberries, raspberries, pecans, and some other plants have been domesticated during history, but nearly all human plant consumption is of species domesticated before history was recorded. However, the fossil record does not tell a healthy story about the transition from hunter-gatherer to shepherd and farmer. Human skeletons significantly shrank when the domestication revolution began.
Violence is proportionally far greater in the hunter-gatherer lifestyle than in “civilization,” even including civilization’s innumerable wars. Civilization spawned many things both beneficial and disastrous for the human species. Permanent dwellings, writing, professions, and other “advancements” were part of civilization’s seeming benefits. Their companions, however, were organized warfare, environmental degeneration, social hierarchies, exploitation on a grand scale, and - what concerns this essay - epidemic and degenerative disease. Hunter-gatherers ate food that was cooked at most. They had to constantly move around, because there was little vegetation that humans could eat, especially during periods of plant dormancy. Although chimpanzees are the most carnivorous of the great apes, flesh only amounts to about 1 to 2% of their diet, and they do not eat carrion. The mountain gorilla eats insects sometimes, and that is the most carnivorous part of its diet.
The great apes subsist mainly on live fruit, not hunter-gatherer fare, and the domestication revolution further altered the human diet. Not only were great amounts of flesh eaten, but grasses were domesticated for their seeds, hence wheat, corn, barley, millet, oats, etc. Legumes (mainly beans) were domesticated, as well as root crops. Domestic grains, legumes, and root crops are relatively new innovations in the human diet, yet they make up the majority of it today, and humans have not evolved to ideally eat them. In addition, fruits are designed to be eaten by animals, as a way of dispersing the seeds. Fruit’s sweetness is attractive to great apes and other animals, hence the human sweet tooth. Such is not the case with grains, legumes, roots, and much of what are called vegetables. That is why a sweet dessert rewarded eating an unsweet and often disagreeable main course.
Flowering plants appeared on the evolutionary scene about 160 million years ago, about 75 million years or more before primates did. When flowers are fertilized, they grow into fruit, which is an evolutionary adaptation in which the plant is not eaten to satisfy animal hunger, but the fruit provides the animal with energy, and the plant a means to distribute its seed. Primates are primarily tree dwellers, and fruit comprises 65% of the great ape diet. It is a perfect symbiosis of plant and animal. That symbiosis is not evident in roots, for instance, as eating a plant’s root kills the plant. The same goes for vegetables. Grains and legumes are seeds, and are not ideal foods; many are highly toxic, and even through domestication, there are toxic and other properties of grains and legumes that make them difficult to digest. Humans eat only about 2% of all legume species. The natives of California used acorns as a staple food. However, they had to leach the tannic acid from the acorns in order to eat them. Seeds rarely have symbiotic relationships with animals, and plants have many adaptations to minimize animal predation, such as thorns, thick husks, etc. The castor bean is toxic to all animals, even insects. Some insects eat toxic seeds and use the seed’s toxic properties to make themselves toxic to animals that would otherwise eat them. Those non-fruit plant parts are not ideal foods, which is partly why organs such as livers and kidneys exist, to deal with the toxins. Those crops have not had all their toxic and non-digestive properties bred from them, and it may not be entirely possible.
Cooking and other food processing can minimize certain toxic chemicals (such as acid in acorns and the cassava root), make more of certain substances digestible (such as protein in grains), and kill parasites and bacteria in flesh, but such processing also destroys vitamins and introduces toxins such as Maillard compounds. Domesticating and growing those plant parts that humans can digest (largely non-cellulose parts) is a mixed blessing. The same goes for the domestication of animals and eating large quantities of flesh and milk products.
Also, our food animals are often raised on grain diets, which they are not suited for, and they become fatter than normal (among other health problems) also by design (feed, genetics, drugs, hormones, etc.), but obviously not ideal for those consuming their flesh. Most of adult humanity (about 70%) is lactose-intolerant, which means that they cannot effectively digest milk products. There has been some evolutionary adaptation in adults who can digest milk, but as somebody who has eliminated milk products from his diet more than once, I can say that even descendants of pastoral societies are far from ideally adapted to consume milk products. We are the only creatures on Earth that consume milk as adults, and it is not from our species. Less than 1% of humanity is gluten-intolerant; gluten is a protein found in wheat. I cannot comfortably digest quinoa, a New World grain. Many people have allergic reactions to corn, peanuts, eggs, milk, meat, the nightshade family, etc. (although some of those reactions are undoubtedly due to how the food was raised and prepared, or attendant chemicals such as pesticides). Those are some of the prices that humanity has paid for leaving its natural habitat.
Civilized people developed methods to survive the seasons, which were largely based upon food preservation. Cooking, grinding, salting, and other methods were used to preserve food. What is largely overlooked is that preserving food means preventing further decay. Food preservation is often a method of decaying food to a level so that it takes a long time to decay further. Cooking robs food of nutritional value, even as it makes it more digestible. Grinding food destroys its structure and hence creates a rapid deterioration in what remains. Modern methods of bleaching flour further rob it of nutritional value, and are performed by design. Bleached flour is far less inviting to insects that eat unbleached flour, because there is little nutritional value left. One way to kill the mice that infest mills is to let them eat all the bleached flour they want. They then quickly die. Spicing, salting, and drying are other methods of food preservation, but living food is obviously far more nutritious than the spiced, salted, or dried versions, and anything that was cooked should be eaten immediately. Domesticating animals allowed humans to keep living food around during the winter, killing the animals as needed. The prevailing theories today hold that nearly every epidemic disease is a consequence of domesticating animals, civilization’s dense human populations, and civilization’s filth. Accordingly, measles came from dogs or cattle, bubonic plague from rodents, influenza from pigs and ducks, smallpox from cattle, the common cold from horses, and so on. Infectious disease needed dense human populations in order to spread to epidemic proportions. The sparse, relatively clean hunter-gatherer populations did not experience epidemic disease.
With the rise of civilization, humanity began soiling its nest. In the early days of civilization, there were no sewers, dumps, and other measures for keeping civilization clean. Filth accumulated and disease flourished. The filth was closely related to “germs,” and improving sanitation and nutrition ended most epidemic disease, and vaccination received little or no credit (perhaps even negative credit).
Civilization began before history, as it took time for writing to develop. The first known writings were the cuneiform tablets used in Sumer, and of the 30,000 surviving cuneiform clay tablets discovered in Mesopotamia (literally “land between the rivers,” today’s Iraq, part of the Fertile Crescent), about 1,000 dealt with medicine.[34] Women’s status declined during the Sumerian centuries, which reflected not only the culture’s degeneration, but also the conflict between masculine and feminine principles. In addition, the agricultural methods, relying on irrigation, eventually degraded and salinated the soil, making it infertile.[35] Filthy urban conditions, undernutrition, and malnutrition lead to susceptibility to epidemic and degenerative disease. The earliest medical professionals undoubtedly noted the contribution of filthiness and poor nutrition to disease. While the historical record of long ago is sparse, and was written to favor the victors (men and masculine principles), the notion of sanitation and nutrition as disease prevention survives in the mythological Greek figure of Hygeia, a woman.
By the time of Hippocrates, when the foundations of Western medicine (and modern democracy) were being laid, men had taken over the medical profession. Aristotle theorized that women were inherently inferior because of their biology. In ancient Rome, women were treated relatively better and were better represented in the healing arts. Even though Rome had sewers (they earlier appeared in Harappan civilization and in Assyria and Crete) epidemic disease swept through ancient Greece and Rome, and is thought of as partly a consequence of their imperialism, bringing new diseases back with the soldiers, slaves, and imperial commerce.
One problem with historical investigation of early medicine or any ancient culture is that the analysis is often of stones, bones, the writings of the elite, the lives of kings, and so on. It is difficult to get an intimate sense of the times. My paranormal experiences showed me that there is far more to consciousness than the West admits. When modern commentators scoff at ancient “superstitions” and “witch doctors,” how much of that is a self-serving projection? Psychic healing is real, and the “placebo effect” only hints at the potential of human consciousness to create disease or health. People used to be much more connected to their dreams, and they had importance in their waking lives. Some of today’s scientists pass off dreams as some kind of garbage that the mind sheds during sleep. The most open-minded of them may have little appreciation for the inter-dimensional doorway that dreams could represent. What were the dreams of ancient humans like? Studying stone axes, pottery fragments, and bones provides little evidence.
While the West has “advanced” in some important ways, it is also evident that even though there surely was superstition in ancient healing, and a poor understanding of anatomy, in some ways those “primitive” doctors were still ahead of Western medicine. Socrates could well have been speaking of today’s medical establishment when he said, “The cure of many diseases remains unknown to the physicians of Hellos because they do not study the whole person." Holistic medicine is still marginalized in Western medicine, more than two millennia later. The feminine-oriented (they did not have to be women to be feminine-oriented) healers of an earlier era may have had a better grasp of the role of the patient’s personality and spirit in healing than those Hellos doctors, or today’s.
Today’s books about Western medicine’s history largely focus on two men from ancient times: Hippocrates and Galen. Their work formed the foundation of Western medicine. Hippocrates lived during Greece’s classic period, about 400 BCE. Many works attributed to Hippocrates are not his, but from the school of thought that he came to represent. The Hippocratic method was founded upon observation and reason, and its primary dictum was “first, do no harm.” Western doctors take the Hippocratic Oath today.
Galen was also Greek, lived during the second century CE, but made his mark in Rome. Galen was a prolific writer, and he furthered the Hippocratic notion of observation. Galen dissected animals and applied his findings to human anatomy. Unfortunately for the West, Hippocrates’s work fell victim to Roman Catholic hostility toward all things Greek, and Galen’s work became dogmatized. The principle of observing nature was abandoned, Galen’s works ironically became a bulwark against observing nature, and medical authorities uncritically repeated his work for more than a millennium.
The Beginnings of Today’s Medical Establishment
The rise of Western science is inextricably connected to the rise of Western medicine, as is European imperialism, the decline of the Catholic Church, the Industrial Revolution, modern warfare, political-economic ideologies such as capitalism and communism, and other factors. When studying the development of medical science and its attendant establishment, the interplay of scientists, their nations of origin, dominant religious sects, and other factors can be seen to influence the course of scientific theory as well as the data.
It is no coincidence that Copernicus and Vesalius both published their works in 1543. Long-standing dogma was challenged on many fronts, not least of which was the Protestant Reformation. In 1543, the Catholic Church, although it had burned books many times in the past, dramatically toughened its policy and levied heavy penalties for selling books that the Church had banned. Cardinal Carafa went so far as to declare that no books could be published without permission from the Inquisition.[39] In 1559, the infamous Index Auctorum et Librorum Prohibitorum was first published, a list of banned books that would endure until the 1960s.
Harvey was not the first European to describe the heart’s circulation of the blood. In 1553, Michael Servetus anonymously published The Restoration of Christianity. In his work, he challenged Galenic dogma and correctly described the pulmonary circulation between the heart and lungs, although it was in the context of how the Holy Spirit enters man. He escaped the Spanish Inquisition only to land in Calvin’s Geneva, where both he and his work were burned. Burning the heretic and his books ensured that his theory about the heart and circulation would not influence European science.
Joseph Schwartz persuasively made the case that Galileo and Newton couched their work in mathematics to make them less susceptible to the Church's attacks. Those strategic decisions helped send science awry, making it too reliant on mathematics and more occult than it needed to be.[40] I have virtually never needed to use mathematics to explain a scientific theory, and Einstein avoided math in his work when he could, and felt that math could be a barrier to scientific understanding, as it is a human artifice, not reality.
Ambroise Paré, Vesalius's contemporary, advanced the science of surgery, honing his craft in battlefield hospitals, introducing the practice of binding arteries to reduce hemorrhage and ending the practice of pouring boiling oil on wounds to cauterize them. That was discovered accidentally when one day he ran out of oil and used soothing lotions instead. Paré brought to Western surgery the notion of gentle treatment of wounds, and he engaged in the customary academic fisticuffs with his rivals. As with the other pioneers, Paré became the surgeon to several kings of France.
During the next three centuries, Western science made its advances. Vivisection became the norm in medical research. Witches and heretics burned across Europe, and devastating wars endlessly raged back and forth, often over religion. The distinction between saint, heretic, and witch was largely political-economic.
The gradual elimination of the spiritual perspective was a complex affair, with various schools of thought rising and falling. The writings of Francis Bacon (1561-1626), an English statesman and philosopher, were influential in their materialistic perspective. Bacon argued for relying on what our senses tell us, using reason to interpret it, and staying within that framework. The materialism of Bacon would influence the materialism of Marx and others. Newton explained the effect of gravity with equations, and he, along with Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo helped initiate the science of celestial mechanics. Seeking the mechanism behind everything became science’s Holy Grail. The world of the spirit gradually fell away and Western science put nature “on the rack,” torturing her secrets from her. A wide array of scientific and medical theories proliferated. Bacon, Descartes, and other philosophers initiated an age of rational thought, although the outright rejection of religion would not begin until the Enlightenment, during the 18th century. Materialist and spiritualist theories vied with one another, some explaining life as a mechanism, others denying that mechanics could ever explain the ineffable spark of life.
As the new lens-making technologies that made telescopes possible also made microscopes possible, exploration of the previously invisible world began, as well as exploration of the Earth’s farthest corners, usually in the name of conquest and subjugation. Midwives and herbalists still practiced, although they were increasingly subject to repression. Disease was studied by the new science of medicine. The practice of Western medicine, however, did not change much during the 16th through 18th centuries. While women specialized in the gentle medicine of herbs and nutrition, the male-dominated medical profession used leeches, purgatives, emetics, surgery, and other violent methods. European women healers found it increasingly difficult to work from the time of Vesalius onward.[41] Epidemic disease swept through Europe regularly. European cities were hellish arenas of violence, filth, and disease. With numbing regularity, famine, disease, or warfare (or all three) would march through, carrying off vast numbers of souls. The only way that Europe’s cities kept their populations stable was through a constant influx of “surplus population” from the countryside, to replace those who died off in the cities. As Europeans sailed the high seas, natives in the New World, Australia, the South Pacific, and elsewhere died off from European-introduced disease in stupefying numbers. Perhaps 50 million Native Americans died off from European-introduced disease during the 16th century, with maybe another 20 million being worked and abused to death, in history's greatest single demographic catastrophe, which killed off perhaps 90% or more of a hemisphere’s human population.
The Age of Enlightenment, with its egalitarian ideals, a faith in science, reason, and a promotion of humane principles, was the fruit of centuries of ferment. That era saw the creation of the greatest music that humanity has yet produced. Medicine for the masses became popular. To be sure, there were men who subscribed to the principles of Hygeia, such as William Buchan, John Wesley, Johann Frank, and others of the Enlightenment era. Also, the age of quackery largely coincided with those days. While “quack” may have described many folk healers and their seemingly nonsensical medicine, the notion has also been greatly abused ever since to suppress medical innovation. Less than a month before I wrote these words in 2001, a “skeptic” challenged me about Dennis Lee and alternative energy’s plight. He stated that the unmistakable mark of a quack, medical or otherwise, was the claim of being persecuted. As we shall see, it is also the unmistakable mark of a pioneer. In 1761, the German physician Leopold Auenbrugger invented the method of rapping on a person’s chest, listening to the sound produced, a method familiar to any American who has ever had a physical examination. An amateur musician, Auenbrugger began cataloguing what the various sounds might mean. He realized the importance of his work, but had no illusions of becoming a medical hero. He wrote:
“In making public my discoveries I have not been unconscious of the dangers I must encounter, since it has always been the fate of those who have illustrated or improved the arts and sciences by their discoveries to be beset by envy, malice, hatred, destruction and calumny.”[42]
In North America’s colonial settlements, women had a freer hand to practice medicine. The restrictive atmosphere of European medicine could not entirely prevail an ocean away. The Enlightenment also helped spawn political revolutions, beginning with the American Revolution. Also, finally, Western medicine began understanding how to cure some diseases.
When Europeans began sailing the high seas, scurvy attended their voyages. In 1498, Arab traders cured Vasco de Gama’s crew of scurvy by feeding them oranges. In 1535, Jacques Cartier's crew came down with scurvy on the Saint Lawrence River and 25 members of his crew died before a local Indian showed them how to make bark and evergreen needles into a drink. The drink was high in vitamin C and his men were cured. When Cartier reported the incident to the medical authorities upon his return, they laughed at the ignorant practices of the “savages” and never pursued it. In 1593, Richard Hawkins, Francis Drake's relative and fellow pirate-explorer, sailed to the South Pacific and noted that the natives used citrus fruit to cure scurvy, which also cured his men. His observation was also not acted upon by the day’s medical profession. In 1601, Captain James Lancaster sailed his fleet of four ships, and gave lemon juice to the crew on the ship he sailed. The other three vessels’ crews came down with scurvy. In 1636, John Woodall published The Surgeon’s Mate, in which he unequivocally wrote that scurvy could be prevented by eating fresh vegetables and citrus fruit. The medical establishment ignored those findings, while an estimated two million sailors lost their lives to scurvy. It was not until the Scottish James Lind performed an experiment that Western medicine began considering the cure. His experiments aboard the HMS Salisbury in 1754 proved that citrus fruit cured scurvy, although he did not know why. In the 1760s, James Cook sailed around the world, embracing hygienic principles, and he used citrus fruit to cure scurvy in his crew. Cook only lost one man from disease during the three-year voyage, and it was to tuberculosis. Many thousands more sailors died on the high seas, and it was not until 1795, largely due to the efforts of Gilbert Bane, that the British began issuing citrus juice to its sailors, and “limeys” soon ruled the high seas.
The scurvy cure was implemented long before anybody knew why; vitamin C was not discovered until the 20th century. Similarly, malaria was prevented with quinine long before anybody knew why. Establishment histories of medicine, such as Roy Porter’s The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, often do not mention anything about people curing scurvy before Lind’s work. That is always a hazard of reading mainstream history. The official story can leave plenty out, and incidents can cast an importantly different light on the story.
The Enlightenment came to an end with the French Revolution and Napoleon. The Industrial Revolution was underway, capitalism was evolving in ways that Adam Smith did not foresee, and the world of Charles Dickens came to pass. The early years of the 19th century are typically considered the beginning of the modern era. In the early 19th century the stethoscope was invented. Auenbrugger’s method, neglected for more than 40 years, was finally used. Diagnosis finally began being earnestly practiced in Western medicine. Again, was that a step forward? Seth said that cataloguing disease is not dealing with the issue in the most enlightened way. He said that focusing on health and how to be healthy (Hygeia’s principles once again) is far preferable to studying and treating disease. Studying disease has helped lead to today’s medicine refining the art of symptom management, instead of the underlying cause. Also, any treatment that does anything other than suppress symptoms (with male-oriented knives and drugs) has largely been outlawed in the United States.
In the USA, one of the Declaration of Independence’s signers, Dr. Benjamin Rush, became America’s most famous doctor. He taught at the University of Pennsylvania for more than 40 years, and his impact on American medicine can still be felt today. Rush represented the early medical establishment in the USA. He did, however, write this prescient paragraph:
“Unless we put medical freedom into the Constitution, the time will come when medicine will organize into an undercover dictatorship...To restrict the art of healing to one class of men and deny equal privileges to others will constitute the Bastille of medical science. All such laws are un-American and despotic… and have no place in a republic...The Constitution of this Republic should make special provisions for medical freedom as well as religious freedom."[43]
Rush’s friend Thomas Jefferson wrote:
"If people let the government decide what foods they eat and what medicines they take, their bodies will soon be in as sorry a state as are the souls who live under tyranny."
Although Rush warned against a medical racket taking shape in the USA, his work was the epitome of masculine medicine. Rush began using mercury in large doses to “cure” patients during a yellow-fever epidemic in Philadelphia in 1793. Rush patented his “cure,” and Rush’s Pills became a mainstay of American medicine. Rush’s pills were a violent purgative made from calomel (mercury chloride) and jalap. A person’s bowels would virtually explode after ingesting Rush’s cure-all. Rush’s pills were informally known as “Thunderclappers.” Rush believed that nearly every disease condition could be cured with Rush’s Pills.
The deadly effects of mercury have been well known since ancient times. Mercury poisoning may have killed Isaac Newton as well as destroyed his mind, as he worked with it in alchemical experiments, probably trying to make gold. Rush’s logic was that the ingestion of mercury and jalap would blast out any diseased matter in the intestines. If that failed to provide the cure, the patient would also get mercury poisoning, which “altered” the original disease and somehow combined it with the mercury poisoning. The logic was that if patients survived the mercury poisoning, their recovery would also cure their original disease.[44] That type of treatment, in typical masculine fashion, became known as “heroic” medicine. In those years of heroic mercury therapy, there were instances of cadavers being dissected and mercury ran from their bodies.
Using large doses of mercury was not the only innovation that Rush blessed America with. He probably initiated “heroic” bleeding. The bleeding practices of the past were not enough. Rush believed in bleeding the better part of a gallon (the adult human body only holds about five quarts) of blood from his sicker patients. Not only adults were bled under Rush’s ministrations, but also infants as young as three months old. Because newborns are so small, the jugular vein was often the only one large enough to be opened for bleeding. Rush noticed that newborns could not survive being bled as much and as often as adults, so he could not be quite as heroic with infants.
Calomel was not banned as “medicine” until my lifetime, to demonstrate how influential Rush was to Western medicine. Mercury, bleeding, and other “heroic” methods clearly reflected masculine medicine’s principles. Rush distrusted nature. He saw disease as a failure of nature, so heroic intervention was the only effective approach. Rush’s outlook became the orthodox American medical paradigm of the 19th century, and that medical establishment had the audacity to call alternative practitioners “quacks.”
Rush, the physician general to George Washington's revolutionary army, subscribed to warfare ideology in his medical approach. Rush wrote, “It is necessary that (the remedies) be so - that is, more powerful than the disease, or they cannot overcome it.”[45] Washington was probably bloodlet to death by doctors practicing “heroic” medicine. That heroic philosophy is still prevalent in today’s American medicine. Rush pointed to surviving patients as proof that his treatments worked, but millions of people paid the price of his certitude. Rush was hostile toward plant-based remedies, but believed in metallic medicine. Highly toxic heavy metals such as mercury, lead, and antimony (in the same chemical family as arsenic) found their way into the day’s orthodox medicine. Rush’s methods were in keeping with the assembly-line strategies that accompanied the Industrial Revolution. Orthodox doctors could treat up to 30 patients in an average morning while prescribing nearly the same treatment to everyone, no matter their condition. It was a “one-size-fits-all” medicine.
The Enlightenment began in France, and in no small measure had the European experience in North America to thank. Although the Enlightenment looked back to ancient Greece’s democracy for political inspiration, in major ways classical Greece was a poor example: slaves outnumbered citizens in Athens and women were nearly prisoners in their homes. When the Enlightenment began, humanity’s only functioning democracy was the Iroquois Confederation, in the area of present-day New York State. Iroquoian women elected the chiefs, ran village life, and cast their children’s vote in proxy, for a balance of power between the sexes that no Western society has yet approached. History being the ultimate ironist, George Washington led the effort to eradicate Iroquois society. The Iroquois saw Washington in much the same way as 1940s Jews saw Adolf Hitler. The largely classless societies among the North American natives, and the freedom that was such a natural part of native life, were attractive to Europeans, which led to a long-standing colonial problem: colonists running off and “going native.”[46] Later theorists such as Friedrich Engels drew upon the Iroquoian example.[47] The Iroquoian government was very democratic, with decentralized power and had no executive branch, which monarchical Europe could not countenance, so the framers of the USA's Constitution invented the executive branch, which has undermined the other branches ever since, amassing power to itself (so that those who control the president control the government). Ben Franklin, the American ambassador to France, was profoundly influenced by the Iroquoian form of government.
One Enlightenment outcome was the improvement of women’s lives. Gone were the days of being burned alive as a “witch,” although full citizen rights for American women would not come until the 20th century, on paper at least. Victorian prudery would soon appear, transforming women’s sexuality from something to be feared into something to be repressed. Chattel slavery was transformed into wage slavery, communism would appear as a challenge to capitalism, and revolutionary activities characterized the 19th century, as well as European imperial land grabs throughout the world. Throughout the chaos, social movements grew, counterattacks by various establishments were waged, and the 19th century was humanity’s most tumultuous…until the 20th.
What happened in Western medicine parallels what happened in Western politics. While the divine right of kings was challenged, to more violent effect in France than in Britain, male-dominated heroic medicine was also challenged. Understandably, people feared the day’s orthodox medicine, with their bleedings, mercury, lead, and other deadly methods that passed as medicine. The foundation of orthodox medical practice and philosophy came under fire from several quarters, largely motivated by disgust with orthodox medical practice. In the early 19th century, there were three major challenges to American orthodox medicine. One was a revival of herbal medicine, largely based upon Native American remedies. Those practitioners became known as “Indian Doctors.”
Samuel Thomson mounted another challenge to orthodox medicine. Thomson was a New Hampshire farmer who devised a medical system for the masses that utilized Native American steam baths and an herbal pharmacopoeia that eventually encompassed 65 herbal remedies. Thomson learned his herbal medicine from a woman herbalist. Thomson’s system created an army of folk healers, and their ideal was “every man his own doctor.” By 1839, one-sixth of the United States (three million people) used his system of medicine.[48] Orthodox doctors saw Thomson as such a dire threat that they had a law passed that named Thomson specifically. What did the law state? Thomson was forbidden to treat people without charging them. Those challenges to orthodox medicine were nearly the antithesis of heroic medicine.
The third challenge to American orthodox medicine came from within its ranks, from Europe. It was the most substantial challenge to American orthodox medicine, as it was the most professional. In the late 18th century a German physician, Samuel Hahnemann, developed a system of medicine wholly at variance with orthodox medical theory. He rejected the materialistic perspective of science and medicine, and saw disease and health as spiritual conditions. Hahnemann thought that dissection and attempts to describe the mechanics of the human body, as a way to guide treatment, was a useless undertaking. Hahnemann borrowed from the ancient Greeks and Paracelsus in developing a “law of similars.” Hahnemann’s theory was that if a healthy person were given a medicine that produced certain symptoms, an ill person with those same symptoms would be cured by the same medicine. It was a case of “paradoxical” therapy. It was not the first, and not the last, paradoxical therapy. Ericksonian therapy in psychology, for instance, is used today with great success. Hahnemann’s style of medicine became known as homeopathy. While purgatives and other violent medicines were given by orthodoxy, and the more concentrated the better, Hahnemann took the opposite approach, based on his experience with treating patients.
Hahnemann’s medicines were highly dilute, and the more dilute, the more powerful the apparent healing properties, even when so dilute that not even one molecule remained of the original substance. It might seem like nonsense, but it worked, and there is experimental data to support the notion. The effect and philosophy of homeopathy markedly differs from drug therapy. Homeopathy uses dilute substances to help stimulate the body to heal itself, as a helpful reminder of sorts. Drug therapy, on the other hand, overwhelms the body, taking over its chemistry, manipulating it to “health.” Whereas homeopathy stimulates the body to heal itself and to correct the underlying condition, which is classic feminine medicine, drug therapy reflects masculine principles of warfare and domination, taking over the body’s processes, usually acting by suppressing disease symptoms.
I have used homeopathy to dramatic effect and have seen it work miracles. It is similar in some ways to the concept of vaccination, stimulating the body to ward off disease. In the attacks against homeopathy that continue to this day, the orthodox assailants always say how “absurd” homeopathy is, while the homeopathists respond, “OK, it may seem that way to our conditioned minds, but it works and nobody is harmed by it.” In fact, there is a theoretical basis for homeopathy, which is largely unchanged from Hahnemann’s day, but it is radically different from orthodox theory.[49] Hahnemann was banned from practicing in Germany. He had to keep moving his place of residence because of the attacks, and homeopathy was introduced to the USA in 1825.[50]
During the early 19th century, the USA's citizenry began abandoning orthodox medicine. Monopolistic medical laws were overturned across America, and orthodox doctors had to compete with alternative movements. As far as millions of Americans were concerned, abandoning orthodox medicine was an exercise in freedom. In the words of one senator who introduced a law that helped overturn the orthodox medical monopoly:
“A people accustomed to govern themselves and boasting of their intelligence are impatient of restraint. They want no protection but freedom of inquiry and freedom of action.”[51]
That statement was similar in spirit to Ben Franklin’s observation that people who give up freedom for security will get (and deserve) neither. Orthodox medicine had plenty going against it. For one thing, their “medicine” was widely considered deadly. Another factor was the minimal training that orthodox doctors received. Orthodox training was so poor that between 1853 and 1873 only about a third of all applicants, with medical school diplomas in hand, passed the examination to become a naval doctor.[52] The director of naval medicine thought another 10% could have passed an easier examination, but the remaining majority of applicants were hopelessly unqualified.
The life-giving and life-taking aspects of Western medicine are in strange juxtaposition regarding the first breakthrough that would change Western interventional medicine for the better. Sanitation, Hygeia’s principle, was first practiced in places where life begins and ends: maternity wards and battlefield hospitals.
John Pringle, the physician-general of the British army and physician to the royal family, studied infection, disease and antisepsis and in 1752 strongly recommended that cleanliness and hygiene were the best preventives.[57] His observation did not become a universal practice, far from it, but battlefield hospitals were real-world laboratories that have led to a great deal of today’s emergency medicine.
The earliest Western medical doctor to establish sanitary practices was Hungarian obstetrician Ignaz Semmelweis, who made his discovery at the Vienna General Hospital in 1847. Vienna was the heart of the Austrian empire and Europe’s most progressive city, and the Vienna General Hospital was a teaching hospital. Men and women were both trained there, men to be doctors, women to be midwives. Semmelweis was a bright young doctor from Hungary, but being from the imperial hinterland, with foreign dress and speech, he was subjected to numerous harassments. He weathered those difficulties and was appointed as assistant to the director of obstetrics at the Vienna hospital. Although obstetrics was not a glamorous branch of medicine, Semmelweis was doing well for a foreigner. In that era, pathology was popular and male medical students learned their craft by dissecting cadavers and handling diseased organs. In those days, puerperal fever raged through maternity wards. Puerperal fever was killing off great numbers of women who gave birth in European hospitals, especially its teaching hospitals. At times it galloped across swaths of Europe. In the Lombardy region of today’s Italy, not one woman survived a teaching hospital-delivered childbirth for an entire year, during the 1770s.[58]
Two maternity wards were in the Vienna General Hospital. The male medical students served the first ward; midwives-in-training serviced the other. The maternity wards of the teaching hospital only attracted desperate patients, the poor women of Dickens’s Europe. Semmelweis witnessed cases where expectant women would be admitted to the hospital when only the first ward was open. Women got on their knees and begged to be admitted to the second ward. Semmelweis once watched a woman leave the hospital to give birth in an alley rather than be admitted to the first ward. What did those desperate women fear? It turned out that the death rate from puerperal fever was more than 20% in the first ward, served by the medical students. The ward served by the midwives-in-training had about a 2% mortality rate. What those desperate women obviously knew, Semmelweis eventually noticed.
As he began wondering why, one of his favorite teachers accidentally cut himself during an autopsy and died in the same fashion that those poor mothers did. Semmelweis then theorized that something was passing from the cadavers in the autopsy rooms to the mothers in the first ward. In those days, surgeons gloried in the gore that they became coated in as they performed their heroic labors. The Vienna medical students would go straight from the autopsy room to perform pelvic examinations on the women in the first ward. Their hands smelled cadaverous. Semmelweis theorized that there were “invisible cadaver particles” that clung to the medical students’ skin. Semmelweis had his medical students thoroughly wash and scrub their hands, then rinse them in a chlorine solution until the cadaverous smell was gone. During the first month of that program, the mortality rate in the first ward fell to 2%. Semmelweis was on his way to making history.
Although the initial reception to his work by his superiors was positive, Semmelweis’s tale is one of medical history’s more tragic. Probably at least partly because of impediments he had already encountered because he was foreign, he did not immediately approach the Viennese medical establishment with his findings. An immediate realization of Semmelweis’s findings was that doctors were inadvertently killing their patients. Not surprisingly, many doctors contemptuously dismissed his findings. Also, those were the days before the germ theory of disease, and the idea that invisible “particles” could cause death were laughed out of medical meetings. Semmelweis was also part of the revolutionary movement that swept Europe in 1848, and his political views helped get him shut out of any employment opportunities in Vienna. He lost his job at the Vienna General Hospital and went back to Hungary. His findings and preventive method fell into obscurity. In 1843, Oliver Wendell Holmes suggested that hospital attendants might transmit childbirth fever to the mothers, but his theory was quickly dismissed by orthodox medicine.
Many subsequent observers have blamed Semmelweis for not promoting his findings as vigorously and properly as he might have. Semmelweis obviously deserved some of the responsibility, but the greater share rests with the medical establishment. There was an anti-Semmelweis movement among European orthodoxy, with even a luminary such as Rudolf Virchow voicing his negative view. Semmelweis did not weather the opposition well. In 1861, he finally published his great work on his findings. He was only about 43 years old, but aged greatly during those years of attacks from his professional brethren.[59]
Although he is a major figure in Western medicine’s history, his 1861 magnum opus receives negative reviews even today. A recent treatment of the Semmelweis affair is Hal Hellman’s.[60] Hellman is more sympathetic than other recent writers, and rounded up doctors of Semmelweis’s day and medical historians of the 20th century who thought that his work was epochal, and one specialist called Semmelweis’s book one of the “most moving, persuasive and revolutionary works in the history of science.”[61] Semmelweis came to a dismal end, dying in an insane asylum in 1865. His mental faculties rapidly diminished during his last years. An investigation into his final days has unearthed harsh facts. His body was exhumed and examined in 1963, and further research was undertaken in the 1970s, with a summary published in 1995. Semmelweis was lured to one of Vienna’s shabbier asylums under false pretenses, and then involuntarily committed by three physicians who had no psychiatric training. He soon died of infection that apparently resulted from severe and untreated beatings administered by the asylum staff.[62] Semmelweis was a forgotten figure for many years, with his “crazy” treatment abandoned. In 1891, in the wake of the successes of sanitary practices, his body was exhumed and moved to Hungary, and he was honored in 1906 by a statue in Budapest. Semmelweis’s theories went beyond “cadaver particles.” Before there was a germ theory, Semmelweis had broadened his theory to include any putrid and decaying matter, which will have relevance later in this essay.
It would not be until Joseph Lister’s work became embraced, as Lister began to pioneer sanitary surgical techniques soon after Semmelweis died, that Semmelweis’s discovery would begin recovering from its neglect.
From the earliest days of the New World’s invasion by Europe, the quest for riches and fame characterized the West, especially the USA. The quest for riches and fame casts a dark shadow over the story of the first great innovation to rescue surgery from its barbaric status: anesthesia.
Dentists, not surgeons, brought anesthesia to medicine. Painless dentistry and tooth extraction would also rescue dentistry from its reputation. One of mercury poisoning’s chief effects is damage to and loss of the teeth. Rush’s medicine created business for dentists. Mercury is put into dental fillings even today, and its toxic effects are minimized by the same kinds of scientific groups that have minimized the damage that lead and fluoride do to the human body. At nearly the same time that Semmelweis watched women begging to be admitted to the Vienna General Hospital’s midwife-served maternity ward, general anesthesia was discovered in the USA. Humphry Davy experimented in England during the 1790s on the intoxicating effects of nitrous oxide, and recommended that it might be used for painless surgery. His discovery was quickly forgotten.
Nitrous oxide eventually became famous as “laughing gas,” a party favorite among the educated class. In 1844, a young dentist named Horace Wells attended a laughing gas show in Connecticut and saw one of the inebriants wound himself, which he did not feel until the gas’s effects wore off. The point was not lost on Wells, who arranged to have a tooth painlessly extracted that same evening while under a nitrous-oxide-induced stupor. As he sobered up, Wells envisioned a new era of tooth extraction. Wells enlisted the assistance of William Morton, a former student of his, in gaining an introduction to Boston’s surgical community.[63] Morton successfully used ether in 1846 to anesthetize a patient for a leg amputation. Unlike the statistical and theoretical case made by Semmelweis, the effects of anesthesia were dramatically obvious to any observer, and anesthesia quickly became an integral part of Western medicine. Its pioneers, however, received no benefit. The battle for priority and money over the discovery of anesthesia is a sordid tale.
Morton studied chemistry under Charles Jackson, who gave Morton some important information and suggestions about using ether. Subsequently, Wells, Morton, and Jackson became embroiled in the battle of who had precedence in discovering anesthesia. Wells became a chloroform addict and committed suicide in prison in 1848, after throwing acid on two prostitutes. Morton engaged in many fruitless legal battles over his rights to anesthesia and died in 1868. Jackson also tried cashing in, lost his mind, and spent his last years in a psychotic state, dying in 1880. Crawford Long, a country doctor, used ether successfully in 1842 but did not engage in the self-promotion of the others. He died in obscurity, and his discovery was not vindicated until after his death in 1878.[64]
It was not until Joseph Lister began experimenting with the sterilization of surgical implements that surgery became relatively painless and safe. Before Lister, death rates from post-surgical infection ranged from 25% to 60% in Western Europe’s hospitals. Lister came upon Pasteur’s work and his germ theory and invented a carbolic acid treatment of surgical implements, wounds, and dressings. In 1870, he published the first results of his new technique: death from infection quickly fell from 45% to 15%. Lister was also spraying the air with his acid, however, a misdirection from Pasteur’s work, which did not help his patients much, but still the death rate fell. Lister taught in Scotland during the years of his great advances. Similar to Semmelweis, Lister’s findings were not immediately embraced by surgeons, although he did not receive the vociferous attacks that Semmelweis’s work did. Doctors proposed other theories to explain his findings. Lister himself thought that it would take a generation for orthodox medicine to embrace his findings. He was right. In the late 1880s, Lister’s discoveries were still held in contempt by many in the medical establishment, although he had many successes and converts.[65] The early reception in the USA was also poor. A quote from Medical Dark Ages, about one of America’s most famous surgeons, is appropriate here:
"I spent a part of ...1923 with...Dr. W.W. Keen...In the…Civil War...he was a surgeon...and had seen many men die from suppuration of wounds after he had operated. ...He would hold the sutures in his teeth and sharpen his knife on the sole of his boot, after he had raised up his boot from the muddy ground. That was the accepted practice at the time."
"...He went to Scotland and studied under Lister...("Lister was persecuted by the British Medical Association. He was threatened with having his license revoked.") Yet in Lister's hospital virtually no one died as a result of operations because Lister had developed a carbolic acid wash and disinfectant. Dr. Keen came back from Scotland...He was referred to as a crazy Listerite...He was denied an opportunity to practice in every hospital in Philadelphia."
"Finally there was one open-minded surgeon in the great Pennsylvania General Hospital. He said, 'Let us give this young fellow a chance.' So they let him operate."
"...No one died from infection under Keen. ...He (Keen) began to chronicle the results in statistical articles. He was threatened with expulsion from the Pennsylvania Medical Association...This was in the 1890's...Finally was accepted as the greatest surgeon in the US. The old man told me - and he started to cry...'I nearly went under. I was nearly shut off." - US Senator Paul Douglas, Congressional Record, 1963.
There have been four great watershed events in American history, and they have been wars: the American Revolution, the American Civil War, World War II, and wars in Asia after the 9/11 terror attacks. Each marked the beginning of an epoch in American history. One effect of those wars was that great fortunes were made. George Washington became the richest man in America, partly from native land that his armies helped steal. World War II was the greatest era of war profiteering, even worse than during World War I, but the Civil War was when war profiteering became an American science. A group of young men seized the initiative during the Civil War. They all bought their way out of military service (an option in all American wars), and then engaged in war profiteering on a vast scale. The Civil War kicked the American Industrial Revolution into high gear, initiated The Gilded Age, and made vast sums for a group of men who became known as robber barons.[66] Their legacies can be felt today, with men such as John Rockefeller, James Mellon, J.P. Morgan, Philip Armour, and Andrew Carnegie beginning their empire building during the Civil War. American empires in railroads, steel, oil, banking, and other industries were founded during the Civil War. They became the great trusts that the American government tried breaking up in the early 20th century.
The American pharmaceutical industry also got its start during the Civil War. Pharmaceutical empires such as Squibb’s and Stearns’s received their starts making pharmaceuticals during the Civil War, to be soon joined by Lilly, Merck, Abbott, and others.[67] The specter of Benjamin Rush loomed over the Civil War, as the major “medicine” vended to the Union Army was calomel, the cure-all. Along with vending calomel, the new pharmaceutical companies vied with one another, each vending its own “patent medicine,” which was a misnomer, because not only were the formulas not patented, they were secret, which was officially frowned upon by the AMA. In 1876, Frederick Stearns invented the concept of proprietary medicine, which solved the problem of divulging ingredients yet retaining monopoly rights, and unleashed a flood of mixed drugs and other substances designed to cure one malady or another. Thousands of those proprietary “medicines” were on the market by 1880. Many items in the eclectic and homeopathic pharmacopoeia were adopted directly into the new proprietary medicines.
The AMA also condemned the proprietary-medicine craze, but was economically subservient to it and allowed proprietary and “secret ingredient” medicine ads in the Journal of the American Medical Association ("JAMA"). Prescription medicine also got its start in those days, with doctors prescribing proprietary medicines to their patients. The doctors had almost no idea about the efficacy of the drugs pumped into the marketplace. Prescribing the new medicines was an American fad, and drug stores began dotting the landscape. That dynamic still dominates today’s orthodox medical paradigm. Financial incentives were waved under doctors’ noses to prescribe certain drugs, and true “medicine” was the last thing being practiced. A handful of “cure-all” drugs (fever reducers) became standard ingredients, used by orthodox doctors for nearly every disease condition. Assembly-line medicine continued to be practiced by orthodoxy, as it is today. American orthodox doctors eventually became highly paid marketing and administration conduits for the pharmaceutical companies, with typical pharmaceutical representatives being gorgeous fashion models to titillate male doctors.
Investigating Life’s Mysteries
While heated battles were waged by American orthodox medicine against alternative practitioners from the 1840s onward, events in Europe would initiate big changes in medical practice. Although Semmelweis endured many attacks for his work, as is typical for medical pioneers, there was great scientific ferment in Europe. Science and industry helped transform the West in the 1800s, and medicine was not immune to its march. Paris, the hotbed of political revolution, became the center of a revolution in Western medicine in the early 19th century. Hospitals became laboratories in France, and the science of pathology was established, with autopsy results compared to bedside diagnoses. The Enlightenment ideals of empirical investigation took root in medical research, although that was relative. Medical students flocked from across the West to Paris to learn the new medicine. In Germany, laboratory science began its rise, partly due to improvements in microscopes, and by 1850, laboratory science was an important part of medical research, which used chemistry, dissection, vivisection, microscopes, and other empirical techniques to learn about life and nature.
The 1850s were a time of radical new theories and discoveries in European science and medicine. There were distinct schools of German, English, and French thought and practice. In England, clinical medicine and private medical practice dominated, with little emphasis on research that was not directly applicable to medicine. England and the USA were considered relatively backward with respect to research and the application of science to the medical arts. German science and medicine was publicly institutionalized, locally supported, and with emphasis on the laboratory. Germany was the center of “pure” research. France had a centralized system that focused on Paris. Their hospitals were the center of treatment and research, but it was mainly concerned with training doctors. The French, however, have long been renowned among Europeans for their creativity. All three imperial rivals played their role in dealing with a hot issue in the 1850s: what is life, and how did it come to be?
With the ascendance of Western science, those issues were earnestly addressed. Paracelsus and Descartes taught that the spontaneous appearance of life from dead matter was a normal chemical occurrence. In those days, many considered such a materialistic understanding to be common sense. Eels came from mud, parasites formed inside humans, rotting meat created flies. The idea had been around since antiquity (see the Book of Genesis and the creation of Adam from mud). As experimental science became established, the source of life became the focus of a debate that continues to this day, although today’s scientific establishment generally subscribes to a materialistic interpretation of evolution.
In the 1600s, Robert Boyle was impressed with the experiments of Jean-Baptiste van Helmont. Van Helmont put a five-pound willow shoot into a pot of soil. After five years, the willow tree weighed 168 pounds but the soil weighed the same, leading van Helmont to conclude, “All vegetables do materially arise whole out of the element of water.”[68]
Microscopes made possible the discovery of an amazingly complex microscopic world, and sexual reproduction in the smallest insects. English and French philosophers in the late 1600s rejected Descartes’s notion of the spontaneous emergence of life from laws of motion acting on inanimate matter. Antoine Lavoisier eventually demonstrated in the late 18th century, before his neck met the business end of a guillotine, that water was only nourishment for plants, not their source. Lavoisier was the first to describe plant and animal respiration, and his work with oxygen, respiration, and combustion became the foundation of modern chemistry, and was one of Kuhn’s examples of revolutionary, paradigm-founding work. Religious philosophy was also involved in the spontaneous-generation debate, as life coming from random processes, by mere “chance,” was directly opposed to the day’s theology. In the late 17th century, the pre-existence of souls and the seeds of life were popular ideas. William Harvey wrote Generation of Animals and was concerned with sexual reproduction, but he was rather neutral about the ultimate spontaneity of life. The issue was a chicken-or-egg argument, and the egg position prevailed at times.
By the end of the 18th century, spontaneous-generation theory was again in vogue. Its rehabilitation was mainly due to evidence and theory involving parasitic worms. Largely because the parasitic life cycle had yet to be understood, the prevailing theory was that parasitic worms must spontaneously manifest within the host organism. In the 19th century’s early decades, spontaneous generation was largely accepted, and there were different schools of thought. Germany, led by its parasitologists, accepted spontaneous generation. In France it was also largely accepted. In Britain during the 18th and early 19th centuries, there was open hostility to the notion, as it was “atheistic” and “contrary to an unerring law of nature.”[69]
Beginning around 1830, spontaneous-generation theory was subject to challenges in France and Germany. Experiments showed that the organisms associated with decay were not spontaneously generated, and chemical and biological theories vied for supremacy.
During 1835-36, the Frenchman Charles Cagniard-Latour studied beer yeast and determined that fermentation was the result of the yeast’s biological processes. He concluded that yeast was a living organism. His conception of fermentation was original, and was confirmed at about the same time and taken further by Theodor Schwann. Schwann, a German, is today considered the father of histology, which is the study of plant and animal tissues. Schwann investigated cellular structure, putrefaction, and fermentation, and concluded that yeast was a living fungus. He also demonstrated that vacuum-sealed boiled meat did not rot or produce the microscopic organisms associated with rotting. With Cagniard-Latour and Schwann’s work, the notion of fermentation as a purely chemical process was challenged. There were counterattacks to that idea, most prominently from the German chemist Justus von Liebig. Liebig refused to look through microscopes. He did not subscribe to spontaneous-generation theory, but also saw fermentation as a purely chemical process, with no life involved. During the 1840s and 1850s, there was a plethora of confused hypotheses about fermentation and spontaneous generation.
