Holistic Beefs

The Cancer Profile Test

2011-07-29T08:45:00.000-07:00

Last time, in addition to emphasizing the importance of detecting cancer as early as possible, I also told you how and why conventional diagnostic tests for cancer so often fail to do so. Today I want to tell you about a simple combination blood and urine test that is able to detect changes in your body’s biochemistry that are early warning signs that you may be on the way to developing cancer.

The test is called the Cancer Profile© and is available from American Metabolic Laboratories here in the United States. Developed by Emil Schandl, PhD, AML’s founder, who has a master’s degree in both biochemistry and enzymology and a doctorate in molecular genetics, the test is based on the scientific fact that certain detectable changes in biochemistry occur as the human body progresses from a healthy state towards states that are precancerous and cancerous.

How The Cancer Profile Test Works

The Cancer Profile test incorporates eight tests which, combined, provide a far more accurate indication of whether or not a person’s biochemistry is shifting towards an unhealthy state than if the tests were done separately. The test measures levels of thyroid-stimulating hormone (TSH), and indicator of thyroid function (low thyroid function, or hypothyroidism, can predispose one to developing cancer) ; DHEA-S, a hormone produced by the adrenal gland that serves as an indicator of adrenal and immune function, as well as a marker for cancer; gamma-glutamyltranspeptidase (GGTP), an enzyme marker for overall liver function (healthy liver function is essential for protecting against cancer); and the cancer markers CEA (carcinoembryonic antigen), PHI (phosphohexose isomerase enzyme), and HCG (human chorionic gonadotropin), the last of which is measured using three different methods to ensure the best possible accuracy.

Based on his many years of research, Dr. Shandl observed that the substances his Cancer Profile test measures tend to become elevated at least 10 or more years before cancer can be detected using conventional screening tests. This is not surprising, since we now know that, in the vast majority of cases, it takes years before cancer develops to the point where it becomes a threat to health. Because of this long timeline, alternative cancer specialists realize that, by looking for shifts in biochemistry such as those the Cancer Profile measures, they can help their patients actually avoid cancer before it gains a foothold inside their bodies, using highly effective approaches such as dietary and lifestyle changes, along with nutritional supplements, detoxification therapies, and other modalities, as necessary.

If you read my last article on the need for early detection, you will recall what I mentioned about the importance of sensitivity and specificity. Briefly put, sensitivity and specificity in combination with each other determine how accurate a cancer screening test is. Sensitivity refers to the probability that a test will show a positive result when cancer actually exists, while specificity refers to the probability that a negative test result will occur when no cancer exists. A test that has high sensitivity and high specificity is far more useful than tests for which one or both of these measures are lower.

Dr. Shandl developed the Cancer Profile test for precisely this reason. He wanted to ensure a high level of accuracy, which simply cannot be achieved when doctors rely on only one of the markers alone. For example, despite the fact that numerous scientific studies show that HCG levels in the body become elevated when cancer cells are present in the body, other studies have found that tests that screen for HCG alone can often fail to detect such increases in elevations, usually because, even though the levels have risen, they may not have done so at levels high enough to be detected. As a result, HCG screening tests by themselves account for approximately 30 percent false negative results. (A false negative reading means a patient is told he or she does not have cancer when in reality cancer is present but was not detected.)

Similarly, other studies have shown that screening for either CEA or PHI alone can also lead to false negative results, whereas when both of these markers are measured, the overall accuracy of such testing increases significantly.

Given these facts, you can understand the advantages that the Cancer Profile test offers in comparison to stand-alone marker tests. Simply put, what a single cancer market test can often miss, the combination of markers included in the Cancer Profile will usually find with far more accuracy. (Testing has shown that the Cancer Profile has an overall accuracy rate of between 87 and 97 percent, depending on the type of cancer that a person may be developing, which far exceeds the rates of most other cancer screening tests.) Even more significantly, as I said, it can detect cancer far earlier than conventional cancer tests.

Another significant advantage of Dr. Shandl’s test is that, unlike stand-alone marker tests that typically screen for only one type of cancer and therefore fail to detect others types of cancer that might be present, the Cancer Profile is able to detect whether cancer is present in general. This saves time and money and can potentially also save lives. As with other blood screening tests for cancer, however, the Cancer Profile by itself cannot definitively prove that cancer is present. Such confirmation can only be obtained with further testing methods, which also can determine which type of cancer a person has.

