There’s a full-scale war being waged against natural-health advocates.
It’s revving up as more health care practitioners embrace natural-healing modalities and the general population realizes the benefits of healthy preventative-care living.
That’s not good news for the medical industrial complex. And it is retaliating by launching attacks against the effectiveness and legitimacy of natural health care.
In the US, for example, a projected $3.2 trillion, approximately $10,000 per citizen, will be spent this year on health care. These enormous profit-hungry medical and big pharma conglomerates saturate every aspect of the American health care system.
Indeed, since there are no drugs on the market to cure chronic degenerative disease, and since society has become prescription-drug addicted, the medical elite focus on treating, not healing, disease.
Despite growing awareness of natural approaches to health and well-being, and mounting evidence of corrupt science and business practices that allow unsafe treatments to market, the established medical industry permeates the vast health care market with treatment-based answers to disease and illness. Their products and services depend on it.
A POWERFUL, EXPANSIVE INDUSTRY
This powerful network of private, public and nonprofit entities includes the pharmaceutical, hospital, medical insurance and product industries. It expands to university medical schools and research departments, private laboratories, health care service industries and professional medical associations.
Hundreds of thousands are employed in this vast network of medical industries. And hundreds of billions are spent through federal health agencies — such as the Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Food and Drug Administration, National Cancer Institute and dozens of others — to also feed the medical industrial complex.
Out of necessity, the complexity of the health care establishment, with numerous vested interests, has compulsively focused on high profits for long-term sustainability.
This means all parties within the pharmaceutical industrial complex, including government, have cooperated synergistically. Doctors and medical associations, Medicaid and Medicare, state medical boards, journalists, scientists and legislators support each other to shape and expand a paradigm that dominates and controls all discussions and debates about health today.
Moreover, this American model is being copied and amplified around the world.
CHALLENGING THE ORTHODOXY
Still, despite the intrinsic and growing power of the medical complex, there is a resilient cottage industry among developed nations that serves about 5 percent of the population and is growing.
Aside from emergency care, those in this alternative health segment no longer abide by medical protocols of the orthodoxy. And they are doing extremely well. They have adopted plant-based diets, exercise, do yoga and other Eastern body disciplines, and practice mindfulness meditation.
They made the concerted decision to unclutter their lives, detox their bodies and clean up their immediate environment. They are conscientious about what enters their bodies and minds.
You won’t find the numerous studies and research on the benefits of healthy lifestyles reported in the mainstream media. We are far more likely to hear about a new super drug or vaccine than we are about the large body of science supporting the anti-diabetic or anti-cancer benefits of cruciferous vegetables, medicinal mushrooms or a large variety of herbs.
Further, as the Trends Research Institute has been forecasting as part of its Artful Aging trend line, as the world’s population lives significantly longer, there will emerge even larger niches for natural-health practitioners to fill.
The medical, product and service industries that serve seniors today focus on coping and treating, not healing and well-being. A large segment of that mega market, as it continues to age, will become more oriented toward gentle, natural-healing alternatives that emphasize quality of life over coping with life.
THE TRUE COST OF SUCCESS
However, penetrating the mass mindset, which is taught to believe there’s a pill for every ill, has been difficult and will grow even more difficult.
Today, it is common practice to keep patients in chronic-care facilities or enduring endless doctors’ visits, doped on cocktails of multiple medications, for the remainder of their lives. When viewed quantitatively and not qualitatively, America’s health care delivery system has been an unqualified success.
No one within the gargantuan medical-industrial complex will entertain or accede dissent about the properness or direction of a paradigm that keeps the all but dead alive. The problem, therefore, becomes existential.
CARELESS CARE AND OTHER LIES
It is not true that the No. 3 cause of death in the US is iatrogenic medicine, or medical error and mistakes? The September 2013 issue of the Journal of Patient Safety estimated that preventable hospital mistakes cost the lives of 210,000 people. The number increases to 440,000 when improper medical guidelines for patients and erroneous diagnostic results and/or conclusions are added.
And these are conservative figures. Independent analysis identifies medical error, including adverse prescription-drug reactions, as the leading cause of death today. This is 400 percent higher than a decade ago. If we consider these statistics in the vernacular, is conventional American health care today committing medical genocide?
THE PROFIT OF TREATMENT
Because health care costs fundamentally target treatment, both acute and chronic, as well as bureaucratic and administrative overhead to keep the death machine running, funds don’t exist for prevention. You rarely hear the surgeon general or anyone in power challenging the factory farming, big agriculture, sugar or junk food industries as major causative contributors to the many epidemics ravaging the population.
In 2013, the US Department of Agriculture dished out over $510 million to 62 food corporations providing low quality food to 55,000 American public schools. Over $500 million of that went to beef and chicken producers alone. Among the recipients were Tyson Foods, Pilgrim’s, Domino’s Pizza, American Beef Packers Inc., General Mills, Sara Lee and others. And since the USDA’s corporate interests support genetically modified foods, school children are getting much more of their minimum daily requirement of GMOs.
The US has the most obese population on the planet. We have more overweight and diabetic children than ever before
. Years ago, significant numbers of children suffering from cardiovascular disease were unheard of. Indeed, type 2 diabetes among children is a new phenomenon.
Americans consume vast amounts of sugar, trans fats, high fructose corn syrup, refined carbohydrates and animal proteins. We are overstressed and overworked; hence, junk food, alcohol and prescription and illegal drugs are viable recourses to sublimate the incompatibility between the reality of our lives with higher goals to be healthy, happy and constructive.
Yet not a word is ever spoken by our medical establishment and pro-pharmaceutical media about the true underlying causes of our unhealthy behavior.
And why should there be? Turn on the TV or peruse digital sites online and witness the nonstop parade of drug company ads all designed to sustain the treatment model the establishment is so dependent on.
BEHIND THE DECEPTION
This isn’t a medical conspiracy; it’s an overt action plan to gain market share and build profits at any cost.
There have been hundreds of lawsuits, including class-action suits, filed against and settled with pharmaceutical companies that had knowledge about health risks of their drugs — but concealed the studies from the FDA. These companies are repeat offenders, which is why the distinguished co-founder of the Cochrane Collaboration, Dr. Peter Gotzsche of the University of Copenhagen, has called the medical establishment an organized crime syndicate.
Worse, federal health agencies are complicit in the approval of unproven, toxic drugs. Mainstream media won’t report on this because it would interfere with their profit flow from drug companies.
This is not conjecture or conspiratorial theory. It is simply casebook law. It is no different than Wall Street banks conspiring to manipulate markets or the mortgage scandal that led to the 2008 crash. Tens of billions of dollars are paid in legal settlements, yet no pharmaceutical or health-insurance executive sees prison bars. And the cost of Big Pharma’s criminal activities has contributed to innumerable medical injuries and deaths.
The corruption is endemic. It runs through the entire medical complex.
The medical industry won’t be reformed. It is incorrigible and beyond reform. Nor will there be any major shifts in how the industry endemically misleads, betrays and lies directly to the public. If health can be commoditized and commercialized, it will be exploited.
Four decades ago, the great sociologist Ivan Illich wrote in his classic volume “Medical Nemesis,” “Modern medicine is a negation of health. It isn’t organized to serve human health, but only itself, as an institution. It makes more people sick than it heals.”
Prophetic words that are even more urgent today. TJ