The Whigs were a British political party, and "Whig history” was writing history as a tale of progress, a linear story beginning in a primitive past to climax with humanity’s crowning achievement: modern Western civilization.[70] John Farley took a sabbatical from his teaching position at Harvard, which produced The Spontaneous Generation Controversy, published in 1974. Farley partly wrote his book because many episodes in science history were still written in Whiggish terms.[71] Farley thought that the textbook treatment of the spontaneous-generation controversy was a “paradigmatic” case of Whig history in science. His book sought to help curtail spontaneous generation’s Whiggish treatment, particularly in how its major figure, Louis Pasteur, has been seen by history. The standard histories of the spontaneous-generation issue have it slowly discredited by scientific experiments until Pasteur came along and ended the controversy for all time with his “brilliant” experiments, winning a public contest to resolve the issue. Pasteur will be a focus of this medical essay, not because of his unique virtue, but because his triumph may have placed modern biology and medicine on a false foundation.
In the 1850s, the spontaneous-generation controversy was contested in three areas. One dealt with parasites, another was the area of fermentation, and the third was an overarching theory that largely ended the controversy in the scientific community, not in the 1850s, but in the 20th century. The new overarching theory was Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, which exploded onto the scene with the Origin of Species, published in 1859. Darwin was influenced by the gradualist theory of geology produced by fellow British citizen Charles Lyell (as contrasted with catastrophic theory) and the theories of the British economist Thomas Malthus, which posited that humanity would always be struggling to survive because of its uncontrolled breeding. Darwin’s work would bring Britain back to the spontaneous-generation issue because the logical outcome of evolutionary theory was that life somehow came into being by a gradual evolution from non-living matter. That theory would not be more fully worked out until the 20th century, however.
In the early 1850s Western scientists, largely German, discovered the life cycles of parasitic worms. The pleomorphic (it means “changing shape,” the way a caterpillar and butterfly are the same species, but in different “morphic” stages) properties of parasitic worms were not discovered until the 1850s. That discovery was a severe blow to spontaneous-generation theory. Similar to Semmelweis in Vienna, Rudolf Virchow lost his job in Berlin because of his revolutionary activities in the late 1840s. Virchow performed extensive work with parasitic worms in the 1850s, which further justified his belief that spontaneous generation was an invalid theory. In 1858, Virchow published his Cellular Pathology, which argued that the cell was the smallest unit of life. Schwann believed that cells could “crystallize” from a disorganized “mother” medium, but Virchow firmly stated that cells only arise from the division of existing cells. Cells have largely been seen ever since by orthodox science as the elementary unit of life, although it somehow evolved from protoplasm (today called cytoplasm). Virchow theorized that the health of an organism was dependent on the health of its cells. Today’s study of healthy and diseased cells, such as Pap smears and biopsies, grew from his work.
Darwin’s evolutionary theory and the findings in parasitology created more debate about spontaneous generation. The logical conclusion of evolutionary theory would demand an abiogenetic (life coming from inanimate material) explanation of the ultimate source of life, although parasite research discovered that they do not spontaneously form within host organisms. In the 1860s, both Germany and England grappled with the issue of spontaneous generation, generally agreeing with it. As Farley noted, their stance may seem at odds with the textbook story of Pasteur’s work sounding the death knell to spontaneous-generation theory in the 1860s. Pasteur battled for many years against the spontaneous-generation theorists after his work supposedly gave spontaneous-generation theory its fatal blow.
A brief summary of Louis Pasteur’s life is in order. Born in 1822 in a French village to a tanner who served in Napoleon’s army, Pasteur came from humble roots. A morally rigid young man, Pasteur did well in school and had artistic talent. He took the academic route, going to school in Paris. He had some major academic failures early in his collegiate career, but through extra effort was able to get into college and eventually earn his doctorate. As with the men who discovered anesthesia, Pasteur was consumed with ambition to become rich and famous. In 1844, Pasteur the chemistry student performed his first experiment: isolating phosphorous from cattle bones. It was successful, and Pasteur advertised his feat by putting a big blue label on the flask that held his result.[72]
In 1848, Pasteur was working in crystallography, a subdiscipline of geology. During 1848, revolution gripped Paris and Pasteur left his laboratory for a few moments to show some of his patriotism (he must be categorized as a political conservative). If he lived in the USA in the early 21st century, he would have probably been a George W. Bush supporter or perhaps lean even further to the right. In 1848, Pasteur made his first discovery, and it was a worthy one. Solutions of dissolved substances could evidence optical activity, which meant that if polarized light were shined through it, the light would become rotated from its original orientation when it came out the other side. French physicist Jean-Baptiste Biot discovered the phenomenon in 1815. Nobody knew why some substances rotated light. Pasteur discovered why in 1848. He was making crystals of sodium ammonium tartrate, which is not an optically active solution. As the crystals formed in solution, Pasteur noticed that some crystals were mirror images of each other. He plucked them out by using tweezers and separated them into two piles. He then made solutions of them. One solution rotated light to the right, and one to the left. It was a major discovery, and Pasteur immediately rushed out and dragged a physics instructor who was passing by into his laboratory, and explained his discovery to him. Pasteur would later state that the rotation of the light was due to the molecule’s structure. He was correct.
My collegiate organic chemistry textbook gave Pasteur high praise for his finding.[73] Pasteur’s discovery had profound implications for the life sciences. Stereoisomers (molecules that are identical except for being mirror images of each other) are one of life’s mysteries that remain unresolved. Optically active substances only come from living organisms. They use one version of a substance, but will not use its mirror image, because of the way it fits with the other molecules. To imagine the situation, try shaking a person’s left hand with your right hand. Nobody can really shake hands that way. Try right hand to right hand, and it works.
How living organisms came to incorporate chiral (right- and left-handed) molecules into their chemistry is a mystery to evolutionary theorists today. Nevertheless, optically active solutions are only made from living organisms (or, as in Pasteur’s fortunate case, he was able to pick out the right-handed and left-handed crystals). Solutions derived from chiral molecules not produced by life processes will have equal distributions of right-handed and left-handed molecules, which make the solutions optically inactive. Pasteur correctly theorized that optical activity was related to life processes. He successfully repeated the experiment for the skeptical, elderly Biot, and gained an academic patron.
Unable to land a suitable position in Paris upon completing his doctoral studies, in January 1849 Pasteur moved to Strasbourg to take a position as a chemistry teacher. Within three weeks of his arrival, Pasteur proposed to marry the college rector’s daughter, which may have reflected his ambition more than his ardor.[74] The rector was cautious, but Pasteur was persistent and married the woman in May of that year. Pasteur worked hard in his laboratory with his crystals, and an insight into his motivation may be reflected in an incident early in his marriage. He told his wife, who scolded him about his long hours in the laboratory, that he would make it up to her by "lead(ing) her to fame."[75] His wife anticipated that fame and the benefits it brought, writing to Louis’s father one day that, "Louis always worries a little too much about his experiments. You know that those he is planning for this year will give us, if they succeed, a Newton or Galileo."[76]
Pasteur is a controversial figure. During the 1990s, Gerald Geison, a history professor at Princeton, spent a year reading Pasteur’s experimental notebooks. In 1995, he published The Private Science of Louis Pasteur. In the final analysis, Geison respected Pasteur’s contributions to science and medicine but found a disparity between Pasteur the public scientist and Pasteur the experimenter. Geison’s book created an uproar in France, and he received plenty of scorn. One irony of Geison’s work is that Pasteur tried to ensure that his laboratory notes were never made public, partly because a row erupted over the posthumous publication of Claude Bernard’s notes. Bernard, Pasteur’s friend, was shown to subscribe to a more chemical theory of fermentation. Pasteur published a devastating critique of Bernard’s notes, and Pasteur then made his family promise to never make his notebooks public, which his grandson eventually betrayed.
Geison presented several events in which the public and private science of Pasteur were at odds, the first of which was Pasteur’s discovery of chirality. Pasteur made public presentations about his discovery of crystal chirality, and Geison shows that they were highly abbreviated versions that were in part self-serving. Geison’s central figure of Pasteur’s presentation of his discovery is Auguste Laurent. Laurent was a major figure in the early days of crystallography and Pasteur studied under his tutelage. Pasteur changed the subject of his doctoral chemistry thesis at Laurent’s suggestion, which set him on his path of discovery.
By analyzing Pasteur’s notes, Geison could find little evidence in Pasteur’s early work that suggested how he came upon his discovery of chirality. Pasteur was treading down paths that Laurent and others had blazed for him. He was dealing with complicated issues regarding crystal formation, and he was not focused on the optical activity of crystals for most of his doctoral work. He was researching anomalies that arose from Laurent’s work. Pasteur’s discovery was unexpected, and his laboratory notes do not show how he stumbled onto it. It is a mystery. Nevertheless, nobody has suggested that Pasteur’s discovery was not his own. However, when it came time to present his findings, Pasteur wrote Laurent completely out of the picture. His wallpapering over Laurent not only happened during his future talks about his discovery, but Pasteur began minimizing Laurent’s contributions to his work in the early drafts of his papers.[77] By the time that Pasteur published the first major paper about his discovery, Laurent’s contributions had been completely eliminated. Pasteur went further than that, making clear his low opinion of Laurent’s work in private correspondence with one of Laurent’s chief rivals, Jean-Baptiste Dumas.
Geison speculated that Pasteur’s disavowal of Laurent likely had much to do with his maneuvering in the day’s fierce political climate. Laurent was a political radical. Jean-Baptiste Dumas was Laurent’s rival in matters of molecular theory, and Dumas was the epitome of the establishment scientist, holding high positions in France’s academic establishment and eventually parlaying his activities into being named a senator by Napoleon III, the autocrat of France, a man who named himself emperor, just as his uncle did.[78]
Pasteur sought the fame and prosperity that he promised his wife. When a promised medal from Dumas did not arrive quickly enough for his liking, Pasteur complained.[79] While it would be a mistake to say that Pasteur did not have friends, he was not a particularly likeable fellow. In interviews and speeches, Geison stated that Pasteur “was by no means always humble, selfless, ethically superior…Quite the opposite.” Geison found Pasteur’s “behavior and conduct in general unlikable through much of his career.”[80]
Pasteur cultivated patronage and fame while he worked with crystals. His theory of the relationship between chirality and life led him into the spontaneous-generation controversy. Pasteur gained a prestigious appointment to the University of Lille in 1854 and became involved with fermentation in 1856 due to his position as a chemistry instructor and the industrial problems of the local beet sugar industry.
A few years earlier, parasite research had shown that intestinal worms do not spontaneously manifest. Regarding the issue of intestinal worms, an unfortunate dynamic was evident in the practice of science. The French Academy of Sciences held contests to decide the truth of scientific matters. In 1852, it offered a prize for the best explanation of how intestinal worms are transmitted. The winner, P.J. van Beneden, held a powerful university position in Belgium, and John Farley thinks that van Beneden’s political connections, more than his scientific efforts, may have won him his prize. In addition, van Beneden made claims of priority of discovery that were obviously false, with the true credit due to German scientists.[81] When scientific truth is decided by contest, objectivity can easily go flying out the window. The practice continues today and further underscores Kuhn’s point that paradigms prevail because scientists believe in them, not necessarily because they are more accurate than other paradigms.
With discoveries in parasitology disproving the notion that parasitic worms were generated spontaneously, fermentation was the last great, unresolved area of contest. Pasteur was one of many scientists investigating the area, and Pasteur had almost no biological training. He originally subscribed to the notion of spontaneous generation, and those theorists were called sponteparists.
According to the official stories, Pasteur quickly discovered that yeast was alive, and he published his first results in 1857. In his 1857 writings, Pasteur described the yeast and its associated fermentation products as taking “birth spontaneously…every time that the conditions are favorable.”[82] While Pasteur theorized that the yeast was alive, he also thought the yeast had spontaneously generated, which reflected his early sponteparist position. Pasteur’s position was far from original. There was a strong minority position that yeast was alive, and Pasteur’s position was merely a rehash of Cagniard-Latour’s work of a generation earlier. Although Pasteur campaigned heavily to be admitted to the French Academy of Sciences in 1857, he failed. His residency in Lille weighed against him. Paris was the center of French academic life, and Pasteur knew that he would not realize his ambitions in the relative hinterland of Lille. He received a promotion and moved to Paris in 1857. In the classroom, Pasteur was notoriously unpopular with his students and academic colleagues. He was a humorless martinet who ran the classroom as if it were a boot camp.[83]
As late as 1860, Pasteur was describing yeast and the products of fermentation as spontaneously produced. In 1862, he finally gained admittance to the French Academy of Sciences, in its mineralogy section. In all the accounts of Pasteur’s career that I have read, he clearly was a showman and self-promoter. Around 1860, Pasteur began theorizing that there were germs in the air, and that they were responsible for fermentation. In late 1860, he performed a theatrical experiment in which he traveled across France and into the high Alps, sampling the air, with his experiment proving that germs exist in the air. The history books portray the issue as one in which Pasteur had a conflict with Felix-Archimède Pouchet, who had a theory of heterogenesis, as opposed to abiogenesis. Heterogenetic theory states that life arose from life or organic matter, and abiogenetic theory posits that life ultimately came from non-living substances. The distinction was vitally important in the debate on spontaneous generation.
In France, spontaneous-generation theory was unpopular by the time Pasteur became embroiled in it, and Pasteur was considered to have only delivered spontaneous-generation theory’s deathblow. The French Academy of Sciences held contests on the issue, in 1862 and 1864. As Farley pointed out, both the 1862 and 1864 juries were composed of men hostile to spontaneous generation. The 1864 jury was even more biased than the 1862 jury, and Pasteur's patrons Dumas and Antoine Balard presided. History books have told of Pasteur’s triumph, but Farley’s account portrayed the proceedings as shamelessly rigged.[84]
Before the 1864 jury convened, Pasteur gave a public speech about his findings and the mortal blow it gave to spontaneous-generation theory. It was given at the Sorbonne and was attended by the Parisian literati, including Alexandre Dumas, George Sand, and Princess Mathilde. It was an educated audience, but not a scientific one. Pasteur was embarking on his career as a popularizer. Pasteur gave a brief account of the controversy, as well as its religious and philosophical implications. Then he delivered his coupe de grâce, announcing that his experimental findings had shown that when he was able to keep airborne organisms from touching a nutrient-rich medium, no life was seen to take place, because, “I have kept away from it the germs that are floating in the air, I have kept it away from life, for life is the germ, and the germ is life.”[85] The largely lay audience greeted his pronouncement with thunderous applause. Pasteur’s reputation was thereby made. He became the savant of germs in the air. In Pasteur’s work at the time, he failed to even mention the role of parasitic worms in the controversy, and he regularly assailed rival scientists. He became famous for his thunderous orations at meetings of the French Academy of Sciences.
Even sympathetic historians and biographers admit that Pasteur’s fame was due in no small part to his efforts at self-promotion and his rhetorical talent. In 1863, soon after his election to the French Academy of Sciences, Pasteur was introduced to Napoleon III, and he told Napoleon of his ambition to understand and cure disease. Pasteur realized his ambition and was subsequently seen hobnobbing regularly with French royalty, with Pasteur “always being receptive to flattery from high places…”[86] While exhibiting artistic talent in his youth, Pasteur was aghast at innovation in art and consistently supported the old school, and was highly contemptuous of Manet and the Impressionists.
With imperial patronage under his belt and his avowal to cure disease (even though he still had no medical or biological training), Pasteur was asked to look into diseases that were plaguing French industries. Pasteur’s germs-in-the-air philosophy led to the germ theory of disease. In 1863, Pasteur was asked to look into a disease that was harming French grapes and their wine industry, and in 1865, he was commissioned to look into a disease that was devastating silkworms and the French silk industry. The history books give Pasteur full credit for resolving those issues and saving those industries, to later take on such diseases as anthrax and rabies. For his entire career, Pasteur battled his rivals and critics. Even his friends were not immune, such as with his posthumous attack on Bernard’s notes.
Pasteur’s germ theory led to introducing those germs to people as a way of preventing disease, hence his anthrax and rabies vaccines. Geison presented cases where Pasteur “cooked” his data to conform to his theories. In dealing with his anthrax work, Geison crossed the line and accused Pasteur of outright fraud, telling his readers that, “Pasteur deliberately deceived the public and scientific community about the nature of the vaccine actually used…” in his famous demonstration of his anthrax vaccine in 1881.[87] Pasteur misrepresented how his vaccine was prepared, apparently to triumph over his rival Jean-Joseph Henri Toussaint over the anthrax vaccine. Pasteur’s public victory over the anthrax issue appears to have been the final blow for Toussaint, who lost his mind the next year and never recovered. Geison noted that one must consider the financial considerations that may have prompted Pasteur’s deception. Pasteur soon began building a financial empire on his work, and by the mid-1880s his laboratory earned a 130,000-franc profit from anthrax-vaccine sales.[88]
Pasteur ventured into outright human experimentation and used his rabies treatment on humans before he had used it on animals.[89] His private notebooks yielded that finding, but it comes as no surprise to those who have read a letter that Pasteur wrote to the emperor of Brazil. In 1884, Pasteur wrote that people condemned to death should become subjects of human experiments and given the option on the eve of their planned executions. The choice presented would be execution or becoming subjects for rabies vaccine testing. Pasteur predicted that the condemned would all consent to becoming experimental subjects, as a “person condemned to death only fears death.”[90] Pasteur performed his experiments on his patients after he wrote his letter to the Brazilian emperor. Patrice Debré, who authored a sympathetic biography of Pasteur, wrote that one could not read Pasteur’s letter to the emperor without thinking of the Nazis’ death-camp experiments.[91] Even one of Pasteur's disciples said about Pasteur's human rabies experiments, "The scientist's conscience smothered the conscience of the man."[92]
It should be made clear that Geison, Debré, Rene Dubos, John Farley, and others have generally praised Pasteur’s contributions to science and medicine, even if their work has removed some of the luster from Pasteur’s heroic journey.
Geison’s book created quite a splash when published, as Pasteur is in science’s Pantheon of the great and a French national hero. Not everybody agreed with Geison’s assessment of Pasteur’s work, both public and private. Hal Hellman wrote that while Geison’s work was careful and not easily dismissed, it “does much to smudge a shining image of a real medical hero.”[93] Hellman felt that there were few true “heroes” in science’s history, and he did not like to see Pasteur’s image deconstructed.
Unfortunately, Farley’s work had little impact on the Whiggish history that first-year microbiology students are taught. All the microbiology books I obtained, written long after Farley’s book was published, all told the same utilitarian fairy tale of Pasteur and spontaneous generation.[94] The spontaneous-generation debate was not finally settled in scientific circles until Aleksandr Oparin and the 1936 publication of his The Origin of Life on Earth. Oparin was a Russian biochemist whose work was influenced by the dialectical materialism of Karl Marx and friends. Marx’s influence went far beyond political-economic theory, which may surprise most Americans, as Marx is a discredited, even demonized, figure in the West. Oparin theorized that the primordial soup of the young earth gave rise to higher orders of molecular organization and eventually led to an abiogenetic origin of life. The scientific community has embraced Oparin’s work as completing the theory of how life arose on earth, and there the matter rests…for now.
Pasteur’s legacy is enormous. Today’s germ theory grew from his work. Pasteurization wears his name. He pioneered vaccination. Robert Lister based his carbolic-acid treatment on Pasteur’s work, which made surgery largely free of infection. Pasteur industrialized science, applying scientific findings to industry, and helped create the academic institutions that feed industry with scientists. Before Pasteur died, Pasteur Institutes dotted France, becoming major institutions of science and medicine. René Dubos wrote a number of books about Pasteur, his work, and legacy. Under a heading of “The Benefits of Precise Knowledge,” Dubos listed dozens of major corporations that are primary beneficiaries of Pasteur’s legacy. All the major oil companies headed Dubos’s list, followed by food-processing, pharmaceutical, and biomedical companies.[95]
This essay is not intended to assassinate Pasteur’s character. He was human, as with all of us. Hellman noted that Geison’s critics stated that his critique veered from purely scientific matters, taking Pasteur’s legacy to task perhaps unfairly. Hellman is convinced that Pasteur fudged his data, but it was understandable given the circumstances. This essay’s point is that if he fudged the data, how accurate were his findings? We go back to Kuhn here. Pasteur prevailed, but was he right? Probably more than any other single figure, Pasteur’s work founded the paradigm under which today’s medicine operates. Is our health better because of his work? Was there another paradigm that could have been adopted? That is a major crux of this essay. What if Pasteur was wrong? Not just a little wrong, but profoundly wrong, so wrong that his legacy has killed far more people than it has helped? Are microbiology textbooks understandably expedient in telling the Whiggish tale of the germ theory’s foundation, or do they march students off in the wrong direction on their first day of class?
There is a large and impressive body of evidence that suggests that the Pasteurian paradigm prevailed due to considerations of money and power more than the accuracy of his science. This essay will now explore that allegation.
In the several biographies of Pasteur I have read through, as well as works such as Farley’s, there is an obscure figure who receives little mention, and the only place I saw his work dealt with at all was in Geison’s book. While dealing with the Pasteur myth, Geison spent a paragraph dealing with a book by Ethel Douglas Hume titled Béchamp or Pasteur. It was originally published in 1923. Geison felt that the book was plagued with a “ludicrous incomprehension” of the true nature of Pasteur’s work and science. Geison, while admitting that Pasteur probably treated Béchamp poorly, did not feel that Pasteur plagiarized him.[96] Who was Béchamp, and what plagiarism was Pasteur accused of?
Pierre Jacques Antoine Béchamp lived from 1816 to 1908. Béchamp, a physician, unlike Pasteur, had plenty of biological and medical training. He was also a doctor of science, a pharmacist, and a college chemistry, physics, pharmacology, and toxicology professor. He is a known figure in industrial science, as he developed an economical process to produce aniline and the many dyes and drugs based on it. Regarding his life’s work, however, he is virtually unknown today. He was a leading figure in his time, but today his name is all but unknown in the orthodox histories of biology and medicine. I first heard of Béchamp in 1990 as I began my education in alternative media, history, medicine, and related areas. His story is worth telling, and the rest of this medical essay will deal at length with the idea that Béchamp was only the first in a long line of researchers whose work pointed toward a different paradigm in biology and medicine, which may still be adopted one day.
In the 1850s, Béchamp was one of many scientists investigating fermentation. By 1854, the chemical explanation of fermentation was the prevailing one, with the work of Cagniard-Latour and Schwann disregarded by the mainstream. It was known that yeast initiated fermentation, and was seen as a chemical reagent by the mainstream and chemists such as Liebig. As such, yeast was called a “ferment,” since it initiated fermentation. However, Cagniard-Latour and Schwann’s theory that yeast was a living organism was not altogether discarded. Yeast was not the only focus of research into fermentation. In May of 1854, Béchamp performed an experiment investigating a phenomenon known as the inversion of sugar. If cane sugar (sucrose) were put into water and left to sit, the sugar would slowly transform into glucose and fructose (which is also called grape sugar). That process was called the inversion of sugar, and was thought to be a strictly chemical transformation. The transformation could be detected by using polarized light and a polarimeter, seeing if the angle of rotation changed. If the angle changed, it meant that inversion took place.
In Béchamp’s 1854 experiment, he took four flasks and filled them with a sucrose solution, sealed them, and left a small amount of air in the flasks. One flask held distilled water and cane sugar. The other three solutions held calcium and zinc chlorides and cane sugar. The first flask had inversion while the other three did not. Also, mold appeared in the distilled water solution and not the others. Béchamp published the result of that experiment in February 1855 in the French Academy of Sciences’s official record, the Comptes Rendus. It was the first in a series of experiments now known as the Beacon Experiment. Another researcher published similar results to his in 1856, and Béchamp considered two questions:
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What is the origin of the molds that appear in the sugared water?[97]
As Pasteur did in 1854, Béchamp moved on from Strasbourg to greener academic pastures and took a position at the university at Montpellier in southern France, where he spent many happy years. For an 18-month period, beginning in June 1856, Béchamp performed a new set of experiments designed to answer those two questions. Pasteur had yet to involve himself in fermentation when Béchamp began publishing his Beacon Experiment findings. Béchamp’s new round of experiments introduced several substances into cane-sugar solutions, including creosote and several metallic salts. Creosote is a close cousin of carbolic acid, which Lister would make famous with his sterile surgical procedures. The zinc, calcium, and mercury chlorides prevented inversion, while other substances seemed to promote inversion, and some inverted solutions became very moldy. Béchamp also performed a litmus test and found the inverted solutions acidic.
In March 1857, Béchamp set out to investigate the role of creosote more fully. He prepared several cane-sugar solutions. In some, he boiled the water, and the air was passed through a sulfuric acid solution before introduction to the flasks. In others, he allowed no air and the flasks were completely filled with boiled water and cane sugar. In others, he added creosote, both with filtered and unfiltered air. Two of his filtered-air flasks with only sugar and water displayed inversions. Béchamp noted that those two flasks were imperfectly manipulated and contaminated by unfiltered air. He also noted that the more mold seen, the greater the rotation of light, hence greater inversion. The perfectly sealed flasks of boiled water and filtered air had no change in light rotation, and no mold. It became obvious to Béchamp that inversion was not a strictly chemical process. Béchamp deduced two conclusions from those experiments.
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Boiled water and cane sugar, when put into an airless flask, will not undergo inversion.
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The same solution, boiled or not, enclosed with air, would invert, with mold forming and the solution becoming acidic. To prove that air alone could not account for the inversion, no matter its volume, a little added creosote would prevent it whether the flask was sealed or not.[98]
It was common knowledge in those days that nitrogen was present in albuminoid matter. Albumin is a simple protein. There is no nitrogen in sugar or water. In those days, the prevailing view was that fermentation could not occur in the absence of albuminoid matter, which was why Pasteur worked with sour milk. Because mold accompanied the inversions, Béchamp reasoned that they were responsible for them, because his work had shown that air alone did not do it, although air was a required component of inversion and mold formation. Schwann was the first to perform experiments to prove that the organisms that accompanied fermentation, seen through microscopes, were introduced through the atmosphere. Béchamp analyzed the mold and discovered that they had nitrogen in them. The only place the nitrogen could have come from was the air in the flask. Béchamp’s conclusions from his Beacon Experiment were firm, and he first submitted them to the French Academy of Sciences in December 1857. An extract of his findings was published by the Academy in January 1858, with the full paper included in Annales de Chimie et de Physique, published in September 1858. Béchamp’s conclusion was very clear, writing that the:
“germs brought by the air found in the sugared solution a favorable medium for their development.”
Béchamp wrote that the:
“new organism, making use of the materials present, effects the synthesis of the nitrogenized and non-nitrogenized materials of its substance.”[99]
With his Beacon Experiment, Béchamp was the first to prove that not only could fermentation take place without the presence of albuminoid matter, but also that the organisms responsible for the fermentation actually created them by incorporating nitrogen from the air. When Béchamp submitted his findings to the French Academy of Sciences in late 1857, Pasteur was still experimenting with sour milk and calling fermentation a spontaneous process. Béchamp was far more interested in investigating nature’s mysteries than becoming rich and famous. Béchamp sought no fanfare, and after submitting his seminal experimental results, pursued the implications of them. Béchamp had conclusively demonstrated that fermentation was not due to spontaneous processes in 1857.
Most official stories of Pasteur do not even mention Béchamp, and Geison’s quick dismissal is misleading. Ethel Douglas Hume published under the names E. Douglas Hume and Douglas Hume, to hide the fact that she was a woman, to further demonstrate Western civilization’s ingrained misogyny. Geison disparaged and dismissed Hume’s work, also stating that Hume’s book did not persuade him that Pasteur had “plagiarized” Béchamp. In reading Geison’s brief account, the impression is easily received that Hume was about the only person making the case. Béchamp makes the case for Pasteur’s plagiarism in his work, notably in the preface to his The Blood and its Third Anatomical Element. Hume’s work was largely based on Béchamp’s account of events, and he did not mince words and described in detail four instances in which Pasteur allegedly plagiarized him, then Pasteur added indignity to injury when he led a campaign against Béchamp. Béchamp noted the fate of Galileo and others who run up against the establishment, and he finished his summary of the issue of Pasteur with:
“It is that part of mankind which allows the plagiarist to calumniate and vilify the victim whose work he has plagiarized.”[100]
"First…a new theory is attacked as absurd. Then it is admitted to be true but obvious and insignificant. Finally it is seen to be so important that its adversaries claim that they themselves discovered it."[101]
Pasteur’s alleged plagiarisms of Béchamp were not innocuous: they may have marched biology and medicine off in the wrong direction. When Béchamp had proven that fermentation in sugared water was initiated by the “germs brought by the air,” Pasteur was still adhering to his sponteparist view. Pasteur observed the lactic ferment created by one of his experiments, and wrote that the ferment "takes birth spontaneously as easily as beer-yeast every time that the conditions are favorable."[102] An extract of Béchamp's work appeared in the Academy's Reports on January 4, 1858, while Pasteur's report appeared in April 1858. It appears that Pasteur was aware of Béchamp's discovery when he published his paper. Accompanying the sentence "takes birth spontaneously as easily as beer-yeast every time that the conditions are favorable" is a footnote stating that he used the word "spontaneously" as "the expression of a fact," but he backpedaled on its truly spontaneous nature. Pasteur then threw in some platitudes about his results that others had discovered earlier. There was nothing original in Pasteur’s work to that time. Pasteur was badly out of his field in interpreting his experimental results, partly because he had no biological training. He was a chemist. By 1857, Pasteur had made no original statements about the nature of fermentation, and leaned toward the sponteparist position.
In December 1857, Pasteur published the results of his experiment with putting yeast into sugared water and observing the fermentation. In his conclusion, Pasteur stated, "Fermentation then takes place as it does in a natural sugared liquid, juice of the grape, or sugar cane, etc., that is to say, spontaneously…"[103]
Pasteur adhered to the sponteparist position long after Béchamp had produced his enlightening results. In 1859, Pasteur seems to have glimpsed the importance of Béchamp's work. He performed an experiment but omitted the yeast, and described the origin of the yeast as coming from the air. Pasteur persisted in giving the phenomenon a spontaneous-generation explanation. He wrote, "As to the origin of the lactic yeast in the experiments, it is solely due to the atmospheric air: we fall back here upon the facts of spontaneous generation…On this point the question of spontaneous generation has made progress."[104] In an 1860 memoir, Pasteur still referred to the spontaneous generation of yeasts and fermentations. Béchamp would later criticize Pasteur's experimental conclusions, stating that Pasteur's deductions proved that he did not understand "the chemico-physiological phenomena of transformation, called fermentation, which are processes of nutrition, that is to say, of digestion, followed by absorption, assimilation, excretion, etc."[105]
In 1860, Pasteur finally grasped the importance of Béchamp's work. Instead of acknowledging Béchamp's trumping of the whole field, Pasteur seemingly labored to make Béchamp's discoveries his own.
In September 1860, Pasteur performed the experiment that put him in the history books. Two German scientists had already performed the experiment that he proposed, but not so flamboyantly. Working quietly in a laboratory, filtering air into flasks to prove that "germs" were in the air, had already been done. Pasteur embarked on a tour of France, carrying 73 vials with him. He opened and sealed the vials at different locations and altitudes, ending with the famous opening and sealing of 20 vials on a French Alp, above Chamonix. Pasteur was "proving" that germs existed in the air. He was also making a radical departure from his sponteparist convictions.
The campaign that Pasteur waged to claim credit for the work of others began soon thereafter. In a meeting at the Sorbonne in 1861, Pasteur, in the presence of Béchamp, tried claiming credit for proving that living organisms can appear in a medium devoid of albuminoid matter. Since that claim was a direct theft from Béchamp, Béchamp did something he was not accustomed to: he spoke up regarding Pasteur’s attempted theft. Béchamp did not accuse Pasteur of plagiarism in that meeting, but merely recounted the results of his Beacon Experiments and his published conclusions derived from them. As he returned to his seat (Pasteur sat next to him), he asked Pasteur to be so kind as to admit his knowledge of the Beacon Experiment work. Pasteur hastily admitted his knowledge of Béchamp's work, and stated that the results Béchamp put forth were of the "most rigid exactness."[106]
Years later, Pasteur would attack Béchamp's work and call his conclusions "an enormity." In what appears to be an instance of opportunism, Pasteur quickly abandoned a theory that he had held for years (spontaneous generation), did a complete about-face based upon the work of others, and then tried to claim credit for the discovery.
Béchamp was not immediately hailed for his breakthrough. Because his results and conclusions were so novel and far ahead of his day, scientists attempted to explain his results as due to impurities in the sugar he used. Even when that was disproved, they continued to question Béchamp's work.
As late as 1872, Pasteur was still woefully ignorant about what fermentation really was. He wrote "That which separates the chemical phenomenon of fermentation from a crowd of other acts and especially from the acts of ordinary life is the fact of the decomposition of a weight of fermentative matter much superior to the weight of the ferment."[107] Pasteur was repeating the day’s misunderstanding that many scientists subscribed to. Béchamp put forth a simple explanation of fermentation that should have made it clear why a ferment could affect a medium of vastly larger proportion than itself. Béchamp proposed the following analogy:
"Suppose an adult man to have lived for a century, to weigh on an average 60 kilograms; he will have consumed in that time, besides other foods, the equivalent of 20,000 kilograms of flesh and produced about 800 kilograms of urea. Shall it be said that it is impossible to admit that this mass of flesh and of urea could at any moment of his life form part of his being? Just as a man consumes all that food by repeating the same act a great many times, the yeast cell consumes a great mass of sugar only by constantly assimilating and disassimilating it bit by bit. Now, that which only one man will consume in a century, a sufficient number of men would absorb and form in a day. It is the same in yeast; the sugar that a small number of cells would only consume in a year, a greater number would destroy in a day; in both cases, the more numerous the individuals, the more rapid the consumption."[108]
Jonathan Swift wrote that the way to spot a genius was by the dunces who unite in confederation against him/her. Pasteur used his position, with imperial patronage and help from his friends, to begin a campaign to discredit and suppress Béchamp’s work, organizing, in Béchamp’s words, a “conspiracy of silence.”[109]
After Pasteur’s failed 1861 attempt to claim credit for his “germs in the air” theory, his public speech in 1864 at the Sorbonne apparently completed his plagiarism. While Béchamp is not mentioned in any microbiology or biology textbook that I could find, Pasteur’s “discovery” of “germs in the air” is supposedly what overturned spontaneous-generation theory. Geison is not convinced of Pasteur’s plagiarism in that matter, but at this time, I am.
In the wake of his 1864 speech, Pasteur became the toast of Parisian intellectual life, and by invitation he spent a week at the Emperor's palace in 1865. Pasteur eagerly lapped it up. His imperial patronage gave him the "Teflon effect" for the rest of his life. Many scientists, particularly French ones, became decidedly timid in confronting or criticizing a man who had blessings from French society's highest levels. While Pasteur was realizing his lifelong ambition to rub shoulders with the rich and powerful, as a ticket to wealth and fame for himself, Béchamp had unceasingly continued his investigations into life's mysteries.
Pasteur took the position that life was in the air, and that bacteria came from the air. Although Pasteur would deny that flesh could be alive independently of the organism that housed it, Charlton Bastian was producing experimental results that had no easy answer, particularly in light of Pasteur's germs-in-the-air evangelizing. Bastian found bacteria on the inside of animal organs and fruits and vegetables. Pasteur's air-germ theory did not account for them. In fact, Pasteur's air-germ theory misled scientists for some time. Lister bought Pasteur's germs-in-the-air theory and sprayed his carbolic acid spray into the air around his patients, trying to kill those germs in the air. That led to many unnecessary deaths. Lister would later reject that idea and admit that the only germs of consequence were the ones introduced by "other than atmospheric sources."[110]
Béchamp took his fermentation studies much further, and the microscope became a source of revelation in Béchamp's hands. Preceding Béchamp, other scientists had noticed minute "granulations" that appeared to be organized and perhaps alive. They were smaller than cells. Rudolf Virchow postulated in 1858 that cells were the primary unit of life, which Béchamp’s findings contradicted. In Béchamp's early experiments, he noted the granulations and movements and called them "little bodies." He had nothing further to add in those early days, so the little bodies were merely noted.
During Béchamp's fermentation experiments, he added various salts to the sugar solutions. In one experiment, he substituted calcium carbonate for potassium carbonate. The calcium carbonate's source was a form of chalk. When he added creosote to the sugared water, inversion still took place. Béchamp had already proven that creosote inhibited the formation of mold from exterior sources. The experiment with chalk was a contradiction. Béchamp believed the results were due to some faultiness in his procedures, left out the chalk results from his published work, and resolved to investigate them further.
Béchamp then began a series of intensive investigations into chalk that should have shaken the foundations of biology, but today few know his name. He undertook many experiments with chalk and fermentation. Béchamp performed numerous experiments where he created an air-free environment. When chemically pure calcium carbonate was added, no inversion took place. Ordinary chalk inverted the sugar. Béchamp took elaborate precautions to ensure that atmospheric germs could not gain access to the flasks, yet chalk still inverted the sugared water.
Béchamp then obtained chalk, and subsequently a block of limestone from a quarry, and engaged in great precautions to ensure that they did not contact the air. The limestone inverted the sugar, even when creosote was added. Béchamp was shocked to find that a mineral such as limestone would invert the sugar. It became obvious that there was a difference between chalk and pure calcium carbonate. Béchamp then began his epochal observations with his microscope. He was amazed to find the same "little bodies" in the chalk as he had earlier seen in living cells. The little bodies moved rapidly, similar to what was known as Brownian movement, but Béchamp noticed a difference between Brownian movement and what the "little bodies" were doing. The little bodies refracted light from their surroundings differently from particles agitated by Brownian movement. Béchamp determined that the "little bodies" were inducing the fermentation. Although they were much smaller than Virchow's cell, they were more powerful at inducing fermentation than anything else that Béchamp had seen.
There were two tenets that guided Béchamp's work at that time, based on his experiences. One was that no chemical change takes place without a cause. The other was that there is no spontaneous generation of living organisms. Béchamp concluded that if the little bodies were truly alive, then he should be able to isolate them, prove them to be insoluble in water, and find them composed of organic matter. Through rigorous procedures, Béchamp proved those notions. He also was able to "kill" the little bodies by heating them. When he heated chalk to 300° C (572° F) it no longer inverted the sugar, and the little bodies no longer made their characteristic movements.
His experimental results brought him to strange musings. If the little bodies were alive, as Béchamp had proven to his own satisfaction, how did they get into limestone and chalk? The limestone block that Béchamp obtained was considered to be millions of years old, and was a powerful fermentative agent. How could something survive in limestone for millions of years? He experimented with tufa limestone, coal deposits, peat bogs, and the dust of cities. Ancient peat bogs and city dust proved to be powerful fermentative agents, while the coal and tufa proved weak.
The pursuit of his "error" in observing chalk initiate fermentation took him into territory never trod by science before. Béchamp discovered new realms of investigation and left his contemporaries far, far behind. What Béchamp discovered was that the little bodies were indeed alive, and apparently capable of lying dormant for millions of years. Furthermore, they were far smaller than Virchow's cell and seemed to be building blocks and the organizers of cells. Béchamp's microscopic investigations of chalk, limestone, peat, and the like showed him that the little bodies might be the living remnants of ancient cells. Béchamp recalled that Jacob Henle had earlier (1841) observed that the little bodies were structured, and suspected that they might be the cells’ building blocks. Béchamp was not much given to speculation, but built his theories upon what he observed. His experiments took place in the late 1850s and early 1860s. Béchamp soon bestowed his own term to the little bodies, calling them microzymas, which meant "tiny ferment" in Greek.
Alfred Estor, a physician and surgeon at Montpellier's hospital, was captivated by Béchamp's discoveries. Estor wrote enthusiastically about Béchamp's work, and the two men became partners in further investigating the microzyma. Béchamp also discovered the cause of fermentation in beer yeast, and called it zymase. Although Béchamp coined the term zymase and its purpose in 1864, credit was given to E. Büchner for "discovering" it in 1897.[111]
In 1863, Pasteur’s most powerful patron, Napoleon III, gave him his first task: researching the disease that was decimating France's vineyards. The year before, in 1862, Béchamp was already investigating the vineyard disease, on his own. Through his experiments he concluded that the disease's cause was a mold that was found on the leaves and stalks of the grapes. He thoroughly published his results in 1864, while Pasteur had barely begun his investigation.[112]
In 1865, Pasteur was assigned another task: discovering the cause of the disease of silkworms, which was destroying France's silk industry. Pasteur was handsomely paid by the state for his efforts in the vineyard problem and silkworm disease, known at the time as pébrine. Again, before Pasteur had even laid eyes on a silkworm, Béchamp, working on his own and unpaid, had solved the riddle of pébrine. Béchamp's experimentation yielded the fact that pébrine was a parasitical disease, and could be prevented with an application of creosote. Béchamp spoke before the agricultural society in 1865 about his findings. Pasteur, again demonstrating his misunderstanding of life processes, performed his own experiments and in 1865 announced that pébrine was neither animal or vegetable, but something akin to pus or starch. Pasteur's understanding was abysmal, but he had imperial patronage and France's ear.
While Béchamp was explaining the parasitical nature of pébrine and how to prevent it, Pasteur stated that thinking of the disease as parasitic "would be an error." Béchamp called the disease the result of a vegetative ferment, transmitted by spore. Béchamp differentiated pébrine from another silkworm disease called flacherie. He discovered that flacherie was not due to an outside disease, but was related to ill health in the silkworm's microzymas, and appeared to be hereditary. In other words, flacherie was a degenerative disease of the silkworms' constitutions, and pébrine was a parasitical disease that attacked the silkworms. Béchamp solved those problems in his spare time at his own expense, while Pasteur blindly wandered on behalf of the Emperor. In 1866, Pasteur admitted that his earlier conclusion of pébrine resembling starch or pus was badly mistaken.[113]
Because Béchamp understood the diseases, he also suggested treatments: use creosote to prevent infection of pébrine and do not breed moths with flacherie. Here is where Pasteur apparently began inflicting damage on Western science and medicine due to his lust for fame, wealth, and power. The ingenious investigations of Béchamp were far ahead of his time, and although they were clear and precise, the bureaucracies of the day looked to the oracle of Napoleon III for his pronouncement. Pasteur demonstrated his complete misunderstanding of the disease, stating that pébrine was contagious and hereditary, and his preventive was finding eggs free of the disease and only breeding those. Although the history books today credit Pasteur with saving the silkworm industry (called sericulture), the numbers tell a different story. When the troubles began with sericulture in about 1850, France produced about 30 million kilograms of cocoons annually. By 1866-67, the production had fallen to 15 million kilograms. After Pasteur's "preventive" was introduced, it fell to 8 million kilograms in 1873 and as low as 2 million kilograms in subsequent years.[114]
After summarizing the plunge in silkworm production, apparently accelerated by Pasteur's "preventive," here is what Dr. Lutaud, the one-time editor of Paris's journal of medicine, had to say about Pasteur's "miracle."
"This is the way in which Pasteur saved sericulture! The reputation, which he still preserves in this respect among ignoramuses and short-sighted savants, has been brought into being, (1) by himself, by means of inaccurate assertions, (2) by the sellers of microscopic seeds on the Pasteur system, who have realized big benefits at the expense of the cultivators, (3) by the complicity of the Academies in the Public Bodies, which, without any investigation, reply to the complaints of the cultivators - 'But sericulture is saved! Make use of Pasteur's system!' However, everybody is not disposed to employ a system that consists of enriching oneself by the ruination of others."[115]
Hume observed that perhaps the greatest harm that Pasteur inflicted on science was deflecting notice from Béchamp's discoveries, marching biology and medicine off in the wrong direction as he continued claiming credit for Béchamp's discoveries, while being so ignorant that he did not understand what he stole. Pasteur tried taking credit for Béchamp's silkworm discoveries, particularly Béchamp's explanation of flacherie, which was founded on his microzyman investigations, of which Pasteur knew literally nothing and had done no original work on.[116] When Pasteur tried taking credit for Béchamp's silkworm discoveries at the Academy of Sciences, Béchamp was once more compelled to make reference to his earlier publications, and even told of how a French bureaucrat had quietly approached him about his solution to the problem.
In the meantime, Béchamp was continuing his investigations into the world of the microzyma. Béchamp and Estor labored long and hard at Montpellier, microscopes in hand. Their discoveries were startling.
Microzymas could be seen moving about inside cells. In healthy cells the microzymas looked one way, and appeared to be vital for the cells' healthy functioning. It seemed that microzymas were required for cells to form, and were essential building blocks of life. When tissue was diseased, microzymas seemed related to the bacteria they were seeing. The microzymas in chalk and limestone appeared to be surviving remnants of the creatures that became the rock, and incredibly came alive after millions of years of dormancy.
Béchamp and Estor tirelessly performed experiments that lasted for years. When a freak frost hit Montpellier in the winter of 1867-1868, Béchamp obtained a large cactus that had frozen. It was a cactus with a large, thick skin, impervious to invasion by organisms. Béchamp sectioned the cactus and looked deep within its interior. He found it teeming with destructive bacteria. They concluded that the bacteria they saw in damaged tissue, as in the frostbitten cactus, came from the microzymas.
Béchamp held that microzymas were both the beginning and end of life, in a category all their own. Microzymas initiated the formation of cells, and also initiated the cells’ destruction. Béchamp stated that nothing is the prey of death, but everything is the prey of life. When animals and plants decay, organisms are nourished by consuming them. The organisms that live inside them are apparently responsible for their life in the first place. The decay initiated by the microzymas when cells die is identical to the fermentation process in wine, beer, and the inversion of sugar. Microzymas exist at the beginning of life, and when the cell dies, microzymas are eventually the only organized material left, and the rest is broken down into its constituent elements. The microzymas can survive in limestone for millions of years. The recent “revival” of ancient bacteria by today’s scientists is more confirmation of Béchamp’s work. Microzymas, not the cell, appear to be the smallest unit of life, and its building block. A cell is a higher level of organization of life processes, similar to the manner in which a multicellular creature is another, higher level.