Finally, another major benefit of the Cancer Profile test is that is can not only be used to screen for cancer, but also to monitor how well patients’ cancer treatments are working. This is vitally important because no cancer treatment, whether alternative or conventional, works 100 percent of the time. This means that even the most promising treatments with the highest success rates are incapable of helping everyone. By using the Cancer Profile test to monitor how well their treatments are working, physicians can quickly know whether they are on the right track for each individual patient, or whether they need to change what they are doing before it is too late. In addition, if surgery is deemed necessary to remove cancerous tumors, the Cancer Profile can be used prior to surgical procedures to provide patients and their physicians with a benchmark to determine whether or not the surgery was successful. Following surgery, a follow-up Profile test can be given. If surgery was indeed successful, the Profile will confirm that by showing lowered levels of the cancer markers it measures. If the markers stay at the same level as before, or continue to rise, then doctors will quickly know that their patients need additional treatment.

Just as importantly, physicians can use the Cancer Profile to monitor how well their patients who achieve remission of their cancer are maintaining their health. As anyone who has had cancer knows (including me), once cancer strikes, it can strike again. Here too conventional cancer tests are often ineffective due to their inability to indicate in a timely fashion whether cancer is returning. For this reason, patients and their physicians alike are often forced to “watch and wait,” hoping that the patient’s remain cancer-free. Unfortunately, too many times cancer does return, and when it does so it is often worse than it was originally, making further treatment more challenging. By using the Cancer Profile, physicians don’t have to wait to detect signs of relapse. Instead, they can see from the Profile how well their cancer patients are doing and, if necessary, take appropriate action much earlier, before the cancer recurrence becomes more serious.

How You Can Obtain the Cancer Profile Test

Despite the benefits that the Cancer Profile test offers, as well as the fact that physicians and patients from all across the United States and around the world have made use of it, the test still remains relatively unknown. For this reason, I urge you not to wait for doctors to find out about it on their own. Instead, learn more about it yourself. You can do so by contacting:

American Metabolic Laboratories
1818 Sheridan Street, Suite 102
Hollywood, FL 33020
(954) 929-4814
http://americanmetaboliclaboratories.net

Your doctor can order the test for you, or you can do it yourself by contacting American Metabolic Laboratories directly. After you receive your results, you can also schedule a free phone consultation with one of the lab’s trained representatives.

The Need To Detect Cancer Early: Why Conventional Cancer Tests Are Not the Answer

2011-07-22T14:32:00.000-07:00

One of the main reasons that cancer is such a costly disease—both in terms of human suffering and in the financial cost involved in treating it—is because by and large it is not detected early enough.

When it comes to early detection, conventional medicine is well behind alternative cancer approaches. That’s because conventional diagnostic cancer tests look only for signs of cancer tumors. This is true whether the screening methods are measuring cancer markers or looking for signs of tumors directly, such as through CT scans, MRIs, x-rays, etc.

Most people do not realize that it takes years, and in some cases even decades before cancer develops into a visible tumor that conventional screening can detect. By then, the challenge of treating cancer successfully is more difficult and costly. That’s because, during all of the time that tumors are not detectable by conventional means, cancer is still active in the body.

Since the conventional cancer establishment often refers to its approach to cancer as a “war,” think of detection this way:

In war, doesn’t it make sense to be aware of your enemy before he can come ashore and strike, rather than to wait for years while he stealthily infiltrates your defenses before he strikes in full force? Obviously your chances of defeating your enemy are much greater if you can stop him in his tracks before he has a chance to leave his homeland. Similarly, alternative and integrative cancer physicians recognize that the earliest possible detection of cancer greatly increases the chances of their patients’ long-term recovery and survival. Just as importantly, early detection makes treating cancer far less costly, compared to when it’s detected later on.

Limitations of Conventional Cancer Tests

Conventional cancer tests have a number of limitations, starting with the fact that, as I said, cancer must have developed into a tumor before they can successfully detect it. (For the purposes of this article, I am referring here to “solid state” cancers, meaning those for which tumor formation is involved. Nearly all types of cancer fall into this category, with two notable exceptions: leukemias and lymphomas, such as Hodgkin’s disease and non-Hodgkins lymphoma.) As mentioned, this means that cancer has to be present in the body for a long time before conventional cancer tests can detect it. And even then, small tumors can be missed by such tests, escaping detection until they grow larger, by which time cancer has progressed even further.

In addition, as I’ve written about in the past, a number of conventional cancer tests, such as x-rays and CT scans, are capable of causing cancer themselves due to the radiation they emit when patients are tested.

For this reason, conventional cancer specialists also rely on cancer markers to screen patients for cancer. A cancer marker refers to any of a variety of blood tests that measure the level of a protein material or other chemical that is produced by cancer cells. Marker levels become elevated in the presence of a cancerous tumor.

There are different cancer markers for different kinds of cancer. For example, the marker CEA (carcino-embryonic antigen) is used to screen for colon cancer, while CA 15-3 or CA 27-29 are used to screen for breast cancer. Other common cancer markers are CA 125, used to screen for ovarian cancer, and the PSA (prostate-specific antigen) test for men, which until recently was commonly relied upon by conventional physicians to screen for prostate cancer. (Recent research has shown that the PSA test may not be an accurate indicator of prostate cancer, to the points where its developer has now called on physicians to stop relying upon it for this purpose. The PSA test continues to be an accurate indicator for enlargement of the prostate gland or BPH.)