Béchamp and Estor were discovering a dynamic that has profound implications for today's medicine. They set forth a theory known today as pleomorphism. What it meant was this: one day a microbiologist looks through his microscope, seeing a rod-shaped bacterium; the next day he sees a spherical-shaped bacterium; with his microbiology training, based in large measure upon Pasteur's germ theory of disease, those bacteria are considered separate species; according to pleomorphic theory, that rod-shaped bacterium one day and spherical-shaped bacterium the next is the same organism, but has "mutated."
That might seem a minor difference, but it has profound implications for the entire foundation of modern medicine. In the view of Béchamp, a bacterium was not the cause of disease, but one of its effects. Béchamp noted otherwise healthy microzymas going through pathological mutations when cells were ill or dying, mutating into bacterial and other forms.
Pasteur apparently unsuccessfully tried plagiarizing Béchamp's microzyman work when he tried taking credit for Béchamp's explanation of the wine-grape problem. Béchamp was eight years ahead of Pasteur and provided a much fuller explanation than Pasteur's terse explanation.[117] Pasteur’s 1872 attempt at plagiarizing Béchamp’s analysis of the wine-grape problem, was in Béchamp’s words, “his boldest plagiarism; he discovered all of a sudden, eight years after my discovery thereof, that the ferment of vinous fermentation exists naturally upon the grape.” Béchamp said that Pasteur’s announcement of his “new discoveries,” and his claim that he “has opened a new path to physiology and medical pathology” was “too much: up until that time I had treated the man with consideration; but now he must be properly exposed.”[118]
When Pasteur's alleged attempted plagiarism of Béchamp's microzyman work was thwarted, Pasteur used his considerable powers to banish microzyman theory from French science, and he largely succeeded. Maybe Pasteur’s appropriation of Béchamp’s work was not as consciously dishonest as Béchamp averred. Maybe Pasteur was right and Béchamp wrong. The case is not that Béchamp’s evidence and theories were carefully researched and found wanting. It is not that today’s microbiology students are introduced to the subject in a way that develops the history of the germ theory and deals with rival theories and why they may be incorrect. Béchamp’s work has never been pursued by mainstream microbiology, and Pasteur led an effort to erase Béchamp’s name from the history books, and it largely succeeded. Estor was greatly grieved at Pasteur’s plagiarism and corruption of their discoveries, and Béchamp wrote that Estor died with a broken heart over what Pasteur had done.[119] I tried for several years to obtain an English language copy of Bechamp’s magnum opus, Les Microzymas, without success. If Béchamp’s work is never investigated or reproduced, how can anybody tell if it is wrong? It looks as if Pasteur did investigate Béchamp’s work to steal what he deemed useful, and then buried the rest. The good news is that many scientists have pursued the line of Béchamp’s research, sometimes independently. They are still at it. Béchamp’s paradigm may yet prevail, and if we want to be healthy, it probably should.
Today's germ theory of disease guides every medical student from the first day of class. Béchamp's work has shown the shaky foundation that the germ theory may rest upon. Pasteur later applied his germ theory to diseases such as anthrax and rabies. While the history books laud Pasteur's achievements, along with his "saving" of the silkworm industry, an analysis of the original data from Pasteur's treatments of anthrax and rabies not only show that he arguably did not cure anybody of anything, his treatments caused their death rates to rise.[120]
Pasteur's germ theory of disease and the vaccination paradigm it inspired are examples of male-oriented medicine in action. Vaccination proceeds from a premise that there are particular organisms that cause disease by attacking the host body, and by injecting weakened organisms through vaccination, the body builds up immunity to the real thing. It is based upon Pasteur's germ theory. There is an impressively large body of evidence that shows that vaccination does not really work. Furthermore, it creates new diseases while making the disease it supposedly fights more deadly. Just as fluoridation's proponents cannot realistically claim credit for a decrease in tooth decay in America during the past generation, or as Benjamin Rush could hardly claim today that his calomel and bleedings really helped his patients, vaccination can claim little credit, if any, for eradicating diseases. What deserves most and maybe all the credit for the elimination of mass diseases such as tuberculosis and whooping cough is the introduction of public sanitation, a healthier diet, and a reduction in absolute poverty.[121] Vaccination just might be a major component in the great increase of cancer in the West, because it harms the immune system, and cancer and other degenerative diseases are related to immune-system failures.
Is there such a thing as infectious disease? Sure, but what is it, and how is it really transmitted? Is there really a species of disease organism that induces the disease, or is it a pleomorphic stage that any diseased tissue will eventually manifest under certain conditions? The early data from vaccination research shows it was a disaster, arguably never preventing one instance of disease, and causing endless death and suffering for millions of people.[122] Whatever benefits vaccination may appear to convey may be outweighed by other disease dynamics that vaccination sets in motion. Vaccination may help make one disease "disappear," but another takes its place. Many respected scientists have believed that vaccination is responsible for the increase in cancer rates in this century. Many think that AIDS was born via vaccination. When one understands how poorly the current disease theories may be founded, those ideas do not seem farfetched.
There is a major obstacle to challenging the dogma, however: a multi-trillion-dollar industry has grown up around it, and it fiercely protects itself, as all power structures do. In Hume's book, her main lament is that Pasteur pioneered the corruption of modern medicine. Dubos was not being ironic when he described Pasteur’s legacy and how the corporate world is heavily invested in Pasteurian medicine. There may be no greater enemy of the public’s health than the collective effort of those corporations, working hand-in-hand with Western physicians.
Hume noted with irony that Pasteur was not even a doctor, but he was the first to prostitute modern medicine by commercializing it. Vaccines became a big money maker. His "preventive" for silkworm disease was lucrative, even though it probably did not work. Pasteur founded institutes bearing his name, in order to further his work. Nobody knows where medicine may have led if Béchamp’s discoveries had been given their due. The many Whiggish presentations do not even address that possibility.
A scientist at the Pasteur Institute performed one of the first modern confirmations of Béchamp's pleomorphic theory. In 1914, Madame Victor Henri subjected bacteria to ultraviolet light and created a new species of bacteria from a species already known, transforming a rod-shaped bacterium into a spheroid bacterium.[123] With great irony, a woman at the Pasteur Institute confirmed the accuracy of Antoine Béchamp’s theories, pariah that he was.
One problem with microscopic investigation into biology is the microscope itself. The wavelength of visible light is the theoretical limiting factor in optical microscopes. The smaller the wavelength of light shined upon something, the finer the image resolution. Resolution of optical microscopes is traditionally described in terms of diameters. The limit of optical microscopes has been around 2,000-2,500 diameters for many years. It does not matter how fine your lenses are, and it does not matter how hard you look, 2,000-2,500 diameters is the limit of optical microscopes, because of the wavelength of visible light, which is about 4,000 angstroms. I doubt they attained 2,000 diameters in Béchamp's time. Microzymas existed at the limits of resolution back then, and even today, optical microscopes have difficulty viewing the microzyman world.
A dynamic surrounding Béchamp played itself out repeatedly in succeeding generations of microbiologists. Béchamp seemed to be a man of high spiritual attainment. He sought to prevent cruelty to animals, while Pasteur engaged in numerous cruel animal experiments with dogs, rabbits, and other mammals.[124] Pasteur pioneered a process whereby a dog’s skull would be opened while it was alive, and the brain studied. Pasteur’s trephination practices were merely one more instance of his spiritual perspective and the degeneracy of scientific practices that do not respect life. Pasteur's animal experiments, like those of his colleague Claude Bernard, became the target of animal-rights groups in the 1800s, even Bernard's wife and daughters campaigned against his experimentation on live animals.
Béchamp seemed to have a spiritual affinity with the microzyma, which was quite possibly related to his discoveries. That offends the scientific notion of objectivity, but other microbiologists had similar proclivities. Barbara McClintock won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1983 for her work on corn genetics. For many years she worked in obscurity, and was even derided for seeing things in her microscope that others could not. She later said that she "had a feeling for the organism."[125]
One thing that primed me for Béchamp’s revelations was that many years earlier I had read Jane Robert's Seth state the facts of pleomorphism. Seth said that viruses were constantly "mutating" according to what the host body told them to do. Seth said that a scientist would look through a microscope one day and see Virus A, and the next day he would see Virus B, and little did he know that it was the same virus, but it had "mutated."[126] It is a harmless virus one day, and harmful the next, depending the conditions it is subject to. Seth wove a fascinating tale regarding the interrelationship between body, mind, and spirit, making the case that to study one without taking the others into account was a dead end, similar to sawing the legs off a chair, thinking it would serve as well with two legs as four.
The Developing American Medical Racket
During the first half of the 19th century, Great Britain was the world's leading industrial nation. Its per capita level of industrialization was more than twice as high as France’s and nearly twice the USA's in 1830, and its gross industrial output was significantly larger than France’s and the USA's combined. American industrialization per capita increased by 50 percent between 1830 and 1860, while British industrialization nearly tripled. In 1860, the United States had a per capita industrialization greater than every nation but Great Britain’s, which was three times higher. In gross industrial output, the USA's was about a third of Britain’s in 1860.[127] The American economy was a dichotomy of an industrialized north and an agricultural south. Although the reasons for the American Civil War were multiple, with the slavery issue and European influence receiving nods of recognition, my perception is that the overriding issue was holding the empire together, a motivation of every nation and empire in history. Lincoln even said that he would allow slavery if it would keep the “union” whole.
The USA still bears the scars of the Civil War, the bloodiest war it has fought, as far as domestic casualties are concerned. Disparagement of “Yankees” still can be heard in Southern conversation. Although the slaves were freed, they were in near-slave status for a long-time. At the dawn of World War II, black family income was only about 30% of white America’s, an even lower ratio than it was in 1900. Lynching blacks was an American pastime well into the 20th century, and entire communities assembled to celebrate the murder of people whose crime was having black skin. Women would pose in their Sunday best in front of the burning or hanging corpse, while the local newspaper reporter would take pictures of the event suitable for framing.[128] It was common for those photographs to be made into postcards and mailed to family and friends, to commemorate America’s civilized ways. While the North was supposedly fighting to free the South’s slaves, the genocide of Native Americans in Western North America was at about its zenith. American women would not obtain voting rights until after World War I. The humanitarian impulse was muted at best, with the veneer of American civilization thin.
Beginning with the Civil War, the USA rapidly caught up and surpassed Great Britain in industrialization. By 1928, the USA's industrialization per capita was 50% higher than Great Britain’s, and its gross industrial output was higher than Britain, France, Germany, the Soviet Union, Italy, and Japan combined.[129] Industry dominated the USA, and what is known as the medical-industrial complex was well on the way to its current hegemony.
If that milieu is considered, it is not surprising that a class of men largely took over American industry, beginning during the Civil War. They all bought their way out of military service, and not because they were pacifists. They then began building industrial empires, and war profiteering during the Civil War was how they got their start. Of the big name robber barons, it is generally acknowledged that the most ingenious, ruthless and successful of them all was John D. Rockefeller. The first American oil well was drilled in 1859 in Pennsylvania. After carefully sizing up the new industry, Rockefeller joined it in 1863. He quickly realized that if he could control the industry’s refining arm, he could control it all. All oil production would have to pass through his hands if he controlled refining. His strategy was diabolically ingenious. He used the business of his competitors to get kickbacks from the railroads. He then marched through the new industry, giving his competitors two options: sell out or be wiped out. Those who resisted his offer were quickly run out of business. There were mysterious refinery explosions and deaths in those days for those who refused to sell out. By 1880, Rockefeller controlled 95% of American refining. When he wiped out or bought out a competitor, if his prey put up a vigorous and talented fight, he would try to hire them. He soon amassed a team of the most capable and ruthless businessmen around.[130] Once he controlled the oil industry, he began diversifying. Through direct investment and “philanthropy,” Rockefeller would eventually cast a long shadow over mining, banking, government, the media, education, and - what concerns this essay - medicine. Rockefeller’s father was a genuine snake oil salesman and con man who sold cancer “cures.” John D. learned the business at his father’s knee, when he was around. His father funded his early ventures.
While Rockefeller and the other robber barons built their empires, the AMA was also building its monopoly. The AMA's charter stated that one of its goals was “eliminating the competition.” In the 1850s, the AMA launched its first political campaign, which sought to ban abortion. Before the AMA's campaign, abortions were legal if they were performed before the baby could be felt kicking, and even the Catholic Church did not oppose it. The AMA's campaign was stepped up in 1864, decrying abortion’s evils, eventually calling abortionists murderers and executioners. It worked, as between 1875 and 1900, every state but Kentucky passed laws banning all abortions. Hundreds of thousands of American women died during the years that abortion was illegal, as they had back-alley abortions and died from the complications. Not only was the AMA campaigning to ban abortion, it also actively discouraged contraception and even information on fertility. While the AMA clothed itself in righteousness, an examination of the internal record revealed that the AMA’s motivation had nothing whatsoever to do with the sanctity of life. Their war was waged to wipe out female healers. Midwives were the traditional administers of abortion and contraception.[131] It would take nearly a century before abortion was made legal again, and in the early 21st century, the right was under siege once again in America, although the effort is unlikely to succeed. The effort is about controlling and punishing women, and has little to do with a reverence toward life, as evidenced by most anti-abortionists’ supporting capital punishment (their attitude epitomized by the American president who led the new attack, George Bush the Second), as well as murdered doctors and blown-up clinics.
Also in the 1850s, the AMA began campaigning against homeopaths. As with most inquisitional behavior, the early campaign was relatively gentle. Books were written to ridicule “alternative” medicine, AMA members were forbidden from associating with homeopaths, and AMA pressure began getting homeopaths expelled from medical societies. The Thomsonian school of medicine also came under fire, but as they were generally laypeople, they were not as much of a threat as homeopaths were.
Although it would be a mistake to attribute all of it to a conspiracy, there is a familiar pattern when rival movements are attacked and destroyed. For instance, the Catholic Inquisition got its start in the early 1200s as a response to internal corruption that left the Catholic Church’s religious monopoly in Europe vulnerable to challenges from reformists. By the early 1200s, the Catholic Church was holding ecumenical councils that attempted to curb the corruption in its priestly ranks. Christian Europe’s most socially progressive and cosmopolitan region was France’s Languedoc region. Returning from the Balkans with Crusading soldiers was Catharism, a dualistic sect whose roots predated Christianity. The Cathars lived the austere lives that people imagined that Jesus lived, and the pious example of the Cathars’ spiritual practice was a marked contrast to the Catholic Church’s priests’. The Cathars took vows of poverty, fasted, and apparently the most advanced of them could heal with a touch. Catharism spread like wildfire throughout Languedoc, and by the early 1200s, about half of the Languedoc region was Cathar. The Church had to deal with other threats in those days. The followers of Peter Waldo comprised an internal challenge to the Church’s corruption. Waldo’s attempts to reform the Church and bring Christianity back to its humble roots got him excommunicated.
The early attempts to curb Catharism were largely restricted to counter-preaching, and Dominic led the effort to bring the Languedoc citizens back to the fold. He had little success, and Pope Innocent III crafted an effective solution. In businessmen’s parlance, it consisted of putting cement shoes on the competition while marketing an ersatz version of their product. Innocent called a Crusade on Languedoc and simultaneously sanctioned the mendicant orders, the Dominicans and Franciscans, who imitated the austere practices of the Cathars. The Albigensian Crusade was waged over decades and completely depopulated parts of France and killed about one million people. The Cathar threat to the Catholic Church’s monopoly was wiped out in a prodigious bloodbath, and the Church enjoyed another three centuries of religious racketeering, until Martin Luther came along. The Dominicans and Franciscans became the Inquisition’s foot soldiers, enforcing the faith with the rack, hot tongs, and flaming stakes.
In significant ways, the offensive mounted by orthodox medicine is reminiscent of how the Catholic Church operated. Orthodox medicine abandoned its more egregious practices. The public rightly feared the heroic bleedings and large doses of “medicines” such as calomel. The highly dilute doses administered by homeopaths had great appeal. During its crusade against the competition, American orthodox medicine curtailed its heroic bleeding practices, as well as its heroic doses of calomel and other “medicines.” It began co-opting homeopathic medicines into its pharmacopoeia. There was a trend ever since the 1830s, when the alternative movements began in earnest, to begin trusting nature again. Orthodox doctors began allowing the body to heal itself, or at least assist it, instead of bludgeoning it with heroic medicine. Orthodox medicine was raiding the alternatives for what it deemed useful, so it could offer a competing product. At the same time, orthodox medicine tried putting cement shoes on its competition. Getting homeopaths kicked out of medical societies were some of the early AMA successes in the 1850s.
The spiritual, political, and social perspectives often have parallel in one’s scientific and professional orientation. The homeopathic movement was not only revolutionary in the medical field. Most American homeopaths in the 1850s were also abolitionists and members of the nascent Republican Party. When Abraham Lincoln came into office in 1861, his Secretary of State, William Seward, had a homeopath as his personal physician. Homeopathy enjoyed political support in Washington in the 1860s, which helped to blunt the orthodox assault.
The 1860s through 1880s were the period of greatest influence for homeopathic practitioners. The press and public were fairly unanimous in their criticisms of the orthodox medical establishment, and sympathetic toward homeopathy. By the 1870s, about a million American families were loyal to homeopathy. In 1878, a yellow-fever epidemic swept from New Orleans into the Mississippi Valley. There were about 20,000 deaths. Yellow fever was the most feared disease in the South, and official commissions were launched to investigate the 1878 epidemic. One commission investigated the records of homeopathic physicians where the epidemic raged. It turned out that people treated by homeopaths had a yellow-fever death rate of less than 7%, which was less than half the death rate of the general public. When the results were announced to the USA's Congress, they were impressed.[132] The attacks on homeopathy by orthodoxy relaxed during those years, although homeopathy had been so demonized in the AMA’s ranks that many orthodox practitioners would go berserk at the mere mention of it. There were various factors that doomed homeopathy. Orthodox medicine’s alliance with the drug companies loomed largely, but the seeds of its destruction came largely from within its ranks.
Hahnemann’s system was developed through experience with patients, and his practice made the homeopath both diagnostician and pharmacist. The homeopathic pharmacopoeia was vast, and the proper application of it took years of careful study. Homeopathy was not for quick study artists. There was no one-size-fits-all treatment, no universal “medicine” such as calomel, no assembly line to run the patients through. Not surprisingly, a movement arose in homeopathy that tried making homeopathy easier to learn and use. Its practitioners were influenced by the universal prescriptions that orthodox practitioners were handing out. With the relaxation of attacks from orthodox medicine, the internal division of homeopathy became evident. In 1880, it divided into the “purists” who followed Hahnemann’s teachings to the letter and the revisionists who tried making homeopathy easier to learn and apply. The subsequent internecine warfare was the major reason that the homeopathic movement began disintegrating in the late 19th century. The homeopaths that I have dealt with or been aware of in my life have usually been from the “purist” school.
Another factor deserves mention. Although the heroic treatments of orthodox medicine were feared by millions of people, and rightfully so, they were by no means the majority of Americans, at least to the point of refusing to submit to them. Heroic medicine enjoyed the benefit of being spectacular. When a patient ingested calomel, the effect was dramatic. Something happened, even if it nearly killed the patient. I have experienced and watched homeopathy produce instant and dramatic results, for many ailments. For chronic conditions, however, the treatment could take many months, as the body gradually healed itself, in subtle, feminine fashion. There was often self-discipline involved with homeopathic treatment, and most people preferred to take a quick-acting pill for their afflictions. That dynamic can readily be seen today. True health in today’s USA comes from taking care of one’s self. Eating well, exercising, refraining from tobacco, alcohol, and other stimulants/depressants, and other aspects of a healthy regimen require some self-discipline, which relatively few people exercise. Most people would rather take a pill to make their symptoms disappear so they can continue to pursue their addictions and deadly lifestyles. Symptom suppression is the essence of Western medicine today, and its appeal is largely to people who refuse to accept responsibility for their health. Most want a pill or spectacular intervention, such as surgery, to make the problem “go away.”
The homeopathic movement largely had itself to blame for its demise, but its internal weakness was also exploited by other competitors, the most damaging among them orthodox doctors, who allied with the burgeoning pharmaceutical empires. The homeopathic remedies administered by the “purists” were highly dilute and never mixed with other substances. It was the opposite approach to the polypharmacy of the proprietary medicine craze that gripped orthodoxy during the Gilded Age.
The final blow to homeopathy, however, was dealt by diversifying robber barons, John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie in particular. Rockefeller and Carnegie amassed enormous fortunes during the Gilded Age, through ingenuity and ruthlessness. As they came to dominate their respective industries, they branched out and became “philanthropists.” Their “philanthropy” was more directed toward social engineering than humanitarian activity. Rockefeller and Carnegie exercised “institutional control” over American medicine.
By 1900, homeopathic schools had largely abandoned Hahnemann’s methods, and the “make homeopathy easy” faction dominated. That “short cut” school of homeopathy was close in spirit and practice to orthodox medicine, and both pumped great numbers of graduates into the medical marketplace. Homeopathy suffered from the internal division, and its colleges relied almost solely upon student fees. Homeopathy probably also lost its effectiveness as Hahnemann’s methods were abandoned. The same economic situation in relation to student fees existed in orthodox medical schools until 1910 and the Flexner Report, which was funded by the Carnegie Endowment. Medical schools that received Flexner’s approval received Carnegie and Rockefeller funding, while those that failed to gain approval did not. Not surprisingly, the favored paradigm prevailed, and the AMA and drug industry allied itself with Rockefeller and Carnegie and formed a power structure that dominates Western medicine to this day.
The AMA worked hand-in-hand with Flexner, and government was soon a player. State boards refused to license doctors that did not come from AMA-approved schools. That interlocking institutional control spelled the death knell for homeopathy. In 1900, there were 22 homeopathic colleges. In 1918, there were only seven. Homeopathic colleges were not the only casualties of the institutional control that Rockefeller, Carnegie, the AMA, licensing boards, and drug companies would exercise over medicine. That process also closed most medical schools for women and blacks. The AMA successfully kept blacks out of medicine until the 1960s, with an effort led by Morris Fishbein.[133] The alleged strategy was bringing science and education to medicine, but it was also obviously a power play to consolidate wealth and power. Ironically, Rockefeller would not take the drugs that his empire promoted. His personal physician was a homeopath, and John D. lived to be nearly 100 years old. To gain some insight into Rockefeller’s motivation, a quote from Medical Dark Ages is appropriate:
"...a surgeon told John D. (Rockefeller) that everyone should have an appendectomy before the age of 16 as a preventative. The oil wizard saw the point at once. 'Why, you've got a better thing than Standard Oil!', he exclaimed." - In Nat Morris, The Cancer Blackout.
Rockefeller was creating paradigms in Western society, using his ill-gotten money to shape and dominate institutions that he funded, and it goes far beyond the drugs and knives paradigm that rules Western medicine. Soon before he began taking over medicine, he was reshaping the University of Chicago and remaking it to his liking. The University of Chicago would spawn social control ideologies. John Taylor Gatto, one of America’s finest teachers, noted that today’s grade schools were partly designed by theorists from the University of Chicago, where they honed their “instruments of scientific management of a mass population.” Gatto’s thesis is that our educational system “dumbs us down,” so that we can be controlled. From 1990 through 1997, in the wake of the Soviet Empire’s collapse, in every year but two, the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences was awarded to a University of Chicago economist, and their work was generally concerned with scientific, capitalistic means of managing the world economy. There was about zero humanitarian impulse in Rockefeller’s “philanthropy.” He only became excited when pondering how rich he would become.
The knives and drugs paradigm prevailed due to considerations of wealth and power, not because it works. In 1914, a few years after the publication of Flexner’s report, Rockefeller strikebreakers turned machine guns on a camp of striking miners in Colorado, killing 40 people, including women and children. Exploiting workers was always the way that capitalists primarily amassed their fortunes. In the 1990s, a member of Dennis Lee’s organization had lunch with a Rockefeller heir. The heir said that he knew of no rich American family (at the level of dynastic wealth) that made its fortune honestly. In America at least, behind every great fortune is a great crime. Even the “radical” Carnegie was a crafty strikebreaker, and the bloody Homestead Strike stained his reign. Machine-gunning one’s employees could be effective but was a crude method of exerting control. Rockefeller and the other robber barons pioneered and refined methods of manipulating public opinion and shaping the public mind. Rockefeller’s image in the wake of the Ludlow Massacre, especially as it became evident that he authorized it, was at about the level of Attila the Hun, and Rockefeller then waged one of history’s first public relations campaigns. He hired Ivy Lee in 1914 to help manage the Rockefeller Empire’s image. Lee is considered the leading pioneer of today’s public relations industry, working first for J.P. Morgan, then for Rockefeller.[134] John D. Rockefeller soon engaged in the charade of carrying around a bag of dimes, handing one to everyone he met.
Before Rockefeller and Carnegie became involved, the AMA was getting its act together. In 1899, the AMA hired George Simmons as the new editor for JAMA. Harris Coulter described Simmons as somebody with considerable “political abilities.”[135] JAMA was a deeply hypocritical publication. Its primary source of revenue was drug ads, and the ads it ran for “secret ingredient” and “proprietary” medicines violated the AMA’s code of ethics. In the 1890s, the AMA came under fire from state boards and other organizations for its unethical ads, and was on its way to becoming a laughingstock. Simmons rescued the AMA, largely by turning JAMA into a money machine by closely allying itself with the drug industry. Drug ads funded the AMA, especially after Simmons became involved in 1899. Coulter did not delve into Simmons’s credentials in his work, but Eustace Mullins did, in his Murder by Injection, as have others.[136]
An Englishman, Simmons settled in the Midwest in 1870 and began a journalism career. After several years as editor of the Nebraska Farmer, Simmons opened a medical practice, advertising that he specialized in homeopathy and the "diseases of women."[137] He apparently was an abortionist when the AMA was campaigning to ban abortion. Simmons advertised that he received his training and diploma at Rotunda Hospital in Dublin, Ireland. That hospital never issued diplomas. There is no evidence that Simmons ever received any medical training. Simmons then got a diploma from Rush Medical School. There is no evidence that Simmons ever set foot on the medical school campus. He apparently received a mail order degree. Simmons appears to have been the classic "quack." However, Simmons was ambitious and resourceful. He organized a Nebraska chapter of the AMA. In 1899, he was invited to Chicago to take over the editorship of JAMA. Simmons saw that the AMA was not properly seizing its opportunities. He quickly named himself the AMA’s secretary and general manager. Simmons then found a capable assistant, a man who had been arrested for embezzlement as the Secretary of the Kentucky Board of Health, who may have bought his way to a pardon, and was then encouraged to leave the state. He became Simmons's right hand man.[138]
Simmons turned the AMA into a gold mine when he initiated an approval racket. For a price, the AMA gave its "Seal of Approval" to drugs. It was a form of extortion, and the AMA engaged in no scientific research. Their "research" was a form of "green research." Simmons, like a shrewd horse trader, would set his price based on how badly a drug company wanted the AMA's Seal of Approval. The racket soon led to a troubled situation with Wallace Abbott, the founder of Abbott Laboratories. Abbott refused to knuckle under to Simmons’s blackmail, and therefore the AMA never approved Abbott's drugs. One day, so the story goes, Abbott went to see Simmons and showed him the investigative file that he had built on Simmons's "career." Simmons had sex charges brought by some of his patients, and charges of negligence in the deaths of others. That, combined with the fact that Simmons had no credible medical credentials, caused a sudden change of heart at the AMA. Abbott's drugs were suddenly approved every time, and Abbott did not have to pay for them.[139]
Simmons was soon raking it in hand over fist. JAMA’s advertising revenue rose from $34,000 per year in 1899 to $89,000 in 1903. By 1909, JAMA was making $150,000 per year and became the AMA’s cash cow. Other racketeering strategies involved threatening firms that advertised anywhere except in the pages of JAMA. Simmons was ingenious in making JAMA the icon it became, exerting institutional control over the up and coming industry. Simmons’s efforts made the AMA and drug companies into natural allies of the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations.
Simmons recruited Morris Fishbein to the AMA in 1913. Simmons was a wealthy man by the 1920s, sitting at the AMA's helm. He openly had a mistress and attempted to get rid of his wife. A standard technique in those days was having one’s wife committed to an insane asylum. Simmons heavily drugged his wife and then tried convincing her that she was going insane. His strategy backfired. Mrs. Simmons took her husband to court in 1924 and the sensational trial ruined Simmons's image. The trial inspired numerous books, plays, and movies, the most famous of which was Gaslight, starring Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman. Simmons stepped down at the AMA and his protégé, Morris Fishbein, took over. Fishbein ran American medicine with an iron fist for the next 25 years, becoming a household name and a rich man.
Fishbein soon extended the drug approval racket to food: for a price, food would garner the AMA's Seal of Acceptance. The testing involved seemed limited to seeing how much money was in the bank account of the companies seeking AMA approval. At the same time that Fishbein was announcing the Seal of Approval and citing two tuna companies as meeting the AMA's stringent requirements, the FDA was seizing shipments of those very brands because "they consisted in whole or in part of decomposed animal substance."[140] Fishbein’s first customer for his food approval racket was Land O’Lakes Butter Company, which had been criminally prosecuted many times for adulterating its product to hide spoilage and watering it down.[141] It widely advertised its new, AMA-approved, status. The AMA's Seal of Approval racket for food lasted until the 1940s, and it always teetered on the verge of damage lawsuits as it performed virtually no testing on its "approved" foods. The drug Seal of Approval racket, however, proved long lasting, but drugs comprised only one pillar of the developing racket. The other was surgery. When anesthesia and antiseptics made surgery respectable, the surgeons sought to make surgery into a monopoly.
Surgery was not rescued from its barbaric status in the United States until the 1880s. Keen was not the only American pioneer of antiseptic procedures. The most famous is William Halsted. Germany, with its focus on laboratory science, became the center of medical research and training during the last half of the 19th century, not France or England. Halsted was a rich boy from Yale who studied in Germany and brought back the German philosophy of medical practice. Halsted pioneered sterile surgical procedures in Baltimore. As happened often in those days, Halsted became a cocaine and morphine addict, and never beat his addiction. Along with pioneering sterile surgery, Halsted also refined the practice of invasive surgery. Halsted invented the radical mastectomy.
This essay will now largely concern itself with the development of today’s cancer racket. With Halsted’s innovations helping it along, surgery became the favored, even sole, way to treat cancer in the late 19th century. Cancer is a disease of civilization, and the greatest doctors of history knew that treating cancer by attacking the tumor was futile. Cancer was also seen long ago as a disease of the “humors,” i.e., the body’s fluids. Western medicine gradually abandoned the humoral perspective to adopt the “solidist” one. Studying and treating the humors (blood, lymph, and bile) was largely abandoned in favor of treating the body’s “solids.” Such a change was partly based on the cell theories of Virchow and others, but the rise of surgery also contributed greatly, because it is impossible to use a scalpel on blood.
The world’s most influential cancer research institution is Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. Its “spiritual founder” was J. Marion Sims. Sims received minimal training during the 1840s before he began performing experimental surgeries on slave women. Slave women were at the bottom of America’s social hierarchy (except for the Indians who were being dispossessed and exterminated), and as such made ideal subjects for human experiments. Performed without anesthesia, Sims’s surgeries were accomplished by having friends hold down the slaves as he operated. According to his sympathetic biographer, his operations were “little short of murderous.” Sims’s friends could only endure about one stint of holding down his experimental subjects, as the subjects’ thrashing and shrieking were too much for them to endure. When local plantation owners refused to lend Sims any more subjects for his experiments, he bought a slave woman for $500 and performed 30 operations on her in a few months. After a few years of his experimental surgeries, he may have been run out of town, as he had the reputation of being some kind of Dr. Frankenstein.
Sims abruptly moved to New York City from the South, and in 1855 helped found Women’s Hospital, a charity hospital. He again began performing experimental surgeries, that time on immigrant women, and the Dr. Frankenstein rumors began anew. In the 1870s, he began performing experimental cancer surgeries. His brutal experiments, called life-threatening by the hospital trustees, combined with his open contempt of his female subjects, got him expelled from the hospital. Sims cultivated wealthy women as his professional clientele (his specialty was operating on vesico-vaginal fistulas), and those contacts got him reinstated. An Astor heir died of cancer, and the Astor family offered the Women’s Hospital $150,000 if they would open a cancer treatment wing of the hospital. The trustees associated cancer treatment and research with Sims’s barbarities and hesitated to accept the money. Sims double-crossed the trustees and negotiated directly with the Astors to set up a new hospital with the money. His negotiation worked, although he died before New York Cancer Hospital opened in 1884. He would have been its first director had he lived. The name was changed to Memorial Hospital in the 1890s, and to its current name in the 1950s.[142]
Cancer treatment by surgery grew during the late 19th century and well into the 20th. Ever more drastic surgeries were devised to treat cancer. Using war terminology and imagery, one cancer treatment that removed the entire jaw was known as the “commando” because it reminded the doctors of the slashing attacks of World War I commandos. Memorial Hospital surgeons invented procedures that virtually hollowed out the entire body, trying to get every last potential piece of cancerous flesh. Another innovative surgery at Memorial Hospital was called a hemicorporectomy, where half the body would be carved away (everything below the pelvis) as a way to treat advanced pelvic region malignancy. Many patients elected to die rather than submit to such surgeries.[143]
James Douglas, who owned the world’s largest copper mine, also owned large pitchblende deposits, from which come radium and uranium. Douglas began experimenting with radium as a cure all, and not long before World War I became the leading “philanthropist” of Memorial Hospital. His $100,000 donation was attached to the condition that Memorial Hospital would begin using radium treatments for cancer. With the adoption of radium as “medicine,” the price of radium instantly increased by more than 1,000%. Douglas died in 1913, probably from radiation poisoning. By the 1920s, Memorial Hospital’s radium treatments constituted its single largest source of income.
In 1927, John D. Rockefeller and his son began contributing millions of dollars to Memorial Hospital, including money and land to build a new hospital in the 1930s. The same year that the Rockefellers began “donating” to Memorial Hospital, Standard Oil of New Jersey signed its first agreement with I.G. Farben. Farben was Europe’s largest and most notorious cartel. Farben ran the rubber works at Auschwitz, and invented Sarin, Tabun, and the Zyklon B used in the gas chambers. In 1934, the Rockefeller Empire sent its PR wizard Ivy Lee to Germany to help improve Farben and the Third Reich’s image.[144] The Rockefeller Empire worked hand-in-hand with Nazi Germany, as did many other American industrialists, including Hitler’s hero, Henry Ford. The Rockefellers even renewed their contract with Farben in 1939, and the contract stated that they would continue doing business even if the USA and Germany went to war, an agreement that was kept clear until 1942, after Germany had declared war on the USA. It was not until the American government investigated the Rockefeller companies, and one investigator called their relationship with Germany bordering on “treason,” with a resultant publicity black eye, that the Rockefellers discontinued their open support of Nazi Germany, although they apparently kept dealing with Hitler’s regime clear to the end of World War II.
The Rockefeller/Farben connection influenced Memorial Hospital to begin pursuing chemotherapy research before World War II broke out, and Standard Oil executive Frank Howard sat on Memorial Hospital’s Research Committee. Before World War II was over, Howard recruited two General Motors executives, Alfred P. Sloan and Charles Kettering, into becoming donors for an ambitious plan to make Memorial Hospital into a research and treatment center. Kettering also funded Kettering Laboratories in Cincinnati, which was notable for producing “research” that proved the “benign” properties of industrial substances such as lead, fluoride, and aluminum. Sloan was a long-time representative of the Morgan family interests, and the Rockefeller and Morgan interests shared power in running Memorial Sloan-Kettering.[145] Today more than ever, Wall Street runs Memorial Sloan-Kettering, which dominates the direction of Western cancer research and treatment. “Corporate philanthropy” is an oxymoron. Corporations “give” money with an eye toward the benefits that might accrue in the end. Everything that a corporation does is ultimately designed to increase its profits. Earning a profit is the only reason that corporations exist, but few will ever state it that baldly.
Today’s cancer treatment paradigm attacks the tumor as a way to eradicate cancer. What did the great doctors of history have to say about attacking cancer tumors? From Medical Dark Ages I obtained these quotes:
"It is better not to apply any treatment in cases of occult cancer; for if treated (by surgery), the patients die quickly; but if not treated, they hold out for a long time." - Hippocrates, (460-370 BCE).
(Advanced cancer is)" irritated by treatment; and the more so the more vigorous it is."
"Some have used caustic medicaments, some the cautery, some excision with a scalpel; but no medicament has ever given relief; the parts cauterized are excited immediately to an increase until they cause death."
"After excision, even when a scar has formed, nonetheless the disease has returned, and caused death; while ...the majority of patients, although no violent measures are applied in the attempt to remove the tumor, but only mild applications in order to sooth it, attain a ripe old age in spite of it." - Celsus, (1st century CE).
"When [a tumor] is of long standing and large, you should leave it alone. For myself have never been able to cure any such, nor have I seen anyone else succeed before me." – Abu’l Qasim, (936-1013 CE).
"It should be forbidden and severely punished to remove cancer by cutting, burning, cautery, and other fiendish tortures. It is from nature that the disease comes, and from nature comes the cure, not from physicians." - Paracelsus, (1493-1541 CE).
The same mentality was held by the Hawaiian kahunas. The kahuna lore stated that "If it is (cancer), do not treat it."[146]
The heroic medicine of Benjamin Rush was diametrically opposed to such a sentiment. He wrote that one of the “Vulgar Errors in Medicine” was to “let tumors alone.”[147]
With surgery coming into vogue, it became a monopoly as a way to treat cancer. Today, there are basically three legal ways to treat cancer in America: surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. The second legal way to treat cancer was discovered in the 1890s. How was that pioneer treated? Again, from Medical Dark Ages:
"The surgeons. They controlled medicine, and they regarded the X-ray as a threat to surgery. At the time surgery was the only approved method of treating cancer. They meant to keep it the only approved method by ignoring or rejecting any new methods or ideas. This is why I was called a 'quack' and nearly ejected from hospitals where I had practiced for years." - Dr. Emil Grubbé. Dr. Emil Grubbé, ...discovered...X-ray therapy (for cancer) in 1896...X-ray was not recognized as an agent for treating cancer by the American College of Surgeons until 1937...Dr. Grubbé...still was not recognized as late as 1951." - in Herbert Bailey, Vitamin E, Your Key to a Healthy Heart
The third legal way, chemotherapy, came directly from World War II chemical warfare experiments. Using chemicals to treat cancer had been around since Paracelsus, but the chemicals killed the patients more often than not, since they were based on arsenic, lead, and other deadly substances. In the early 20th century, chemical treatments and finding the “magic bullet” (more masculine imagery) to kill cancer cells became an intensive area of study. In the 1930s, chemotherapy research was noted for its deadly and barbaric effects, and those who used surgery and radiation battled against chemotherapy. World War II was a watershed in the use of chemicals. DDT was first used during World War II, the Nazis invented nerve gases, the allies invented napalm and nuclear weapons, and the notion of “better living through chemistry” became entrenched due to the experience of World War II.[148]
The racketeering impulse has been with Western medicine for many years and is deeply embedded today. The rise of the Western medical paradigm coincided with the rise of the corporation and new kinds of empires. The reason that American medical doctors are the highest-paid professionals on Earth is not because they perform valuable work. They are technicians in what is arguably the West's greatest racket, in which the power of life and death is in the hands of the world's most lucrative professions and industries. The fact that only violent methods of cancer treatment are legal is no accident. Here are two quotes from Medical Dark Ages.
"The thing that bugs me is that people think the FDA is protecting them. It isn't. What the FDA is doing and what the public thinks it's doing are as different as night and day.” Dr. Herbert Ley, Commissioner of the FDA. (San Francisco Chronicle, 1-2-70).
(In response to above quote) "What is the FDA doing? As will be shown by the material that follows, the FDA is "doing" three things:
"First, it is providing a means whereby key individuals on its payroll are able to obtain both power and wealth through granting special favors to certain politically influential groups that are subject to its regulation. This activity is similar to the 'protection racket' of organized crime: for a price, one can induce FDA administrators to provide 'protection' from the FDA itself.
"Secondly, as a result of this political favoritism, the FDA has become a primary factor in that formula whereby cartel-oriented companies in the food and drug industry are able to use the police powers of government to harass or destroy their free-market competitors.
"And thirdly, the FDA occasionally does some genuine public good with whatever energies it has left over after serving the vested political and commercial interest of its first two activities." - G. Edward Griffin, World Without Cancer.
Ley was the commissioner of the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) in the 1960s. That quote of Ley has some history and previously incorrect reporting, including in earlier versions of my work, and its tale is told at this footnote.[149] The FDA apparently acts as Mr. Deputy, Ms. Prosecutor, and Ms. Deputy Attorney General did in protecting the interests of its patrons.
The insurance companies are an integral part of the racket, keeping the money from the alternatives because they are "not approved." "Not approved" becomes a self-fulfilling Catch-22 by mainstream medicine, as they refuse to investigate alternatives, so therefore they are not approved. It goes even further, as laws are passed making it a criminal offense for a doctor to use an "unapproved" treatment.[150] It is an impressive use of circular logic to produce an insulated racket. Evidence for that bold charge will be presented in this essay.
This essay sketched the path the big three took in becoming about the only approved cancer treatments in the USA, although the data shows that cancer patients usually do not live longer by using their treatments. The evidence suggests that people can live much longer by doing nothing rather than allowing themselves to be treated by orthodox, attack-the-tumor methods. For instance, Hardin B. Jones, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, studied 23 years' worth of cancer mortality statistics. His research was simple: when was somebody diagnosed with cancer, how long did they live after diagnosis, and did they have mainstream cancer treatment? His study was done in the 1950s and was published in 1956. For treated patients, their life expectancy after diagnosis was three years, which is about the same today. For untreated patients, those who generally refused treatment, their life expectancy was 12.5 years.[151] For mainstream treatment, Jones found no evidence that early detection or "aggressive" treatment increased patients' life expectancies, and that the data that showed that we were "winning" the war on cancer was largely due to statistical games.[152] Researchers have collected those kinds of statistics only a few times since Jones's work, and their data always confirmed Jones's findings.[153] Ironically, as alternatives are attacked because they allegedly do not work, there is no evidence that the mainstream treatments work, if by "working" we mean increasing a patient's life expectancy. By the standards imposed on alternative cancer treatments, the mainstream treatments are worse than complete failures, cause immense suffering while they do not work, and “coincidentally” make huge sums of money for the cancer treatment industry.
The "improvement" in cancer statistics since the 1950s is largely a statistical chimera, gained by factors such as earlier detection of the cancer, giving other reasons for the patient's death, calling benign conditions cancerous, etc. One of the statistical sleights of hand played in the cancer game is nearly identical to the one they played with heart disease a generation ago. Blood pressure tables were age-adjusted, which made hardening of the arteries appear to be a normal aging process. Although cancer rates sharply increased during the 20th century in the USA, if one "age adjusts" the data, the increase does not appear so large. Again, it assumes that cancer is a normal aging process. Although nearly a quarter of all Americans die of cancer, it is no "epidemic" in the mind of Elizabeth Whelan.[154] Maybe in a future generation, the geniuses who dreamed up age adjusting the cancer data will make the same admission the blood pressure age adjusters did: they did not know what they were talking about.
One of the potentially hilarious, if it were not so tragic, aspects of modern manipulation of the cancer game is the statement, "We got the cancer, but lost the patient." The evidence strongly points to cancer being a systemic disease, not one part of the body "turning traitor." Where the tumor first manifests is merely the result of the body's weakest part manifesting a tumor first. Attacking that part of the body to "kill the cancer" would therefore be insane, but that is how the paradigm operates.
As with most of Western medicine, attacking a tumor has nothing to do with curing the disease, but suppressing its symptoms. When oncologists talk about how successful their treatment is, it is nearly always in terms of how responsive the tumor is. Cancer patients hear the hopeful news that their type of tumor usually has a high response rate to the treatment proposed. Sure, the tumor responds. It is being attacked, but the attack is similar to America’s attacks on Iraq during the 1990s: most of the bombs miss the target and cause "collateral damage." When people undergoing chemotherapy lose their hair and have other maladies, that is "collateral damage." Their hair falls out because the chemotherapy kills all dividing cells, so it not only kills off tumor cells, it kills off hair follicles and tissue much more vital than hair.
See John Robbins's Reclaiming Our Health for an excellent summary of where American cancer treatment stood in the early 21st century. In Ralph Moss's Questioning Chemotherapy, he presented the results of more than 400 technical papers regarding the results of chemotherapy clinical trials. Time and time again, Moss demonstrated that the data itself showed no increase in the patients' life expectancies.[155] They sure suffer a lot however, and big money rolls in by treating them. At its most optimistic, chemotherapy "works" for about 4% of all cancers, although 90% of mainstream cancer patients receive at least some chemotherapy.
Although Western medicine’s history is not an inspiring one, and the rise of the AMA and the robber baron empires during the last half of the 19th century were ominous trends, Morris Fishbein is largely credited with turning cancer treatment into the racket it is today. Fishbein took over American medicine in 1924 when Simmons was forced to step down in the wake of the scandal over his divorce.
As with Simmons, Morris Fishbein graduated from Rush Medical School, even though he failed his anatomy course. He interned for only six months and never practiced medicine a day in his life. He refused to go through a two-year internship at an accredited hospital, which was the standard back then. Fishbein was seriously considering a career as a circus acrobat, and was working part-time as an extra at an opera company. Before he could leave medicine, Simmons recruited him to work at the AMA’s offices in 1913.
The name "American Medical Association" said a lot about the organization. The very name "medical" was a smokescreen designed to hide the fact that the organization was formed to look after the interests of its doctors, but calling it "medical" gave it a benign, selfless feel. It was an Orwellism before Orwell. How many people would be fooled if the American Bar Association suddenly changed its name to the American Justice Association? Would people then believe the organization was not primarily concerned with the welfare of its lawyers, but was about selflessly seeking justice in America?[156] Yet, the AMA is portrayed as an association of selfless healers, although its members make more money than lawyers. Of course, the AMA cultivates that image, just as the mainstream media characterizes itself as "free." American lawyers and doctors are two of Earth’s highest-paid professional groups. It is no coincidence. One capitalizes on conflict and misery, while the other capitalizes on illness and misery.
As I was graduating from high school in the 1970s, doctors' incomes were skyrocketing, and becoming a doctor was the ultimate goal for many of the best students. During the mid-1970s, only about 10% of medical school applicants were accepted. Something quite interesting happened by the mid-1980s: applications for medical school had declined drastically. I read a business analyst’s opinion during those days. He stated that the kind of the people who tried getting into medical school in the 1970s were going into investment banking and other “hot” professions in the 1980s. The implication was obvious. The big money was easier to make as a corporate raider and other 1980s glamour professions than as a doctor.
The grand gentleman of alternative cancer treatment, Ralph Moss, wrote:
"Over the past twenty years I have heard many stories of how people are treated by their oncologists. Some of these are truly heartening and there are clearly many caring individuals out there. More often, however, I have been shocked by some of the profession's lack of empathy and sensitivity in both language and behavior…In my own experience at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, the way I heard doctors speaking to and about their patients added to my growing disillusionment with the war on cancer. For instance, I routinely heard some doctors refer to their advanced patients as 'waste-basket cases.' I heard the widely used drug BCENU jokingly referred to as 'Be seein' you,' and 5-FU as 'Five Feet Under.'
"At Grand Rounds early one morning, a prominent doctor displayed a Playboy centerfold and said, 'Some of our patients look like this.' He then displayed the picture of a seriously overweight woman, her breasts hanging down to her waist. 'Others,' he said, 'look like this.' Another celebrated surgeon who I interviewed for Center News had a lamp in the shape of a woman's breast on his office desk. I was so astonished I could hardly get out a single question. Have doctors changed? In 1994, the New York Times described a top clinical researcher as "self-confident with a manner that is often perceived as arrogant and abrasive."[157]
History demonstrates that outlawing abortion and/or birth control has always been part of the war against women. The Third Reich and Ceausescu's Romania outlawed abortion. The AMA’s anti-abortion campaign that began in the 1850s is easily seen in a similar light. High abortion rates usually accompany low contraception rates. The practice of abortion reflects an ignorant or repressed population, but banning it is even more repressive and compounds the problem, not ameliorate it. Similar to the war on drugs, crime, and the renewed war on terror, abortion is not a cause of the problem, but a symptom, and criminalizing it is always the path of disaster, which America never seems to learn, but is doomed to repeat forever.
Texas oilman Harry Hoxsey made a deathbed pledge to his father to distribute a family remedy discovered by one of their horses that cured cancer. It is an herbal remedy. The Hoxsey method treated tens of thousands of American patients during the 1920s and 1930s.
Hoxsey looked like the classic “quack.” He was a fast-talking Texas oilman. He never claimed, however, that he developed his remedy. He was merely passing on a family tradition and making it available to humanity. He opened his first clinic in early 1924, with immediate and spectacular results. An impressed doctor arranged to have Hoxsey treat a Chicago policeman who had terminal cancer and was given only a few weeks to live. Hoxsey’s treatment was used only to determine if it was toxic. The doctor who arranged the trial was not expecting the policeman to improve, as he had already been subjected to surgery and radiation, and his condition was rapidly deteriorating. The doctors were using the policeman as a human guinea pig, but Hoxsey felt that his treatment could cure the man.
See the below image for the progress of the policeman’s condition with Hoxsey’s treatment.
When the policeman astoundingly recovered, Morris Fishbein, through his agents, offered to buy the rights to Hoxsey’s treatment. The sticking point in negotiations related to the deathbed pledge that Hoxsey made to his father: people would get the treatment regardless of their ability to pay. Hoxsey made that a non-negotiable issue, and he treated countless patients for free over the years. The response of Fishbein and his cronies was that they would charge whatever they wanted for the cure, once they bought it. That ended negotiations, and thus began a vendetta against Hoxsey, led by Fishbein and the AMA, which lasted for a generation. Fishbein, who never practiced a day of medicine in his life, led a “war on quacks.” Eventually the Hoxsey clinics were run out of America, and today the only one operates in Mexico, run by one of Hoxsey's nurses until she recently died. Kenny Ausubel produced a documentary on Hoxsey’s story in 1987, and a superb book in 2000 of the same title: When Healing Becomes a Crime.
Immediately upon assuming the AMA’s helm in 1924 (although his official position was merely JAMA’s editor), Fishbein began cancer treatment racketeering. Hoxsey’s was only one in a long line of harmless, effective, and cheap cancer treatments that Fishbein helped wipe out.
My mystical mentors have informed me that light will be one of the remedies of the future. Subjecting the body to varying frequencies and intensities of light can eliminate disease and keep a body well. When one begins studying the human aura, the idea becomes a natural one. Dinshah Ghadiali was a gifted scientist who rubbed shoulders with Edison and Tesla, and came to America from India in the 1890s, believing the "land of the free" propaganda and Horatio Alger tales. In the 1920s, Ghadiali developed and used with great success what he called Spectro-Chrome Therapy ("SCT"). It was simply subjecting people to light waves. In certain respects, it was little different from Royal Rife's therapy (presented in this essay soon). As soon as he came into power, Fishbein attacked Ghadiali and SCT in the January 24, 1924 JAMA. Fishbein led the attacks that saw Ghadiali put on trial eight times, and he eventually spent eighteen months in prison.[158] In a pattern that will become familiar, a 1945 fire of mysterious origin destroyed Ghadiali's main research building just before an important trial. At that trial, with the fire eliminating most of the evidence that he could defend himself with, part of the judgment was to burn his books.
Royal Rife and Morris Fishbein
While Fishbein was wiping out cancer cures that he could not monopolize, a San Diego biologist was developing a microscope that today stands as one of biology's greatest breakthroughs. Royal Rife originally attempted to find an electromagnetic means to cure disease. The direction of Rife's work can be considered male-based medicine, to a degree. Rife sought a way to kill the bad guys while sparing the good guys. Although Rife may not have attained the ideal solution, he still stands among science’s giants.
Rife was trying to cure tuberculosis by electromagnetically killing the organism responsible for it. He needed a microscope that could view the tuberculosis organism, but such a device did not exist, so Rife conceived and built his own. He began building his first one in 1917 and completed it in 1920. For the next five years, Rife prepared and viewed about 20,000 tissue specimens, but his microscope was not powerful enough. Rife completed a second microscope in 1929, and in 1933 a third microscope was built, which he named the Universal Microscope. It was an impressive contraption, containing about 5,000 parts. Below is a photograph of it, from Barry Lynes's definitive account of Rife’s discoveries, The Cancer Cure that Worked!, on page 162.
Modern optical theory cannot explain how Rife's microscope worked. The 1929 microscope attained a resolution of 17,000 diameters, far greater than the 2,000 diameter limit that optical microscopes have. His 1933 Universal Microscope attained a resolution of 31,000 diameters. Although anti-Rife propaganda has circulated since the 1930s, and his microscope is dismissed by orthodoxy today, images taken with his microscopes survive, which prove the “impossible” results that Rife’s microscope achieved.
In September 1998, I heard Tom Bearden talk about Rife's microscope. Bearden speculated that Rife may have been generating gravitons (a mythical subatomic particle) to gain that high resolution. In the 1930s, Rife's Universal Microscope was by far the world’s most powerful microscope. It attained new vistas of microbiology. Rife had such incredible personal focus that he was able to sit at his microscope for days at a time, barely moving. Many years later, one of his colleagues would say:
"I've seen Roy sit at that doggone seat (his Universal Microscope) without moving, watching the changes in the frequency, watching when the time would come when the virus in the slide would be destroyed. Twenty-four hours was nothing for him. Forty-eight hours. He had done it many times. Sit there without moving. He wouldn't touch anything except the little water. His nerves were just like cold steel. He never moved. His hands never quivered.
"Of course he would train beforehand and go through a very careful workout afterward to build himself up again. But that is what I would call one of the most magnificent sights of human control and endurance I'd ever seen.
"…I'll always remember Roy as my ideal. [after expressing his awe of Rife's mind – Ed.]… He had so many wrinkles [ways to make money with his discoveries – Ed.] that he could have cashed in and made millions out of it if he wanted to, and I mean millions of dollars. Which would have benefited the human race, irrespective of this tremendous thing that he built which we call the Rife ray machine.
"…In my estimation Roy was one of the most gentle, genteel, self-effacing moral men I ever met. Not once in all the years I was going over there to the lab, and that was approximately 30 years, did I ever hear him say one word out of place.
"All the doctors used to beat a path to Rife's lab door and that was a beautiful lab at one time."[159]
Because there was nothing else like it, doctors and scientists beat a path to Rife's door. Peering deeper into the microbiological milieu than anyone had ever done before, Rife clearly saw the pleomorphism that Béchamp had documented. Rife was able to stain his specimens with light, not the crude staining procedures of the day, which killed what was observed. Rife was able to see his specimens in vivo and in vitro. In watching life processes under unprecedented magnification, Rife accomplished a feat that has still not been reproduced by orthodox science nearly a century later.
In 1931, Arthur Kendall was challenging the dogmatic assertions of Thomas Rivers, the father of virology, and Kendall heard of Rife's microscope. Rife and Kendall had a historic meeting in San Diego. With Rife's microscope, they observed a typhoid culture that Kendall produced, which he called his "K Medium." The typhoid bacillus was theoretically filtered out of the K Medium, but they could see the typhoid bacillus in its smaller, previously invisible stage.[160] It should have been a momentous event in medical history. The Los Angeles Times first broke the story in November 1931, under the heading "The World's Most Powerful Microscope." Rife was making demonstrations of his microscope to hundreds of scientists. His laboratory became a scientific Mecca, but it was a threat to the medical racket that was steamrollering along.
In 1932, Kendall was invited to deliver a paper to the Association of American Physicians. There he presented his epochal observations. In a crass demonstration of raw power, Rivers tried having Kendall's talk canceled. When that proved impossible, Rivers ascended the podium after Kendall presented his results. Rivers and Hans Zinsser of Harvard proceeded to tear Kendall limb-from-limb professionally, and concluded that since they could not reproduce Kendall's results, that he was lying to the audience. Just as Pasteur's apparent plagiarism prevailed partly because his imperial patronage and public image cowed other scientists, nearly all the doctors in attendance were cowed by Rivers's and Zinsser's performance. Rivers had the Rockefeller Institute, a highly powerful and rich institute during the depths of the Great Depression, behind him. Naturally, Rivers and Zinsser could not reproduce Kendall's results if they did not have the world's most powerful microscope at their disposal, but the herd of physicians and scientists was easily dissuaded from taking such a novel direction in microbiological research.
Rife took his cue from Kendall, using the K Medium in his further work. Kendall obtained a Rife microscope and used it in his Chicago laboratory. In 1932, Rife had a fortuitous "accident." He had been experimenting with the field produced by an argon-filled electrified tube. It seemingly altered the culture he was observing, and through that serendipity, Rife isolated what he dubbed the "BX cancer virus." Rife performed hundreds of experiments, and described a four stage life-cycle of the virus:
-
BX (carcinoma)
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BY (sarcoma - larger than BX)
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Monococcoid form of the monocytes of the blood of over 90 percent of cancer patients. When properly stained, this form can readily be seen with a standard research microscope
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Crytomyces pleomorphia fungi - identical morphologically to that of the orchid and of the mushroom.[161]
Besides isolating the cancer virus (something never before seen) Rife had also proven the pleomorphic theory of microbiology first elucidated by Béchamp. In 1932, Rife was using his frequency device to destroy the typhus bacteria, the poliovirus, the herpes virus, the cancer virus, and others using experimental animals. Human treatment was not far off.
Rife fortunately had a powerful ally in Milbank Johnson, an influential doctor in Los Angeles circles and a member of the Pasadena Hospital's board. Johnson began laying the political groundwork for Rife's cure to be used on humans. In 1934, Rife began using his frequency device on humans, and Johnson began the University of Southern California Medical Research Committee, a committee that Johnson ran until his sudden death in 1944.
The Rife frequency treatment worked on cancer from the beginning. Fourteen of his first sixteen cancer patients were cured using his device within three months. The patients all had "terminal" cancer that orthodox medicine had given up on.[162] The device was simple. It created an electromagnetic field that Rife calibrated to the resonant frequency of the cancer virus. Once every three days, a patient was subject to the field for a few minutes. The patients felt nothing, and no tissue was damaged. All signs of cancer quickly left those patients. The device could also be calibrated for other diseases such as syphilis, and several diseases could be cured at the same time.
In 1935, Johnson's clinic was going full steam, clinical results were carefully documented, and Rife was perfecting a production model frequency device. Rife was also making a microscope that could be produced for under $1,000, and would give a magnification of "only" 10,000 to 15,000 diameters. That was still several times what conventional optical microscopes could give, and was high enough to see the pleomorphic forms that Rife had discovered and described.
In 1936, Rife met with the International Cancer Research Foundation, in hopes of getting their support for his methods. In an illustrative instance of bureaucratic stupidity, the research foundation took the arrogant position that they did not need guidance from Rife to replicate his results. Sailing blindly, they failed. Meanwhile, Dr. E.L. Walker at the Hooper foundation in San Francisco isolated one of the BX virus forms by using one of Rife's microscopes.[163]
Rife began having trouble with his eyes, and his doctor restricted his time spent at the microscope. Those events transpired during the depths of the Great Depression, and money was scarce. Rife had help refining his frequency device from an electrical engineer named Philip Hoyland. A company was formed to build and sell the frequency generators. It was called Beam Ray, and Hoyland, Rife, James Couche (a doctor who had been using the frequency device to treat patients for years), Ben Cullen (a long-time friend of Rife's), and a promoter named Hutcheson were the company’s owners. The company made 14 frequency devices, and they were used with phenomenal success. Cancer, cataracts, and other diseases simply melted away with the device, properly calibrated to the disease forms.
One doctor, Richard Hamer, was running 40 cases a day through his San Diego clinic, and the results were miraculous.[164] One of Hamer's patients was an elderly man from Chicago, in his eighties. He had skin cancer on his face and neck. His face looked like hamburger. He had already lost the lower half of one eyelid, the lower lobe of one ear, and it was eradicating other facial features. After six months of treatment at Hamer's clinic, the man only had a small black spot on the side of his head, and that was about to fall off. The man returned to Chicago with skin as smooth as a baby's bottom.[165] Milbank Johnson was trying to gather enough clinical evidence to prove beyond any doubt that Rife's treatment worked, and they were trying to keep their patients quiet about their treatment.
The old man returned to Chicago, but could not remain quiet about his miraculous cure. He came to the attention of Fishbein. Fishbein was a household word in those days, so famous that his name was used in a Marx Brothers movie and his face graced the cover of Time.
Fishbein heard of the man's miracle cure and invited him to his office. The AMA's headquarters were in Chicago and still are today. The old man was reticent about his cure, but Fishbein wined and dined him and eventually pried the information out of him that Dr. Hamer in San Diego had cured him.[166] Those events with the old man and Fishbein happened in 1938-1939. Through his agents in Los Angeles, Fishbein approached Beam Ray and tried buying into the company, and their offer was rebuffed. Hoyland was the weak link that Fishbein went after. After Beam Ray rejected the AMA's offer, the AMA funded a lawsuit by Hoyland to try seizing the company. The lawsuit led to a trial. The brutal realities of America's legal system were too much for Rife's constitution. The trial destroyed Rife and stopped Beam Ray in its tracks. The lawsuit would be considered a frivolous one today, and Hoyland would have never waged it if not enticed and funded by the AMA.
Rife was subpoenaed in 1939, and the AMA attorney tore into him on the witness stand in a way that Rife had never experienced. Rife had never been in a courtroom before, and I can sympathize with what he lived through. Rife's doctor suggested that he take a drink to calm his nerves, and Rife's alcoholism began. If Fishbein and friends could not own the Rife device, they would destroy it.[167] They hunted down all the doctors using the device. Everybody was threatened with losing their license if they kept using the Rife frequency device. Hamer quickly gave up his device.
Milbank Johnson was not intimidated. Johnson had demonstrated his motivation years earlier. He was a doctor who had seen the suffering of countless patients, and he had dedicated his life to discovering a cure for cancer. While Fishbein and his minions tried wiping out the Rife frequency device and discrediting Rife's research, Johnson continued to amass data, getting authorities (including international) involved, and led the effort to get Rife's device the recognition it deserved. Apparently on the brink of making a very public announcement about Rife's device, Johnson suddenly took ill in 1944 and died. His death remains mysterious. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, two federal inspectors examined Johnson's hospital records and concluded that he was likely poisoned.[168]
During the same period when Johnson suddenly died, a new technician in Rife's lab stole one of the quartz prisms from Rife's microscope, rendering it inoperable. Just before that theft, Dr. Raymond Sidel published a description of Rife's microscope in the Smithsonian, in which Sidel ran the censorship gauntlet that the AMA had dropped on Rife's work. In the Smithsonian, Sidel described how the cancer virus "may be observed to succumb when exposed to certain lethal frequencies." Those surviving micrographs from Rife's scope came from Sidel's article. That public exposure made somebody irate, for soon after the article was published, Sidel became aware that somebody was following his car and a bullet crashed through his windshield. Dr. Couche defied the AMA and continued using Rife's frequency device until the 1950s, when they revoked his license.[169] The judge in Hoyland's lawsuit was accusatory of Hoyland when rendering the verdict, telling Hoyland that he thought he was crooked, and he ruled in favor of Beam Ray. The judge even told Beam Ray that he would be happy to represent them in a lawsuit against the AMA, but the trial had bankrupted Beam Ray. Ben Cullen even lost his house in the ordeal.[170] Rife was a ruined man who never recovered from the 1939 trial.
Just prior to the AMA-funded attack on Rife, the other quality "electronic medicine research lab" in America mysteriously burned to the ground in New Jersey, while that lab's owners were visiting Rife's lab in California, for another "coincidence."[171]
With Rife, the spiritual perspective once again comes into play. While Pasteur and orthodox medical researchers performed horrific experiments on animals and even humans, Rife also performed animal experiments, but his animals were not sacrificed. He would induce cancer and other diseases to his animals and then cure them. He performed exacting operations on them. His experimental subjects were his pets, and they died of old age, not from his experiments.
From my experiences with Dennis Lee, I discovered that few people can weather even a "fair" trial, being smeared in the media, and bearing the brunt of other establishment attacks. Semmelweis's fate is not unusual or perplexing. Rife was never the same man after Fishbein waged the 1939 trial, yet he never completely gave up.
In 1950, John Crane became aware of Rife’s story and approached him and proposed to collaborate with him in producing his frequency device again. For the next decade, Crane devoted his life to doing just that. After a decade of research, corresponding with the medical authorities and hiring experts to further develop the Rife frequency device, Crane made some major breakthroughs that made the device far more effective than it was in the 1930s.
In 1960, Crane was making and selling the device, along with a detailed technical manual on how to use it, and was attempting to get it patented. The medical authorities raided Crane's facility in California and seized everything: machines, engineering data, research records and reports, pictures off the walls, etc. They did not even have a search warrant. Then the railroad treatment began, with the kangaroo court tactics I know so well: none of the seized material was made available to Crane so he could defend himself; no testimony of the other doctors and researchers working with the technology around the country was allowed into evidence, much of it impeccable in its methods and findings; the jury foreman was an AMA doctor, and the rest of the jury was carefully stacked. The only medical authority allowed to testify was an "expert" from the AMA who had never actually seen the device working. Crane was convicted and sentenced to ten years in prison, and Rife fled to Mexico. Crane was not the only Rife follower to go to prison. Another of Rife’s assistants was imprisoned.
Crane emerged from prison in a little over three years and went right back at it, trying to get the frequency machine out there. In October 1965, he submitted an application to the California Board of Public Health, trying to get official sanction for the frequency device, as he tried doing before they threw him into prison. The authorities threw up the "there’s not enough evidence" roadblock, one of their favorite tactics, while they were busily hunting down and wiping out doctors who used the device.
Rife died in 1971, and his Universal Microscope eventually ended up in Crane’s home, being cannibalized for spare parts for a radio! In the mid-1970s, Christopher Bird began researching the Rife saga, and began the search for his microscope. The results were published in New Age Journal in March 1976, under the title, "What has Become of the Rife Microscope?" In 1978, Wilhelm Reich’s daughter told Bird that there was another Rife who was working in Canada, and Bird found Gaston Naessens. Naessens's story is coming soon enough, but this essay will first cover the rest of Fishbein's illustrious career.
Shaking down the food and drug companies was only part of the racket. Wiping out cancer cures was another. Fishbein also helped cover up health disasters, such as an outbreak of amoebic dysentery at the World's Fair held in Chicago in 1933. His complicity in the hush job caused many people to contract the disease.[172] Fishbein regularly approved drugs with his Seal of Approval program that later proved deadly or ruinous to health.[173] Most deadly, however, was his promotion of tobacco.
Native Americans used tobacco for medicine and ceremonies, but they were not addicted to it. The Spaniards first brought tobacco to the Old World. When the English began invading North America they sought gold, just as the Spanish did. When gold proved scarce in North America, another economic gold mine had to justify the New World's invasion. For the English, it became tobacco and furs. Jamestown would not have survived if not for tobacco revenues, which kept the colony afloat. Walter Raleigh had big plans for tobacco and his Roanoke colony, but failed. By 1638, three million pounds of tobacco a year were making their way to Europe from the Chesapeake. By 1672, it had grown to 17 million pounds a year. Europeans were becoming addicted.
Although the science of epidemiology did not exist in those days, it did not take a rocket scientist to realize that regularly inhaling smoke into one's lungs was unhealthy. Smokers had the most atrocious coughs and often died of respiratory diseases. Here are some Medical Dark Ages quotes to bring some perspective to what people suspected about smoke in the lungs all those years ago.
"Smoke… makes a kitchen also oftentimes in the inward parts of men, soiling and infecting them, with an unctuous and oily kinde of Soote as hath been found in some great Tobacco takers, that after their death were opened." - James I, A Counter-Blaste to Tobacco, p. 32; 1604 CE.
"The Hellish and dismal cloud of...Coal...perpetually imminent over (London) ...that her inhabitants breathe nothing but impure and thick mist...corrupting the lungs and disordering the entire habit of their bodies; so the Catarrhs, ...Cough, and Consumption, range more in this one City, than in the whole Earth besides." - John Evelyn, 1661 CE.
Although "science" did not begin making a "persuasive" connection between smoking and disease until the 20th century, many people could easily see the connection between smoking and ill health. The cigarette was an industrial idea applied to tobacco consumption, and the tobacco company propaganda was clever.
In the 1929 Easter Parade in New York City, marching in the parade was a group of attractive young women, smoking cigarettes. It was seen at the time as a great victory for women’s freedom. It was later discovered that those marching, smoking debutantes were fashion models hired by Edward Bernays at the behest of the American Tobacco Company. Bernays is considered the "father of public relations" and a professional descendant of Ivy Lee. He was a nephew of Sigmund Freud, and Joseph Goebbels used Bernays's Crystallizing Public Opinion in his campaign against the Jews. The tobacco companies were cynically manipulating American women into thinking that smoking was a badge of freedom.[174] Bernays was a non-smoker who lived to be 103, who also designed the propaganda campaign to fluoridate America’s water supplies.
Although Hitler's propaganda minister took pages from the tobacco guru's book in his campaign against the Jews, the Third Reich itself was not keen on cigarettes. Germany, the world’s center of scientific medical research, began its own war on cancer in the 1920s, as it had one of the world’s highest cancer rates. German doctors documented the health hazards of tobacco during World War I, and before that, many German researchers suspected that cancer did not involve local disturbances but was a systemic condition and was based on numerous factors, such as diet, stress, genetics, and other factors. Those researchers proposed largely dietetic solutions that were low in fat, sugar, and protein, and high in fruit and fiber.[175] During the 1920s, German researchers documented the link between smoking and cancer. In 1939, Franz Lickint published Tobacco and the Organism, which Robert Proctor called “arguably the most comprehensive scholarly indictment of tobacco ever published.”[176]
Hitler's goal was turning Germany (and Eastern Europe, once the "subhumans" were removed) into a land of Aryan supermen. The Third Reich investigated cigarettes, tobacco consumption, and health, and found them to be bad news indeed. Hitler said that tobacco was the red man's vengeance from the grave upon the white man. Hitler became the centerpiece of a German propaganda campaign against smoking. Hitler was also against drinking and eating meat, but it appears to have been partly a PR stunt to project an ascetic image. Hitler apparently liked beer and meat once in a while, although he correctly considered live food to be humankind’s natural diet. Hitler took gleeful satisfaction in the fact that he did not smoke, but Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin did. Hitler and Nazi Germany was a strange combination of the enlightened and the insane, but when it came to improving the health of the chosen race, German researchers were far ahead of their Western rivals.
While the Third Reich was trying to discourage tobacco consumption in Germany, because it was harmful to health, the USA was actively promoting the same substance for its populace. George Seldes, considered by many to be the father of investigative journalism, was writing back in the 1930s about the American press covering up the dangers of cigarette smoking while taking big money from the tobacco companies for cigarette ads.[177]
Fishbein applied Simmons’s “Seal of Approval” racket to food for a generation. Fishbein also began an active campaign of promoting cigarettes in the 1930s. From the 1930s to the 1950s, the pages of JAMA were filled with cigarette ads, and they made medical claims. What follows are some of the witty slogans that graced cigarette ads in those days. "Not a cough in a carload" (for Old Gold). "Not one single case of throat irritation due to smoking Camels." "More doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette." "Just what the doctor ordered" (slogan of L&M cigarettes). Philip Morris said that its cigarettes were "recognized by eminent medical authorities." "For Digestion's Sake, Smoke Camels" because the magical Camel cigarettes would "stimulate the flow of digestive fluids." Another was "Chesterfield is Best for You." Former smoker turned smoking reformer, Senator Maurine Neuberger (D-Oregon) said, "The American smoker during the '30s and '40s could have been forgiven for confusing his favorite brand of cigarettes with the latest wonder drug."[178]
Not only was Fishbein raking in money from cigarette ads, he was advising cigarette companies on how to structure their "research" so that they could make ever-grander medical claims. In 1935, Philip Morris began a new ad campaign, with JAMA being the most prominent place for its ads, touting a new additive that made its cigarettes superior to the competition's. The additive was diethylene glycol. Philip Morris stated that its research showed that its additive was superior to the rest of the industry, which used glycerine as its moistener. Ethylene glycol is what goes into car radiators today as antifreeze. Diethylene glycol is its cousin.
What Americans did not know about diethylene glycol was that Fishbein was working behind the scenes with Philip Morris to design their research. After looking at the original data that Philip Morris produced, Fishbein told them how to create "good data" that they could promote. They took his advice and hired Michael Mulinos, a pharmacologist at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, to perform a study on diethylene glycol. Mulinos's study appeared in the New York State Journal of Medicine in June 1935. Mulinos reported that rabbits that smoked Philip Morris cigarettes with diethylene glycol had three times less swelling of their eyes than those who smoked the brands using glycerine. That study became the cornerstone of Philip Morris's promotional campaign. Philip Morris's chief chemist and nine of his assistants canvassed the nation, spoke at major medical conferences, and hyped the research results, and targeted doctors in particular. Their ads offered free cigarettes to doctors, and Philip Morris even sent representatives to doctors' offices to give them free cigarettes while promoting diethylene glycol.[179]
The Philip Morris campaign was a major success and made Philip Morris America’s leading cigarette seller. Those experimental results were used in Philip Morris's ad campaigns clear into the 1950s. Philip Morris was so grateful to Fishbein that they offered him a retainer for his continued good advice. Fishbein uncharacteristically declined their offer, probably because it might show favoritism to the other tobacco companies. Fishbein was raking it in from the ad money anyway.[180]
As fate would have it, diethylene glycol made headlines in 1937 when a drug company put diethylene glycol, without first testing it, in the first antibacterial medicine ever sold in America, sulfanilamide. Within weeks of introduction, sulfanilamide began killing people across America, including children. About 100 people died. The AMA even helped prove that diethylene glycol was the culprit. Fishbein had a problem on his hands, and he acted characteristically. He ran an editorial in the midst of the tragedy, noting that diethylene glycol was used safely in many American products, including cigarettes. Helped by Fishbein's damage management, Philip Morris was able to continue promoting its diethylene glycol for another generation.
In 1949, Fishbein was finally overthrown as the dictator of American medicine, largely due to the legal victories that Harry Hoxsey was winning. As with his mentor Simmons, Fishbein was thrown out when his public image suffered. Even President Truman’s brother testified on Hoxsey’s behalf, as Hoxsey’s treatment cured his skin cancer. Truman’s brother talked to the sitting president about saving Hoxsey from the AMA’s vendetta, but the President said that his hands were tied because of the medical establishment's political-economic realities.[181] Truman would call the AMA, “just another mean trust.” Fishbein soon went to work for the cigarette manufacturer Lorillard at a retainer of $25,000 a year. That was big money in those days, the equivalent of about $250,000 a year in 2014.
Probably not coincidentally, in 1950 (the year after Fishbein was deposed at the AMA), for the first time JAMA published research results about the harmfulness of tobacco. Medical student Ernst Wynder and surgeon Evarts Graham of Washington University in St. Louis found that 96.5% of lung cancer patients in their hospitals had been smokers.[182] American science and medicine finally produced research results that confirmed the obvious. More than 400 years ago, King James I toured England, holding up the blackened lungs extracted from dead smokers while blasting the effects of smoking. The Nazis quickly found out how deadly smoking was. George Seldes was excoriating the American press in the 1930s for covering up the ill effects of smoking. Reader's Digest began a heroic campaign in 1941 against smoking, which continues to the present day. It took JAMA until 1950 to produce their first word on the hazards of smoking, and that did not even slow the ad campaigns for cigarettes in JAMA.
Fishbein was working hard for his new employers, helping to design more research that Lorillard could promote. Fishbein helped mastermind the last advertising blitz for cigarettes that graced JAMA. The hullabaloo centered on Lorillard's Micronite filter, a "breakthrough" in cigarette technology. It was the first "mineral" filter. During the cigarette advertising wars that raged on JAMA's pages, the AMA Advertising Committee directed their chemical laboratory to study the effectiveness of cigarette filters. None of the filters worked very well, and actually worked against the desired effect of cigarettes in the first place: filling the lungs with smoke. There was a marginal improvement with the Micronite filter, which was the only mineral filter tested. Lorillard was attempting to reproduce the resounding success that Philip Morris had with its diethylene glycol blitz of the 1930s. In 1952, Lorillard began running ads in JAMA with headlines announcing, "Have you Heard the Story of New Kent Cigarettes, Doctor?" And "Doctor, Have You Tried the New KENT Cigarette?" In their ad campaign Lorillard proudly announced, "At the recent convention of the American Medical Association, thousands of physicians heard the Kent story, and saw a convincing demonstration of the MICRONITE FILTER'S phenomenal effectiveness."[183]
Physicians began complaining to the AMA about those shameless displays, especially when increasing evidence was submitted from the American scientific community about the harmfulness of cigarettes. Reader's Digest was in the midst of a tremendous anti-tobacco campaign at the same time that Lorillard's Fishbein-inspired ad blitz was taking America by storm. Reader's Digest was running articles with titles such as "Cancer by the Carton," and cigarette smoking began declining in the early 1950s, as America began waking up. Reader’s Digest took one of the most heroic stands that any American media organization ever took, as its competitors had their pages filled with cigarette ads.
It finally came to a head in 1953. It was not due to an episode of conscience overcoming the AMA. The drug companies, which had long been the financial backbone of the AMA, began complaining. They thought that cigarette ads running alongside their drug ads in JAMA were discrediting them, because cigarettes were being likened to miracle drugs. Faced with that economic reality, JAMA announced that it would no longer accept cigarette ads beginning January 1, 1954. That decision cost JAMA $100,000 a year in cigarette ad revenues, but that did not stop Lorillard's ad campaign. In 1954, Lorillard ran ads in Time, Life and other popular magazines, citing the AMA experiments that "proved" how superior Kent's Micronite filter was to other cigarette brands' filters. In 1954, a war broke out between the AMA and Lorillard. JAMA editorials blasted Lorillard for using its name without permission, while Lorillard countered with ads that told its readers that while the AMA did not endorse any particular brand of cigarette over another, their research still showed that Lorillard's Kent filter was the best.[184]
In one of many Kafkaesque twists to the Lorillard story, guess what the magical ingredient was in the Micronite filter? Asbestos! Asbestos had already been linked by researchers to a number of respiratory diseases, including lung cancer. Truth can be stranger than fiction. In Fishbein's autobiography, published in 1969, he lauded the Micronite filter, and wrote how it spurred all the cigarette companies to put filters on their cigarettes, but that:
"Within two years, however, the talk about the relationship of cigarette smoking to cancer began to assume the proportions of a great propaganda. Now many years have passed, the campaign is intensified, and one begins to wonder how long it will be before some definitive answers are found for the questions that make people anxious and doctors despondent."[185]
On the same page that Fishbein displayed his stalwart allegiance to the tobacco companies (without mentioning the hefty sums that he also earned from them), he stated that he campaigned for fluoridation at the same time. Fishbein campaigned for fluoride and asbestos and called the effort against smoking a "great propaganda." Wow.
Even after the Lorillard affair, the AMA and the tobacco interests stayed in bed together for nearly another 40 years. Immediately after the USA's Surgeon General issued a report in January 1964, which was damning of smoking and cigarettes, the AMA spent $500,000 of its own money, and the tobacco companies contributed another $10 million, to fund a "study" to counteract the Surgeon General's report. The AMA issued a brochure in May 1964 titled: Smoking: Facts you Should Know. The brochure downplayed the hazards of smoking, stating that smoking's greatest health hazard was smoking in bed and burning the house down. The brochure tamely suggested that some research pointed to some health problems, although "some equally competent physicians and research personnel are less sure of the effect of cigarette smoking and health." The brochure concluded with "Smoke if you feel you should, but be moderate." The tobacco companies were so pleased with the AMA's stance on smoking that they kicked in another $8 million for further AMA "research."[186]
It was not until a 1980s investigation revealed that two AMA board members owned a farm where tobacco was raised, and that the AMA's retirement fund was invested in tobacco stocks, that the AMA finally began speaking out against cigarette smoking. In the 1980s, some young, idealistic doctors in the AMA's ranks began making noise. Even then, the AMA has rarely been at the battle’s forefront. Until the 1980s, if people walked into the AMA’s headquarters they could find cigarette vending machines in the bathrooms and lobbies.[187] In 1986, just as the AMA's relationship with the tobacco interests became a national scandal, the Reagan administration used the threat of trade sanctions to force open several Asian nations to American tobacco companies, who specifically targeted their women and children for tobacco addiction. In 2014 in Seattle, I constantly see the young Asian victims of those American tobacco companies as they visit the USA and smoke with abandon.
Fishbein was the face of modern medicine in those days, a household name, writing his health column in hundreds of American newspapers and the editor of two AMA publications, including JAMA (the other publication that Fishbein edited was named Hygeia, of all things). Eustace Mullins, the author of Murder by Injection, is derided as a conspiracy theorist. Conservative and highly respected writers such as Ralph Moss prefer the "structural analysis" view of the racket. The conspiracy theorists are nearly always tagged as delusional and paranoid nut cases.
Consider Morris Fishbein. Here is a theory that few are willing to ponder, because few will admit that anybody could be so diabolical, especially somebody who runs the medical establishment. The “spiritual perspective” section of this web site gives a glimpse into what may have motivated Fishbein. Here is an unpleasant thought to consider: Fishbein was actively promoting the single greatest cause of cancer while simultaneously wiping out the cancer cures that worked, cures that were harmless, and Fishbein knew exactly what he was doing. His cigarette promotion was creating a market (patients) for a racket where the cash registers rang resoundingly, and anything that could cheaply cure the disease was ruthlessly wiped out.
I have never seen anybody make that argument for Fishbein before. If we accept that some people are actively committed to evil, and it probably has to be admitted if one believes in free will, then this argument about Fishbein is not easily dismissed. Maybe he was merely greedy and blind, with low intelligence. Although Fishbein has been compared to Hitler a number of times, I will be gentler and call him the Al Capone of modern medicine, whose racketeering efforts greatly contributed, wittingly or unwittingly, to the suffering and deaths of many millions of people around the world in the 20th century. He gets my vote for medical gangster of the 20th century. However, in significant ways, the medical racket is worse today than it was in Fishbein's time.
Hoxsey, Rife, and Ghadiali were far from the only cancer treatment pioneers wiped out by Fishbein and his cronies. Fishbein led a war on "quackery" during the 1940s, and eventually the AMA's "quack" files included 300,000 names. Parallels to the 1950s communist black lists are not coincidental.
Dr. William Koch developed glyoxylide in the 1940s and found himself in Fishbein's gunsight. This link presents some pertinent Medical Dark Ages quotes about Koch. Koch apparently experienced numerous attempts on his life. Doctors who supported his treatment were physically attacked and some died violently or mysteriously. Koch died in disgrace, with his treatment abandoned. Today, modern medical orthodox research has borrowed from his work, without giving him any credit or mention. Koch’s fate was part of Fishbein’s self-proclaimed “war on quacks,” an AMA dynamic going clear back to the AMA’s founder. It was really a war on the competition, Al Capone-style.
Another 1940s snuff job was on Max Gerson, another genius who came to the land of the free, trying to make the world a better place. More Medical Dark Ages quotes lay out a brief version of Gerson's tale. Gerson also survived murder attempts, his clinic was also run out of the country, and like Hoxsey's clinic it now resides in Mexico. In 2014, Gerson's daughter Charlotte Gerson runs the clinic, and Norman Fritz helped out.[188]
Another casualty of the Fishbein era was Howard Beard. More Medical Dark Ages quotes give a brief overview of Beard's fate. In Beard’s case, it was the relatively gentle methods of repeatedly burning down his laboratory and throwing him into prison.
Over and over, the pattern repeats itself. Sometimes it is an attempted buyout. When that is rejected, the attacks come. Gunshots, poisoning, hit and run "accidents," kangaroo courts, prison, media smears, mysterious fires, the litany goes on and on. It is frighteningly similar to Dennis's story. The Fishbein era was probably the most notorious, but the same tactics have been repeated in different combinations to the present day. There are dozens of instances of alternative cancer cures being wiped out in the USA during the 20th century.
Fishbein was not a lone crusader against “quacks.” In 1913, the same year as his men were machine-gunning striking workers, John D. Rockefeller founded the organization that would reincarnate as the American Cancer Society ("ACS"). The ACS was also part of the “war on quacks.” When Fishbein had to admit in court, during his battles against Hoxsey, that he never practiced medicine and failed anatomy (and Fishbein’s lawyer even admitted that Hoxsey’s treatment worked), his star fell quickly, and he went to work promoting cigarettes and fluoride. After Fishbein was deposed, the “war on quacks” did not abate.
In the 1950s, the cancer treatment known as Krebiozen was championed by one of America's most respected doctors, Andrew C. Ivy. Ivy held many high positions in the medical profession during his career, including a board member of the American Cancer Society, a dozen international awards, a dozen honorary degrees, high-ranking university positions, etc. The Krebiozen treatment and Dr. Ivy were wiped out in the early 1950s, after Fishbein was forced down at the AMA. Ivy's career was ruined because of his support of Krebiozen and Dr. Durovic. The attacks on Hoxsey and Ivy became the focus of a congressional investigation in 1953. The Fitzgerald Report found that more than a dozen promising cancer treatments were wiped out by organized medicine. Under oath, Dr. Durovic told a familiar story. Durovic stated that J.J. Moore, the AMA's treasurer at the time, asked him to give distribution rights to Krebiozen to two businessmen who were friends of his. When he was rebuffed, Moore threatened to use his power at the AMA and the university to destroy Durovic, Ivy, and Krebiozen, which subsequently happened.[189] Medical Dark Ages provides pertinent quotes about Ivy and Krebiozen.
The attacks that Hoxsey, Rife, and Durovic endured have little documentation to support the conscious and conspiratorial nature of what happened. The kinds of offers that Fishbein, his friends, and Moore made to Hoxsey, Durovic, and Beam Ray would not initially be in writing. Gangsters and government officials have long known the game of not leaving a paper trail for those kinds of offers. It is part of the plausible denial strategy, not letting the right hand know what the left hand was doing. When Dennis was given the billion-dollar offer to go away and leave the energy racket intact, the offer was not in writing, and those giving the payoff would not beseech the courts for recourse. They would simply resort to murder. All that can be pointed to are the testimonies of their victims. When one sees the same pattern repeated ad naseum, of poisonings, shootings, buyout offers, public and legal attacks, mysterious fires and the like, how can it be all dismissed as "coincidence" or "delusion," especially when the motive is so clear?
Eustace Mullins is a scholar of the political right. Scholars of the right often propose conspiracy theories to explain events. One major problem is that by their very nature, conspiracies do not leave much of a paper trail.
Generally, the right’s scholarship can seem uneducated and paranoid when compared to the left's scholarship. On the cancer issue, Mullins's Murder by Injection comes from the right’s perspective, and Ralph Moss's The Cancer Industry comes from the left. Mullins's book is not worthless, or even wrong in its assertions. It is a valuable piece of work, but it has no footnotes or index. Although many of his assertions are backed up by plenty of documentation and are hard to dispute, he does not always present them with the factualness of a scholar. His work is decidedly informal, as if he knows that he is not addressing a sophisticated audience. On the other hand, Moss's The Cancer Industry is an awe-inspiring piece of scholarship.
Mullins wrote about the "Rockefeller Syndicate." There may in fact be a "Rockefeller Syndicate." The Rockefeller name has popped up so many times during the research that went into making this site, and our own encounters with Rockefeller interests, that if it was at the heart of the global conspiratorial octopus (or one of its biggest arms) it would not be terribly surprising, although I doubt that the Rockefellers play at the global power system's top echelon. I would be surprised if the Rockefeller interests were not somehow involved with the offer that Dennis received, especially as it was delivered in Chicago. Mullins is decidedly conspiratorial in his outlook, further reinforced if other works of his are read, such as The Secrets of the Federal Reserve. Compare Mullins's writings with Moss's. In the politics of the right and left, the conspiracy theory versus structural analysis dynamic is easily seen. In finishing his presentation of the "Cancer Industry" Moss wrote:
"Distant circles of power have formed which, while differing among themselves on many issues, are sufficiently cohesive and interlocking to form a 'cancer establishment.' This establishment effectively controls the shape and direction of cancer prevention, diagnosis, and therapy in the United States...Within the cancer field it appears that the major decisions are made at the top of four or five organizations. If a doctor or scientist exercises real decision-making power, it is as a result of his or her inclusion in one of these groups, rather than through professional expertise per se."
"Doctors who still believe that they are free to give whatever treatment they consider best for a willing patient are, in fact, toying with "quackery," as it is defined by these leading bodies."[190]
In one respect, the perspectives of Moss and Mullins are not far apart. Moss views it as more of an institutional phenomenon, but a select few people are making the decisions that direct the entire industry. Mullins says virtually the same thing, but he sees another layer of control behind those people, such as the "Rockefeller Syndicate." Moss sees the issue as more institutional, in which the people at the top, making the decisions, may not realize the full implications of their actions, guided by merely protecting their industry's turf, and not really thinking through the full impact of their selfish actions. Mullins thinks that the actions at some level are quite conscious, and engaged in by a few diabolical people.
One "skeptic" who might have leapt to Fishbein's defense was Martin Gardner, the granddaddy of the modern skeptical movement. He outranked even James Randi. In 1952, he published Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science. The book's cover states that it is "a study in human gullibility," and it is still in print in 2014. Chapter 16 of Fads and Fallacies is titled "Medical Cults." Gardner called homeopathy and naturopathic medicine "world-wide medical cult(s)."[191] Gardner also called osteopathy a cult. He finished the chapter by calling chiropractic "the greatest of American medical follies." In Chapter 17, titled "Medical Quacks," Gardner told the story of Dinshah Ghadiali, from a point of view decidedly less sympathetic than the article I read. Gardner also told the story of Koch, telling his readers, "There is not the slightest doubt about the complete worthlessness of the 'Koch treatment'." In the appendix of Fads and Fallacies, Gardner gave a brief review of the fates of Hoxsey, Ivy, and the Krebiozen treatment. Gardner candidly admitted that the primary source for most of his chapter on medical cults was Morris Fishbein's Fads and Quackery in Healing.[192] When Fads and Fallacies was published, Fishbein was spearheading the asbestos cigarette filter "research" scheme for Lorillard while being paid the equivalent of $250,000 per year for his efforts. I would be careful about how I threw around the word quack (Fishbein even looked kind of like a duck). Today, in 2014, whenever I read a critic of unorthodox medicine use the word "quack," especially in the first sentence or paragraph of his/her writings, I immediately think, "Another hack at work."
In the same book that Gardner demonstrated his great respect for Fishbein, he also wrote a very unflattering account about Hoxsey, obviously influenced by Fishbein's version of events. By the time that Fads and Fallacies was written, Hoxsey had already won a libel suit against Fishbein, which ruined Fishbein’s AMA career. One will not see that little fact appear in Gardner's work, even though the award was one dollar.
Gardner ended Fads and Fallacies with a paean to the scientific establishment. His message was that establishment scientists almost unerringly reject the "preposterous" and are alone in telling us which scientific unorthodoxies may have merit and which do not. He ended his book with "By all means let the Don Quixotes of science be heard. But let them be heard in a manner befitting their position on the spectrum of unorthodoxy, and let that position be determined by those who alone are qualified to do so."[193] In medicine, Gardner appeared to mean that Morris Fishbein was "alone" in being qualified to determine who is a quack and who is not.
Fishbein was far from alone in abusing his power from the medical racket throne. Steve Milloy is about the closest thing to his professional descendant today, as far as his relationship to the tobacco companies goes. One of Fishbein’s direct professional descendants is Dr. George Lundberg, who was JAMA’s editor until he was fired in January of 1999, when right in the middle of the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky scandal, Lundberg published a survey of college students that questioned whether having oral sex was really having sex. That was not exactly a pressing medical issue (related to making a medical determination on whether Bill Clinton really smoked pot, if he did not inhale). That was the last straw, and Lundberg was fired, after about 17 years as JAMA's editor.
The AMA leapt into the JFK assassination fray, acting as the establishment bulwark that they are.[194] In 1992, Lundberg called a press conference and he gave his own "case closed" speech on the medical evidence, again supporting the "lone nut" contentions. In his speech, accompanied by articles in JAMA by JAMA staff writer Dennis Breo, Lundberg went further than his lone nut announcement. He slandered Dr. Charles Crenshaw, who attended Kennedy in Dallas. Lundberg called Crenshaw's book, JFK: Conspiracy of Silence a "sad fabrication." One of Breo's articles stated that Crenshaw was probably not even in the same room with JFK in Dallas, and none of the other doctors remembered seeing him, and Breo wrote that Crenshaw was not mentioned in the Warren Report. There was a sad fabrication. Crenshaw is mentioned several times in the Warren Report, by staff in the emergency room who worked with Crenshaw on JFK. Confirming that Crenshaw is in the Warren Report is one of the easiest things to do. I looked it up in the Warren Report in about a minute. For Breo to make the statement that Crenshaw was not even in the same room with JFK in Dallas is the kind of mistake that a National Enquirer cub reporter would probably avoid making. Breo had no defense. He published libelous statements while attacking Crenshaw.