The most obvious limitation of conventional cancer marker tests is the fact that each of them can only be used to screen for one particular type of cancer. This means, for example, that a woman screened for breast cancer may be given a clean bill of health if her cancer markers show a low score all the while that she may have colon or another type of cancer that the markers cannot screen for.

Nor is that the only problem. Cancer markers can produce inaccurate results known as false positives and false negatives. A false positive results in patients being told they have cancer when in fact they don’t, while a false negative can result in people with cancer being told they are cancer-free. Obviously, either type of false reading is not a good outcome.

False positive and false negative outcomes from cancer marker tests are related to two statistical measures that determine a screening test’s usefulness. These measures are known as sensitivity and specificity. Sensitivity refers to the probability that a test will show a positive result when cancer actually exists, while specificity refers to the probability that a negative test result will occur when no cancer exists. A test that has high sensitivity and high specificity is far more useful than tests for which one or both of these measures are lower. Unfortunately, too many conventional cancer marker tests fall into this latter category. They include the PSA test, as well as the CA 27-29 and CEA tests, among others.

False negative outcomes are also quite high with the traditional PAP smear test, which is used to screen for cancer of the cervix. This test examines stained cells from the mucous membrane of the cervix for signs of precancerous changes. Pre-cancer of the cervix is called cervical dysplasia. When detected early enough, it is almost always reversible, but once it progresses into malignancy and becomes invasive it is much more difficult to treat. It is estimated that a full one-third of women who die from cervical cancer do so because it was not accurately detected soon enough for successful treatment to begin.

Given all of the above, you are probably wishing that there were accurate and noninvasive tests that could screen for cancer in its earliest stages, far ahead of the conventional diagnostic tests I’ve mentioned, that could also screen for multiple types of cancer at once, instead of patients needing to have multiple types of tests to know whether or not cancer is present in their bodies.

Fortunately these types of tests do exist, and more and more alternative physicians are now making use of them even though both tests are still ignored by their conventional counterparts. In future articles I will tell you about two of these tests, one from Germany and one that is available right here in the United States, and I will also let you know how you can obtain them. Stay tuned.

Until then, remember this: When it comes to cancer, prevention is your best option, followed by the earliest possible detection methods.

Cancer and Your Immune System

2011-07-14T17:35:00.000-07:00

It may surprise you to know that cancer cells are produced in your body each and every day, to the point where they even form tumors. That’s because each of us is constantly being exposed to carcinogens in our food, air and water supply. Fortunately, your body has a powerful weapon that is constantly on the alert for such abnormal cells and is quick to destroy them once they are found. What is this powerful weapon?

Your immune system!

When you are healthy, the cancer cells and tumors mentioned above never make it past the microscopic stage. Instead, they disappear before you even have a chance to know they exist. According to conventional oncologists, this disappearing act is known as “spontaneous regression.” But in reality it’s all due to the ability of the immune system to identify cancer cells early, before they can multiply, and quickly eliminate them as part of the overall protective role that the immune system performs as it helps to maintain your overall health.

Based on these facts, three things are very clear with regard to cancer:

1) The health of immune system is one of the most important factors that determine cancer patients’ survival.

2) The presence of cancer cells in the body is far less important than the immune system’s ability to properly identify and eliminate such cells, even when they are few in number.

3) Cancer takes hold in the body largely as a result of a functional breakdown or imbalance in the immune system, which can occur as a result of many factors, including poor diet, nutritional deficiencies, chronic exposure to toxins that over time overwhelm the immune system, unhealthy lifestyle choices (smoking, alcohol or drug abuse, etc), chronic stress, and unresolved emotional issues, to name just a few.

How Your Immune System Fights Cancer

When functioning properly your immune system protects against cancer in a number of important ways. First, it assesses whether normal cells have been transformed into cancer cells. This task is performed by specialized white blood cells known as T lymphocytes, or T cells. T cells are produced by the thymus glad and travel throughout the body where they seek out abnormal cells and foreign proteins known as tumor-associated antigens that are released by tumor cells.

If cancer cells are present, certain types of T cells signal other types of white blood cells to spring into action. These include B cells that produce antibodies that neutralize foreign matter in both blood and tissues, as well as other lymphocytes that produce anticancer chemicals known as cytokines. Cytokines act like a natural form of chemotherapy and include tumor necrosis factor, interleukin, and interferon. Unlike chemotherapy drugs, cytokines do their work without harming healthy cells.