That Breo and Lundberg made such statements about Crenshaw was bad enough. What made their actions worse was not letting Crenshaw respond to set the record straight. They failed to apologize for writing something about him that was grievously false, something that anybody with the Warren Report in their hands could see was not true. All Crenshaw originally wanted was a retraction printed in the same journal where the lie was published. His request was denied.
Goaded by the AMA’s impudent stance, Crenshaw took them to court for libel and won. The settlement of more than $200,000 to Crenshaw caused JAMA to lose its liability insurance. JAMA was forced to publish Crenshaw's rebuttal, more than three years after they first libeled him. Even then, they censored and truncated his rebuttal, and buried it in the obituary section in fine print. Then they launched another smear attack on Crenshaw.[195]
Regarding medical pioneers, Ralph Moss echoed William James when he wrote:
"More often than not, attempts are made to deprive the pioneer of all credit. For example, hundreds of articles have been written about the role of free-radical scavengers in cancer; few have acknowledged their debt to disgraced pioneer William Koch and his Glyoxylide. Dactinomycin was marketed as an orthodox anticancer drug without any recognition of the fact that it comes from the same ray fungus as was used in the production of Krebiozen. Emanuel Revici was exploring the relationship of a nontoxic form of selenium to cancer as early as 1955, yet this fact is never mentioned in current articles on that mineral. The discussion of vitamin A and cancer is totally devoid of any recognition of the pioneering work of Max Gerson, a pattern of neglect Albert Schweitzer already discerned in 1959."
"In 1976 the author was in a private conversation with a high official of Sloan-Kettering Institute, during which the man closed the door and asked, ‘Do you want to know where we get all our new ideas?’ This leading scientist proceeded to take down from his shelf a copy of the American Cancer Society’s Unproven Methods in Cancer Management. ‘This is our Bible,’ he said simply and eloquently."[196]
The ACS’s Unproven Methods in Cancer Management is the cancer industry’s black list. People listed in that book can pretty much consider their careers finished. The people on that list go to prison, get shot at, have their licenses revoked, that sort of thing. The ACS is an integral part of the racket.
As of 2014, Ralph Moss is the most conservative writer on alternative cancer methods. He has a doctorate in biochemistry and was a science writer for the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. He was originally a big believer in chemotherapy and the war on cancer. He gradually became disillusioned, and when Sloan-Kettering essentially lied about their research results with Laetrile, Moss called a press conference in 1977 to publicize the positive Laetrile results by one of the world's most respected cancer researchers, Kanematsu Sugiura, who did his research at Sloan-Kettering. Although silenced by his employers, Sugiura never backed down from his findings. Sloan-Kettering fired Moss the next day.[197] Although Moss has written extensively about Sloan-Kettering in his subsequent work, I have never seen or heard of Moss uttering a bitter word about Sloan-Kettering.
In chapter six of The Cancer Industry, Moss dismembered the ACS's Unproven Methods blacklist, and he did it like the gentleman that he is. As with the best critiques of such things, Moss lets the ACS hang themselves with their own rope. The ACS used to call their Unproven Methods Committee the "Committee on Quackery." Their descriptions of those practitioners of those “unproven methods” include, "ignorant, uneducated, misguided persons, to highly educated scientists who are out of their area of competence supporting a particular form of treatment. A few hold Ph.D. or M.D. degrees."[198] Then Moss analyzed the credentials of those on the Unproven Methods list, and found that 77% of them have either M.D.s, often from major medical schools, or scientific doctorates. Moss dryly summarized the ACS position on the credentials of those on the black list: "Recall, however, that the ACS primer on unproven methods states that 'a few' hold M.D. or Ph.D. degrees; a few in this case is 77%."[199]
It does not get any better for the ACS and its list. The Unproven Methods list calls to mind the Inquisition's Index. The list is one of the most concrete indicators of the racket's existence. In one Unproven Methods list, of sixty-three methods on the list, 44% of them were not investigated at all by any independent agency before making the list. In 11% of the cases, the investigative results were positive.[200] In only one case that I am aware of, was an Unproven Method subject to a medical double-blind study, which is the only way, according to the medical establishment's own rules, that it could be proven or disproven (something that the orthodox treatments have never really been subject to).[201] In that case, with laetrile, the trial was rigged.
Here is the classic Catch-22. If they never test an Unproven Method, there is no chance that the treatment could ever be proven, according to their standards. Then states pass laws outlawing the use of an Unproven Method, and in the late 20th century, about ten states have criminal laws where the doctor could go to jail for even recommending it to a patient. That is why I call it a racket. It is designed so that there never can be any competition to cut-burn-poison methods of cancer "treatment." It is a totally insulated racket, engaging in circular logic to wipe out the threat of an actual cure appearing on the scene, and the USA is called a free nation.
Perhaps the greatest irony is that the actual data shows that orthodox methods not only do not work, but they hasten the deaths of the patients, causing agonizing pain and suffering while making huge sums of money for the racket. Radiation, surgery, and chemotherapy are spectacular failures, "proven" only in fantasy, while methods that are vastly more effective, and also cheap and harmless, are banned for being "unproven." The great fear of the people running the racket is the appearance of an actual cure, because then the game would be over.
Investigating "unproven" cancer treatments quickly yields "quacks" such as double Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling promoting “moonshine” such as Vitamin C. Here are some quotes from Nobel Laureates about the cancer industry in America.
"Everybody should know that the 'war on cancer' is largely a fraud, and that the NCI and the ACS are derelict in their duties to the American people who support them." - Linus Pauling 1954 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for "his research into the nature of the chemical bond and its application to the elucidation of the structure of complex substances," and 1962 Nobel Peace Prize.
"(The National Cancer Program is) a bunch of (obscenity)."
"The American public is being sold a very nasty bill of goods about cancer." - James Watson, co-discoverer of the DNA double helix, and 1962 Nobel Laureate in Medicine for that discovery and related work.
"The American Cancer Society tried to ruin my research foundation." - Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, discoverer of vitamins C and P, 1937 Nobel Prize, "for his discoveries in connection with the biological combustion process, with special reference to Vitamin C and the catalysis of fumaric acid."
"The American Cancer Society has done the American public a really great disservice." - Dr. David Baltimore, 1975 Nobel Laureate in Medicine for, "their discoveries concerning the interaction between tumor viruses and the genetic material of the cell."
"…The truly fraudulent claims must be discarded. But novel methods of therapy should not be rejected because they are novel, or because they run counter to some generally accepted belief, or because we do not understand the mechanism of the proposed treatment, or because it has come from an unconventional source." - Linus Pauling
"...cancer...there is no disease whose prime cause is better known...In the meantime, millions of men must die unnecessarily." - Otto Warburg, Nobel Laureate in Medicine in 1931 "for his discovery of the nature and mode of action of the respiratory enzyme.".
"But how long prevention will be avoided depends on how long the prophets of unbelief will succeed in obstructing the application of scientific knowledge in the cancer field. In the meantime, millions must die of cancer unnecessarily." Otto Warburg.
"...It would be possible to make much more progress than has been made if the NCI (National Cancer Institute) knew its job better, knew how to make discoveries...The NCI really does not know how to make discoveries...So long as the NCI is not willing to follow up ideas that seem good to people who have had experience making discoveries, the work of the NCI is going to be pedestrian." - Linus Pauling.
"...What kills science in this country now, (is) that you must tell in advance what you will find, and what you will do exactly, and what you will spend your money on. And if you knew it all, then you wouldn't need to do it. ... And so you cannot have (any) new discoveries. - Albert Szent-Gyorgyi.
Béchamp's Professional Descendants
Many scientists continued Béchamp's line of investigation during the 20th century, either directly, finding their path independently, or taking a parallel route. They include Rife, Kendall, Guenther Enderlein (his work followed directly from Béchamp’s, and he called his tiny bodies "endobionts"), Ernst Almquist, Edward Rosenow, Roger Wyburn-Mason, Lida Mattman, Wilhelm Reich, and Gaston Naessens. They usually endured similar slings and arrows to what Béchamp experienced, and some experienced far worse.
Wilhelm Reich saw organisms through his microscope that he called "bions." Reich had an extraordinary life and career. A pupil and colleague of Freud, Reich blazed paths of scientific inquiry that orthodoxy still has not explored. Reich was a Jew and Communist who left Germany after Hitler came to power, and lived in Norway before coming to his final refuge: America. Reich was the first experimenter (and is still about the only one) who made the subjective feelings of his subjects an integral part of his experiments. He experimented with the electrical charge of one's skin and the feelings of pleasure. He hypothesized that the building and releasing of electrical charge accompanied sexual behavior, and his experimental evidence supported it. He investigated the connection between consciousness and the human body, which is largely taboo even today in science, and his research into sexuality may never get a fair hearing in our Puritanical culture.
Reich's bions were similar if not identical to Béchamp's microzymas. In his defense, Reich said that he saw bions when others could not because good microscopists had to learn to "resonate" with the specimen. Reich's work on sexuality and electricity led him to his bion research, which in turn led him to investigating something that he called "orgone" energy. He performed numerous experiments with the energy and built orgone accumulators that defied present notions of physics, as the temperature inside the accumulator was greater than outside it. Reich even had Albert Einstein's interest for a while before Einstein came up with untested explanations for the temperature increase and lost interest (World War II was raging at the time, so Einstein can be perhaps somewhat forgiven for that unscientific attitude). When Reich had advanced cancer patients sit in his accumulators, they lived much longer than those who did not. Numerous people and animals that sat in orgone accumulators experienced remarkable healing episodes.
Reich's work has influenced fields as diverse as psychology and physical therapy. Near where I lived in Ventura worked a chiropractor who called himself a "Neo-Reichian." He could induce an out-of-body experience by simply pressing on certain parts of one's spine and body. I know people who he did that to, who were in the medical field and knew that he did something quite beyond what orthodox medical science had acknowledged was possible.
Nazi Germany cheerfully burned Reich's books, The Mass Psychology of Fascism among them. During the early 1950s and the McCarthy witch-hunt years, while the medical establishment was forcing fluoridation onto the American population and concurrently covering up its harmful effects (including brain damage), while the pages of the JAMA were filled with cigarette ads making medical claims, and while it was relentlessly wiping out doctors and scientists who had developed cancer cures that did not involve surgery, chemotherapy, or radiation, the FDA targeted Reich. While Reich never claimed that his orgone accumulators cured cancer, the FDA misrepresented his work and performed badly flawed (if not intentionally flawed) "reproductions" of his research.
The story of Reich is similar to that of many other pioneers. The genius of Reich was accompanied by personal idiosyncrasies and character "flaws" that everybody can lay claim to. The nature of his research led him far beyond the prevailing paradigm, and his work was generations ahead of its time. He lived with the frustration of having nobody whom he could fully collaborate with, because nobody could truly comprehend the full scope of his work. Orthodoxy quickly dismissed his work as of no consequence, and the highly charged nature of his work (sexuality, emotional health, cancer, etc.) resulted in a career that suffered attacks from all quarters. Genius and insanity have plenty in common. In addition, men such as Reich are susceptible to paranoia, especially considering his circumstances. Reich became somewhat mentally unbalanced and strident during the FDA’s inquisition. Few have the emotional resources to survive being the object of that kind of vendetta without receiving deep psychic scars. Usually, those who endure such treatment receive emotional and mental wounds that cripple them.
The FDA investigators, for their part, acted like Dominican inquisitors and openly admitted that they made up their minds before they ever "investigated" Reich's work. The fruits of genius are often incomprehensible to minds mired in orthodox paradigms, and it was no different with the FDA and Reich. The FDA was more interested in stopping Reich than in stopping people from pursuing his work, yet it accomplished both. As with most people, Reich was naïve about how the USA's legal system really worked and he provided essentially no legal defense against the FDA, and even refused to appear in court to defend himself, saying that he was a researcher and that the FDA had no jurisdiction in the area of pure science.
Reich made extra-legal defenses of his work. He made an "orgone gun" called a "cloudbuster," which could apparently affect the weather. During the FDA’s attack, Reich announced that he would create an unexpected storm around his laboratory in Maine, and an unexpected one appeared. His demonstrations and wide-ranging body of work were no help, and he was arrested and put on trial in 1956. As is standard with those kinds of court activities, whether there was merit in Reich's work was specifically not the issue, and the judge even had a prosecution witness's testimony stricken from the record when he admitted that his use of the orgone accumulator had ameliorated his medical condition.
Reich was predictably found guilty of violating the FDA's injunction. Then came the tactics of the Catholic Inquisition and Nazi Germany. Reich (who was nearly 60 years old at the time) was ordered to prison for two years, he was forced to destroy his accumulators, and his books were burned. The FDA would not do the dirty work themselves. Reich was ordered to destroy his own work. The FDA would merely supervise. That was similar to the Catholic Church's stance when they would not burn their heretics themselves, but "relax" them to the secular authorities for their execution. Reich's organization was even forced to pay for the expenses of destroying its work. One of Reich's followers, who was a member of the book-burning event, which burned six tons of literature, wrote:
"All the expenses and labor had to be provided by the (Orgone Institute) Press. A huge truck with three to help was hired. I felt like people who, when they are to be executed, are made to dig their own graves first and are then shot and thrown in. We carried box after box of the literature."[202]
Reich's 12-year-old son had to take an ax to his father's accumulators, under the FDA's watchful eyes. Technically, the books to be burned were only those dealing with orgone energy, but not being too particular, the FDA also burned his earlier works such as The Mass Psychology of Fascism. As Reich watched his books burn in the FDA bonfire, he commented to the FDA agent standing next to him that his books had been burned in Nazi Germany, but he never dreamed that he would see his work burned again.[203] To this day, neither the American mainstream media nor the history books give much notice to one of the most outrageous acts of inquisitorial behavior in American history. George Orwell wrote in his Notes on Nationalism:
"The nationalist does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them."
In another show of bureaucratic vindictiveness, the FDA issued a report, full of distortions of the record, which tried to influence the prison officials into denying Reich parole and to treat him harshly in prison. Reich died in prison a year later, and his work has ever since been legally forbidden by the FDA and ignored by orthodoxy. An entire body of research, which could lead to brand new ways of looking at the universe and life, has been marginalized, burned, and buried. Those who pursue Reich's work do so at their peril. New psychological therapies have incorporated Reich's work since his death, generally without acknowledging his contribution, which is another standard fate of the pioneers. The FDA has even bragged that wiping out Reich's work was one of its greatest achievements.
The work of Béchamp, McClintock, and other pioneers was limited by the resolution of their microscopes. Science has developed electron microscopes that get resolutions measured in millions of diameters, yet they cannot research life processes, because an electron microscope kills what it looks at. There are other microscopes today, such as ultraviolet microscopes and near field microscopes, which slightly increase the resolution by reducing the wavelength of light, getting slightly more than that 2000-2500 diameter limit.
In the early 1930s, when Hume was writing about Béchamp and Pasteur, optical microscopes were all that existed (other than Rife's scopes). Electron microscopes did not appear until after World War II. The resolution limit of optical microscopes had a significant bearing in coining a new biological term: virus. The size of viruses versus bacteria became a major point of distinction between them. Only one "virus" could be seen with an optical microscope: the smallpox virus. The others were too small to see. Dr. Thomas Rivers of the Rockefeller Institute was influential in establishing the science of virology as a subdiscipline of microbiology in the 1920s. It appears that the distinction between bacteria and viruses may be rather arbitrary.[204] Pleomorphic dynamics have finally been admitted to be of significance by mainstream science, but are still pushed toward the margins. When it is finally admitted how important it is – it may well be critical in overturning the current foundation of Western medicine - it would be advisable to recall what William James said.
Fortunately, Fishbein and friends could not entirely eradicate Rife’s work. In the 1940s, a French biologist began pursuing an independent path that ended up exploring the same territory that Béchamp and Rife did. Gaston Naessens was another gifted scientist who came upon the problems of the resolution limits of optical microscopes. After intensive work with lenses, Naessens realized that playing with the wavelength of light was the only avenue open to him in seeing life processes at higher resolutions. He experimented with magnetic fields, polarizing filters, and ultraviolet light and developed a microscope that got up to a 30,000-diameter resolution, and could resolve objects as small as 150 angstroms, far less than the 4,000-angstrom wavelength of visible light. As is the case with Rife's microscope, current optical theory cannot explain how it works, but again, one does not need optical theory to believe what one’s eyes reveal. Optical theory is due for an overhaul.
As with Rife, when Naessens began his microscopic explorations, viewing life processes that nobody else could see, he confirmed Béchamp's pleomorphic work. Unlike Rife, electron microscopes existed when Naessens developed his microscope, but electron microscopes cannot view life processes. Because electron microscopy subjects its specimens to a vacuum, electronic bombardment, and desiccation, it kills or seriously distorts any life process it might view. Thus, electron microscopes produce snapshots of dead matter, which is another variation on masculine research, terminating life in order to observe it. Because orthodox research does not use microscopes that can see it, the discoveries of Naessens are as ignored today as Béchamp's and Rife's were. It is obvious that what Béchamp discovered is available to today's technology, but technology is far from the only ingredient of successful research. It is similar to the forest and trees analogy. Microbiologists have been seeing the forms that Béchamp, Rife, and Naessens have described for more than a century, but when one is asked what they are, the responses are usually a variation of:
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"Oh, that is only a bacterium."
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"It is an artifact of the staining process."
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"It is merely intercellular debris" (platelets were seen exactly that way a century ago).
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"That junk? Whatever it is, it can't be important."
As Ralph Moss noted in his Cancer Chronicles, the medical and microbiological textbooks are completely silent on the forms discovered by Naessens and others.[205] Once in a while, I hear of an honest and open-minded reaction by orthodox microbiologists after glimpsing the world of the microzyma and bion. They stagger away from the microscope (usually dark field), dazzled and overwhelmed, seeing a world that they never knew existed, even though it had been under their noses for their entire careers. Most react with thinly veiled fear, with the paradigm they were indoctrinated into wobbling before their very eyes. The shaky laughter of denial can sometimes be heard.
Naessens delved into that dazzling world. Naessens coined his own term, naming those little guys somatids, meaning "little body" in Greek. While giving full credit to the pioneering work of Béchamp and his numerous professional descendants, Naessens seems to have taken the work further than anyone has yet done. After many years of research, work that began in the 1950s and even earlier, Naessens documented a 16-stage somatid-mutation cycle. As with Béchamp, Naessens concluded that the somatid was essential to life. Naessens believed that the somatid may be a precursor to DNA, and might be the elusive link between inanimate matter and life. Naessens discovered that in a healthy body the tiny somatid is found in its three primary forms. In a healthy body, the somatid-mutation cycle would be confined to its initial state and a single and double-spore stage.
When a body's biochemistry becomes unbalanced, through factors such as smoking, drinking, poor diet, stress, and chemical poisoning, the somatids undergo thirteen more stages of their mutation cycle, which is a pathological process. Naessens found that the somatids would mutate into bacterial, yeast, and other forms. Again, the pleomorphic observations of Béchamp were confirmed. Naessens dubbed his microscope a Somatoscope, after the little bodies it was able to see.
Here is a diagram of the somatid cycle that Naessens discovered, accompanied by some images from his Somatoscope:
Naessens discovered, just as Béchamp had, that somatids are virtually indestructible. He tried killing them with radiation, acids, even cutting them, breaking diamond micro-knives in the process before he was finally able to cut one. The notion of somatids surviving in limestone for millions of years does not seem farfetched in light of those derided pioneers' discoveries. In the 1940s, Naessens developed an anti-cancer substance that was successfully used in Europe. Later, in a horse-related experiment, Naessens developed an antibody serum he called Anablast. It became very successful, in fact, too successful. Medical gangsterism is not the exclusive province of the USA. Twice the French medical authorities dropped the hammer on Naessens, closing his laboratory, heavily fining him, and confiscating most of his equipment but somehow sparing his microscope. When he was practically run out of France, he was invited to establish his laboratory on the island of Corsica, which, although part of France, is more like an occupied nation than a willing part of the French Empire.
Armed with his Somatoscope, Naessens soon developed more treatments for cancer and degenerative diseases, and word got out about the miracle cures coming from Corsica. Soon, desperate patients besieged Corsica, flying to Naessens's lab from across the world. When one begins flying high, it attracts the establishment’s attention, and in the wake of people flocking to Naessens's lab from across the world the French medical authorities convened an inquisition. Naessens was run out of Europe and fled to Quebec in 1964.[206]
Naessens lived under a hailstorm of bad publicity and retired from the medical field to become a handyman, fixing electronics devices and car engines. He kept a low profile for years, just trying to get by. In 1971, fortune smiled upon him. David Stewart, head of the prestigious McDonald-Stewart Foundation, which was devoted to cancer research, had witnessed the bottomless pit of orthodox cancer research (well more than $1 trillion) that has to this day produced very little that can be said to truly help cancer patients. As with Milbank Johnson, Stewart was extremely moved by the suffering of cancer patients, and would look anywhere that seemed promising for a cure, even if it meant going against the attack-the-tumor dogma.
Stewart became aware of Naessens the handyman and discovered that he was that Naessens. He set up Naessens in his own lab in Montreal to continue pursuing his cancer research, but the outrage by the orthodox cancer crowd in Canada became so heated that Stewart decided to put Naessens's lab in the country, out of the limelight. Naessens moved to the small town of Rock Forest where his bride-to-be lived. The lab still stands there in 2014.
Naessens continued his research and developed the treatment that I would first use if I got cancer. If one has the microscope that can see things that others cannot, then one will make discoveries that others cannot. One common denominator of those microscopic pioneers was that they were usually using dark-field microscopes. A dark field microscope works quite differently from the light field microscopes that most Americans are familiar with. A dark-field microscope creates different lighting conditions for the specimen, whereby the field of vision is dark, but the organisms are lit up, usually in outline. The above image demonstrates that difference. In that unusual lighting, the world of the somatid, bion, and microzyma light up.
What follows is what Naessens discovered. The single and double-spore stages of somatid development appear to be healthy and even necessary stages for cellular life. That mutation dynamic appears to be required for cellular division to occur. When the body's biochemistry becomes unbalanced from factors such as poor diet, stress, chemical poisoning, and the like (our industrialized world has created many new stresses on the human body that it was not designed to withstand), the next 13 stages of the mutation dynamic are in evidence, and bacterial and yeast forms, among others, are seen. Naessens discovered that during the normal mutation cycle, a substance was secreted that initiated cellular division. Naessens called it a trephone, a name originally coined by Nobel Prize winner Alexis Carrel, who first discovered it.
In a healthy body, trephone production is normal and necessary for life. In an unhealthy body, those next 13 mutation stages are accompanied by tremendous trephone production. When that occurs, two things happen to the cells. The first is that they undergo a fermentation process (remember Béchamp) whereby the cells lose their differentiation, undergoing a kind of reverse evolution where they become amoeba-like, and look like primitive, unicellular organisms. The second effect is that the cells begin dividing wildly, stimulated by the trephone production, or more properly, trephones produced because the trephone inhibitors (chemicals in the blood) have largely disappeared. That series of events leads to the production of cells that are called cancerous, i.e., typical cancer cells. They lose their differentiation and rapidly divide. They stop becoming team players in the body, stop doing anything useful, and instead hog nutrients as they wildly divide. In a sense, the cancer cells are helping to break down the body, similar to the way in which Béchamp’s microzymas would break down the body after death. With cancer, however, the person is not quite dead yet.
Naessens discovered that all of us have that dynamic in our body every day, as Béchamp also stated. In a healthy body, those are unusual conditions, probably due to localized trauma. When a pocket of cells acts that way, our immune system rides to the rescue and absorbs those errant cells. It happens in healthy bodies, but not that much, and our immune system easily takes care of such aberrations. In anybody who is chronically unhealthy, that dynamic is more widespread within his/her body.
After pondering those dynamics for years, I have an anthropomorphized way of describing what is happening. This may make it easier to understand. Every part of our bodies is a community of cells, working together in a marvelous and barely understood fashion that enables them to function. The inner workings of our best-run cities bear only the faintest resemblance to the miracle of cooperation that happens within our bodies every moment. The human body is a miracle. When those cells undergo those mutations due to poor body chemistry, the immune system is like a fire station, sending out the firemen to put out the fire.
What Naessens discovered was that in an unhealthy body, the 16-stage pathological-mutation dynamic gallops along. Trephones are created in great quantities, and cells are rapidly dividing, fermenting, and losing their differentiation. The body's immune system then rides to the rescue, putting out the fires, absorbing those “bad” cells and treating them as if they were an infection. In most parts of the body, the fire station is well manned, with the best equipment, and the fire is just around the corner. Not all the body is so fireman-friendly. In the lung tissue of a smoker, for instance, the “streets” have already been damaged by daily ingestion of smoke, and what are clean, readily accessible city streets in the liver, for instance, in the lung are streets clogged with burned out cars, and buildings have collapsed into the streets. The fire there is as bad as anywhere else, or even worse, but the fire crews have to work extra hard to get there. The water mains may have also been damaged on those burned-out streets, so when they turn on the hoses nothing comes out, and they have to rely on the water in their truck, if the truck could even make it down the street to the burning building.
I have to have a little fun in writing about the cancer racket, and this illustration is about all the fun I get, so please bear with me. In the "bad neighborhoods," the firefighters have a difficult job. Just when they put out one fire, another springs up a few blocks away. The immune-system firemen in damaged lung tissue, for instance, are much more beleaguered than firefighters elsewhere. Eventually the fires in the bad neighborhoods rage for days. Naessens found that a fire left to burn long enough takes on a new characteristic. Like Dr. Frankenstein's monster, lying on the table, it opens its eyes and becomes self-aware. Those errant cells, left alone to ferment and divide wildly for long enough, become a pocket of cells that redirects its biochemistry. Those cells are long past the stage of doing useful work for the body as lung cells, for instance, and begin pursuing their own agenda.
Naessens discovered that when a "critical mass" of errant cells was reached, those cells secreted a new substance. It is well known in orthodox cancer research that the nutritional needs of cancerous cells are markedly different from those of normal cells. Naessens noted that those pockets of cancerous cells became "nitrogen traps." Their altered biochemistry gave them an avid thirst for nitrogenous substances.
Naessens discovered that the new substance produced by the pocket of errant cells did two things. What it did was easy to understand and seemed almost diabolical. The substance attacked the neighboring healthy cells, robbing them of nitrogenous compounds, and it paralyzed the immune system in the local vicinity. That seems natural and logical. The pocket of errant cells needs nitrogen, and robbing the neighboring cells is the only way to get it. Simultaneously putting the local firemen to sleep is logical, because attacking the neighboring cells should turn a local disturbance into a five-alarm fire, as the body's entire immune system would rush to the lungs and put out the fire that was threatening to destroy the entire city. In putting the local firefighters to sleep, the errant cells could feast on the spoils of intercellular plunder without interruption by annoying firefighters. The fire rages out of control, the cancerous pirates devastate the cellular neighborhoods of the lung, and the body now has full-blown cancer. The fire begins to spread throughout the body. The immune system is disabled wherever the fire spreads to next, and eventually the entire body becomes an inferno of cancer.[207]
Without a microscope that could observe the sub-cellular milieu of the somatid, and with a mind blinkered by modern microbiological training, orthodox cancer researchers could not reach square one in blazing the path that Naessens's research discovered. As with Béchamp and Rife, Naessens left his contemporaries far, far behind.
Armed with the knowledge of how cancer really worked, Naessens invented a brilliant solution. He also discovered what the ancient doctors knew but "modern" medicine had completely forgotten. Ancient doctors saw diseases such as cancer as a problem in the body's fluids, or "humors." Modern medicine has rejected the "humors" philosophy, particularly regarding cancer research and treatment. The "modern" paradigm looks solely at the tumor and devises strategies to get those bad guys. In looking at the humors again after centuries of neglect, Naessens and others have discovered that cancer is a systemic disease, directly related to the humors’ state. Attacking the tumor is insanity when the systemic nature of cancer is understood.
Naessens discovered the reason why those pockets of pirate cells attacked their neighbors, and secreted the substance that robbed them of nitrogen compounds and paralyzed the immune system. He called that substance CKF, for Cocancerogenic K Factor. He then experimented with substances that were high in nitrogen content and eventually decided on a derivative of camphor. The substance he developed and patented in Canada was composed of camphor, ammonium chloride, ammonium nitrate, sodium chloride, ethanol, and water. He dubbed it 714X, after the initials in his name. Here is what he did with his 714X.
The lymphatic system circulates body fluids, as the bloodstream does, but the lymphatic system is largely ignored, since it only circulates “humors.” Modern cancer research and treatment knows that the lymphatic system is how cancer metastasizes in the body, but they do not really treat the lymphatic system, at least not in the ingenious way that Naessens does. What Naessens did was take his 714X and inject it into a lymph node of a cancer patient. The lymph nodes in the groin have proven the easiest to inject, and the most effective for distribution throughout the body. The 714X then flushes into the lymphatic system and is carried throughout the body. The cancer tumors have been secreting the CKF and attacking their neighbors to extract nitrogen, while simultaneously paralyzing the local immune system. When the 714X hit, those pirate cells would suddenly find themselves awash in nitrogenous booty beyond their wildest imaginings.
When a pirate suddenly gets wagonloads of plunder delivered onto his ship's deck, he is too busy counting up the booty to get too excited about plundering the next port. He quickly becomes complacent and may even settle down to a life of luxury, perhaps even becoming respectable, because that was his dream in the first place. Similarly, when those cancer colonies found themselves awash in 714X, they began feasting on the booty the lymphatic system so kindly delivered to their front door, and stopped attacking their neighboring cells. They stopped secreting the CKF. Then the firemen in the immune system gradually awakened. They heard about those fat pirates feasting down the street. Those pirates were oblivious to the fact that the firemen were awake. They were not very smart pirates. The immune system came back to life and easily mopped up the cancer cells so intent on their feast that they forgot they were unwelcome members of multicellular society. That was the end of the cancer. Again, please forgive these anthropomorphic excesses here, but it was fun to write. It might make the cancer dynamic easier to understand for some, as well as Naessens's brilliant solution.
Also, a little sympathy for the pirate is in order. The pirate originally was a happy member of multicellular society. It was only when society began letting the pirate down, with him going hungry periodically, that he began reverting to the primitive behaviors that his ancestors engaged in, when it was every man for himself. He was going to survive, and if society could not provide the proper nourishment, he would take the matter into his own hands. Eventually, he would recruit others to his little band, and they would embark on their new careers as pirates. The breakdown of intercellular society (poor diet, smoking, etc.) was what led to their life of crime. Importantly, the dynamic that Naessens discovered for degenerative disease - when the cells were not properly nourished, they ceased becoming productive members of the body and looked out for their interests at the expense of the body – is also the most prominent dynamic yet proposed for why civilizations collapse.
It can be breathtaking to consider how Naessens had flipped the entire cancer paradigm upside down: instead of attacking the tumor, Naessens was feeding it! When I read Bird's book on Naessens in 1990, I was primed to devour its revelations. I had not yet heard of Béchamp, and Naessens's 714X treatment was one of the first alternative cancer treatments I had ever heard of.
Seth discussed exactly what Béchamp, Rife, Naessens, and others had discovered. Jane Roberts was a poet, and very probably had no earthly knowledge of the work of Béchamp or Rife when Seth talked about virus mutations. There have been many scientific confirmations over the years of channeled material, and I leapt all over Naessens's pleomorphic somatid-mutational dynamic when I read it. Naessens's inversion of the prevailing paradigm was something I had seen Dennis and other ingenious mentors of mine do many times. When Seth talked about pleomorphism, the stories of Béchamp and Rife were deeply buried in obscurity. It was only when Christopher Bird, Barry Lynes, and others began researching Rife's story that the pleomorphic tales of Béchamp and others were revived in Western thought. Their discoveries should have overturned the entire medical paradigm long ago, but there is a money machine hooked up to it, and it will not willingly turn itself off so that people can have reasonable things such as cheap, harmless, and effective cancer cures.
Of course, the medical establishment would not acknowledge that Naessens’s miracle treatment actually worked. The medical establishment will not easily let an actual cure get into mass circulation. In 1989, Naessens was arrested, thrown into a filthy jail cell, and prosecuted for practicing medicine without a license and other "crimes." They were going for life imprisonment. That trial is the centerpiece of Bird’s The Persecution and Trial of Gaston Naessens. The railroad tactics used by Fishbein and friends were readily evident in Naessens’s trial.
Naessens developed his 714X elixir, and it is not a drug. There are no known side effects of its use. It is so dilute that it is considered in the class of homeopathic remedies. 714X is essentially food for cancer cells and completely harmless to the human body. Naessens began giving the 714X to cancer patients. He even showed them how to self-administer it. In a few hours, a person would be trained to give himself/herself the treatment. Naessens would then send them on their way with a bottle of 714X. With Naessens's treatment, as with all alternative treatments, patients will virtually never pursue alternative treatments when they get cancer or other diseases. They always go the conventional route first. It is only when their doctors pronounce their death sentences that some decide they will not give up so easily and they look into alternatives. It was no exception in Naessens's case. The people who came to him for 714X treatment were usually people that orthodox medicine had already given up on, with their bodies usually already badly damaged by the orthodox therapies, not to mention the original disease. Charlatan that Naessens was, people often got 714X for free. By 1989, about 1,000 people had used the 714X treatment. The 714X treatment improved 75% of those patients. Here is a 75% improvement rate with a harmless treatment for cancers usually deemed terminal, and the people did not lose their hair, had no missing organs to show for their trouble, were out virtually no money, and had new leases on life.
There is much, much more to Naessens's research and story not yet told here. He discovered that the somatid mutation dynamic he chronicled for cancer was common for every degenerative disease he studied, including rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, and AIDS. Naessens found that the somatid cycle leading to the various diseases were simply different manifestations of the same underlying dynamic, and 714X works for them all. The nature of somatidian theory is so deep and startling that our very understanding of life itself will be radically altered if the medical racket does not succeed in snuffing out the revival of the lines of inquiry that Béchamp initiated so long ago.
One patient that testified at Naessens's trial was Roland Caty. Caty developed a form of prostate cancer that is almost invariably fatal. Caty was working in Africa, building a university. The orthodox treatment his doctors prescribed for him was removing all his genitalia, for starters. Caty was understandably not too keen on such a treatment, and refused to go through with it. His doctors told him that he was "crazy" and would be dead in three months. Caty heard of Naessens's 714X treatment. He visited Naessens's lab, got a bottle of 714X, learned how to inject himself in a few hours, and went back to work in Africa, injecting himself with 714X. He quickly and completely recovered, which is considered impossible in the halls of orthodoxy. More than a decade after he was cured, he testified at Naessens's trial.[208] Bizarrely, he was called to the stand by the prosecution, in order to show what a crime Naessens's treatment was.
Jacques Viens was only 39 years old when he developed stomach cancer. Nearly his entire stomach was surgically removed. It did not work, the cancer had infected his lymph nodes, and Viens went home to die. On his deathbed he heard of 714X treatment, and was secretly given it by a member of the medical establishment, whose name he refused to reveal, because of the repercussions that he knew would be visited on him/her. A few months later, Viens had recovered to the point where he went hunting. He returned to work, fully recovered.[209]
In 1981, Gary Diamond, who lived in California during the 1989 trial, was diagnosed with Hodgkin's Disease. His doctors recommended chemotherapy and radiation, to which Diamond submitted, and his condition gradually worsened. In 1983, while he was slowly dying of Hodgkin's Disease, which the treatments he was getting did nothing to arrest, he visited Naessens's lab in Quebec. He received about 60 days of 714X injections while he completed his orthodox chemotherapy. After the 714X injections, Diamond made a quick and complete recovery.[210]
At Naessens's trial, many of his patients appeared on their own initiative to tell their stories. One was Bernard Baril, a 33-year-old Quebec-born restaurant and catering consultant. He contracted HIV while living in Paris. HIV is theoretically what causes AIDS, although many alternative practitioners will dispute that. Again, with the germ theory of disease being such a poorly understood distortion of Béchamp's work with the microzyma, as well as what the same work shows about degenerative disease, nobody should take for gospel any mainstream theories on disease or its treatment. After Baril was diagnosed with HIV, he came down with cancer tumors that filled his mouth and a Kaposi's Sarcoma attacked his palate. The doctors at the Montreal General Hospital excised the Kaposi's Sarcoma, and the biopsy was classified as type IV-D, which is termed "extremely advanced." The doctors told him that treatment was pointless, and Baril refused conventional treatment and waited to die. He was going to become one more AIDS statistic.
The tumor soon reappeared, and Baril's weight declined from 165 to 115 pounds. It got so bad that he was barely able to eat. On his deathbed he heard about Naessens through a friend, and began taking the 714X treatment. In a few weeks the tumor began shrinking, and within three months the lesions began disappearing. Barely holding back his tears at the press conference, Baril exclaimed, "Look at me! I now weigh 170 pounds! I feel entirely fit! Don't I look in the pink of health?"[211] Dozens of AIDS patients had similar results with the 714X treatment by 1990.
Naessens's trial demonstrates that the Canadian medical racket is not as powerful and corrupt as it is in America. They tried turning it into kangaroo court, but there was too much public outcry. There were picketers at the trial, mainly cured patients. The trial became highly visible in Quebec.
In Quebec, Augustin Roy was its highest-ranking medical official, and he led the attack against Naessens. Bird aptly compared Roy to Fishbein, a "doctor" who had virtually never practiced medicine, but ruled the Quebec medical establishment with an iron fist. As patient after patient paraded to the witness stand, telling of their miraculous cures after mainstream doctors had given up on them, the prosecution's response was astonishing: none of those miracle cures were cures at all; they had all been misdiagnosed in the first place, and none of them had cancer to begin with! When Hoxsey was on trial, the prosecution made the same motion to dismiss the testimonies of an army of patients who were cured with his treatment, including President Truman’s brother.
The prosecution was going for life in prison for Naessens. Just before the jury verdict was rendered, Quebec's most famous poet and songwriter, Gilles Vigneault, suddenly appeared at the trial after taking a red eye flight from France, where he had been on tour. He was coming to show his support for Naessens. In Quebec, it was as if Bruce Springsteen had showed up.
Naessens was acquitted, which made headlines in Quebec. Not a peep was heard in America when that happened. I found out about Naessens because I was mail-ordering mystical material from Canada and read of the trial and book. For years, I mail ordered the book from Canada. In 1991, a mystical book company began publishing an American printing of the book, and slowly, over the years, more Americans have been finding out about the stories of Naessens, Rife, Béchamp, etc.
There are other amazing aspects of Naessens's story. Like Béchamp, Naessens has not just invented a cure for diseases, he has ventured so far out onto the leading edge of science, and his discoveries are so hard to believe that the most common reaction to them by mainstream scientists is "impossible!" For instance, one of his experiments reminded Bird of Dr. Frankenstein's lab. Naessens took a piece of meat, the kind anybody can get straight from a butcher’s shop. He separated out somatids from an in vitro culture and injected them into the meat. The meat was then placed in a sealed vessel in a vacuum. Not only will the meat not rot, it will retain its healthy looking color, and even continue to grow, as if it were still part of the cow.[212]
Another "impossible" experiment is to take two rabbits, one white and one black. Somatids are extracted from the blood of the white rabbit. A solution of the somatids is prepared and injected into the blood of the black rabbit, at a rate of about 1CC per day. After about a month of that treatment, the fur of the black rabbit begins turning gray. A close examination of the fur yields the fact that the rabbit's fur is composed of 50% black hairs and 50% white hairs. The same effect is observed in a white rabbit that is injected by the somatids of a black rabbit. Furthermore, when a patch of skin from the white rabbit is subsequently grafted onto the black rabbit who is now a gray rabbit, there is no rejection of the graft. According to orthodox biological theory, the experimental results are not only impossible, but also ridiculous. Yet, that experiment has been reproduced many times.[213] Again, those results are so startling and profound that the entire foundation of microbiology may have to be eventually discarded, in a much needed paradigm shift. Here are pictures of some I consider to be the true heroes of science and medicine, with their subtle, feminine, humanitarian, and profound work:
Unlike his professional ancestors, Naessens is alive and does not have to die in obscurity, disgrace, or prison. Whether he does or not is not up to the medical and scientific establishments, as much as I would like to see them wake up. It is up to the average person, probably most importantly, the average American. His discoveries can have immediate and dramatic effect on the lives of millions, if not billions. The French can trade in their questionable national hero for two genuine ones.
One of the awe-inspiring parts of Naessens's work is that the somatidian-mutation dynamic is easy to see when one is properly trained. The somatids and their mutational forms have been seen by microbiologists for the past century and longer. The somatid-mutation forms are not invisible to modern optical microscopes, although they are more easily seen with the rarely used (by mainstream microbiologists) dark-field microscope. The somatid mutation forms are far larger than the single somatids themselves. If a microbiologist operating under the mainstream paradigm looks under the microscope, he might see what Naessens calls a stage-six somatid mutation, but the mainstream microbiologist would call it a rod-shaped bacterium. Naessens would agree with the microbiologist, but would add that yesterday it was a double bacteria form, and next week it might become a yeast form.
The final stage, stage 16 of the somatid-mutation dynamic, is a husk Naessens calls a fibrous thallus. The thallus is left over after the mutation forms eventually develop into something like a cocoon. One day the cocoon explodes, spreading zillions more somatids into the area, where each somatid then begins the mutation cycle anew. Microbiologists throughout this century have seen that empty thallus, but in their understandable ignorance they have always thought that the thallus was an artifact of the staining process. They could see the trees, but had no idea what the forest looked like.
When one looks through a dark-field microscope at a drop of live blood, and have the proper paradigm to guide one’s eyes and brain, a world of information previously invisible becomes available. In the early 1990s, I had had my own living blood analyzed by a dark-field microscope, and I saw it myself on a television screen. For an hour of my time and $35, a man told me more about my health than thousands of dollars of conventional medical tests could. Naessens does the same thing. When somebody comes to his lab and asks for his help and insight, he draws a drop of their blood and they both look at it on the TV monitor that is hooked up to the Somatoscope. Right away, by looking at what the somatid forms are doing in that drop of blood, Naessens can tell the state of his/her immune system, and much more. The man that read my blood (not affiliated with Naessens, but who knew his work well) was able to point out a stage-six somatid mutation in my blood, and many other things.
By looking at a drop of blood, Naessens and others can tell people how healthy they are, and here is the stupefying part: they can tell if somebody is on the road to getting cancer, up to two years before there is a tumor to find. In the late 1990s, Naessens and his wife founded a school in Quebec to train technicians to do just that. There is evidence that mammograms may cause as much cancer as they discover. Even the conservative Ralph Moss wrote about research results that show that there is no credible evidence to show that mammograms have anything to do with an increased survival rate of women with breast cancer.[214] The same holds for cervical cancer. Early detection combined with orthodox treatment does not increase life expectancy at all. Naessens produced a video that shows and explains the somatidian forms and shows people how to treat themselves using 714X. The entire current paradigm can come crashing down and be replaced with sanity. It is up to the average person whether the insanity ends and sanity begins. Looking to the medical establishment to lead the way is like asking the wolf to stop eating the sheep, and believing him when he says that he ceased indulging that habit long ago, even when there is a little wool hanging from his chin.
I have seen many attacks on Naessens over the years, coming from self-appointed quack-hunters, and what has really been incredible, even in 2014, are reading attacks on Naessens and dismissals of his discoveries and treatment without ever mentioning his microscope. Bird’s first title for his book called Naessens the “Galileo of the microscope,” because just as those who condemned Galileo’s discoveries about Jupiter’s moons refused to look through his telescope, orthodoxy has generally refused to look through Naessens’s Somatoscope, as his work has been simultaneously denigrated.
Maybe Béchamp, Rife, Naessens, Reich, and others were on the wrong track. Maybe their work does not point to a new paradigm, but I have never seen anybody from the halls of orthodox medicine perform any credible investigation. How do you fake microscopes that achieved the "impossible," when all you have to do is look through the lens? The evidence I have seen has impressed me, and even if the racketeering in medicine was not so obvious and pervasive, orthodoxy has always reacted with denial and fear when paradigm-shifting discoveries have been made. The attacks on Semmelweis, the ignoring of the Wright brothers, and what I have witnessed in many areas of fringe science and technology, even leaving aside organized suppression and the blatant dishonesty of the "skeptics," give me no confidence that orthodoxy would ever react honestly to discoveries that threaten to upend the paradigm and the huge cash machine hooked up to it. Orthodoxy has never been where the big breakthroughs come from. In a world of scarcity, orthodoxy always tends to become a racket. All I have seen from orthodoxy's defenders has been name-calling and a pronounced aversion to performing anything that could be called a non-laughable effort to investigate. It is not as if those men and their work was dismissed after careful, dispassionate investigation, in a clear pattern that began with Béchamp.
Pasteur’s Germ Theory, Vaccines, and Alternate Paradigms
Semmelweis eventually enlarged his sanitation theory to include any decaying matter as infectious. He died before Pasteur developed his germ theory of disease. Béchamp’s work supported Semmelweis’s theory that any rotting material can induce infection. Rotting, put more scientifically, is fermentation, or the digestive processes of microscopic organisms. Béchamp ended his The Blood and its Third Anatomical Element with:
“The living being, filled with microzymas, carries in himself the elements essential for life, for disease, for death and for destruction. And that this variety in results may not too much surprise us, the processes are the same. Our cellules [cells – Ed.], it is a matter of constant observation, are being continually destroyed by means of a fermentation very analogous to that which follows death. Penetrating into the heart of these phenomena we might really say, were it not for the offensiveness of the expression, that we are constantly rotting!”[215]
It is a testament to Béchamp’s keen talent that he documented the microzyman world with his day’s microscopes. With bacterial and fungal forms (and recall Rife’s cancer virus) as morphic stages of microzyman/somatidian/bionic/endobiontic evolution, there is a direct connection between degenerative and infectious disease.
Pasteur’s germ theory sees the body as a victim to organisms that attack from outside the body. Microzyman theory sees the destruction as coming from within. Béchamp was not alone in his theorizing about “harmful” organisms being created by the disease, not the other way around. Pasteur’s friend Claude Bernard thought the same way, as eventually even Rudolf Virchow did. Bernard theorized that the environment that the germs lived in was all-important, not the germ. The “harmful” germs were only reacting to a dangerous environment. Legend even has it that Pasteur acknowledged the same thing on his death bed, saying that Bernard was right, that “the microbe is nothing, the terrain everything.”[216]
Béchamp theorized that the so-called germs in the air were only the floating microzymas of dead organisms, and would initiate fermentation and turn to bacteria if given a favorable medium. They would not cause disease, in Béchamp’s opinion. Lister eventually abandoned Pasteur’s air-germ theory and stopped spraying carbolic acid into the air, and eventually stated that only germs from non-air sources were harmful. From that time forward, Lister only sterilized surgical implements, wounds and dressings, which led to today’s sterile surgical procedures.