Other cancer fighters in your immune system’s arsenal include natural killer (NK) cells and macrophages. NK cells are one of your body’s most immediate and powerful agents for protecting against cancer. A specialized class of lymphocytes, NK cells lock onto cancer cell sites and destroy malignant cells before they can multiply and spread. NK cells are especially important in the early stages of cancer, when they descend directly upon tiny tumors to devour them or cause them to disintegrate before the tumors can grow and start to harm the body. NK cells have little effect against large tumors, however.

Like NK cells, macrophages also destroy cancer cells by ingesting them. They also support your body’s detoxification system by scavenging for waste and debris, and help to regulate cell reproduction as well as the activity of other immune cells. Research has shown a direct correlation between increased macrophage activity and a decreased incidence of tumors and tumor growth. For this reason, macrophage function by itself can often accurately determine whether tumors will thrive or die.

Recognizing the Immune System’s Role in Fighting Cancer

Unlike conventional most conventional oncologists, alternative and integrative cancer doctors have long recognized the importance of the immune system when it comes to treating cancer effectively. For this reason, alternative and integrative doctors emphasize immune-boosting therapies as part of their overall strategy for addressing cancer. By contrast, most oncologists ignore immune function, focusing instead on simply killing cancer cells and tumors through the use of chemotherapy and/or radiation, both of which wreck havoc on cancer and healthy cells alike, especially immune cells. This difference in approach helps to explain why alternative and integrative approaches for cancer are often far more effective than conventional cancer treatments, both in the short-term and in the long-term.

What many people do not realize is that many cancer patients who are treated with chemotherapy or radiation actually do not die from their cancer, but from secondary infections such as pneumonia that are able to take hold in the body after conventional treatments have weakened and ravaged the immune system. That’s why helping to improve and maintain immune function is so vitally important when treating most cancers.

Alternative and integrative physicians accomplish this in a variety of ways, starting with improving their patients’ diet so that the foods they eat enhance all of the body’s functions, rather than impede them, which is what happens when you eat the nutritionally deficient standard American diet (SAD). Other therapies that may be employed to bolster the immune system are nutritional and orthomolecular medicine, herbal medicine, detoxification therapies, hyperthermia (heat-based therapies), and mind/body medicine (for stress relief and to heal painful emotions), to name just a few.

In addition, alternative cancer specialists, should they deem that chemotherapy or radiation is necessary, will use lab tests to help them determine the most appropriate chemo drugs to use that are most specific to each patient’s needs. By tailor-making chemotherapy treatments to match each individual’s unique needs, the chemo drugs that are employed are usually able to be administered at far lower doses than normal because they have been screened for their effectiveness. This not only increases their usefulness, but it also dramatically reduces the otherwise harmful side effects chemotherapy is noted for, sparing the immune system from harm.

The Cancer Establishment Is Catching On But Is It Enough?

Over the past few years drug companies and the mainstream cancer establishment has at long last begun to consider the immune system as part of their approach to treating cancer. Earlier this year, for example, an immune-stimulating cancer drug called Yervoy (ipilimumab) was hailed as “breakthrough” drug for combating late-stage melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer. Developed by Bristol-Meyers Squibb, it has been approved by the FDA after studies showed that it nearly doubled the number of melanoma patients who survived for three years or more. Since its approval, the drug industry has increased its research into developing other immune-boosting drugs for cancer.

However, the news is not all good. In fact, some of it is downright frightening. That’s because in clinical trials nearly 13% of patients taking Yervoy had severe or fatal autoimmune reactions. In addition, the drug also causes a wide range of side effects, including fatigue, hormone deficiencies, diarrhea, skin rash, and colitis (inflammation of the intestines. Moreover, like many cancer drugs, it is expensive. Plus, because it is new to market, no studies exist showing whether it is safe and effective long-term.

While I applaud the cancer establishment for finally beginning to research immune-boosting drugs, just as I agree that both chemotherapy and radiation have their place as part of physicians’ overall cancer-fighting arsenal, I question the wisdom of relying on drug-based immune-boosting approaches that are not completely safe and also so expensive. Especially when proven safe and natural immune-boosting therapies, such as those I’ve mentioned above, already exist and have a long track record of efficacy.

That’s why I am such a strong proponent of cancer treatments that rely on the “best of both worlds” from both the alternative and conventional fields of medicine. And it’s also why I encourage all cancer patients to explore all of their options from both fields and to seek out doctors who are trained in how to best integrate them. There is no “magic bullet” when it comes to treating cancer, and there most likely never will be. But certainly your body’s immune system is a key part of the complete cancer care picture, and that’s a fact more cancer doctors and patients alike need to recognize.

Conventional Medicine’s Blind and Ignorant Bias Towards Alternative Cancer Therapies

2011-07-13T13:20:00.000-07:00

Today I want to share with you the story of a very brave young boy and his equally courageous family. His name is Connah Broom and his story is both a wonderful testament to the power of love and the human spirit and a sad indictment of the ignorance and bias to be found within the conventional medical community when it comes to alternative cancer therapies.

I recently became aware of Connah when I came upon a link to a feature article about him that appeared in the February 10 2009 edition of the Daily Mail, a major newspaper in England. The title of the article is:

The boy with 11 tumours who was sent home to die... and survives after grandparents' alternative therapy treatments.

Briefly, here’s Connah’s story.

In August 2006, after months of intermittent symptoms of pain and a general feeling of illness that physicians initially misdiagnosed, he was found to have a relatively rare and aggressive form of cancer known as neuroblastoma, which attacks the brain and nervous system running along the spinal cord. By the time Connah was properly diagnosed, his cancer was classed as neuroblastoma stage 4. Doctors found that it had spread through his chest near his heart, to his stomach close to several organs including his kidney and intestine, and down his left leg.

Connah received conventional cancer treatments for seven month, at which point his doctors told his family that there was nothing more that they could do for him and that they should “take him home to enjoy his final months” of life. That was in early 2007.

It was at this point that Connah’s grandparents took action. Instead of accepting the doctors’ prognosis, they refused to give up hope and began to educate themselves about any and all potential alternative options that might save their grandson.

The first thing they did was put Connah on an all-organic diet along with filtering his water, after they read doing so could reduce the amount of harmful toxins in his body. “Once we did this, Connah stopped becoming ill,” his grandmother reports.

As they continued their research, Connah’s grandparents (whom he lives with, along with his father) soon added other alternative therapies to his health-care regimen, including reiki, far infrared sauna, laser therapy, ultrasound, and other therapies, some of which they were introduced to when they visited an alternative cancer clinic in Mexico (the newspaper article does not identify which clinic they went to). After being instructed in the use of the therapies they learned about at the clinic, Connah’s grandparents returned home and built their own equipment devices in order to treat Connah on their own. All of the expenses involved were paid for out-of-pocket.

At the time that the Daily Mail article was written—a full two years after Connah’s doctors had given him up for dead—scans showed that ten of Connah’s 11 tumors had shrunk, had no blood flow and appeared to be dead. Today, more than four years after Connah received his death sentence, he is still alive and his latest scans show that “his disease is stable.”

Not only is Connah still with us, he is also living a normal, active life, including pursuing his passion for gymnastics, playing soccer, painting, and winning awards at dance competitions.

As I said, Connah’s story is wonderful.

But what isn’t so wonderful is how the conventional medical community has responded to it. In the same article, the Daily Mail reported that conventional cancer experts remained skeptical and “cast doubt on whether the alternative therapies had made any difference”.

Bear in mind, these are the same types of experts who had handed Connah a death sentence years earlier!

As if that isn’t enough, the article also reported the experts said “levels of toxins in food and drink are unlikely to be high enough to cause cancer”.

Such a claim is not only downright ignorant, it’s also entirely irresponsible. Numerous studies have shown a link between poor diet and cancer, and that includes consuming foods and drinks that contain cancer-causing chemicals. For conventional cancer experts to say otherwise—and for the Daily Mail to allow them to do so unquestioned—verges on criminal negligence.

But the height of the arrogance and ignorance of the conventional cancer establishment is revealed later in the article when the Mail reports that, rather than taking a serious look at the merits of the approach Connah’s grandparents have used to not only keep him alive, but restore him to an active childhood, “They say cancers often go into remission for unexplained reasons.”

In other words, they have no interest whatsoever in admitting that what Connah’s grandparents are doing is not only working, but is actually far superior to the conventional treatment Connah received—treatments which they themselves admitted had failed him!

I wish I could say that this example of ignorance about and bias against viable alternative cancer therapies was rare, but it isn’t. It’s the norm! And because it is, untold numbers of cancer patients around the world are denied the opportunity to explore nonconventional therapies that can quite possibly save their lives. All because they heed the advice of conventional doctors and conventional cancer organizations that say such alternatives are “un proven” and not worthy of consideration.

Fortunately for Connah, his grandparents were smarter than that. Instead of passively accepting the death sentence Connah was given, they did their own due diligence and by doing so, they saved Connah’s life.

My hope is that, should cancer strike you or your loved ones, you too will be like Connah’s grandparents, and also refuse to give up hope.

You can read the Daily Mail article about Connah here.

You can also watch a video about Connah and his grandparents here.

Finally, if you would like to be kept informed about Connah’s progress or make a donation to help support his grandparents’ work, you can visit this website set up in his name:

http://www.connahsappeal.co.uk

Is the Profit Motive Harming and Killing Cancer Patients?

2011-04-06T12:40:00.000-07:00

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” – Upton Sinclair

Here is a shocking fact you most likely did not know: Unlike other kinds of doctors, cancer doctors (oncologists) are allowed to profit from the sale of chemotherapy drugs. In fact, most of the annual income oncologists earn comes from the profit that they make from selling these highly toxic drugs to their patients.