Pasteurization, antibiotics, and vaccination derive directly from Pasteur’s germ theory. Pasteurization involves subjecting fluids such as milk, beer, and orange juice to high heat, to kill microorganisms that can lead to illness. According to microzyman theory, Pasteurization stops the fermentation process by halting the microzyman nutritive process. Pasteurization also destroys most vitamins. The nutritional value of food is greatly reduced through pasteurization. Pasteurization is the ancestor of today’s irradiation. Those processes are attempting to overcome filth and putrefaction with scorched-earth-style destruction. Far healthier is a clean product that has not been subjected to destructive heat or radiation. Then there would not be any need for such practices. Even better is adopting a mostly live food diet, which eliminates those processed foods.
Antibiotic theory comes directly from the germ theory, in which powerful drugs and organisms kill those invading germs. According to microzyman theory, the deadly germs are usually not of the invading variety, but are local germs reacting to a diseased environment, taking a new shape in response, in the germ’s struggle for survival. That is similar to Naessens’s theory of how healthy cells become pirates when their environment is poor, and diseases such as cancer result.
The antibiotic era began in 1928 with the discovery of penicillin. In the 1940s, penicillin became publicly known and immediately became the Wonder Drug. Penicillin, however, was another scorched-earth treatment. It killed all bacteria, not just the “bad guys.” According to microzyman theory, something such as penicillin did not make the diseased “terrain” healthy, it just wiped out all bacteria in the environment, or more precisely, a morphic stage of a pleomorphic life cycle. The other stages still existed. The bacteria also adapted to the new scourge, as they have adapted to change for billions of years.
In 1952, staphylococcus infections were about 100% curable with penicillin; in 2014, only 2% of British staphylococcus organisms reacted to penicillin. New antibiotics are continually invented to overcome the developing resistance of bacteria. The weakening and destruction of the immune system is one outcome of antibiotic use. Antibiotic use is nearly universal in the American population, and new “super bugs” appear every year, so more powerful antibiotics are developed. Now, hospitals are the realm of those super bugs, and nearly 100,000 Americans die each year due to infection that they acquired in hospitals, which will often not respond to antibiotics. At the rate it is going, the antibiotic age will be over soon, as the “bad” bacteria will have adapted to all the antibiotics that have been thrown at them. The effect on the immune systems of those who have taken antibiotics has been immense, especially as Americans take antibiotics these days for the slightest sniffles. The price for short-term relief will likely be long-term disaster, and Naessens's work demonstrates what other problems collapsing immune systems can lead to. The antibiotic age is a form of arms race, in typical masculine fashion, always seeking ways to make the perfect weapon. Arms races never have a happy ending.
Vaccination is another outcome of Pasteur’s germ theory. Pasteur was not the first vaccinator, as Edward Jenner and others had the idea for smallpox much earlier, but Pasteur provided the theoretical basis, and he was the first great commercializer of the process. His anthrax and rabies vaccinations were two early instances of the commercialization of vaccination. As with fluoridation, assessing vaccine effectiveness is a numbers game. In Hume’s book, she dealt at length with the effectiveness of vaccination, especially Pasteur’s. Before Pasteur pursued his vaccines, smallpox vaccination became mandatory in England, and the numbers are illuminating. In 1840, smallpox vaccines became free in England and Wales. In 1853, the vaccine became compulsory. In 1867, those who did not submit to vaccination were prosecuted. The deaths in England and Wales from smallpox are presented for the pertinent years.[217]
|
Epidemic years |
England and Wales smallpox deaths |
|
1857-1859 |
14,244 |
|
1863-1865 |
20,059 |
|
1870-1872 |
44,840 |
Smallpox only declined in England and Wales when vaccination did.[218] In addition, smallpox mortality increases in vaccinated populations. While the USA's fatality rate from smallpox was less than 3% of cases around 1900, in the far more vaccinated U.S. Army in the Philippines, the fatality rate was more than 25%.[219] The highest death rate in the Philippines during the smallpox epidemic of a century ago was in Manila, with a fatality rate of 65%, and Manila was the most heavily vaccinated place in the Philippines. Vaccination makes the disease more deadly when contracted. George Bernard Shaw remarked on the statistical fraud that took place in England in trying to make vaccination appear more successful than it was.
The standard history books fail to mention that Pasteur’s early experiments with his vaccine were disastrous. Pasteur’s plagiarized vaccine was used on thousands of sheep in Southern Russia. The vaccine was administered to 4,564 sheep, and 3,696 died almost immediately from the vaccine.[220] Pasteur had to pay for all the animals that he killed with his “preventive.” The numbers show similar success with Pasteur’s rabies vaccine. He may have even invented a new disease with that vaccine. Time and again, the actual effects of vaccination show something very different from unqualified success. A chapter of Hume’s book is devoted to the vaccination lessons of World War I. Disease caused nearly as many casualties during the disaster at Gallipoli as those dead and wounded in battle, with heavily inoculated troops. The grand finale of World War I was an “influenza” epidemic that swept the world in 1918-1919, beginning at a U.S. military base and killing probably at least 25 million people and crippling my grandfather, who was in the trenches during World War I. They thought he was dead, and put him in a makeshift morgue with other soldiers. He awoke days later in the charnel house, and nearby soldiers were spooked to watch a man crawl out of there. Rheumatoid arthritis accompanied his illness, which crippled him.
If Hume’s work was all I had seen about the “success” of vaccination, Geison’s criticism of Hume’s poor understanding of Pasteur’s work might have been convincing, but there is little evidence that vaccination gets any credit for preventing or eradicating disease. The Hygienic principles of sanitation and nutrition have apparently eliminated most epidemic disease, not vaccination. The tuberculosis death rate in Great Britain was 4,000 per million people in 1840. The tuberculosis bacillus was identified in the 1880s, when the death rate had fallen to less than 2,000. Antibiotics were introduced at the end of World War II, when the rate had fallen to about 400, and the tuberculosis vaccine was introduced in the early 1950s, when the death rate had fallen below 300. How can vaccination receive any of the credit? Measles mortality, as a death rate per million people, had fallen from 1,100 per million in 1910 to only a few in the 1970s in Great Britain, when immunization was introduced.[221] Whooping cough, now called pertussis, had already declined by more than 80% from 1900 in Great Britain when the vaccine was introduced, in the late 1930s. In 1984, 46% of children contracting whooping cough in the United States had previously been vaccinated, as well as 58% of all children contracting measles.[222]
There are far more ominous aspects of childhood vaccination to report than merely not preventing disease. In 1985, Dr. Viera Scheibner developed a baby-breathing monitor with a biomedical engineer in order to study and prevent Sudden Infant Death Syndrome ("SIDS"), which used to be called “crib death” in the United States, and is called “cot death” in Australia, where Scheibner is from. Scheibner put 150 of the Cotwatch units into the field, and began amassing data. It turned out that babies reacted to stress by breathing shallowly during sleep. In extreme cases, their breathing would stop. The Cotwatch alarms sounded with shallow breathing as well as when breathing stopped. Of the first babies monitored, 28 actually stopped breathing, but the Cotwatch alarm allowed them to be resuscitated. Scheibner began documenting the breathing incidents and various stresses, such as illness and tooth cutting. One area of highly significant evidence was the DPT (diphtheria-pertussis-tetanus) vaccine. DPT injections caused infant breathing incidents for about two months after administration.[223] In an American study of SIDS, of 103 children who died of SIDS, more than two-thirds had been vaccinated prior to death, 70% of them within three weeks of death, and 13% died within 24 hours of injection.[224]
Between 1973 and 1983, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 87% of all American polio cases were caused by the vaccine.[225] Polio was also quickly disappearing well before the vaccine was invented and administered, declining by 60% from 1923 to 1953, the year the vaccine was introduced, and polio cases increased in the New England states when the vaccine was introduced.[226] By 1930, American diphtheria deaths had already declined by 90% since 1900. In 1939, Germany instituted mandatory diphtheria vaccination, and immediately there were 150,000 cases of it. Occupied France was forced to submit to diphtheria vaccinations, and had 47,000 cases by 1943. Norway successfully resisted implementing the Nazi diphtheria vaccine, and only had 50 cases.[227]
There are arguably no cases in which vaccination vanquished a disease. In England and Wales, smallpox disappeared only when people refused to be inoculated. In 1881 there were nearly 4,000 smallpox deaths per one million population, and the population was 96% vaccinated. By 1941, only 40% of the population was vaccinated and smallpox deaths declined to one death per million. In heavily vaccinated Japan, 29,000 people died of smallpox in a seven-year period during the late 19th century. At the same time in Australia, mandatory vaccination was terminated when two children died from the vaccine, and there were subsequently only three cases of smallpox in Australia in 15 years.[228] The smallpox vaccine not only failed to prevent the disease, it actually introduced it, and the fatality rates of those vaccinated were higher than those who were not. Today, the smallpox vaccine is officially credited with eliminating smallpox in 1977. As Scheibner demonstrated from the scientific literature, Africans began dying from “monkeypox,” not smallpox.[229] It is partly a semantics game happening, to declare humankind free of smallpox. Yes, there is little smallpox today, but there is also little bubonic plague. No mass bubonic plague vaccine program was ever introduced.[230]
There have been familiar red herrings and sleights of hand presented by proponents of vaccination. One is very similar to the "attack-the-tumor" paradigm, where a tumor that responds to attack is taken as "success," even if the patient dies. What vaccination advocates look to is antibody production as a reaction to a vaccine, as if antibody production means immunity to the real disease. It does not; all it means is that the immune system is reacting to the insult.[231]
One vaccination advocate sleight of hand is how they measure vaccine safety. The way to measure vaccine safety should be to compare vaccine reactions to a harmless placebo, which is the standard in medical testing for drugs and other procedures. For vaccinations, however, they have abandoned the normal standard and introduced a surreal one: they compare new vaccines with the reactions of other vaccines, and if the complication rates are similar, the vaccine is called "safe."[232] That is similar to the recent study to assess bypass effectiveness, in which its mortality effectiveness is compared to another surgical procedure.
Again, my experience in reading Seth primed me to accept what science uncorrupted by commercial considerations has discovered. Seth stated that our vaccines are not a genuine disease, and injecting them into the body confuses it. Our medical systems ultimately create as much disease as they “cure.” Seth stated that epidemic diseases are more psychic in nature than anything else. Every soul leaves earth when it is ready, and mass death events are to some extent a mass protest by the participants to the times they live in. Seth said that with epidemic disease:
“Initially there is psychic contagion: Despair moves faster than a mosquito, or any outward carrier of a given disease. The mental state brings about the activation of a virus that is, in those terms, passive.[233]
If humanity is to survive on Earth much longer, perspectives such as Seth’s need to be heard, to help form the new paradigms. Seth also talked about sanitation and poverty as factors, but they are also outward manifestations of inward realities. Poverty and disease will be eliminated by love, not technology and ideologies, although they will play their role. Mystical material has always stressed the spiritual nature of health and illness. The greatest healer of all time may have been Jesus, and he carried no medicine bag. According to a book I read everyday for years, the Aquarian Gospel, when Jesus was in India, during the “lost years” of his life in the New Testament, Jesus became a pupil of India’s greatest healer, Udraka. Udraka spoke of obeying nature’s laws, and that obeying them would ensure health, and Udraka taught about physical medicine and the laws of harmony, and that there was a remedy in nature for every physical ailment. Udraka, however, taught:
“Of course the will of man is remedy supreme; and by the vigorous exercise of will, man may make tense a cord that is relaxed or may relax one that is too tense, and thus heal himself.
“When man has reached the place where he has faith in God, in nature and himself, he knows the Word of power; his word is balm for every wound, is cure for all the ills of life.
“The healer is the man who can inspire faith. The tongue may speak to human ears, but souls are reached by souls that speak to souls.”[234]
Udraka spoke of herbs, water, earth and other substances as having healing properties in the proper situations, but that “Thought, reinforced by love, is God’s great sovereign balm.” Jesus, “bowed his head in recognition of the wisdom of this master soul, and went his way.” I have participated in and witnessed amazing psychic healings. The phenomenon goes far beyond the “placebo effect.”
Scheibner made the case that today’s vaccinations for childhood diseases actually impair the immune system’s development, and that measles, mumps, and chicken pox are not fatal diseases, but necessary steps that the body takes in developing its immune system. Vaccinating against those childhood diseases leads to chronic illness later in life, as well as causing neurological damage.
Scheibner also wrote at length that the adverse reactions to vaccines support Hahnemann’s homeopathic theories.[235] A century after it was vanquished, homeopathy may yet stage a comeback. In studying homeopathic theory one encounters Hering’s Law, which states that diseases pass from acute to chronic forms, and when they do so, the symptoms move from the surface of the body to the interior, from the lower body to the upper, from less vital organs to more vital ones. That dynamic is evident in vaccine reactions, as mild childhood diseases can become killers.
Beginning with Pasteur, vaccination became a huge money machine. As with fluoridation and the cancer racket, the vaccine makers are not going to let their grip on the money relax, even if their treatments ruin people’s heath and kill them. At this time, only laymen such as Neil Miller or myself, or retired scientists such as Dr. Scheibner are able to publicly deal with the findings that do not support vaccination, because they cannot destroy our careers for speaking out. But with the racket well in hand, it is largely up to average people whether it continues.
Fortunately, not only laymen are writing about Pasteur’s grim legacy and related subjects such as vaccinations. Dr. Sherri Tenpenny's anti-vaccination stand is one of the few courageous ones taken by practicing doctors as of 2014. Dr. Nancy Appleton’s Ph.D. dissertation was titled, “An Alternative to the Germ Theory,” and her The Curse of Louis Pasteur: Why Medicine is not Healing a Diseased World was published in 1999. In the end, Pasteur’s batting average, as far as helping humanity, may be nearly zero. Appleton covered much of the same territory this essay does, and her work was helpful. Appleton concluded her book on a Hygeiac note, reviewing the mental, dietary (as well as other substances we put into our bodies), environmental, and harmonic aspects of our health. Her regimen was based on feminine, gentle, preventive practices. Her dietary advice was nearly all about eating live food.
Appleton wrote about the pleomorphic discoveries of Béchamp and his professional descendants, “Now that it is possible to view these pleomorphic changes through a camera, it is hard to ignore these filtrationists’ views.”
There are many valid avenues of investigation and practice taking place today. The danger is not adopting new paradigms; it is turning them into dogmas and rackets. While there are numerous schools of thought, and I will not invalidate them (except to poke holes through dogma), I believe that the upcoming new medical paradigm will complement new perspectives in politics, science, economics, history, and spirituality. In general, the new medical paradigm will incorporate the following:
-
The principles of Hygeia will take their rightful place at the head of the new paradigm. Prevention, nutrition, sanitation; these will be seen as the key principles of health. Humans, as with all animals, are designed to eat live food, and the human diet should be at least half live food, and cooked food should rarely be more than boiled or steamed. Vegetarianism will probably become the norm, although meat eating will still be allowed (in the world I envision, everything will be allowed except for exceptionally harmful practices), although the less sentient (a descending scale of humans/cetaceans, mammals/birds, fish, insects, and microorganisms), the better for them and all involved. Virtually all animal experiments will cease, especially those that harm or kill the subjects. Instead of studying disease, people will study health, and how to be well.
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Masculine medicine will be largely discarded, as life-taking principles have little place in a life-giving discipline. Some masculine principles and treatments may have their place in certain situations, such as Rife’s treatment. There may be a place for some drugs, sometimes. Maybe some antibiotics, sometimes. Although it is doubtful, maybe the vaccination concept will survive in some muted form. The racket aspect is making them the only way to practice medicine (even compulsory, as in vaccination and fluoridation), and forbidding all else. The masculine (disease coming from outside) victim-oriented germ theory will be replaced with feminine (disease coming from inside) creator-oriented theories. Invasive and violent “medicine,” or “torture as treatment,” (Ralph Hovnanian’s phrase) will rightly be seen for the barbaric insanity that it is, and gentle, effective, and inexpensive treatments will take their place. Surgery, drugs, and most of today’s “medicine,” especially for the degenerative diseases that kill most Americans, will largely be abandoned. Interventional medicine will become less and less invasive, and will eventually lead to predominantly using light (e.g., Ghadiali) and conscious energy, and preventive medicine will be the dominant practice. Homeopathic and other gentle principles will return to prominence.
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The principle of consciousness will enter medicine, as it will enter science. Consciousness will not only be seen as an intellectual phenomenon, but intuition and emotions will be seen as parts of the whole. The soul will be recognized, as will the Creator. Currently unrecognized energy systems, such as the ones that acupuncture and aura reading deal with, will be “discovered” by science and medicine. Love will be seen as the greatest healer, and the greatest power.
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Greed, which has been elevated to a virtue in today’s ideology, will no longer be the primary operating principle, for medicine or any other human endeavor. Love will reign, not fear.
That is the good news, as far as what is possible. New paradigms such as those will not be achieved, however, until humanity has accepted responsibility for what exists today. For Pasteur, Rockefeller, Fishbein, and gang could not have played their games if the human race did not allow them to. We are all sovereign, divine beings, yet the medical racket could not function if people did not give their responsibility away. There truly are no victims, and until people stop giving their responsibility and power to others, this deadly game will continue until humanity exterminates itself. The choice is ours. Many people are pursuing the paradigms outlined in this essay, but they are a tiny fraction of humanity. This essay must now deal with an issue that not many readers will enjoy reading, but it must be understood, if the current paradigm is to be overturned. We always have been, and currently are, responsible for our fate. Nobody needs to blame John D. Rockefeller for today’s situation.
The alternative cancer treatments that I have investigated nearly without exception abandon the attack-the-tumor paradigm. They are examples of feminine-based medicine, and almost without exception, the treatments are harmless. They generally rehabilitate the body's natural defenses so it can deal with the cancer itself.
How on Earth could we have a system where only violent medicine is legal, and gentle, harmless medicine is outlawed? The give life/take life duality is nowhere more evident than in understanding the modern cancer racket.
As I discovered at age 12, nobody wants to hear that they have an unhealthy diet, especially one they are addicted to (in 2006, for the first time in my life, somebody changed their diet due to my influence). The American medical paradigm plays into people's sense of learned helplessness and their desire for immediate self-gratification. In believing their diets to be "adequate," they do not have to engage in any self-discipline to change. When the day comes that they face health problems, the doctor will make it better by giving them a pill or surgically removing the offending organ. Their worldview requires no self-discipline and puts their fate in the hands of a highly paid specialist who can easily remedy the problem. The medical racket relies on people's complacency and addictions. Modern medicine says, "Don't worry, your diet is fine, and if you get heart disease as a function of being alive, well, we have the answer to that, but your death may be 'normal.'" In 1970, my father was told exactly that by his doctor. Today, nearly the same thing is told to cancer patients. Modern medicine says, "Give us your responsibility, and we will make everything OK. You must trust us." One doctor friend encourages his patients to change their health habits to be healthy (mainly diet, exercise, and the obvious “stop smoking”), but they do not want to hear it. They want a pill to make them well.
From the feminine/creator's perspective, cancer does not occur because some part of our bodies "turned traitor" and needs to be killed, but because our organisms are run down, and cancer is one way that our bodies self-destruct. Virtually all alternative cancer treatments operate from the premise of seeing cancer as part of a systemic condition. An integral part of their approach is addressing our lifestyle. The centerpiece of the feminine answer is making changes to give us more life-giving energy. That nearly always means changing our diet from dead food to live food, because that was a big part of our getting cancer (and arterial disease, diabetes, etc.) in the first place.
The medical profession has various ways of categorizing cancer: type I, II, III and IV (often used for breast cancer), and the TNM system, which refers to tumors, lymph nodes, and distant metastases, for example. The methodology has changed over the years, but there is a stage where your doctor says, "You are going to die." It used to be called "terminal" cancer. Today there comes a stage where the patient's likelihood of recovering using conventional methods is so low that the doctor gives up, often refusing to treat the patient, and asks if he/she wants to die at home or the hospital. That is something that the more compassionate doctors do. There are many, many instances of patients with no hope given treatment until they die, while the hospital racks up big money for providing their worse-than-worthless treatments.
Of those patients given no hope by orthodoxy, very few are willing to make the lifestyle (mainly dietary) changes required to pursue the alternative treatment. Here is a Medical Dark Ages quote to make that idea clearer:
"Though it is a great frustration to realize that less than 10% of all cancer patients are willing to make necessary lifestyle changes required by most alternative cancer therapies, all we can really do is inform the patient as thoroughly as possible and then let him or her make the final decision. ...(:) To undergo the Orwellian nightmare of conventional cancer treatments or ..(the) non-toxic alternative, the Utopia choice of Earth as a beautiful place...Pro-Life Freedom of Choice..." - Hellfried Sartori, MD, MPH, MS, U. of Graz Medical School, Austria, President, Life Sciences Universal (1200 Medical Centers Worldwide) Cancer 1984.
A guess has been made that as high as 25% of cancer patients are willing to make those changes, but it is the optimistic extreme.[236] My experience is that fewer than 10% of terminal (doomed by orthodoxy) cancer patients are willing to make the dietary changes in order to have a chance at surviving. If I had not seen it with my own eyes, I would not have believed it. In more than 40 years of seeing only one person take my advice of changing their diets to reverse their health problems, I have had an even lower batting average in trying to introduce people to alternative cancer treatments. I have never pushed it on anybody. I have watched loved ones go to their graves at the hands of modern medicine, because I knew that they could not believe that the doctors were not God, and I silently watched them get butchered by their doctors and die. It was not easy to watch, especially when I knew it was unnecessary.
Since I became aware of 714X in 1990, I spent hundreds of dollars in the 1990s getting literature into the hands of cancer patients who gave me an indication that they were willing to consider alternative cancer treatments. Two of those people had AIDS. That happened in the early 1990s, when having AIDS was a death sentence. By 1990, 714X treatment had reversed AIDS in dozens of patients.
I had Bird’s book on Naessens mailed from Canada to those two men, one of them being an in-law of mine. I spent hours on the phone, telling him the theory behind it, the data behind it, and he had the book in his hands that repeated what I was saying. He could have taken two days out of his life, driven to Canada, visited the lab, and observed and obtained the treatment for himself at very low cost. His doctors had given him the death sentence. What did he have to lose? The only thing he had to lose was a couple days and a few hundred dollars for a chance at life. But…he would also have had to rethink the whole medical game that he had been taught and question authority. He was not willing to pay that price. I would talk to him and he got excited, and when I called a month later, he wondered what I was talking about.
The last time I called him, asking him if he had any more questions about the process, he brushed me off within seconds, saying that he had to get ready for a party that evening. I stopped trying. He died two years later in unspeakable agony. My in-law went through the entire spectrum of horror that AIDS patients went through. He would probably be alive today if he had taken two days out of his life and gone to Quebec.
Another man with AIDS was directed to me at about the same time. I gave a lucid explanation on how 714X works and the dynamics of immune deficiency diseases. I do not even want to talk to anybody unless they are interested, and I spent hours talking to that man. He worked for an airline and could have flown to Quebec for free, on a day off from work. He could have checked it out with nearly no effort. I bought the book and mailed it to him, and then had a long talk with him. He never pursued it, and died in horrific agony a few years later. The man never looked any further into 714X treatment after talking to me, and accepted the certain death verdict of his doctors. Those were AIDS patients.
If AIDS patients were not even willing to consider a cheap and painless alternative to the death sentence that their doctors gave them, what are the chances that mere cancer patients are willing to consider alternatives? I have tried informing about a dozen people over the years to alternative cancer treatments. I never convinced anybody to pursue alternatives. Instead, I watched them lose their hair, have parts of their bodies chopped off, be fried by radiation, go through horrific sufferings, and usually die as the coup de grâce. As I have watched them file into the hospitals and morgues, dying terrifying deaths at the hands of modern medicine, I have come to call it the March of the Lemmings. Their blind and dogmatic faith in modern medicine is what also keeps the alternatives at the margins.
In the late 1990s, I was bombarded with cases of women close to me getting breast and other cancers. It was extremely difficult to sit and listen to story after story of women having "preventive" double mastectomies, "preventive" chemotherapy, and radiation. I have watched women gulp down "medicine" that poisoned their bodies. I had to hear about how the cancer spread and went to their brains. They had surgery, followed by radiation, and died within weeks in appalling agony, and their relatives even admitted that the cancer did not kill them, but the treatment itself. I have looked at photos of bald women, taken while they were having their chemotherapy. None of them could conceive of trying an alternative. In late 2013, I had another one of those events, as the cancer patient was well aware of my relationship to alternatives and even asked me what I would have done. After listening to my reply with some seeming amusement, she chose certain death instead and died six months later.
Nobody like me begins their journey by being political in their perspective. How it nearly always starts is with the naïve belief that we can help the world become a better place, and we think that the world will welcome our efforts. Only after we are crucified, while the very people we were attempting to help are cheering our fate, do we begin to realize why the better mousetraps are not sold. It is because the people selling the old, inferior mousetraps wipe out or buy out anybody who comes along with a better mousetrap, and the masses are so easily manipulated that they fall right in line with the program, against their own interests. Dostoyevsky’s parable of the grand inquisitor described a less fictional dynamic than it might seem.[237]
With cancer patients, I never begin by talking about the corruption in the medical establishment. I try explaining how the new technologies or methods work, waiting to see the person's eyes light up when they understand. What they usually come back with is, "If it really worked, why isn't it available? Has the FDA approved it?" The dynamic is nearly identical when I talk about alternative energy and my adventures. When I discuss free energy possibilities, the most common reply is “If it is so great, why can’t I buy it?” Then I have to begin the long, grim story of why the better mousetraps are nearly always suppressed. I do not go into chapter and verse, but I present a few examples of how the real world works. What happens next is predictable: I am goring their sacred cow. I am telling them that the medical establishment might not know what is best for them, or worse, may be actively killing its patients. I then watch the light go out of their eyes. Sometimes I have seen them consider what I have said, and then say they will ask their oncologist what he thinks. That outcome is predictable, and is like asking a Fortune 500 executive what he thinks about Karl Marx’s work, or reading what priests during the early 1200s were writing about the Cathars. Asking an orthodox oncologist what he/she thinks about alternative cancer treatment is a similar situation.
In a number of states, a doctor can go to prison if he/she merely tells a patient that an alternative treatment might work. In California, if a doctor even tells you that 714X treatment might work, he/she is subject to going to prison for five years.
I finish wasting my breath, and the next time I see those friends, they are on chemotherapy and their hair is falling out. I stay quiet, biting my tongue. It is not easy to watch.
Naessens is living proof that the medical establishment’s grip on the medical racket in Canada is not nearly as firm as it is in the USA. Not only was Naessens acquitted, but also legislation was passed in Canada to allow people to legally use 714X treatment. Under the emergency drug section of Canadian law, article C.08.010 of the Food and Drug Law, a patient can take 714X at their own risk. By 2000, far more than 10,000 people had 714X treatment, and there was not one case of an adverse effect with it.
Why the System Works the Way it Does
We are all responsible for what happens in our world, and it is a clear dynamic in the system of modern medicine. Modern medicine is a holocaust of immense proportions, with its death camps hospitals and oncology clinics, and its death chambers are operating rooms and radiation chambers. It dwarfs what happened in Auschwitz, and is happening every day in America and around the industrialized world. In that light, the comparisons of Fishbein to Hitler that I have read are not so outrageous.
It appears that most people go into American medicine today because they are chasing the big money. If the people who enter the profession are mainly motivated by money, how much will they really care whether the treatments they provide really work, as long as they are well paid to administer them? If their experience begins telling them it does not work, how many are willing to consider questioning what they have been taught, as long as the big money keeps rolling in?
Doctors long received about zero nutritional training in medical school, and what little they were taught was largely agribusiness propaganda (which may be thankfully changing), not true nutritional training. Their indoctrination is all about knives and drugs. For instance, a survey in the 1990s asked new, first-year medical students if they thought that nutritional advice and prevention would be a significant part of their future medical practices, and about 80% of them answered that it would be. Those same students were asked the same question in their last year of medical school, and around 15% thought the same way. Even when people go into Western medicine with the best intentions, their ideals are usually slowly beaten out of them. The same thing has happened to lawyers that I know. They go in starry-eyed, to emerge bitterly cynical years later. I remember when I believed in the Easter Bunny. Without people willingly playing the game, giving away their responsibility, this system could not function.
The alternative treatment Mecca of the world is Mexico. The doctors’ offices are often in California, but the patients go to Mexico for treatment.[238] There are many "skeptical" shills of the medical establishment who have traveled to Mexico and loudly proclaimed that all that is practiced down there is quackery, and they get loud cheers from the orthodox medical crowd. I happen to know better.
As an example, Mr. Professor developed diabetes in the 1960s. It ran in his family, and America’s industrialized diet, environment, and sedentary lifestyle (Americans are history’s most sedentary and obese people) makes it the world's capital for heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and a host of degenerative diseases (with new ones catalogued regularly), in which the body self-destructs.
Mr. Professor's doctor in Ventura County had diabetes, and advertised himself as an "alternative" diabetes practitioner. Diabetics often lose their legs because their disease destroys the blood circulation. The feet, then the legs, are usually the first to go. In about 1990, with the stress of the Ventura events contributing, Mr. Professor’s feet began turning black, as were his calves, with pits forming on his skin. His "alternative" doctor said that Mr. Professor’s legs were exhibiting the first signs of gangrene. He said that the condition was irreversible, that he could do some things (involving drugs) to slow the progress, but Mr. Professor would have his legs amputated one day, perhaps soon.
Meanwhile, Mr. Professor’s wife had developed severe allergies in the 1960s. She was so highly allergic to nearly everything that she became a prisoner in her own home. Driving to the store would expose her to so many environmental toxins that she would be incapacitated for days. After many years of going to one orthodox specialist after another, none of whom were able to help her, although they would prescribe the awesomely expensive "treatments" vended by the pharmaceutical industry, Mrs. Professor eventually began investigating alternative treatments.
During Mrs. Professor’s research, she eventually connected with the alternative medical field, and when the doctor pronounced his sentence on Mr. Professor’s legs, she said, "We are going to Mexico." They spent a few weeks at a Mexican clinic while Mr. Professor was treated. Mr. Professor had chelation therapy, a blood treatment that has also been largely driven from the United States. After a few weeks of treatment, the condition of Mr. Professor’s legs was completely reversed and the gangrenous condition disappeared. There were not even any scars on his legs. It was as if he never had gangrene. He had new legs and feet. According to today’s orthodox medical doctrine, reversing gangrene in that fashion is impossible. Mr. Professor was living proof of the “impossible."
Mr. Professor went back home and visited his "alternative" doctor. As the doctor examined Mr. Professor’s legs, he could not believe his eyes. "These aren’t the legs I saw a few weeks ago. It is a miracle! The state I saw your legs in is impossible to reverse. What in God’s name happened?!" Mr. Professor began his response with, "Well, my wife and I went to Mexico…" That was all the "alternative" doctor needed to hear. "Mexico?!" he shrieked. He ran out of the room, nearly holding his head in his hands. He did not want to hear any more, even when he saw its “impossible” results. He was genuinely afraid to hear any more.
Most Americans have only heard about Steve McQueen dying of cancer after he visited Mexico for laetrile treatment (actually, he was doing OK until he acquiesced to his doctor's request to perform surgery). Numerous medical doctors in America know that alternatives work, and usually far better than what they are administering to their patients. They are terrified to use them, however, knowing what happens to doctors who do, and often they engage in sophisticated games of denial in order to live with themselves.
A "barrier of entry" protects the racket. In the unholy union between the FDA and the drug companies, today it takes hundreds of millions of dollars of "testing" to approve any substance for medical use. As the long arm of the FDA seeks to regulate herbs and vitamins (and who knows what else is on their wish list?) the issue of health is increasingly one that only large corporations can play. The way the FDA paved that road was a reinterpretation of its mission in the 1960s. Originally, they were charged with food and drug safety. Then they appended the word "effective" to their charge, which the drug companies initially fought, but subsequently perverted into a great way of protecting the racket. All those alternative cancer treatments are "safe" because they are harmless, unlike the mainstream treatments, which are anything but "safe." The FDA creatively defined "safe" so it exempted chemotherapy treatments that destroyed the body (as well as surgery and radiation). Then they creatively defined "effective" so that mainstream cancer treatments that drastically shorten patients' life expectancies were surreally labeled "effective." Then they got creative in the other direction to define harmless treatments as "ineffective." Then they used their police powers to wipe them out.
Even though the FDA is an immensely corrupt racketeering organization, with an actual mission almost the opposite of its publicly stated one, most of those doing the dirty work believe in the publicly stated mission. As I discovered in my profession, most people will do plenty of lying to themselves in order to sustain that belief in what they are doing, and do it quite creatively. Orwell called it doublethink.
To hold beliefs contradictory to a person’s experience is difficult, and leads to the condition known as cognitive dissonance. When that contradiction happens, there are three ways to deal with it. The healthy reaction is to change the thinking to account for the experience, which also can lead to knowledge. The other reactions are pathological. The most common pathological reaction is eliminating the “negative cognition” by quickly averting the eyes or otherwise denying the experience. The other reaction is burying the negative cognition with “positive cognitions,” so the negative cognition is simply overwhelmed by the positive cognitions. The American flag-waving after the World Trade Center attacks is a textbook example of trying to overwhelm the negative cognitions (many people hate America, and for good reason) with positive ones (America is the world's greatest and most noble nation). Eventually, if whatever is behind the belief-challenging experiences are not addressed, those events keep occurring and often escalate. If validating the experience is not done, and instead negative cognitions are suppressed and positive ones are emphasized, or even manufactured from whole cloth, at some stage there will be a breakdown.
That dynamic is a cousin to how paradigms shift in science, with the “anomalous” evidence piling up in the corner, often ignored, until somebody comes along and accounts for it with a new paradigm. People rarely are willing to change their beliefs (or replace it with knowledge gained from experience, which is a far superior treasure), especially deeply inculcated ones, as it can call for an exercise of personal integrity that most appear incapable of mustering, particularly when the belief is self-serving.
Even big names in medicine have their careers ruined when they run afoul of the dogma. For instance, one of the world’s most prominent virus researchers, Peter Duesberg, challenged the orthodox perspective of AIDS. He argued that HIV does not cause AIDS. He had a radically different way of looking at AIDS, a perspective that echoes Seth's. This essay is not concerned with whether Duesberg is right or not. Before he began challenging the emerging view in the late 1980s, Duesberg was a leading figure in viral research. He received the Outstanding Investigator Grant from the National Institutes of Health ("NIH"). When he challenged the dogma, his perspective was not carefully considered, to finally be rejected when it proved inaccurate. Instead, all funding to test his hypothesis was cut off, in a familiar pattern. Two-time Nobel laureate Linus Pauling ran afoul of the cancer establishment when he began investigating vitamin C as a cancer treatment.
The cancer racket also devours its own. The denial theme plays well, even when it kills those who work for it. It might be surprising to know how many oncologists will be the first to try an alternative cancer treatment, or prominent chemotherapists refusing to undergo chemotherapy, as they can see how much the results of their labors “helped” their patients.[239] The reaction of Mr. Professor’s “alternative” diabetes doctor was telling (and I have heard of similar reactions over the years). Although there are a disturbing number of orthodox oncologists who will opt for alternative treatments for themselves and their families, most still go the orthodox route, fully swallowing their indoctrination, even when their eyes tell them what a deadly disaster orthodox cancer treatment is. Even then, the machine they are a part of can devour them. For instance, in 1992 the New York Times published the story of Norman Paradis, the director of emergency medicine at Bellevue Hospital in New York, and his father, also an M.D. The elder Paradis, who had been in perfect health his entire life, was diagnosed with advanced pancreatic cancer at age 75. Advanced pancreatic cancer has about a zero survival rate with mainstream treatment (but about 100% recovery has been documented with some alternatives). The father implored his son:
“I have been a surgeon for almost 50 years. In that time, I have seen physicians torture dying patients in vain attempts to prolong life. I have taken care of you most of your life. Now I must ask for your help. Don't let them abuse me. No surgery, no chemotherapy.”
The son did his duty. He told the attending physicians that his father only wanted and needed painkiller and a bed, and no other treatment. All agreed to the plan. Soon after that meeting, however, Norman discovered that his father was subjected to surgical and radiological procedures. The doctors agreed to stop, but the juggernaut kept rolling. Norman’s brother was an attorney, and together they tried getting the hospital to stop treating their father. They kept getting promises, but the hospital kept on with the testing, surgery, and radiation. On one trip to the hospital the brothers found their father in a hallway, alone, after another “test.” The man pleaded with his sons, “They are treating me like an animal. Please get me out of here.” The doctor in charge of the father’s treatment was again contacted, and the assurances came again. As soon as they walked out the door, the treatment continued. The useless but expensive surgeries continued unabated, and every time they tried taking their father out of there, he was involved in a test or procedure, and was unmovable. When they found their father alone in a hallway again, skeletal and nearly dead, they got him out of there and into a hospice, where he died the next day. The hospital racked up $150,000 in Medicare charges, and Norman complained to Medicare about the outright fraud that the hospital engaged in regarding his father. They told him that a $150,000 case was too small for them to pursue.[240] The hospital saw Dr. Paradis as a lucrative piece of meat, while he still lived.
If the head of emergency medicine could not prevent the hell his father went through before he died, what chance does the average patient have? I have known many people in the medical business over the years, including nurses and others who work directly with the dying. Within the hospitals, patients are often seen as gold mines. When people are dying, there reaches a stage when they are obviously on their way out. People who work with the dying know the stages well – the pallor, the breathing, etc. I know ex-nurse types who candidly admit the money-machine aspect of those last days. They have watched people who were obviously on their way out become the subject of intensive procedures, obviously useless if keeping them alive was the goal. The numbers are awesome. Something like 60% of all the medical service dollars that Americans consume in their lifetimes is “consumed” in the last months of life, and almost no medical industry dollars are ever spent on prevention. It is a huge cash register that feeds off of death and misery. Here is one last tale, to make it clear how the system devours its own.
Betsy Lehman was a prominent health columnist for the Boston Globe who three times won the American Cancer Society local chapter’s top award for her journalism. In 1994, she underwent chemotherapy at a prestigious cancer treatment facility, getting the best that orthodox medicine could provide. As she underwent chemotherapy, she began vomiting sheets of tissue. Her entire digestive tract was shredded, but her reaction was the “normal” one for that treatment. Even though her electrocardiogram was showing enormous stresses to her heart, the doctors continued their treatment. She died from the ordeal, and was just another lost patient for the doctors, who did not feel that anything really went wrong. Her death was a typical treatment outcome. Her autopsy showed that the cancer had been eradicated. Her doctors even said that the treatment “worked” in her case, even though she had died. Two months later, a clerk discovered that she had been given four times the recommended dose.[241]
One friend used to be a nurse, and she admitted that during her ten-year career she had a good record; she only killed one patient. She regularly saw patients killed by mistakes and negligence by the hospital staff, but it was always covered up. Hospitals rarely perform autopsies and can easily bury their mistakes. My friend related one instance when a nurse replaced an IV drip solution with something that stopped the patient’s heart in a few beats (it was a potassium solution). The hospital told the patient’s family that it was a heart attack. When that friend got cancer and went to the hospital, her nurse friends would sit with her at times and make sure that the attending nurses and doctors did not screw up. Even then, their negligence nearly killed my friend when they let her IV go dry, and her blood started pumping out the IV tube and filling the IV sack while she was asleep. Anybody with much time in hospital environments has many stories like that to tell, but they will not admit them publicly, not if they want to continue pursuing their careers. My solution is to never darken their door. If I never get in their clutches, they cannot harm me. I have never been a hospital patient (except when I was admitted for muscle spasms when I was ten), and do not plan on ever being one, unless I am in an accident. Orthodox medical doctors have virtually never treated me, even as I am 56 as I write this in 2014.
The accomplices in the medical establishment holocaust are many, from pharmaceutical executives to FDA investigators to oncologists to medical journalists to surgeons to nurses to medical schools. They all participate in the system, and making money is the preoccupation of all of them. The drug industry is America’s most profitable industry, American medical doctors are the highest paid professionals on Earth, and everybody takes their cut. The biggest accomplices of all, however, are the masses who eagerly believe the propaganda that relieves them of personal responsibility for their health. We are all responsible to one degree or another for this state of affairs. Since we are all in this together, we have to get out of it together. The only answer I know is love, and with love comes truth, and that is the only way out of this mess.
My Early Experience with the Medical Racket
These medical racket writings are more than research and theory. I was exposed to another aspect of the racket in California when Dennis Lee was in jail the first time. I began working at a medical lab in Los Angeles the week before Christmas, in December 1988, which was my life’s blackest month. I would finally be in a stable corporate environment, not the cliffhanging that was my daily life with Dennis. I was in for a surprise. The lab was the nation’s largest privately owned medical lab, owned by a black pathologist who was about America’s richest black man, worth about 200 million dollars at the time. He took an interest in me because we were both vegetarians, as even in Los Angeles in the 1980s, vegetarians were rare, especially in the business world.
The week after I began work, federal investigators came to the lab. They were engaging in an unprecedented investigation as part of a politician's crusade. A Pap test for one of his family members had been misread. Our lab had one of the nation’s largest Pap labs that read about three thousand specimens each night.
Pap smear reading is more of an art than a science. In America, a technician called a cytologist, who is specially trained to read Pap slides, reads nearly all Pap smears. I had been out of the business for many years, but in reading up on the current state of the Pap industry in the early 21st century, it had changed only slightly. A pathologist would reread 10% of the slides, checking the cytologist's work, as before. There were five categories of results for reading the Pap smear. A result flagged as class one meant that all was well. A reading of class two meant that the patient should get another Pap smear in six months. A reading of class three was serious, and the suggested response was having a biopsy performed. A reading of class five meant that the patient had cervical cancer. The Pap specimen was read by looking for cellular abnormalities, mainly known as dysplasia. If enough sample cells showed abnormalities, the rating would rise, anywhere from category two to five.
Although Papanicolaou published his results for 15 years before he got anybody's attention, and there are much better ways to test for cancer, the Pap test was an advance over previous methods. It is considered the best early cancer detection technique in existence today. It is not, not compared to Naessens's methods and others, but it is better than any other mainstream technique. It is still an art, however. Five experts can look at the same sample and derive five different diagnoses.
During the 1980s, the federal government sent out class five Pap samples to many labs, to see how well the labs diagnosed them. About 7% of the time, the lab gave the specimen a class one rating. That was for class fives. In the early 21st century, the statistics showed that about 20% of the Paps read are given what is known as a "false negative." That meant that there were abnormalities in the specimen, but the cytologist did not note them. There can be hundreds of thousands of cells in a specimen. A cytologist does not look at every one of thousands of cells in a specimen, because only a few minutes are devoted to looking at each one. A sampling is made. Finding a few strange cells can move the sample from a class one to a class two. Yet, "strange cells" are subject to interpretation. Again, it is an art and subject to a wide range of interpretation and error.
In addition, cytologists’ pay practices were not ideal, which was unfortunately standard throughout the capitalistic world. The cytologists were largely paid by the slide. During an eight-hour shift, a cytologist would typically read about 80 slides. As I updated this essay in 2014, I saw that practice had thankfully changed somewhat. Cytologists are no longer paid by the slide. As of 2014, they were all paid by the hour or on an annual salary. Also automation made the job easier, which pre-selected likely parts of the slide for examination. There were also standards set, with a limit of 100 slides per hour, but that standard was also abused into becoming a quota, so similar problems still exist.
Being paid by the slide encouraged them not to read them as thoroughly as they might otherwise. A number of our cytologists moonlighted for our competitors, as they were in great demand. Cytologists in the medical lab field were like specialists anywhere. They were all trained in the same institutions, and often played the medical lab merry-go-round, going to whichever lab gave them the best deal. We were just one player in a highly competitive environment.
Because our lab was one of the nation's largest Pap labs (the Pap lab only made up a few percent of the company's revenues, however), we were one of the first labs to undergo an unprecedented investigation by the federal government. Federal investigators came in, reread our Pap slides, and gave them their own rating. They read more than a thousand slides. In the Pap business, well more than 90% of the slides were assigned a class one result. It was like that across the nation. The investigators, however, felt that about two hundred slides from their sample should have been assigned a class two. That cannot really be called an error. The difference between a class one and a class two is on the level of quibbling. Those two hundred slides corresponded exactly to the data in the early 20th century of a 20% "false negative" rate. There were a dozen specimens that the federal investigators thought should be class three, that we had called class one or two. For those dozen, it was still a matter of opinion. The entire investigation was an unprecedented act by the federal government. Our lab was one of two in Los Angeles selected for the investigation, the first of its kind in the USA's history.
The investigators produced their results and met with our company’s management. Their investigation had virtually no legal status. It was a fishing expedition. They had nothing at all to try measuring our results against, because they had never done it before. There were no procedures for determining what their findings meant. By the statistics in the industry then and even a decade later, they discovered that we were an "average" lab. Some 21st century data suggests that there can be up to a 50% false negative rate. That does not mean that cervical cancer is going up; it means that the procedures are getting better at detecting "abnormalities." Being the bureaucrats that they were, the federal investigators called their differences "errors." They played investigator, policeman, prosecutor, and judge, in a type of court that had never been convened before. They were critical of our lab. Frankly, some of their criticisms were understandable, as it was run in a mom-and-pop style, with plenty of "homegrown" talent working there, meaning that the chief programmer used to be a specimen courier, as was the personnel director. That is common in privately held companies. There are good things and bad things about that phenomenon, and one downside is that the staff is not as professionally trained as in a more standard corporate environment. That did not apply to the cytologists, however, or the pathologist who ran the lab. Some of their criticism was well founded, but we were singled out from the entire USA for that investigation. How much of the attention we were getting was because we were the largest privately owned lab and not part of a corporate conglomerate as all the other big labs were, and how much was because the owner was black?