That’s not supposition on my part. That’s a fact reported by NBC Nightly News back in 2006. You can watch the report here.

As NBC reported, oncologists buy chemotherapy drugs at wholesale prices and then sell them to their patients at “marked up prices.”

This absurd practice was made legal years ago after Medicare and health insurance companies decided it would be a good idea to move cancer patients out of hospitals and into the care of private practice oncologists. Their reasoning was that this was necessary in order to save money. What happened as a result of this misguided decision was the exact opposite.

Instead of saving money, the cost of chemotherapy drugs skyrocketed to tens of thousands of dollars a year, and in some cases, tens of thousands of dollars per month.

Medical ethicists have for years questioned the wisdom of allowing oncologists to continue to earn the majority of their incomes from the sale of chemotherapy drugs, correctly pointing out that doing so creates a serious conflict of interest between patient welfare and oncologists’ desire to prescribe the drugs that they are going to make the most money from even when they are not what their patients needs. This includes over-prescribing drugs beyond the point in which they are effective.

How many cancer patients have died because their doctors succumbed to the lure of maximizing their profits and administered chemotherapy drugs inappropriately?

No one can say, but in all likelihood at least some cancer patients did die because of their doctors’ desire for profits.

This is a travesty and it needs to stop!

Correctly this great wrong won’t be easy, however, nor can oncologists as a whole be blamed.

Although I strongly disagree with the use of chemotherapy drugs the way they are administered by conventional oncologists—for the simple reason that, in the majority of cases, they do not work—at the same time I recognize that most cancer doctors and their staffs are extremely dedicated professionals who are doing all they can, based on how they have been taught (persuaded, would be the better word) to treat cancer.

In short, it’s not oncologists who are at the root of this problem; it’s the system in which they are trapped!

This fact was admitted to by Dr. Peter Eisenberg, a conventional cancer specialist who was interviewed as part of the NBC report mentioned above. In it, he said, “Patients should feel that their physician has their best interest at heart, always. And the way the system is set up, because of the incentives [for selling chemotherapy drugs to their patients], does something to destroy that.”

So, what can be done about this?

The first step appears clear-cut. The profit motive for oncologists must be eliminated in the arena of cancer care, by eliminating their ability to buy drugs at wholesale and then to sell them at often much higher prices. (Note: Usually, it is not the cancer patients who pay these exorbitant prices; it is health insurance companies and/or Medicare/Medicaid. The end result is higher health insurance premiums for all of us, and a further drain of taxpayer money from our federal government’s already overstrained resources.)

Oncologists must return to administering their drugs in the same way that all other MDs do: Instead of selling drugs directly, they must simply prescribe them, as they once used to do.

But this step alone, will not fix the problem, and here’s where things get more complicated. And more suspect.

You see, the real reason cancer drugs cost so much has very little to do with how much it costs drug companies to develop them and bring them to market. Nor does their cost have anything to do with their potential to save lives. If that were the case for chemotherapy drugs, their price would be extremely low given how abysmal a track record they have for improving cancer patients’ quality of life and extending their survival rates, let alone actually curing cancer, which they most certainly do not (at best, they only temporarily put cancer into remission).

No, the real reason cancer drugs in the United States costs so much (well over $100,000 a year for a single patient in the case of many of the new generation of cancer drugs) is very simple:

Cancer drugs—especially the new generation of drugs—cost so much because they have no competitors.

In other words, drug companies can charge whatever they want for their cancer drugs, and they do exactly that!

You might think that such price-gouging by the drug companies could easily be curtailed if health insurance companies if they simply refused to pay the prices Big Pharma demands for their cancer drugs. In theory, this is correct, but the reality of this situation paints a different story. First, refusing to pay the cost of cancer drugs would garner a lot of ill-will towards health insurance companies by the public, and these companies already have enough of that as it is.

But the bigger issue has to do with Medicare. You see, when it comes to paying for the price of drugs, both cancer drugs and otherwise, health insurance companies take their lead from Medicare. Medicare does not provide coverage for most types of drugs, but it does cover the use cancer drugs. Most health insurance companies simply follow the guidelines for drug reimbursement that are established by the government’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). And when it comes to the price of cancer drugs, as far as CMS is concerned, anything goes!

This is in stark contrast to how CMS acts with regard to all other types of drugs. Aside from cancer drugs, CMS controls medical costs by establishing the fees that are paid under Medicare/Medicaid for nearly all other medical procedures, including drug usage, by both doctors and hospitals. Once CMS establishes these fees, health insurance companies set their own rates of coverage to coincide with them.

What this means is very simple to understand: If CMS dealt with the price of cancer drugs in the same way that it does for all other medications, the price of cancer drugs would quickly plummet, largely sparing oncologists of the temptation to try and profit from their use.