The controller challenged their right to even be making the investigation, much less trying to be critical of the company. He was probably right, but telling a bureaucrat that he has no power is not a good idea. Those bureaucrats did the only thing they had power to do, and even then it was unprecedented. They revoked the Pap lab's Medicare reimbursement status. The lab could have fought that decision. It did not hurt the company much, as Medicare is not a part of the Pap lab revenues, since women more than 65 years old are not exactly the big Pap market, even though they make up a disproportionately large percent of women who die from cervical cancer. Because they were bureaucrats, they inflicted their vengeance on our impudent company that dared challenge their authority. They attacked us through the media. The same tactic was used against Dennis in Seattle and other places. Media power can quickly destroy a company.
I had been at the lab for only a month when it was splashed across the papers and evening news. In 2014, enough time has passed where revealing the company's name is not going to harm anybody. It was called Central Diagnostic Laboratories, and here (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) are some of the articles about us in the LA Times. Then the federal bureaucrats did what they could; they sicced the state authorities on us. The state health authorities came in and did their own unprecedented audit, just as the feds did. Their results were virtually identical: about two hundred class-one/class-two disagreements, and about a dozen others. They never found a class five that we missed, which would have been an instance of really making an error. Two unprecedented audits, and they never discovered one harmful diagnostic error.
Next, the California State equivalent of the Surgeon General, who, like so many "health" authorities was obese, made a theatrical announcement to the Los Angeles media. We were a "Pap dungeon" with a 20% error rate. Most other labs had the same rate, but we were made an example. The news stations in Los Angeles made us the leading story. We were splashed across the media for weeks. They were even telling women who had a Pap reading done in the past year to call their doctor to see if our lab did the diagnosis. If so, they should get another reading, because the "Pap dungeon" could not find their cytology backside with both hands. The media was inciting hysteria among the women of Los Angeles for no good reason. It was one of the most unconscionable things that I have ever seen the media do, and that is saying something. An attack like that can put a company out of business, and quickly. In the wake of that onslaught, we closed down the Pap lab. If it had just affected the Pap lab, that would have been one thing, but the entire lab's revenues declined by about 30% in one month. Many companies would have been driven out of business by a falloff in business that sharp, with the entire organization unraveling. The owner was rich, however, and weathered the immediate storm, but he wanted out.
The owner had built the company from nothing to a $100-million-per-year lab business in a generation. He was one of the most successful black entrepreneurs in American history. He treated his loyal employees very well. He sold out to a major corporation a few months later for more than $100 million dollars and retired. The lab’s employees, in the meantime, were frantic. I have seen numerous corporate slaughters, and that one was a classic. The people around me were panicking, people who had worked at the lab for more than 20 years. With all I had been through with Dennis, the mayhem there seemed to possess a pastoral calm, although I sympathized with people who watched their careers disintegrate. After the large corporation took over, the blood flowed fast and furiously. One year after I began there, I was the highest-ranking person in administration to survive the takeover.
The California equivalent of the Surgeon General was a spiritual cousin of Morris Fishbein. Again, legally he did nothing, nor could he do anything. He led an unprecedented state audit on the heels of an unprecedented federal audit, and their findings would have been duplicated at most labs they would have audited. He was merely carving a notch on his belt, as a "tough protector of the public interest," whipping up hysteria among the women of Los Angeles and putting a head on a platter. He blindsided us one day by holding a press conference on our front steps, without warning. He announced that he would investigate other labs in California in light of the dungeon he had discovered, to see if the problem was widespread and if reform was needed. About a month later, he quietly announced that they investigated other labs, and their error rate was only about one to two percent, which was what he expected to find. That was a Big Lie of the Goebbels variety. Undoubtedly the one percent "error rate" for those "investigations" was the same one percent that the audits disclosed at our lab: class three versus class one or two disagreements. The labs they audited had some of the same cytologists working for them who worked for us. Somehow, our error rate was ten times as high. That happened before I really began investigating the medical racket.
Today's racketeering methods are more refined than the crude gangster tactics of Morris Fishbein's day, with the racket well in hand. Outright violence, such as being hit by a car, shot, or poisoned, is relatively rare today. If kangaroo court and prison get the job done, they do not need to get violent, and they know that a trail of bodies gets messy. Fishbein would not have much of a chance of buying out a cure and monopolizing it anymore. The racket is so deeply ingrained that nobody will allow one group to appear on the scene with the magic answer. In today's world, if Fishbein tried pulling the buyout stunt that he tried with Hoxsey and Rife, he might end up dead himself. I have not heard of one buyout rumor since those early days of Hoxsey, Rife, and Ivy. The energy buyouts were only to bury them, not monopolize them.
The medical racket is a rather novel monopoly. It is a monopoly of method. No biomedical company accounts for most of the industry’s revenues, such as Standard Oil and refining in 1880. The auto company oligopoly and other robber baron industries also do not quite compare in structure to the medical racket. In medicine, it is a monopoly of method, whereby the AMA, ACS, FDA, NIH, medical schools, state medical boards, and other organizations work closely with the pharmaceutical and other biomedical companies to form a monopoly of their brand of masculine, lucrative, "medicine." The term “medical-industrial complex” is apt, and it has an immune system to ensure that nothing becomes a substantial threat to the cash flow. People in the know have told me that the secret teams and others who protect the energy racket are not as ruthless as those protecting the medical racket. The Fitzgerald Report uncovered definite conspiratorial activities by the medical establishment in wiping out a dozen alternative cancer treatments. Those activities did not end in the 1950s.
In the 1940s, Dr. Ernst Krebs chemically isolated an optically active isomer of amygdalin, which has been derived from bitter almonds and other plants for thousands of years. He called it laetrile. It was originally proposed as a chemotherapy agent, and it appeared to have a “cyanide” effect on cancer cells. That aspect of laetrile’s theoretical function is masculine and magic bullet-ish. Krebs began using laetrile in cancer treatment in the 1950s. More importantly, laetrile appears to have the properties of a vitamin, and has been called vitamin B-17. In 1970, the McNaughton Foundation filed an Investigational New Drug application with the FDA. Amygdalin has been used for millennia and was grandfathered when the FDA was founded, which meant that the FDA could never regulate it. The experiments performed by the McNaughton Foundation had quite positive results.[242] In the 1970s, laetrile became the most popular alternative cancer treatment in American history, with tens of thousands of Americans using it. The cancer establishment ruthlessly wiped out laetrile in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Krebs was shot at and jailed in California, and laetrile was driven from the USA. Most practitioners did not use laetrile as a magic bullet, but as part of a holistic regimen that included diet and lifestyle changes. Most practitioners thought of laetrile in the vitamin category, and saw cancer as a systemic condition, consistent with other alternative treatments.
Dr. Krebs's adventures highlight another aspect of the racket. Because California is the cutting edge of American society in many ways, there are more people in California willing to pursue alternative treatments, and more doctors are willing to provide them, than any place else in the USA. Consequently, California has the most draconian American anti-alternative-cancer-treatment laws and enforcement. The racket must be most vigilant where the herd is most restless. There is more medical gangster activity happening in California than any place else in America. For that reason among others, California also has America’s most corrupt legal system, as Dennis, Gary Wean, and Rodney Stich discovered at great personal cost.
The medical establishment in California took out Dr. Bruce Halstead. They raided his home and put him through kangaroo court. Halstead was even forbidden to discuss nutrition with his patients. Halstead watched the medical inquisitors kill his patients by denying them treatment, remarking after he watched one die, "I could not think of a single tyrannical country in which this scenario could have taken place."
They also yanked the license of Dr. John Richardson for using laetrile. His colleague, Dr. Douglas Brodie (who died in 2005 at age 80), endured many years of harassment from the California medical establishment before he escaped to Nevada and set up his clinic. I have relatives who were his patients, who traveled great distances to see him.
Dr. James Privitera also enjoyed a kangaroo court trial and prison for using laetrile. He worked on a road gang in prison, just like in the movies. Dr. Emory Thurston, a professor at the University of Southern California, also had his office raided and was jailed for using laetrile.
Here is a Medical Dark Ages quote about how it works in California:
"...testifying for Dr. Privitera...To these 19 cancer victims, the enforcement of (California) Health and Safety Code Sect. 1701.1, the denial of them medical treatment, albeit unorthodox, albeit unapproved by a state agency, must surely take on a Kafka-esque, a nightmare quality. No demonstrated public anger, no compelling interest of the state warrants an Orwellian intrusion into the most private of zones of privacy." - California Supreme Court Chief Justice, Rose Bird, dissenting opinion.
Chief Justice Bird was a holdover from the "liberal" days of Governor Jerry Brown. She was about the highest-ranking woman in the USA's judicial system. During the Reagan-Bush years, Justice Bird came under fire for unpopular "liberal" stands, such as opposing the death penalty. A political campaign was waged and Chief Justice Bird was removed from the bench.
Laetrile also cost Ralph Moss his job. In 1988, John Fink published Third Opinion. A second edition came out in 1992. A third edition was published in 1997, and a fourth edition in 2004. The book is a compendium of the world’s alternative cancer treatment clinics, and lists more than 100 clinics. In Third Opinion were the names Naessens, Privitera, Hoxsey, Gerson, Rife, and others that this essay has not mentioned, in the interest of space. Either the pioneers themselves were still at it (such as Privitera after working on a road gang in prison), or their professional or genetic descendants were, such as Gerson's daughter Charlotte.
Dr. Douglas Brodie was in Third Opinion. As with Naessens and others, Dr. Brodie's main diagnostic tool was a dark-field microscope, with which he could see what was happening before a patient developed clinical cancer.
The goal of virtually all alternative practitioners is preventing cancer in the first place, which means quit smoking, eat healthy, stop drinking, etc. They all encourage their patients to stop the habits that can give them cancer. They never advertise their cure as a "magic bullet." They see their "cure" as part of a holistic treatment designed to bring human bodies back to their naturally healthy state, following the Hygeiac paradigm. When Dr. Brodie saw that his patients were unhealthy by looking at a drop of their blood, his goal was not to be right a year later when they finally manifested tumors, but for them to change their habits before they developed tumors or other disease manifestations such as rheumatoid arthritis.
To use a truly useful alternative cancer treatment, patients often must leave the country. Here is typical situation: the main office is in Southern California; they go to the clinic in California and get examined; they do not treat patients in California, or even recommend treatment; they recommend that they visit their clinic in Mexico; then the patients go to Mexico for treatment. That is how they work around the system. There are still dozens of clinics in California, but they play a dangerous game, walking the legal tightrope.
The alternative doctors and clinics in California cannot legally say that they treat cancer, per se. They will say that they are boosting immune systems. They cannot even utter the words "cancer treatment." If people want to survive, they have to play the game and usually end up going to Mexico. The AMA and other medical gangsters do not let up even then. They beat the propaganda war drums, calling Mexico the very bastion of quackery, sending "investigators" down there to expose all the medieval tortures going on in Mexico, the kind of quackery that impossibly reversed Mr. Professor's gangrene.
That is not always enough to keep California doctors out of trouble. There are tales of Mexican clinics mysteriously burning to the ground at night and stories of doctors mysteriously dying. One got on an elevator alone on the ground floor, and two men got in the elevator with the doctor. When the elevator got to its destination floor, the two men walked out of the elevator and promptly disappeared, and the doctor lay there dead in the elevator, with no sign of foul play. If a thorough autopsy were done, they may have discovered an injection mark in a hard-to-find and unlikely spot. Those people can bring sophisticated methods into play if they need to.
Dr. Julian Whitaker was one of America’s few doctors to stand up to the medical establishment, and is still around in 2014. He has been politically active and high profile. Whitaker has a clinic on the East Coast where he reverses heart disease and diabetes using natural methods and treatments such as chelation, which the medical establishment has been moving to outlaw for a long time. In the March 1995 edition of his Health and Healing newsletter, Whitaker told it like it was. He knew that gangsters run the medical racket, and candidly admitted why he did not treat cancer patients at his clinic:
"I do not, as a rule, treat cancer patients. My reasons for this are very simple. I do not want to live in Mexico, and I do not want to go to jail."[243]
In the July 1994 Health and Healing Supplement, Whitaker wrote of two recent FDA Gestapo actions in America. One snuff job happened here in Washington, in which the FDA, with guns drawn, raided the clinic of Jonathan Wright. They confiscated over $100,000 in equipment, patient records, his medical library, and even his postage stamps as part of their "investigation." That is the kind of "investigation" that I am all-too-familiar with. They never charged Wright with a crime. Wright was waging a successful lawsuit against the FDA for its banning of L-Tryptophan, and the raid was widely perceived as FDA vengeance on somebody who challenged them. Dr. Whitaker wrote:
"More recently, Lawrence Taylor, a California physician who practices chelation, began treating cancer patients with a nontoxic, innovative therapy comprised of three readily available - and legal - pharmaceuticals. He was also writing prescriptions for a cancer drug (714X) approved in Canada, and his patients were obtaining the drug in a perfectly legal way from that country, and had signed detailed informed consent papers for the therapy.
"At the behest of the FDA, Dr. Taylor was raided by local authorities and FDA representatives. His offices and home were searched, and he was put in jail. His charges included "treating cancer patients with illegal drugs," which is a misdemeanor.
"His bail was set at $1 million - surely a record for a misdemeanor charge. Bail was reduced to $100,000 on the condition that he not practice chelation therapy. However, chelation therapy was not mentioned in the affidavit or search warrant. Chelation therapy is used for patients with atherosclerotic diseases - a therapy that I dispense every day in my clinic. It is a perfectly legal and, in my opinion, superior to many surgical therapies used for blocked arteries. This is another example of the arbitrary way in which government authorities squelch innovation and creativity in the medical community.
"For trying to help patients with a promising innovative therapy, Dr. Taylor, like Dr. Wright, will be in the legal fight of his life - against his own government."[244]
In 1988, Third Opinion listed a clinic in Tijuana. The clinic operated in Baton Rouge for seven years before moving to Tijuana and was named St. Jude International. Jimmy Keller was a one-time cancer patient himself, and ran the clinic. He had facial skin cancer, originally went the orthodox route and lost some facial features, and his cancer (metastasized melanoma, was considered 100% fatal). Before he lost his entire face, he discovered Hoxsey's treatment, which saved his face and life. After Hoxsey's clinic was shut down, Keller opened a clinic to use it on cancer. The treatment did not attack the tumor. The patients ate strictly raw fruits and vegetables, and nothing else was permitted. The therapy itself consisted of polypeptide injections, vitamin injections, amino acid IVs, prayer, and the like. That holistic treatment built up the body so that it could deal with the cancer itself. The recommended three-week treatment costed less than $4,000, paltry by American medical standards. The same treatment in an American hospital would cost $20,000 at the very least. Many miracle cures accompanied Keller’s eclectic treatments.
Keller's clinic was not listed in the 1992 edition of Third Opinion. Why? Although Keller moved to Mexico, he did not count on how far the American medical gangsters would go to get him. An account of what happened to Mr. Keller comes from the husband of a woman who was being treated in Keller's clinic when they came for him. In 1991, Keller was abducted at gunpoint by bounty hunters working for the USA's Justice Department, at the behest of the FDA. In a blatant violation of international law and Mexico's sovereignty, the USA's Justice Department paid to have Keller kidnapped from Tijuana. When his kidnappers arrived in California with their prey, Keller was placed in the custody of the Justice Department. His "crime" was wire fraud: making interstate telephone calls to attract people to his clinic in Mexico. Keller was convicted to spend two years in a federal penitentiary. That is why he was not listed in the 1992 edition of Third Opinion. That is justice, American style.
Examining American law, its enforcement, and how the USA respects international law begins treading bizarre territory. Not even Hitler could get away with kidnapping people and bringing them back from foreign soil. In 1937, a German emigrant was kidnapped by Himmler's minions in Switzerland and brought to Germany to face the Third Reich's wrath. The Swiss government protested, citing basic international law, and the Third Reich returned the person to Switzerland.[245] America has about zero respect for international law, and has been the world’s leading nation in undermining humanitarian efforts. In light of the American record of respect for international law and order, kidnapping Jimmy Keller to wipe out another person curing cancer is a minor instance of American international gangsterism.[246] Jimmy was released from prison and put on parole, and mere days before his parole was complete in 1998, they threw him back in prison. He got out in 2001 and suffered a stroke that incapacitated him, and he died in 2009. Such is the fate of the true medical heroes of our time.
Keller’s case was part of a trend of American government kidnappings abroad, in full defiance of international law. In 1990, the Drug Enforcement Agency had Dr. Humberto Alvarez Machain kidnapped from Mexico. Dr. Machain was a Mexican citizen. In an incredible U.S. Supreme Court ruling, the kidnapping was determined legal, by the court led by Chief Justice William Rehnquist.[247] The kidnapping of Keller was also the first salvo in a campaign of FDA raids and snuff jobs that swept the nation during the 1990s. Patients died from interruption of treatment, etc.[248] The Supreme Court’s ethical bankruptcy and outright criminality was displayed on the world stage as it participated in the banana republic, coup d’état “election” of George Bush the Second while the media covered for them.
I have only met one person who ever pursued an alternative cancer treatment. At age 38, in 1992, she developed an ovarian cyst and underwent surgery to remove it. When she awoke from surgery, her doctor gave her the bad news. While operating, he discovered ovarian cancer and gave her a hysterectomy. He said that her only chance of survival was beginning chemotherapy immediately.
My friend is quite a woman. She escaped the Kentucky holler where she was raised, got an education, and became the kind of schoolteacher that every student wants and remembers. The woman is not possessed of a dazzling intellect, something she readily admits, but she did something that not one person in a hundred (thousand?) would have done in her position.
She knew nothing about alternatives, and knew almost nothing about cancer. She vaguely remembered an acquaintance who was seemingly cured of prostate cancer by using an alternative method. Her naïveté worked to her advantage. She asked her doctor if he had ever cured anybody of ovarian cancer. After beating around the bush, he admitted that he had not. He said he had three living patients, but that one would likely die soon. He added that he had only been an oncologist for five years, and did not have a record of accomplishment built up yet. She then asked him then if his experienced colleagues could give her the names of their surviving patients. Her doctor said that he did not know anybody.
She called and talked to the Fred Hutchinson Research Center (one of the most respected cancer clinics in the world, here in Seattle, which has been the center of scandal, because it performed involuntary human experiments), the ACS, the National Cancer Institute, various cancer treatment centers in the United States, and cancer hotlines and support groups. Her ear was red and sore from being on the phone for about two weeks, calling all over America, spending hours on hold.[249] She got copies of her slides and medical reports, obtained as much literature as she could find, and shopped for a doctor. She talked to her acquaintance about his prostate cancer cure. He said his doctor was Glenn Warner, and Dr. Warner cured him using immunotherapy. Orthodox medicine repeatedly informed her that the survival rate for her cancer was about 10%. She was not encouraged.
She went to seven doctors, all orthodox oncologists except Dr. Warner. She asked each doctor for the names and phone numbers of surviving patients. To those orthodox oncologists, giving references to patients was beyond the pale of appropriate doctor-patient relations. Only Dr. Warner consented to give her names of his surviving patients (the others may not have had any, or none that were willing to talk about their experiences under that doctor's care). That was the main reason that she chose Dr. Warner. The other reason was that he treated her the most kindly and was the most personable of the seven doctors.
She and her husband radically changed their diets and became vegans, as part of Warner's treatment, which was primarily vitamins, enzymes, and other non-toxic substances that helped enable her immune system. Today her husband is a stricter vegan than she is and runs marathons, and is in better physical condition than anyone I know.
My friend underwent Dr. Warner's gentle treatment, fully recovered from ovarian cancer, and looks forward to living to a ripe old age. The year that she began treatment with him, the witch-hunt began. The medical authorities swooped down on Dr. Warner, although practically everything that he did was mainstream treatment. As with other doctors who attract the medical inquisition’s attention, Warner’s greatest defenders were his patients, and my friend was active in campaigning to protect him. It did not matter, however, and they revoked his license to practice medicine. Not long afterward, the state revoked the license of about the only other alternative cancer treatment doctor in Washington, Dr. Bolles. With the alternative doctors taken care of, the Seattle option is to go to mainstream oncologists who will never give out the name of a patient who survived their treatment.
Dr. Warner died in 2001 at a ripe old age, and my friend attended his funeral. She considers Dr. Warner about the kindest and most loving person that she ever met, who also possessed integrity of the highest order. At his funeral, the church was packed to the rafters with hundreds of people coming to celebrate his life. During the ceremony, somebody stood up and asked if everybody who was a patient of Dr. Warner would raise their hand, and most did. Then those whose loved ones were treated by Dr. Warner were also asked to raise their hand, and virtually every hand in the church was raised. No mainstream oncologist ever had a funeral like that.
When orthodoxy “investigates” alternatives, their investigations often seem doomed from the start. At Naessens's trial, a booklet was introduced into evidence about orthodox experiments using 714X. The experiments of Gaétan Jasmin were prominent, and he testified about his results. The prosecution held up Jasmin’s work as “proof” that Naessens’s treatment did not work. Jasmin performed cancer research using 714X, used on rats. As this essay makes clear, 714X does not attack the tumor, as typical chemotherapy does, but instead revives the immune system. It also must be administered via the lymphatic system in order to be effective; intra-lymphatic injection is the most effective route of administration. Although originally in contact with Naessens, Jasmin made unilateral decisions, unknown to Naessens, which doomed his research. Since rats are rather small creatures and their lymph nodes would be difficult to locate and inject, Jasmin simply injected the rats under their skin or in their abdomen, which completely defeated the research. If you cut your finger, would drinking hydrogen peroxide disinfect the wound? Would rubbing cough syrup on one’s neck help alleviate a sore throat? Would swallowing a suppository ameliorate hemorrhoids? To be charitable, Jasmin’s work could merely be called uninformed and sloppy. Jasmin testified that 714X had no “antitumoral” effects.[250] In other words, 714X did not attack the tumor. Jasmin may have been so blinded by his paradigm that he had no idea how 714X worked, as well as no understanding of how to properly administer it. Such shoddy and worthless research would be embarrassing enough to admit even being done, but it was used as “proof” that 714X did not work. Was that an intentional sabotage of the research? Just how blind was Jasmin, really?
The dynamics demonstrated in this essay are not unique to the medical racket's cancer arm. It extends to heart disease and the cozy relationship that the drug and biomedical companies have with the FDA, NIH, NCI, AMA, ACS, etc. It extends to the insurance companies, as they control the money. Taken as a whole, of the nearly three trillion dollars spent each year as of 2014 on health care in America, at least 80% is probably a complete and fraudulent waste of money. It might be as high as 90%. The food processing, tobacco, and chemical companies are part of the milieu, as they help create the patients that keep the cash registers singing. There is a comprehensive infrastructure that creates and is nourished by all the death and suffering.
If America had a sane system, the nation's food bill might go up as Americans spend more time and effort to have a truly healthy food supply, without all the processing to make it "better," and the chemicals, hormones, and other poisons that are put into it. Processed food is inferior food. The nation's health bill would consequently drop to almost zero if we went back to live food and freshly cooked food, the food processors would go out of business, and chemicals would stop poisoning the environment and our health. At the footnote that ends this sentence, are presented sources of information to find out more.[251] There are avenues to pursue today to begin making a healthy food supply globally available, with zero environmental impact.
In the 1970s, high fiber foods became fashionable. Many breads were suddenly advertised as containing high fiber, but the breads sold by the big food processors are nearly devoid of nutritional value. Bleached flour is "enriched" by spraying it with vitamins, etc. It turned out that the fiber being put into those breads was sometimes sawdust, as wood is full of cellulose, the ultimate, indigestible "fiber." Granola was a conscious attempt to counter the non-nutritional breakfast cereals that the food processors sold. In my late teens I saw an advertisement for granola "puffs." It was a perfect, Orwellian parody of the cereal companies' attitude, but it was a real product.
There are countless instances of that type of "nutritious" food being sold to Americans, and it is legitimate to wonder if it is a conscious plan to ruin America's health, as fluoridation may be. Author Bill Bryson commented on the American diet with:
“Clearly, some time ago makers and consumers of American junk food passed jointly through some kind of sensibility barrier in the endless quest for new taste sensations. Now they are a little like those desperate junkies who have tried every known drug and are finally reduced to mainlining toilet-bowl cleanser in an effort to get still higher.”[252]
If Bryson’s observation does not make sense to an American, turn on the TV and count the junk food commercials (fast food qualifies) that air in a typical hour of commercial TV. Then take an inventory of the percentage of overweight adults (it was more than 68%, in the USA in 2011) encountered during an average day in public venues. If smoking adults are eliminated from the sample, it exceeds 70%.
In Racketeering in Medicine, James Carter, M.D., wrote about "secret teams" and "strike forces" that wipe out alternative medicine to keep the racket protected. There is evidence for their existence, similar to the secret teams that protect the energy racket. The story of how the FDA wiped out L-tryptophan is an example of how conscious the gangsterism might be. L-tryptophan is an amino acid, a naturally occurring building block of human bodies. The body readily metabolizes L-tryptophan into serotonin, another natural body chemical that makes people feel good. For many years, people across the world had been taking L-tryptophan for a variety of maladies, including insomnia and depression, with no ill effects.
Via the mechanism that Edward Griffin described, the biomedical and pharmaceutical companies essentially own the FDA. It is a classic case of capturing the regulator, transforming a public watchdog into an industrial attack dog. Consequently, the FDA’s general philosophy is protecting and promoting drugs and other lucrative products sold by its rich patrons, and wiping out natural remedies and other inexpensive health solutions. Under the FDA's ministrations, natural remedies, health supplements, and their practitioners are wiped out and replaced by lucrative artificial "medicines." The FDA has been trying to regulate vitamins and herbs for many years. Every time they try it, there is public outcry, senators and congressional representatives feel the heat from their constituents, and the FDA is beaten back. They are not thwarted for long, however, as health supplements can be a lucrative business, once they become classified as drugs and can only be made by drug companies, sold only with a doctor's prescription. That might seem extreme, but it accurately describes what the FDA has been doing for generations. The case of L-tryptophan was a standard case of FDA racketeering. It was a clear case of politics overriding medicine (1, 2). Finally, in 2008, the FDA made L-tryptophan legal again as an over-the-counter supplement again.
Because millions of people had taken L-tryptophan and had no ill effects while receiving substantial health benefits, the drug companies avidly desired to take over that market. In 1989, a Japanese company began manufacturing L-Tryptophan, using a new process and a genetically engineered organism to produce it. That is exactly the kind of biomedical "invention" that may kill off humanity someday, but since the companies doing those Frankensteinian experiments own the FDA, the FDA cannot seem to see any danger in new processes that use genetically engineered organisms.
The new process used by the Japanese company introduced a toxin to the L-tryptophan that they produced, and it caused a new disorder known as Eosinophilia-Myalgia Syndrome. In 1989, more than two thousand Americans contracted the disease, and 20 died. The case of L-tryptophan and the Japanese company is a cautionary tale of humankind's cleverness and its dangers. Using artificial methods of producing natural substances is perilous. What did the FDA do when the L-tryptophan produced by genetically engineered organisms killed 20 people? The FDA banned L-tryptophan! That is similar to banning milk because one company created genetically engineered cows that produced milk that caused disease.
At first, the disease was traced to L-Tryptophan, but that was obviously not the end of the trail. The FDA saw its chance to enact its long-held wish to ban L-tryptophan. The investigation could have been easily taken further and shown that all the L-tryptophan that killed people was traced to the same Japanese company. The FDA pounced on all the naturally produced L-tryptophan and ignored the Japanese company. They continued letting the Japanese company's L-tryptophan get sold in making intravenous feeding solutions and infant formulas. While the FDA was "heroically" banning naturally produced L-tryptophan, it continued to allow the sales of the artificially produced L-tryptophan.
When one child subsequently died, the FDA finally (and quietly) banned the Japanese company's L-tryptophan.[253] Instead of taking a hard look at genetically engineered products, the FDA banned a naturally occurring one, which was consequently a gold mine for the drug companies. With that natural antidepressant banned, the path was cleared for Prozac and the avalanche of antidepressant drugs that dominated the 1990s. The drug company cash registers are ringing mightily, thanks to the FDA. A decade later, L-tryptophan was still banned, but Americans could get it with a doctor's prescription…for six times what it used to cost, only obtainable through drug companies. How blind are they, or did I just see them wink at me?
The FDA continues its campaign against vitamins and herbs. The goal is making them only obtainable through a drug company with a doctor's prescription, making it several times more expensive than it is today, all to "protect" the public. The logical conclusion of that mentality is making food and water prescription drugs, maybe even air. Then the biomedical companies will have it all locked up. In addition, with patenting all of their genetically engineered "products," the dark path that trajectory is charting will eventually have the biomedical companies owning life itself. The logical conclusion to that mentality will be outlawing natural and "inferior" procreation, only allowing genetically engineered, test-tube-hatched babies. Science fiction stories have been written about those futuristic events. They are not so fictional. Some people alive today may reincarnate in a world like that.
The organic food industry made the mistake of asking the USDA to regulate it, since there were many unscrupulous "organic" farmers who sold food that was not really organic, as organic. In 1998, there was a major consumer effort to stop an agribusiness takeover of the industry, and the battle is not finished in 2014, as agribusiness continually tries to erode the standards.
Similar to “vegetarian,” “organic” is a misnomer, as the movement is more of an effort to counter the agribusiness mentality, with its artificial fertilizers, genetically engineered life, irradiated food, and so on, and get back to natural methods. Agribusiness companies control the USDA, just as the drug companies control the FDA. In response to the organic industry’s request, the USDA drafted some standards, all right. Among the practices the USDA was going to certify as "organic" were: genetically engineered products, crops fertilized with highly toxic sewage sludge, and irradiated food. It was the agribusiness definition of organic. An internal USDA memo that Mother Jones obtained in 1998 showed that the USDA was influenced by the biotech companies, which was why its original standard classified genetically engineered food as organic.
The organic industry is also far more holistic than what is put on the crops. The humane treatment of farm animals is also part of the program, which the USDA has ignored.
The USDA's originally proposed standard would have eliminated organic food as it is known today. Because about 250,000 Americans protested, including me, the USDA backed down on round one, but the issue is far from resolved. Part of the law the USDA was trying to push through was outlawing any higher standards. If they altered the organic standard so that genetically engineered produce can be called "organic," it would become illegal to create a "higher" organic standard. It was as if Lucifer himself was writing the law. Is the USDA really that blind, or do they know exactly what they are doing?
The way that carcinogens are identified, and how foods are called healthy or not, is also part of the insanity. What the geniuses who designed this system do is take broccoli, for instance, and feed it to a million white rats. Then they look for statistical differences between those rats and a control population. That practice is evil simply because nearly 100 million animals die each year in those experiments. The insane part is its reductionistic aspect. The revelations of Béchamp and others are completely lost on today's scientists. The dynamics of life and disease are profoundly misunderstood. Live food gives life. Dead food gives death. It is nearly that simple, but do not tell that to those scientists in their lab coats with their millions of caged animals. Can they really be that blind?
Around 1995, I heard something on the radio that made me laugh. There was a major announcement: scientists had discovered that eating fresh fruits and vegetables prevented cancer, but they had not yet isolated the exact chemical responsible for it. If they do (they will not, because it is not one chemical), they will market the fruit and vegetable pill, provided by our friendly drug companies. Can they really be that blind?
Human beings, as with all animals, are not designed to digest the concentrated carbohydrates that refined sugar provides. Human bodies react as if a bomb is dropped into it. All those concentrated carbohydrates entering the stomach are like a five-alarm fire sounding in the pancreas. Insulin is what the human body produces to digest carbohydrates.
Fruits have sugars in them, but human bodies are specially designed to digest fruit, as humanity’s great ape cousins demonstrate. The human pancreas reacts to fruit as it is supposed to, releasing insulin gradually to assimilate the fruit's sugars. When refined sugar hits the human digestive system, it is another matter entirely. Cane sugar is sucrose, and fruit sugars are usually fructose and glucose. Glucose runs the human body. The unusual sucrose is a minor issue when compared to its highly concentrated nature. No animal (except bears and skunks raiding beehives, although they raid the hives to eat the bee larvae more than the honey) is subject to the concentrated carbohydrates of refined sugar. The pancreas is subject to a demand that it has never encountered in nature. It immediately produces great amounts of insulin to deal with the threat of that sugar hitting the body. In a sugar-eating society, after years of that abuse, the pancreas gives up the ghost, which leads to diabetes. Also, insulin helps digest fat, and the high fat content in the "civilized" diet contributes to diabetes in the same way that sugar does, and the same exists for relationship with insulin, protein, and the high protein content of the American diet. In fact, as with cancer, rheumatoid arthritis and many other degenerative diseases, diabetes is an immune system problem. With diabetes, the immune system attacks the pancreas.
Similar to the situation with cancer and arterial disease, the other two big degenerative disease killers in America, one will not find the medical establishment stating that a disease where people can no longer digest sugar, has anything to do with ingesting refined sugar! There are many financial interests that use sugar in their food processing, and preventing disease takes money from the medical establishment’s coffers. When I first wrote this in 2001, I just looked through my Mayo Clinic CD-ROM, and not one mention was made of that relationship. I do not know of a relationship more obvious, but their "research" had not quite made the connection yet. A five-year-old child can see that relationship, but billions of dollars in medical research, with highly trained "experts" cannot seem to see it. Just as "medicine" could not find any relationship between smoking and disease, or diet and heart disease, or diet and cancer, or it believed that hardening of the arteries was "normal," or that developing cancer is a normal aging process, it still cannot detect a relationship between refined sugar and diabetes. Can they really be that blind? This is another area where sanity is beginning to prevail, and in 2014, as with artery disease, orthodox medicine is now admitting the diet and lifestyle can prevent diabetes.
Refined sugar creates more tooth decay than any other “food.” The ADA (American Dental Association) received plenty of money from sugar companies, just as the AMA received great sums from the tobacco companies. Refined sugar is another aspect of the "civilized" diet whereby people become obese.
Agribusiness and food processing companies sponsor nutritional training in American schools and universities. Food processors funded Harvard's Department of Nutrition, and "coincidentally" the department founder and head, Frederick Stare, could never seem to doubt the salubrious nutritional properties of processed food. With Steven Milloy's known role as a tobacco company front man, it is difficult to attribute his stance to blindness, especially when his “sound science” challenged the EPA’s findings on the damage that second-hand smoke produces. McDonalds opens outlets in schools and hospitals. It is well known that its nutritional value is abysmally low, as even admitted by McDonalds. Can they all really be that blind?
Morris Fishbein actively promoted cigarettes for a generation. Even in Fishbein’s time, cigarettes were well known to be highly carcinogenic. The same man also helped wipe out numerous cancer cures and tried buying some out so that he could monopolize them. Is it really so ridiculous to ponder that he was intentionally promoting the single greatest cause of cancer while trying to cash in on providing its treatment? Was he really that blind? If Fishbein and his buddies looked no further than their greed and lust for power, did nobody else see the dynamics that are so clear to others and myself? Are all the medical gangsters really that blind, or do some know exactly what they are doing?
Artificial chemicals proliferate at an exponential rate while human biology slowly evolves. Modern "medicine's" answer to degenerative disease is introducing more artificial chemicals into the body, drugs that violently manipulate the body's biochemistry, while medicine is confident that new artificial practices can overcome the artificial practices that created the disease in the first place. One definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different outcome each time. Can they really be that blind?
One critical aspect of that system I have never seen addressed is the barrage of artificial chemicals that are introduced to human biology these days. It is guaranteed that each new chemical confuses the human body. The body may think it is a vital element and will try incorporating it, but it obviously fails to properly do so.[254] The body may correctly eliminate the chemical from the body, but it may not. All those chemicals create problems for the human body, even the most "benign" of them. What is the effect of bombardment of all those chemicals at once, although none of them are ingested in large amounts? To my knowledge, science has not pursued that line of investigation. The exponential proliferation of chemicals, particularly in the past half of the 20th century, has subjected Westerners to a barrage of chemicals never before encountered. It is wishful thinking to believe that humanity has evolved to effectively adapt. The cumulative effect of those artificial chemicals and dead food may be helping to weary the body to the point of degeneration.
Because the process of becoming "modern" has taken many thousands of years, people psychologically adapt to their artifices even if their bodies do not. Consequently, few in America seem to think it remarkable that more than two-thirds of Americans die of degenerative diseases such as arterial disease, cancer, and organ failures that are almost all from the toxins that people ingest, lung disease from smoking, organ failure of the kidney, liver, pancreas, and brain.[255] They think it is "normal." Ancient practices such as fasting are viewed by Americans with consternation. Much of the ancient wisdom has been lost in the rush to "modernize." Less than 20% of the chimpanzee’s (our closest biological cousin) dietary calories come from fat. The “low fat” heart disease reversal diet of Dean Ornish has fat comprise about 10% of calories at most. In the late 20th century, research results were announced in which American women were put on a "low fat" diet to see if it helped prevent cancer, and it apparently did not. What was the fat percentage in that "low fat" diet? 25%. It may have been “low” as compared to the average American diet’s 43% fat content, but how can it really be considered low? Is that blindness? Is it intentional?
This essay attempts to make clear that there is a medical-industrial complex, and its main concerns are amassing and maintaining wealth and power. The public’s health is far from its primary concern. The same is true for energy, my erstwhile profession of public accounting, and every profession and industry I have looked into. More than two centuries ago, Adam Smith observed that every professional and trade organization is a conspiracy against the public’s interest, with its members attending to their mutual self-interest, not the public’s. Nothing has changed since his time. Dennis Lee, the most astute observer of the human condition I ever met, once told me that our society’s institutions are corrupt because people are corrupt.
Just how free are we in the USA, supposedly the world’s freest nation? Mexican citizens enjoy far more freedom in choosing their cancer treatment than American citizens do. Benjamin Rush’s prophetic warning has come to pass. Regarding energy, the same situation exists. People have little viable alternative to what the big energy companies sell, and wiping out the competition is also how today’s energy racket was created and is maintained. Similarly, Americans theoretically have freedom of information access. America’s media is anything but free. If people do not have easy access to important information, how can they make intelligent decisions? There are many instances of censorship in the West’s free press that far surpasses anything that the Soviet Union or communist China accomplished. The Western press’s awe-inspiring censorship of Mark Twain's and George Orwell's work are two examples.
How can Americans choose their cancer treatment when they are not even aware of the alternatives, and if they are ever mentioned, it is usually in the context of its practitioners being jailed and demonized? How free is the USA, really?
Not all drugs and surgical procedures are useless. They are based on male principles, and violent medicine has little place in the healing arts. During these times, with the attitudes that prevail, there may be some place for some surgical procedures and some drugs. I do not advocate making any drug or surgical procedure illegal. If people want to use them, fine, but do not force people to, and wipe out options for gentle medicine to "protect" them. Killing patients with violent and expensive medicine, while the gentle, inexpensive, and arguably far more effective medicines are outlawed, is a racket. Outlawing books that tell me how to heal myself (such as Stale Food Versus Fresh Food) is racketeering activity. What the medical gangsters did to Rife, Hoxsey, Gerson, Ivy, Durovic, Privitera, Krebs, Koch, Crane, Warner, Keller, Ghadiali, Beard, Taylor, Wright, Brodie, Naessens, Burzynski, Halstead, Richardson, Thurston, Pixley, Bolles and many others are great crimes, nearly invariably done in the name of “protecting the public.” Morris Fishbein's efforts to help tobacco companies produce highly dubious "research" in order to make health claims for their cigarettes was surreal. Fishbein covering up disease outbreaks, leading to more people getting the disease, was not the practice of “medicine.”
Are we really that free? Regarding big issues of life and death, Americans appear to be one of the world’s least free people, although their cage is seemingly invisible, and when they notice those bars once in a while, they think that they are there to keep the bad guys out, not to pen themselves in. Also, with the USA's global cultural, economic, and military hegemony, this American-based medical paradigm is taking over the entire planet’s medical system, as the medical racket goes global.
My Personal Encounters with 714X
After years of talking to whomever I thought might listen, I finally got somebody convinced to at least try Naessens's 714X treatment. The person did not have cancer, but psoriasis (it seems that 714X works for that too), and an awesome case of it. The person would not do the intra-lymphatic injections, which is the most effective route of administration, but opted for a far less effective inhaler method, and he only did it for a week, then stopped treatment and never started it again. That was no victory at all, but I obtained the 714X for him, and that was an adventure.
In Julian Whitaker's February 1995 supplement of Health and Healing I was excited to see that somebody was importing 714X into the USA. I kept that in mind, and when I finally convinced somebody to try 714X in 1996, I called the number in Whitaker's newsletter.
The 714X importing company was in nearby New York (I lived in New Jersey at the time), but when I called, they were out of business. Charles Pixley ran the company, but I talked to his son-in-law. I heard the long, sad story from him. Pixley had been playing the FDA’s game, and contacted them to begin the process for legally importing 714X into the USA, so that people could legally use it under the informed consent concept (which means that the patient signs an affidavit stating that they are aware of the "unapproved" nature of their treatment, but are exercising their free will to take it…an unassailable stance, but one that the American medical establishment has assailed many times). Pixley initiated an Institutional Review Board ("IRB") in 1992, which is the standard first step in making the substance legal to use in the USA. Here is part of what The Winds website published on what happened next.
"Pixley states that from the inception of the IRB in April of 1992, they were visited regularly by the FDA who "requested and received copies of all available research, toxicology studies, spectrographic chemical evaluations, rat studies, patient histories, books, tapes, and samples of the 714X." Even though they cooperated fully with the FDA, in 1995 their office was raided. Computers, books, tapes, business records and patients' personal medical records were seized.
"After several attempts, the U.S. Attorney succeeded in having a Grand Jury indict him and his corporation as co-conspirators for "conspiring to defraud the United States by importation of an unapproved new drug," a felony under Title 18 U.S.C. 321. Pixley later determined through the Freedom of Information Act that this FDA regulation had never been published in the Federal Register and, therefore, was not promulgated according to the law. This did not seem to matter. Pixley was ordered into Federal Court in April of 1996."
When I talked to Pixley's son-in-law, they had already convicted Pixley, and they had already spent hundreds of thousands of dollars defending themselves, and were trying to raise money for an appeal. The Winds told what happened next.
"As a defense Pixley planned to expose the evident policy of the FDA to suppress life-saving therapies, both to protect the profits of the medical/pharmaceutical cartels and to carry out a larger agenda of population reduction. The prosecution "filed a 'motion in limine', which was designed to prevent me from saying anything or putting up any defense whatsoever," Pixley told The WINDS. "Even though they didn't know what my defense was going to be, they had an inkling that I was going to start accusing the government of genocide" before the jury. "Their goal was to put me away no matter what." Pixley was found guilty and sentenced to nineteen years in prison. His sentence was later reduced on appeal to a year and a month, partly, he feels, because he was allowed to present arguments detailing the government's suppression of non-orthodox therapies.
"During his interview with The WINDS, Pixley did not dwell on his trial and imprisonment or even his financial devastation and lifetime status of "convicted felon." He speaks and writes mainly of the medical monopoly and its protectors at the FDA, as well as the thousands of cancer patients that are denied alternatives. "In my view," he writes, "the ones who are being punished are the American people who are denied access to life-saving therapies."
That did not happen in the 1940s with Fishbein at the helm, but in the "enlightened" 1990s. At the same time that the skids were being greased for Mr. Pixley, another Eastern European who had come to the land of the free was fighting for his life in Texas. The same week that I was talking to Pixley's son-in-law, I was contacting Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski's clinic in Texas, offering them support in his battle against the FDA. Burzynski was a medical/scientific prodigy from Poland who came to the land of the free in 1970. He eventually developed an ingenious cancer treatment that dealt with peptides and amino acids. His treatment "reprograms" cancer cells. It plays with their "heads," as 714X does. Burzynski's treatment, as with nearly all the alternative cancer treatments, is non-toxic and harmless. Patients can take it all day long with no ill effects. It does not attack the body. In Moss's The Cancer Industry, he devoted his largest chapter to the attacks Burzynski has been weathering from the FDA, ACS, and other cancer establishment members since the early 1980s. The FDA had been after Burzynski for many years.
The 1996-1997 trial was an attempt to put Burzynski behind bars for the rest of his life. In 1996, Burzynski's clinic in Texas had about 100 medical doctors and scientists working at it. Dr. Burzynski's fiercest supporters are the patients who have been rescued from certain death by his treatment. The videotaped testimony by his patients in Washington D.C. was heartbreaking and heartwarming.
They do not usually wipe out somebody like Burzynski for a crime of moral turpitude, but by some obscure regulation that nobody has ever heard of. In a neat Orwellian twist, Burzynski's trial had nothing to do with whether his treatment worked or not. The judge even ruled before the trial that whether or not his antineoplaston treatment worked was irrelevant to the issue being tried, and he would not allow patient testimony. The trial was about such highly important issues such as whether his treatment had crossed state lines. The common people made noise with his trial, similar to what happened at Naessens's trail. The media across the USA openly wondered if Burzynski was the target of an FDA vendetta. Burzynski was acquitted, while the nation witnessed the types of witch-hunting activities that the FDA engages in. It was encouraging.
Pixley's son-in-law said that they could not help me, and had me contact Naessens directly. He was opening an academy to train people to evaluate somatidian dynamics. When I ordered the 714X, they sent it to me and enclosed a bill. I have never gotten anything by mail order like that, and internationally to boot. They sent it for free, and trusted me to send them a check later.
Naessens, as with Rife, worked hard on making a microscope that can see the little bodies for a reasonable price. He sold a retrofit kit for a few thousand dollars. From scratch, for less than $10,000 and some training, anybody could be a junior Naessens and analyze somatidian dynamics (at their academy, they wanted somebody with some technical skills). It was a pittance compared to electron microscopes and other high-tech medical technology. Naessens referred me to somebody in the USA who could help me get a scope together and be in business. The man was helpful. The new biology was accessible. It is not arcane, only for the initiated. Naessens's organization sold an excellent video that not only showed the somatid forms, but showed people how to inject themselves with 714X.
By 2000, far more than 10,000 people had taken 714X, mainly in Canada. Many lives were saved. Unfortunately, when it gets that popular, many people are probably using it as a magic bullet and not changing their diets, etc., which Naessens also recommended. As with all the other alternatives, its long-term effectiveness is directly proportional to how well the patients adopt a healthy lifestyle once the 714X kick-starts their immune system. Naessens never sold 714X as a cure for cancer, per se. He said 714X was designed to help the immune system recover, not to cure disease.
To my delight, when I got the 714X, enclosed was a copy of Ralph Moss's 1995 2nd edition of his The Cancer Chronicles. He devoted an issue of his newsletter to Naessens. In Moss's words:
"Hardly a week goes by that I am not approached by advocates of some new cancer treatment. There are 102 methods in my book Cancer Therapy, and future editions will hold more. One can go batty sorting out the claims.