When it comes to cancer drugs, CMS must change its policies!

Then there is a third, and equally important factor to consider: The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA). PhRMA bills itself as the pharmaceutical industry trade group. In plain English, it means that it’s a drug lobby. And since 1992 its work has paid huge dividends for Big Pharma, from which its funding is derived. You see, PhRMA convinced the US Congress and President Bill Clinton to enact a bill known as the Prescription Drug User Fee Act (PDUFA) of 1992. Once the act was passed and signed into law, Big Pharma effectively became the fox guarding the henhouse of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). This came about because the act means that, since its passage, Big Pharma actually helps fund the FDA’s research and approval process of the very pharmaceutical drugs the FDA is supposed to be regulating on our behalf. Not only does Big Pharma’s funding of the FDA create a direct and serious conflict of interest, it also ensures that the FDA provides a speedier approval process of pharmaceutical drugs, many of which later prove to be ineffective, life-threatening, or both!

By now, I’m sure you can understand that one of the most serious underlying problems that have kept conventional cancer treatment in the US focused almost entirely on dangerous and ineffective cancer drugs is the fact that cancer is big business. Hundreds of billions of dollars are spent each and every year on behalf of cancer patients and their loved ones who are desperate to reverse this terrible disease. And all of that money winds up in the pockets of the doctors and clinics that treating cancer with these cancer drugs, and, most especially, the pharmaceutical drug companies who manufacture them and promote their use.

Human nature being what it is, it would be foolish to expect those who profit most from the use of these cancer drugs, including oncologists, will suddenly change course and start investigating the cheaper, safer, and far more effective cancer treatments that I have spent decades of my life investigating. Not when their livelihoods depend so greatly on the status quo of cancer care today.

Therefore, it is up to each and every one of us to pressure our elected officials to clean up this sad state of affairs that we are in. To do so, we must insist on the following:

• Oncologists must be prohibited from buying and reselling cancer drugs for profit.

• The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services must begin to establish the fees that are paid under Medicare/Medicaid for cancer drugs and cancer treatments, just as they do for all other drugs and medical procedures.

• The influence of Big Pharma and their lobbyist group the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America must end, both at the FDA, and within Congress (the drug lobby has more lobbyists in Congress and spends more lobbying money there than any other lobbyist group), and the Prescription Drug User Fee Act of 1992 must be rescinded.

If we as a nation can achieve these goals, then truly effective approaches for treating cancer in the United States may at last come into the full light of day.

Thermography: The Safer, More Effective Alternative To Mammograms

2011-04-02T10:42:00.000-07:00

Both holistic and conventional doctors agree that early detection of cancer is very important. Simply put, the earlier cancer is detected, the better the odds are for a full and long-lasting recovery.

One of the most effective ways women can detect breast cancer, as well as other types of cancer, early and safely is by using thermography. Thermography is a safe and effective alternative to mammograms. Let me explain why this is so and why you absolutely must know about thermography in your fight to protect yourself from cancer.

What Is Thermography?

Thermography is the name given to a diagnostic technique that employs thermal (heat) imaging to allow health practitioners to get a clearer idea about what is taking place inside their patients’ bodies. Breast thermography is the name given to thermography when it is used to screen for signs of breast cancer, as well as for determining the overall health of the breast. Unlike mammograms, breast thermography is 100% safe, and is far more accurate in detecting signs of breast cancer than mammograms are. Mammograms fail to detect breast cancer 20 to 40 percent of the time. By contrast, breast thermography successfully detects breast cancer 90%, and has the added benefit of being able to do so up to 8 to 10 years earlier than mammography.

Research published in the American Journal of Radiology confirms how important breast thermography is in the fight against cancer. In addition to confirming thermography’s 90% accuracy rate, the Journal reported that breast thermography has a 90% specificity rate and a 99% sensitivity rate. No other screening method for breast cancer comes close to these rates. For example, the sensitivity rate for physical breast exams is only 18%, while for mammograms and MRIs it is 70 and 71% respectively. Moreover, since 1982 breast thermography has also been approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Despite all these facts, few physicians are even aware of the powerful, health-saving benefits thermography can provide, and fewer still ever tell their patients about it. This is a travesty of the highest order! And it exists largely because of the multiyear and multibillion dollar campaign by the American mammography industry to suppress pubic awareness of thermography. All for the sake of profit at the expense of public safety and well-being!

The following facts make it clear why I stress the importance of thermography to doctors and patients alike. I hope you will pay attention to what I am going to share with you next because it’s vitally important.