"This spring I decided I need to go deeper into a few such methods. Just then, a longtime friend suffered a relapse of her breast cancer. IAT therapy, which for years had held her cancer at bay, was no longer working. But when she added 714X, her breast tumor vanished. It made me sit up and take notice."
Moss made three trips to Canada, investigating Naessens, and that issue of The Cancer Chronicles was Moss's first double issue. Moss is the most conservative and informed voice in alternative cancer therapy, but he was nearly giddy when describing Naessens's discoveries, writing, "If he is right (and I think he is) then he is a really great genius."
In the April 30, 2001 edition of People magazine, the cover story was Suzanne Somers and her use of an alternative cancer therapy. At least alternatives are getting some coverage, although the People headline was “Is She Risking Her Life?” While giving rather sympathetic treatment of Somers’s choice, People ran a side box interview of a woman, Barrie Casileth of Sloan-Kettering, under the title “Let the Patient Beware.” The Casileth interview concluded with a Rush-style, masculine medicine admonition, “Surgery and radiation and/or chemotherapy become crucial. Cancer is a terrible foe and it requires the most powerful treatment that we have available.” In 2014, Somers is alive and well.
In the 1960s, the AMA organized an attack on chiropractors, and was convicted of a conspiracy against them in 1987. Just as it lost its legal battle, a spiritual descendant of Fishbein began his career. Nearly identical to Fishbein’s “war on quacks,” Dr. Stephen Barrett founded a “quackbuster” effort. In substance and sometimes tenor, his work is not far removed from Steve Milloy’s. Anybody can read the “quackbuster” work for themselves, and see how the “quackbusters” ply their trade. Similar to Fishbein, Barrett is not a practicing physician, does not even have a medical license, and lost a libel suit over being called a quack himself.
Fortunately, more than a TV personality such as Somers is making headlines over the cancer issue. In the June 4, 2001 issue of The New Yorker, Jerome Groopman’s article, titled “The Thirty Years’ War - Have we been fighting cancer the wrong way?” was the featured article, running under the headline “No Cure for Cancer.” Groopman’s article discusses the complete failure of the “war on cancer.” While not straying from orthodox treatments and its paradigm, Groopman admitted the obvious: the orthodox war on cancer is a failure. Also, note the masculine warfare imagery.
In January 2002, there was noise being made in Boston, as local cancer patients got 714X from Canada and cured their cancer. Naessens finally made the news in the USA. Whether this time has a happy ending for American cancer patients is largely up to the patients themselves.
As this site was being finished, Ralph Moss published his impressions after attending the 2002 Meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology ("ASCO").[256] It is a huge event, with 26,000 attendees. Moss noted that at least there was “some” rational discussion about alternative therapies, not the hysterical “anti-heretic” diatribes directed toward it during the 2000 ASCO meeting. However, Moss was disappointed to see that virtually none of those who spoke about alternative therapies had any experience with them, and none of them had much good to say about them. Many people in the audience had vast experience with alternative therapies, very positive experience, but none of them were invited to speak. Moss said the meeting left him with a “hollow feeling.” In the oncology business, all alternative therapies are called “Complementary and Alternative Medicine,” or CAM. CAM is commonly used as an epithet. I get a sinking feeling that if the derision declines and the orthodox herd begins discovering the merits of therapies that do not attack the tumor, the observations of Moss and James will again be borne out: the orthodox establishment’s members will claim that they discovered it themselves.
As is obvious, the state of American medicine is horrifying. Millions of people are being sacrificed in the name of greed. Most of what is spent in Western medicine produces mainly suffering and death. As Robert Mendelsohn brilliantly laid it out in his Confessions of a Medical Heretic, the God of Western Medicine is death. If a person wants to meet their maker, and soon, then they should submit to modern medicine’s ministrations. Barry Lynes, who also wrote the definitive book on Rife, in his heartfelt and thoughtful monograph Helping the Cancer Victim, summed up the obstacles in bringing sanity to the world of cancer treatment. He wrote:
"The crafting of new cancer laws will require great care and wisdom. The selection of unbiased, competent witnesses will be a difficult task, especially when orthodox medicine begins pushing its political weight around to stop the process, to silence the voices of change, to water down any proposed legislation, to continue…the killing.
"The outcries against the proposed new cancer laws will be loud, emotional and designed to distract attention from the real questions and legitimate health concerns. The behind-the-scenes actions by the Medical Monopolists will be cold, calculating and brutal. Too much money is at stake to imagine that this conflict will be anything but bloody, with good and evil having a monumental showdown before it is over."[257]
Amen Barry, Amen.
[1] See that quote in Cremo and Thompson’s Forbidden Archeology, p. 23.
[2] See Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, p. 151.
[3] See Werner Heisenberg's Encounters with Einstein, p. 121. Einstein made his remark regarding Heisenberg’s quantum theories that introduced randomness to the mechanics of atoms.
[4] See their mystical writings in Ken Wilber’s Quantum Questions.
[5] See Ken Wilber’s Quantum Questions, pp. 101-104.
[6] See Mark Woodhouse’s Paradigm Wars, pp. 41-44.
[7] See Riane Eisler’s The Chalice and the Blade.
[8] For some reading relating to that idea, see Merlin Stone's When God was a Woman, Riane Eisler's The Chalice and the Blade, and for a more conservative investigation see Margaret Ehrenberg's Women in Prehistory. For a broad summary of that issue, see Michael Parenti's History as Mystery, chapters two and three. The issue of matriarchal societies in prehistory is a heated issue, with the firestorm generally centering around the pioneering work of Marija Gimbutas. While there may be no “solid” evidence for there ever being a true matriarchal society, there is good evidence that many ancient societies and religions had women holding a high place, and women’s status degenerated along with a society’s decline. When men and warriors held unchallenged supremacy, the societies were violent and declining, with women living in some form of bondage. When women had higher status, violence was less prevalent and society was healthier. That does not hold true for only prehistoric investigations. Elizabeth I was the first woman English sovereign, and the Elizabethan Era was the most culturally auspicious era that England ever had, with its literature hitting a high point that is still unsurpassed. Nobody is arguing that women are the source of violence in the ancient world or today’s. The furor surrounding the work of Gimbutas and others like her is obviously at least partly an issue of gender bias, with the West’s patriarchal academic system fighting back against a challenge to its power and privilege. The issue has been extremely politicized, but when the dust settles, if it does in my lifetime, I think it will be acknowledged that societies have been much healthier when women had higher status, and when their status was reduced, that society was in decline and often on its way to extinction.
[9] See Joseph Campbell's Occidental Mythology, pp. 3-92.
[10] See Joseph Campbell's Occidental Mythology, pp. 3-92. See Merlin Stone's When God was a Woman, pp. 198-241.
[11] See a brief discussion of that fact in Jeanne Achterberg’s Woman as Healer, pp. 18-19. See, for instance, the nearly complete absence of women in Roy Porter’s The Greatest Benefit to Mankind and Sherwin Nuland’s Doctors; The Biography of Medicine. Even though they are recent works, they typify how infrequently women appear in the standard histories of medicine.
[12] See Jeanne Achterberg’s Woman as Healer, pp. 106-109. For more on women healers, see Elizabeth Brooke’s Women Healers.
[13] See Jeanne Achterberg’s Woman as Healer, p. 90. See Helen Ellerbe's The Dark Side of Christian History, pp. 134-135.
[14] For instance, read about the war-based paradigm that has guided modern male doctors in Sherwin Nuland’s Doctors; The Biography of Medicine, pp. 429-430. Nuland wrote that he and his fellow male doctors thought of themselves as “Spitfire” pilots, and the patient’s body was merely the theater of their glorious battles against disease. That indoctrination was partly so the doctors would not become “emotionally involved” with their patients. Nuland rightfully called such boyish attitudes what they were: anti-feminine. They were also anti-human.
[15] See Jeanne Achterberg's Woman as Healer, p. 136. See Roy Porter’s The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, pp. 364.
[16] See Mary Daly’s Gyn/Ecology, The Metaethics of Radical Feminism.
[17] See John Robbins's Reclaiming Our Health, pp. 51-52.
[18] See John Robbins's Reclaiming Our Health, pp. 15-57. See Robert Mendelsohn's Confessions of a Medical Heretic.
[19] Examples of arguably worse-than-worthless prevention can be found in vaccination, mammograms (may cause as much cancer as they find, and are useless anyway, with orthodox therapies, if increased life expectancy means that it “works”) and other high-tech and/or drug-related treatments.
[20] See Julian Whitaker's Health and Healing, November 1994, p.1.
[21] See Randolph Lee Clark and Russell Comley, eds. The Book of Health, Third Edition, 1973. On page 212: “Blood pressure reaches 120 at 17 years of age…With age, the pressure gradually rises until at 60 years it is about 140/87.” The rule of thumb used to be as bad as “100 plus your age.” See Isadore Rosenfeld's “Don’t be Blasé about Your Blood Pressure.” Parade Magazine, September 13, 1998.
[22] See Dean Ornish's Dr. Dean Ornish’ Program for Reversing Heart Disease, 1990.
[23] In 2006, for the first time ever, I influenced somebody to change his diet, to save his life. It was an old friend who recently had a cancerous kidney removed and had further, deeply invasive, surgery. He adopted a holistic regimen, with a live food diet, meditation and other holistic, preventive practices, but kept having orthodox treatment and died of the treatment in 2007. In May 2007, a friend of mine was looking into adding more live food to his diet, partly due to my influence. I told him that, as with my vegetarian ways and free energy, I really did not keep up much on the “state-of-the art” of such practices. I explored those health habits many years ago, they worked for me, and I did not do much further research into those areas. It is not difficult to understand that humans, as with all animals, are designed to eat live food and that dead food is less nutritious in ways, although cooked food provides more calories than raw for non-fruit foods. As my friend was asking about books on live foods, I thought I might buy him a copy of Paul Bragg’s The Miracle of Fasting. As I searched for the book on the Internet, I came upon evidence that Bragg lied about his age and other aspects of his life’s story. He was 81 when he died, not 95. Not only that, but his accounts of his ancestry, being cured of tuberculosis as a teenager and wrestling in the Olympics were image-making fabrications. His “daughter” is really his former daughter-in-law.
Bragg spent many years in Southern California, and Jack La Lanne lived a short drive from the university that I graduated from. I have friends and family members who have met both men, as well as Patricia Bragg, who is carrying on Paul’s work as his “daughter.” Patricia once spent the evening at a friend’s house and regaled them with Bragg tales. According to La Lanne, Paul Bragg believed that diet was the most important part of the health regimen (including fasting), with exercise less important. La Lanne switched the priorities, with exercise as his regimen’s most important factor. It is hard to argue with somebody who was one of earth’s most fit nonagenarians and really lived to be 96.
In light of the recently adduced evidence, Bragg appears to have been a charlatan, but Jack La Lanne really was living evidence of the benefits of exercise and proper nutrition. I believe the enlightening essence of Jack’s philosophy is in an interview that I read many years ago. Jack was asked how old he thought he would live to be. Jack responded that he did not know how old he would live to be, and did not much care. He said that what was important to him was, “while I am alive, I am living.”
Bragg recommended water fasts, and from age 17 to 24 I performed water fasts. However, my longest water fast lasted only six days, and it was the weakest I ever felt. I read other works on holistic health practices in those days, including Paavo Airola’s Are You Confused? Airola recommended juice fasting, as did others. At age 24, I tried a juice fast. I did a weeklong fast, and it was easy. A few days later, I did a 32-day juice fast, and it also was easy. My longest juice fast was for 45 days, in Boston, but was done partly because it was cheaper than eating. I have encountered people who greatly exceeded my personal fasting record. One friend did a 90-day juice fast, and said he looked like a concentration camp inmate when he finished it (he may have taken it a little too far). Another friend cured his bladder cancer with a 70-day juice fast. Steve Meyerowitz cured his allergies and asthma, after orthodox medicine had failed him, through diet and fasting. His longest fast was 100 days, which is the longest that I have heard of (see his Juice Fasting and Detoxification, which is a better reference book than Bragg’s works). My fasting habits have waxed and waned over the years. I have often fasted while backpacking, and my life’s best backpacking experience was while alone, fasting, and so deep into the trailless wilderness that if I had died out there, it would have been many years before my remains would have been discovered. I went about 15 years without fasting longer than a week, but in 2004 rediscovered longer fasts (20 to 40 days), and planned to keep longer fasts as a permanent part of my health regimen, and I have continued the practice as of 2014. The effects of long fasts can be profound. I discovered for myself that while water fasting may be the “best” fast, it is often incompatible with modern life’s demands. I could not perform my job duties if I water fasted. While juice fasting, I can perform at levels above what I am normally capable of – working 15-hour days and still feeling energetic when I go home. I also need one-to-two hours less sleep each night, along with increased mental alertness and a spiritual high that is unique to fasting. I am on day three of a fast as I write this update in 2014. Fasting can be a truly miraculous process, but juice fasting works best for the vast majority of people. I have skepticism about Bragg’s water fasting advice and other parts of his regimen.
[24] Ralph's book is a gold mine of information, but is not in an easily readable format. It takes effort to decipher his cancer treatment tables. The book is one of a kind, and I have spent many hours riveted to its pages. It was very influential to me. Ralph died in 2013, just as I planned to visit him. He was a friend and a kind and eccentric soul who performed epic labors on humanity's behalf.
[25] The studies were the Veteran’s Administration study published in 1977, the Coronary Artery Surgery Study, published in 1990, and the report of the European Coronary Surgery Study Group, published in 1983. See Charles T. McGee’s Heart Frauds, pp. 24-28.
[26] See Charles T. McGee’s Heart Frauds, pp. 12-13, 23. His book was published in 2001, and in 2014 as I updated this essay, I looked for newer studies than those three cited ones, and could not find any. In 2012, there was a study that compared heart bypass to angioplasty (balloon and stent) surgery, but that is comparing two surgeries, not surgery and no surgery.
[27] See Charles T. McGee’s Heart Frauds, p. 28.
[28] See Charles T. McGee’s Heart Frauds, p. 33.
[29] See Charles T. McGee’s Heart Frauds, pp. 161-165.
[30] See Steven Milloy's “Relax...You Might Not Be Doomed” Public Risk, February 1997.
[31] There is no inherent contradiction between evolution and the notion of a creator, or the role that consciousness can play in it. The battle between creationists and evolutionists is partly a false dichotomy. The Creator’s handiwork can also evolve. Evolution does not necessarily happen haphazardly, but can happen in accordance with consciousness, which is ultimately in charge of the process. The material world is likely manifestation of consciousness, and there is interplay between consciousness and its material manifestation, in my opinion. That is a large and controversial subject, and not one for this essay.
[32] See Roy Porter’s The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, p. 17. See Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel, pp. 104-113, provides a more thorough survey of the issue, but still gives the main impetus to the decline in available hunter-gatherer foods. See discussion in Clive Ponting’s A Green History of the World, pp. 37-67.
[33] See Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel, pp. 166-168.
[34] See Roy Porter’s The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, p. 45.
[35] See Andrew Goudie's The Human Impact on the Natural Environment, 5th Edition, pp. 161-173.
[36] See Elisabeth Brooke's Women Healers, pp. 28-39.
[37] See Angus Armitage’s Copernicus, The Founder of Modern Astronomy, p. 61.
[38] See Hal Hellman’s Great Feuds in Medicine, pp. 1-18. See Sherwin Nuland’s Doctors, The Biography of Medicine, pp. 120-144.
[39] See Edward Burman’s The Inquisition, The Hammer of Heresy, p. 160.
[40] See Joseph Schwartz’s The Creative Moment.
[41] See Elisabeth Brooke's Women Healers, pp. 80-93. See also Jeanne Achterberg’s Woman as Healer, pp. 99-112
[42] See Sherwin Nuland’s Doctors, The Biography of Medicine, p. 204.
[43] I have seen that quote in many places for many years. Nobody that I know of, however, had ever cited the direct quote from a publication. I hunted for it. I obtained three volumes of Rush’s writings: The Autobiography of Benjamin Rush, edited by George Corner; Letters of Benjamin Rush, Volume 1, edited by L.H., Butterfield, and The Selected Writings of Benjamin Rush, edited by Dagobert D. Runes. I did not find the exact quote, but found one close enough that I am sure his famous quote can be found somewhere in his vast correspondence. Rush was a prolific writer and a remarkable man. He was an early campaigner against slavery, capital punishment, alcohol, and tobacco. Although his medical practice and philosophy would have disastrous effects on American medicine, his overall philosophy had much to recommend it.
In a lecture that he gave regarding medicine's progress, he enumerated the causes that retarded it. Some of his points are relevant even today. His 19th point: “The attempts which have been made to establish regular modes of practice in medicine, upon experience without reasoning, and upon reasoning without experience.” His 21st point: “The interference of governments in prohibiting the use of certain remedies, and enforcing the use of others by law. The effect of this mistaken policy has been as hurtful to medicine, as a similar practice with respect to opinions, has been to the Christian religion.” Here is the relevant quote, the 22nd point: “Conferring exclusive privileges upon bodies of physicians, and forbidding men, of equal talents and knowledge, under severe penalties, from practicing medicine within certain districts of cities and countries. Such institutions, however sanctioned by ancient charters and names, are the bastiles [prisons - ed.] of our science.” His 23rd point was: “The refusal in universities to tolerate any opinions, in the private or public exercises of candidates for degrees in medicine, which are not taught nor believed by their professors, thus restraining a spirit of inquiry in that period of life which is most distinguished for ardor and invention in our science. It was from a view of the prevalence of this conduct, that Dr. Adam Smith, has called universities the ‘dull repositories of exploded opinions.’ I am happy in being able to exempt the University of Pennsylvania, from this charge. Candidates for degrees are here not only permitted to controvert the opinions of their teachers, but to publish their own, providing they discover learning and ingenuity in defending them.” However, not all of Rush’s observations are necessarily something to subscribe to, in my opinion. His 12th point was: “An undue reliance upon the powers of nature in curing diseases. I have elsewhere endeavored to expose this superstition in medicine, and shall in another place, mention some additional facts to show its extensive mischief in our science.” Those points were taken from The Selected Writings of Benjamin Rush, edited by Dagobert D. Runes, pp. 227-234.
Here is another observation that was less than salutary: “Mercury was prescribed empirically for many years in the cures of several diseases, in which it often did great mischief; but since it has been discovered to act as a general stimulant and evacuant, such a ratio has been established between it, and the state of diseases, as to render it a safe and nearly an universal medicine.” From The Selected Writings of Benjamin Rush, edited by Dagobert D. Runes, p. 249. In fairness to Rush, his general medical philosophy was to warn of blind adherence to orthodoxy. Just as Christians betrayed the spirit of the Christ, just as capitalists and communists betrayed the spirits of Smith and Marx, so did orthodox American medicine betray the spirit of Benjamin Rush. Rush was certain that medical science was in its infancy, and he would be the first today to react in horror to the universal practice of administering mercury to patients, which he initiated in the USA, as well as his heroic bloodletting. The enemy of science, reason, spirituality, and enlightenment is dogma; it always has been and always will be, because its root is fear. Those who enforce adherence to dogma are those who profit by it.
[44] See Harris Coulter’s Divided Legacy, p. 63.
[45] See Harris Coulter’s Divided Legacy, p. 55.
[46] See a discussion of that issue in David Stannard’s American Holocaust, pp. 103-105.
[47] See Friedrich Engels’s The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Penguin Classics version, introduction by Michèle Barrett.
[48] See Harris Coulter’s Divided Legacy, p. 92.
[49] A brief overview of homeopathic principles is in Harris L. Coulter’s Homeopathic Science and Modern Medicine.
[50] Much of my material dealing with orthodox medicine and the challenge posed by homeopathy and other modalities comes from Harris Coulter’s Divided Legacy.
[51] See Harris Coulter’s Divided Legacy, p. 98.
[52] See Harris Coulter’s Divided Legacy, p. 215.
[53] See Jeanne Achterberg's Woman as Healer, p. 137.
[54] See Harris Coulter’s Divided Legacy, pp. 466-472.
[55] See Harris Coulter’s Divided Legacy, p. 468.
[56] See Harris Coulter’s Divided Legacy, p. 58.
[57] See Roy Porter’s The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, pp. 294-295.
[58] See Hal Hellman’s Great Feuds in Medicine, p. 34.
[59] See photographs of Semmelweis’s rapid decline in Nuland’s Doctors, The Biography of Medicine, p. 259.
[60] See Hal Hellman’s Great Feuds in Medicine.
[61] Written by K. Codell Carter, a Semmelweis specialist, writing in 1983. See Hal Hellman’s Great Feuds in Medicine, p. 47.
[62] See Hal Hellman’s Great Feuds in Medicine, p. 49-50.
[63] Morton did, and Wells botched a public demonstration of his discovery in 1845, leading to his demise.
[64] See Sherwin Nuland’s Doctors, The Biography of Medicine, pp. 263-303. See a brief account in Roy Porter’s The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, pp. 366-368.
[65] See Sherwin Nuland’s Doctors, The Biography of Medicine, pp. 343-385. See a brief account in Roy Porter’s The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, pp. 370-374.
[66] See Matthew Josephson’s The Robber Barons.
[67] See Harris Coulter’s Divided Legacy, pp. 402-410.
[68] See John Farley’s The Spontaneous Generation Controversy, p. 9.
[69] See John Farley’s The Spontaneous Generation Controversy, p. 45.
[70] In the history profession, there is a concept known as present-mindedness, also called presentism. It is writing history from the perspective of the present, which is impossible to completely avoid. The greatest sin of presentism is writing about the past in a way that justifies the present, rather than helping to explain it. Presentism is practiced in the heroification of Junípero Serra, Christopher Columbus and George Washington because their efforts led to the American civilization that exists today. They were all fanatical and bloody conquerors, obsessed with wealth, fame, and building empires, largely at the expense of Native Americans. Their legacies are not much to cheer about, and research into their feats can create revulsion toward those “heroes.” American high-school history books are prominent examples of the presentism phenomenon, portraying the USA's history as one grand tale of state as hero. The many dark chapters of American history are swept under the carpet or polished up and sold as glory stories, turning night into day and focusing on the few “winners,” not the multitudes of losers. The point of the story as taught to American high school students is glorifying the state and its heroes, not gaining a useful understanding of the American nation’s past. The past is only seen in terms of how it contributed to today, that best of all possible outcomes. Events and trends that led to other possible outcomes are treated as “errors” or otherwise disparaged.
American history as taught in high school is far from the only place where presentism is practiced. The mainstream histories of capitalism portray it as mankind’s natural state. The history of capitalism’s triumph is seen as merely the removal of obstacles to mankind’s highest state. Competing ideologies such as communism (never really practiced in the Soviet Union or China, as Adam Smith’s ideology was never really practiced either) or socialism are rejected as systems that do not honor human nature. In reality, the salient feature of “human nature” that today’s capitalism honors is greed, which is one of the seven deadly sins. Capitalistic ideologists have transformed greed into a virtue, turning reality upside down. In history circles, the practice of presentism is called “Whig history.” In that light, both Christian theology and many interpretations of the theory of evolution can be seen as Whiggish interpretations. Men are the apple of God’s eye in Genesis, and the human race is the current flower of evolution. “Whig history” has always been a pejorative appellation, and can be seen in many history texts describing the histories written by others. At times, it has seemed that in describing certain histories as Whiggish, the author was unconsciously telling the reader that his/her work is not Whiggish.
[71] See John Farley’s The Spontaneous Generation Controversy, p. 2.
[72] See Patrice Debré’s Pasteur, p. 28.
[73] See Morrison and Boyd’s Organic Chemistry, Third Edition, p. 120.
[74] See Patrice Debré’s Pasteur, p. 55.
[75] René Vallery-Radot's The Life of Pasteur, p. 58. A slightly different version is in Debré’s Pasteur, p. 57, where Pasteur said he would lead her to “prosperity.”
[76] See Patrice Debré’s Pasteur, p. 57.
[77] See Gerald Geison's The Private Science of Louis Pasteur, p. 86.
[78] See Gerald Geison's The Private Science of Louis Pasteur, p. 88.
[79] See Patrice Debré’s Pasteur, p. 59.
[80] See Christine Russell’s “Louis Pasteur and Questions of Fraud” in the Townsend Letter for Doctors, October 1993, p. 960.
[81] See John Farley’s The Spontaneous Generation Controversy, p. 65.
[82] See Ethel Douglas Hume’s Béchamp or Pasteur, A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology,” p, 37. It is cited from Pasteur’s work.
[83] See Patrice Debré’s Pasteur, pp. 116-123.
[84] See John Farley’s The Spontaneous Generation Controversy, pp. 92-120.
[85] See Patrice Debré’s Pasteur, p. 169.
[86] See Patrice Debré’s Pasteur, p. 128.
[87] See Gerald Geison's The Private Science of Louis Pasteur, p. 151.
[88] See Gerald Geison's The Private Science of Louis Pasteur, p. 174.
[89] See Gerald Geison's The Private Science of Louis Pasteur, p. 204.
[90] See Patrice Debré's Louis Pasteur, p. 434.
[91] See Patrice Debré's Louis Pasteur, p. 434.
[92] See Patrice Debré's Louis Pasteur, p. 435.
[93] See Hal Hellman's Great Feuds in Medicine, p. 89.
[94] See Microbiology, An Introduction, Second Edition, by Tortora, Funke and Case, published in 1986. See The Microbial World, Fifth Edition, by Stanier, Ingraham, Wheelis and Painter, published in 1986. See Microbiology, Fifth Edition, by Pelczar, Chan and Krieg, published in 1986. See Bernard Dixon’s Power Unseen: How Microbes Rule the World, published in 1994.
[95] See Rene Dubos's Pasteur and Modern Science, p. 71.
[96] See Gerald Geison's The Private Science of Louis Pasteur, p. 275.
[97] Béchamp, Les Microzymas, pp. 50-51, quoted in E. Douglas Hume, Béchamp or Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology, p. 47.
[98] See Antoine Béchamp's The Blood and its Third Anatomical Element, pp. 12-13.
[99] See Antoine Béchamp's The Blood and its Third Anatomical Element, p. 14.
[100] See Antoine Béchamp's The Blood and its Third Anatomical Element, p. 48.
[101] William James's Lecture 6, in “Pragmatism’s Conception of Truth,” from, Pragmatism, A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking.
[102] Louis Pasteur, (his paper had a long French name I will not burden the reader with here), quoted in E. Douglas Hume, Béchamp or Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology, p. 37.
[103] E. Douglas Hume's Béchamp or Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology, p. 40.
[104] E. Douglas Hume's Béchamp or Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology, p. 60.
[105] E. Douglas Hume's Béchamp or Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology, p. 61.
[106] E. Douglas Hume's Béchamp or Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology, p. 65.
[107] E. Douglas Hume's Béchamp or Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology, p. 77.
[108] E. Douglas Hume's Béchamp or Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology, p. 78.
[109] See Béchamp, The Blood and its Third Anatomical Element, p. 47.
[110] E. Douglas Hume's Béchamp or Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology, p. 191.
[111] E. Douglas Hume's Béchamp or Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology, pp. 68-75.
[112] E. Douglas Hume's Béchamp or Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology, pp. 92-93.
[113] E. Douglas Hume's Béchamp or Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology, pp. 100-117.
[114] E. Douglas Hume's Béchamp or Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology, p. 113.
[115] E. Douglas Hume's Béchamp or Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology, pp. 113-114.
[116] E. Douglas Hume's Béchamp or Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology, pp. 110-112.
[117] E. Douglas Hume's Béchamp or Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology, pp. 144-164.
[118] See Antoine Béchamp's The Blood and its Third Anatomical Element, p. 45.
[119] See Antoine Béchamp's The Blood and its Third Anatomical Element, p. 47.
[120] See data and analysis on Pasteur's work on anthrax and rabies in E. Douglas Hume's Béchamp or Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology, pp. 203-237.
[121] See Nancy Appleton's The Curse of Louis Pasteur, pp. 112-114. See John Robbins's Reclaiming Our Health, pp. 330-334. See Viera Scheibner’s Vaccination, p. 257.
[122] E. Douglas Hume's Béchamp or Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology, pp. 189-221 and 238-287.
[123] E. Douglas Hume's Béchamp or Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology, p. 183.
[124] Although Pasteur's defenders claimed that he was sensitive to the animals he was experimenting on, an incident in which Pasteur kicked the bars of a caged dog that Pasteur pronounced would die the next day, taunting it, gives another view. See E. Douglas Hume's Béchamp or Pasteur, p. 283.
[125] See Barry Lynes's The Cancer Cure that Worked!, pp. 6, 94-95.
[126] See Jane Roberts's The Nature of Personal Reality, session 631, December 18, 1972, pp. 125-128.
[127] See Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, p. 149.
[128] See one of those photos in James Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me, p. 167.
[129] See Paul Kennedy's The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, pp. 200-202.
[130] See Peter Collier and David Horowitz's The Rockefellers. See Matthew Josephson's The Robber Barons. See Gary Allen's The Rockefeller File.
[131] See John Robbins’s Reclaiming Our Health, pp. 95-99.
[132] See Harris Coulter’s Divided Legacy, pp. 298-305.
[133] See Dana Ullman's The Homeopathic Revolution, p. 363, note 110.
[134] See Stauber and Rampton’s Toxic Sludge is Good for You! and Stuart Ewen’s PR!
[135] See Harris Coulter’s Divided Legacy, p. 419.
[136] See Dana Ullman's The Homeopathic Revolution, pp. 256-257.
[137] See copies of Simmons's ads in Eustace Mullins's Murder by Injection, p. 6, 17.
[138] See Eustace Mullins's Murder by Injection, p. 18.
[139] See Eustace Mullins's Murder by Injection, pp. 19-21.
[140] See Eustace Mullins's Murder by Injection, p. 26.
[141] See Kenny Ausubel’s When Healing Becomes a Crime, pp. 88-89.
[142] See Ralph Moss’s The Cancer Industry, pp. 46-47. See Mullins, Murder by Injection, pp. 60-62.
[143] See Ralph Moss’s The Cancer Industry, pp. 48-49.
[144] See Peter Collier and David Horowitz's The Rockefellers, pp. 225-226.
[145] See Ralph Moss’s The Cancer Industry, pp. 390-394.
[146] See O.A. Bushnell's The Gifts of Civilization, p. 99.
[147] See The Autobiography of Benjamin Rush, edited by George Corner, 1948, p. 354.
[148] See Ralph Moss’s Questioning Chemotherapy, pp. 15-34.
[149] I discovered Ralph Hovnanian’s Medical Dark Ages in 1990 by reading Barry Lynes’s The Healing of Cancer (pp. 162-163). Ralph’s book was my wakeup call on how the medical racket works. In 1992-1993, I spent days keying in those quotes that are in the Medical Dark Ages section of this site. Probably my favorite quote from Medical Dark Ages was the quote by Ley. As I discovered, however, the quote as presented in Medical Dark Ages is inaccurate. Ralph was a friend of mine, and he conscientiously called me in the spring of 2002 to tell me that his quote of Ley was inaccurate, and that if he ever published another edition of Medical Dark Ages, he would correct it. He said that Lynes was the first person to tell him that he quoted Ley in error. It was an honest mistake by Ralph. This situation is an example of the hazards of relying on secondary scholarship, which I have had to deal with continually. I have tried to mitigate those potential errors, and have sought primary sources whenever I can, and I have often gone to great lengths to try finding the primary evidence, such as that famous quote by Benjamin Rush. Ralph originally combined the quote by Ley with the quote by Griffin, making them both appear to be Ley’s. The combined quote made for a great impact. Correctly attributing them definitely takes some of the wind out of its sails. The Rush and Ley quotes were the two from Medical Dark Ages that related the most directly to this essay, and I eventually hunted for the original source for the Rush quote, as I have seen it quoted across the Internet dozens of times, but nobody ever gave its source, accurately.
I had been queried about the Ley quote before, by people who found it hard to believe, and running down the original Ley quote was on my list of things to do, before I really took my site “public,” and then Ralph called me. In May 2002, I descended into the University of Washington’s microfilm archives and located that San Francisco Chronicle article. The Ley quote that this footnote ties to is accurate, and the Griffin quote is also accurate, but Griffin is obviously not an FDA official, although he does credibly demonstrate why his sentiment is probably correct. The Ley interview was given to Richard Lyons of the New York Times, given in Ley’s home, soon after he was sacked as the FDA commissioner, after three years of service. Ley was a Harvard professor before being tapped to head the FDA. The article is sobering. Ley said that he was under “constant, tremendous, sometimes unmerciful pressure” from the drug industry. Ley said, “Some days I spent as many as six hours fending off representatives of the drug industry.” Ley commented that the FDA staff was a poor one to effectively protect the American consumer, with its ranks being full of “retreads” and others who were not motivated to do their jobs effectively, and that “there has been total lack of topside support from the current administration.” Ley admitted that his former boss, the HEW head, was a Republican Party fundraiser, but it was not his boss’s fault, as the Nixon administration was “a business-oriented administration.” Every administration since Carter’s has been even more so. Ley said that the drug company lobbyists, combined with the politicians who worked on behalf of their patrons, could bring “tremendous pressure” to bear on him and his staff, to try preventing FDA restrictions on their drugs. The interview concluded with Ley stating that the entire issue was about money, “pure and simple.” The situation has become much worse since Ley’s day, as he was the last commissioner who tried standing up to them.
[150] Many states have those criminal laws on the books. For example, California Health and Safety Code Sect. 1701.1, makes it a crime punishable by five years in prison to administer or prescribe an unapproved cancer treatment. California is the worst state of all in persecuting alternative cancer treatments. The only treatments approved are surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. My wife's doctor endured 15 years of persecution in California for curing cancer using an "unapproved" treatment that worked.
[151] See Ralph Hovnanian’s Medical Dark Ages, p. 19. See Ellen Brown’s Forbidden Medicine, p. 165.
[152] See Ralph Moss's The Cancer Industry, pp. 21-42.
[153] See Ralph Moss's The Cancer Industry, pp. 32-33.
[154] She challenges the notion of a cancer epidemic in Toxic Terror. 536,900 Americans died of cancer in 1994, for 23.5% of all deaths, up from 17.2% in 1970, and up from 4% in 1909.
[155] See Ralph Moss's Questioning Chemotherapy, pp. 56, 57, 97, 98, 103, 110, 113, 117, etc. to page 150.
[156] See John Robbins's Reclaiming Our Health, p. 96.
[157] See Ralph Moss's Questioning Chemotherapy, p. 35.
[158] See Stuart Troy's "The AMA's Charge on the Light Brigade," Nexus, December 1997-January 1998, pp. 35-40, 75-76.
[159] See Barry Lynes's The Cancer Cure that Worked!, pp. 34-36.
[160] See Barry Lynes's The Cancer Cure that Worked!, pp. 17-26 and 41-52.
[161] See Barry Lynes's The Cancer Cure that Worked!, p. 50.
[162] See Barry Lynes's The Cancer Cure that Worked!, pp. 60-61.
[163] See Barry Lynes's The Cancer Cure that Worked!, p. 80.
[164] See Barry Lynes's The Cancer Cure that Worked!, p. 88.
[165] See Barry Lynes's The Cancer Cure that Worked!, p. 29.
[166] See Lynes, The Cancer Cure that Worked!, p. 29.
[167] See Barry Lynes's The Cancer Cure that Worked!, p. 96.
[168] See Barry Lynes's The Cancer Cure that Worked!, p. 97.
[169] See Barry Lynes's The Cancer Cure that Worked!, p. 98.
[170] See Barry Lynes's The Cancer Cure that Worked!, pp. 98-99.
[171] See Barry Lynes's The Cancer Cure that Worked!, p. 99.
[172] See Eustace Mullins's Murder by Injection, p. 31.
[173] See Eustace Mullins's Murder by Injection, pp. 31-33.
[174] See John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton's Toxic Sludge is Good for You!, pp. 1, 25-32.
[175] See Robert Proctor’s The Nazi War on Cancer, pp. 126-128.
[176] See Robert Proctor’s The Nazi War on Cancer, p. 184.
[177] See Martin Lee and Norman Solomon's Unreliable Sources, p. 331.
[178] See Howard Wolinksy and Tom Brune's The Serpent and the Staff, pp. 144-147 and Robbins, Reclaiming Our Health, pp. 204-207.
[179] See Howard Wolinksy and Tom Brune's The Serpent and the Staff, p. 146.
[180] See Howard Wolinksy and Tom Brune's The Serpent and the Staff, p. 146.
[181] See Kenny Ausubel's When Healing Becomes a Crime, p. 109.
[182] See Howard Wolinksy and Tom Brune's The Serpent and the Staff, p. 147.
[183] See Howard Wolinksy and Tom Brune's The Serpent and the Staff, p. 148-150.
[184] See Howard Wolinksy and Tom Brune's The Serpent and the Staff, p. 147.
[185] See Morris Fishbein's Morris Fishbein, M.D., An Autobiography, pp. 368-369.
[186] See John Robbins's Reclaiming Our Health, p. 208.
[187] See John Robbins's Reclaiming Our Health, p. 212.
[188] See a brief description of Gerson's fate in John Robbins's Reclaiming Our Health, pp. 279-281. See also Barry Lynes's The Healing of Cancer, pp. 32-33.
[189] You can also see a brief summary of what happened to them in the Hoxsey documentary, Hoxsey: How Healing Becomes a Crime. See also Kenny Ausubel's When Healing Becomes a Crime, pp. 125-127, 167-168.
[190] See Ralph Moss's The Cancer Industry, pp. 389-390.
[191] See Martin Gardner's Fads and Fallacies, p. 191.
[192] See Martin Gardner's Fads and Fallacies, p. 197.
[193] See Martin Gardner's Fads and Fallacies, p. 324.
[194] A particularly disturbing aspect of the JFK assassination milieu is that critical conclusions regarding Kennedy's wounds do not jibe with the testimony of the doctors who treated Kennedy in Dallas. The back of Kennedy's head was blown out, consistent with a frontal shot, and completely at odds with the "lone nut" theories involving Lee Harvey Oswald. Gerald Poser's Case Closed is establishment apologetics at its most strained. Posner is a Wall Street lawyer. The establishment lined up in praise of his Case Closed, and he was so "successful" at debunking the conspiracy theories surrounding the JFK assassination, so the story goes, that he then published a book debunking any government-involved conspiracy theory surrounding the Martin Luther King assassination. I wondered if he will publish a work on the Bobby Kennedy assassination and complete his debunker trilogy.
[195] See an account of this incident in Jim Fetzer, ed., Assassination Science.
[196] See Ralph Moss's The Cancer Industry, p. 431.
[197] See Ralph Moss's The Cancer Industry, p. 183.
[198] See Ralph Moss's The Cancer Industry, p. 98.
[199] See Ralph Moss's The Cancer Industry, p. 99.
[200] See Ralph Moss's The Cancer Industry, p. 108.
[201] See Ralph Moss's The Cancer Industry, p. 117.
[202] See Myron Sharaf's Fury on Earth, p. 461.
[203] The definitive work on Reich is Myron Sharaf's Fury on Earth, A Biography of Wilhelm Reich, from which most of this narrative is taken. Regarding the FDA’s burning of Reich's books, see pp. 459-461.
[204] See Barry Lynes's The Cancer Cure that Worked!, pp. 17-26. See also Brown, AIDS, Cancer and the Medical Establishment, pp. 126-153.
[205] See Ralph Moss's The Cancer Chronicles, Volume 5, Numbers 5 and 6.
[206] The narrative of Naessens's adventures is in Christopher Bird's The Persecution and Trial of Gaston Naessens, originally published in 1990 as The Life and Times of Gaston Naessens, The Galileo of the Microscope.
[207] Naessens describes this dynamic without my anthropomorphic flourishes in a paper he wrote which is reproduced in Bird's The Persecution and Trial of Gaston Naessens, pp. 294-304.
[208] See Christopher Bird's The Persecution and Trial of Gaston Naessens, pp. 37-38 and 75-76.
[209] See Christopher Bird's The Persecution and Trial of Gaston Naessens, p. 132.
[210] See Christopher Bird's The Persecution and Trial of Gaston Naessens, pp. 129-131.
[211] See Christopher Bird's The Persecution and Trial of Gaston Naessens, pp. 39-40.
[212] See Christopher Bird's The Persecution and Trial of Gaston Naessens, pp. 14-15.
[213] See Christopher Bird's The Persecution and Trial of Gaston Naessens, pp. 16-17 and 97-105.
[214] See Ralph Moss's “The War on Cancer,” Townsend Letter for Doctors and Patients, January 2002, pp. 30-31
[215] See Antoine Béchamp's The Blood and its Third Anatomical Element, p. 240.
[216] See Nancy Appleton's The Curse of Louis Pasteur, p. 47.
[217] See E. Douglas Hume's Béchamp or Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology, p. 197.
[218] See Sherri Tenpenny's Saying No to Vaccination, pp. 29-32.
[219] See E. Douglas Hume's Béchamp or Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology, p. 198.
[220] See E. Douglas Hume's Béchamp or Pasteur: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology, pp. 220-221.
[221] See John Robbins's Reclaiming Our Health, p. 334.
[222] See Neil Miller’s Vaccines: Are They Really Safe and Effective? pp. 34-35.
[223] See Viera Scheibner's Vaccination: 100 Years of Orthodox Research Shows that Vaccines Represent a Medical Assault on the Immune System, p. xiv.
[224] See Neil Miller’s Vaccines: Are They Really Safe and Effective? pp. 36-37.
[225] See Neil Miller’s Vaccines: Are They Really Safe and Effective? p. 23.
[226] See Neil Miller’s Vaccines: Are They Really Safe and Effective? p. 20.
[227] See Neil Miller’s Vaccines: Are They Really Safe and Effective? p. 24.
[228] See Neil Miller’s Vaccines: Are They Really Safe and Effective? p. 45.
[229] See Viera Scheibner's Vaccination, pp. 205-224.
[230] See Viera Scheibner's Vaccination, p. 260.
[231] See Sherri Tenpenny's Saying No to Vaccination, pp. 32-37.
[232] See Sherri Tenpenny's Saying No to Vaccination, pp. 25-27.
[233] See Jane Roberts’s The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events, p. 31.
[234] See Levi Dowling’s The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ, chapter 23, pp. 41-42.
[235] See Viera Scheibner's Vaccination, pp. 239-253.
[236] See Ralph Hovnanian's Medical Dark Ages, p. 55, section A.2.11.
[237] See Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, book five, chapter five.
[238] See John Fink’s Third Opinion for listings of those alternative clinics.
[239] See John Robbins's Reclaiming Our Health, pp. 240-241.
[240] See John Robbins's Reclaiming Our Health, pp. 257-259.
[241] See John Robbins's Reclaiming Our Health, p. 242.
[242] See Ralph Moss's The Cancer Industry, p. 144.
[243] See Julian Whitaker's Health and Healing, March 1995, p. 2.
[244] See Julian Whitaker's Health and Healing, Supplement, July 1994, p. 2.
[245] See Noam Chomsky's Year 501, p. 153. In 1995, Presidential Directive 39, signed by Bill Clinton, makes the USA's kidnapping of "terrorists" in foreign nations a government policy, stating that "Return of suspects by force may be effected without the cooperation of the host government." See William Blum's Rogue State, p. 85
[246] See also Ellen Brown’s Forbidden Medicine.
[247] See William Blum's Rogue State, pp. 210-211. The ruling is posted to the Internet at this time (January 2002)
[248] See Ellen Brown’s Forbidden Medicine, pp. 284-286.
[249] My friend had an event similar to mine, Dennis's, and those of others. As with Eugene Sledge, my friend heard an actual voice, not the foreign thoughts in my and Dennis's heads. After two weeks of frustration, of being on hold for hours each day, she felt defeated. She sat on her bed in despair, and just then, she heard a voice that seemed to come from behind her. The voice said," Do not worry. I will take care of you." She was shocked and looked behind her, but nobody was in her bedroom. The voice repeated its message, went silent, and she never heard it again. A feeling of peace then descended on her, and she never worried after that event. She soon met Dr. Warner, who cured her.
[250] See Christopher Bird's The Persecution and Trial of Gaston Naessens, p. 107-109
[251] Once in a while a great soul comes to Earth, on special assignment from the Creator, and I believe that John Robbins is one of them. His Reclaiming Our Health may be the most important book on this list. His gentle and enlightened voice is easier reading than this essay’s tour of the dark side of the force. Here is a list of books to help find out what is happening, and can also provide ideas on how to heal the mess. Howard Wolinksy and Tom Brune's The Serpent on the Staff, Ralph Moss's The Cancer Industry, Robert Mendelsohn's Confessions of a Medical Heretic (an excellent and easily readable book on the medical racket), Fink's Third Opinion, Raymond Brown's AIDS, Cancer and the Medical Establishment, Eustace Mullins's Murder by Injection, Ralph Moss's Questioning Chemotherapy, Ralph Hovnanian's Medical Dark Ages, Barry Lynes's The Healing of Cancer, The Cancer Cure that Worked!, and Helping the Cancer Victim, Christopher Bird's The Persecution and Trial of Gaston Naessens, James Carter's Racketeering in Medicine, Ralph Moss's Cancer Therapy, The Independent Consumer's Guide to Non-Toxic Treatment and Prevention, Ellen Brown's Forbidden Medicine, Burton Goldberg, et al.'s An Alternative Medicine Definitive Guide to Cancer.
[252] See The Sun, January 2002, p. 48.
[253] What the FDA did to L-tryptophan is well known and well documented. For one place of many, see James Carter's Racketeering in Medicine, pp. 171-175.
[254] For instance, the body mistakes strontium 90, one of the many radioactive isotopes introduced into the environment by modern "progress," for calcium. If a human being ingests strontium 90, the body will incorporate the strontium into the body, where it can become part of the bone or teeth. The strontium will not do the job of calcium, and will eventually radioactively disintegrate, harming the body with radiation and particles as it decays. Strontium 90 is a component of radioactive fallout, which is partly why nuclear bombs have such devastating long-term consequences.
[255] In 2014, I totaled up the USA's death statistics in 2010, and 69% of the 2.5 million deaths were due to degeneration of the arteries and organs, such as the lungs, brain, pancreas, liver, and kidneys, which are all primarily attributable to what people ingest, including smoke, alcohol, food high in sugar, fat, and protein, and various industrial chemicals, which is all also certainly related to the immune system failure called cancer, which all occurred in history's most obese and sedentary people.
[256] See Ralph Moss's “The War on Cancer”, Townsend Letter for Doctors and Patients, August/September 2002, pp. 36-37.
[257] See Barry Lynes's Helping the
Cancer Victim, p. 38.