Cancer cells double every 90 days. That means it takes 90 days for a single cancer cell to turn into two cells, and approximately one full year before that single cancer cell grows to 16 cells. By the end of year two, if left unchecked, that single cancer cell will have grown to 256 cancer cells, forming a tumor that is .25 centimeters in size. Thermography can detect tumor cells that are even smaller than that—about the size of a single grain of rice. When tumors that small are detected, patients have nearly a 100 percent (99%) chance of long-term survival.

Now consider this: at best, mammography can only detect breast tumors that are 2.5 centimeters in size (about the size of a dime and 10 times the tumor size at the end of year two). This equates to tumors comprised of nearly 4.3 billion cancer cells, a number that will not occur until the end of the eight year after the first cancer cell took hold. Most times, however, mammograms fail to detect breast cancer tumors until they have grown to contain between 69 billion to over 1 trillion cancer cells! Meaning that it is not until the 9th or 10th year, or even later, that mammography will detect breast cancer. (The same is true if breast self-exams, too.) By then, the spread of cancer can often prove too much for conventional cancer treatments to reverse, and also more challenging for practitioners of alternative and integrative cancer care to treat.

Based on the above facts, doesn’t it make sense for all women over the age of 35 to replace their annual mammograms with annual thermography checkups instead? Of course it does!

How Thermography Works

Perhaps you are familiar with night vision goggles used by the military and police agencies. These goggles enable their wearers to spot people in the darkness by the heat signature of their bodies. Thermography works in much the same way. It employs a special infrared sensitive camera to digitally record images of the surface temperature of the body. This enables technicians trained in the use of thermography to detect variations in surface body temperature throughout, as well as the entire body. (As a result, thermography is also highly useful for detecting a wide range of other disease conditions, including prostate and other cancers, inflammatory breast disease, fibromyalgia, gastrointestinal disorder, thyroid issues, hiatal hernias, and even early warning signs of heart disease and stroke!)

Abnormal variations in surface body temperature are biomarkers, or “fingerprints”, indicating the sign of tumors or other potential health problems. These temperature variations can be very subtle, but where they occur, it is highly likely that they are signs of a pathology in the breast. That’s because research has shown that the metabolic activity and vascular circulation in both pre-cancerous and cancerous tissues and the surrounding areas of the breast are almost higher, resulting in an increase in surface body temperature compared to that of normal, healthy breast tissue.

This rise in surface body temperature is also due to the way that cancer cells nourish themselves. As cancer cells and tumors grow, they require an ever-increasing supply of nutrients. In order to obtain these nutrients, tumors increase circulation to their cells by diverting nutrients through existing blood vessels, as well as by opening dormant blood vessels and creating new ones (a process called angiogenesis), all of which raises surface body temperature in the areas of the breast wherever blood vessels have been taken over by tumors. These temperature variations are among the very earliest signs that breast tissue has entered into a pre-cancerous or cancerous state. In fact, studies have shown that an abnormal thermography reading is the single most important indication of high risk for developing breast cancer, ten times as significant as a family history of cancer. Currently, only thermography is capable of detecting these temperature variations at their earliest stages.

Another major advantage of thermography is that it is noninvasive and quick, and free of the discomfort associated with mammograms. There is no compression, no direct contact with the body, and no harmful substances to be exposed to, let alone the cancer-causing radiation emitted by mammograms. Instead, all you have to do is allow your body to reach a steady temperature state that is compatible with the special temperature conditions of the thermography room. This usually takes no more than 15 minutes. After that, you will be positioned in front of the thermography camera so that all surfaces of your breasts, upper chest and underarms can be imaged. The images are captured in real time and then transmitted to a sophisticated computer for analysis. The computer allows your doctor to isolate differences in surface body temperature and vascularity. After the images are analyzed, they are graded using a strict standardized system based on five categories. Depending on the results of your exam, further tests may be ordered should there be any indication of breast abnormalities. (It’s important to note that neither thermography nor mammograms can definitively determine whether or not breast cancer is present in patients. Subsequent testing is always necessary for confirmation.) If your reading is normal, then your doctor has a baseline reading of your breasts that she or he can compare to followup thermography readings as part of your annual health checkup.

Now that you know more about thermography I think you will agree with me that thermography belongs on the frontlines of every early cancer detection program.

To locate a thermography center near you, visit www.iact-org.org/links.html

Medical Genocide?

2011-04-02T10:36:00.000-07:00

Each an every day in the United States, more than 5400 people die as a direct result of properly prescribed pharmaceutical drugs or because of a medical error. Since doctors rarely report medical errors, some experts claim that over 15,000 Americans die each day from medical errors.

Illness is not due to pharmaceutical drug-deficiencies. This basic fact underlies the primary flaw inherent in most of conventional Western medicine.

The Dangers of Mammograms: What You Need To Know (Part 2)

2011-04-01T14:33:00.000-07:00

Last time I explained to you why mammograms are so often ineffective at accurately detecting breast cancer. Today I want to tell you why mammograms can actually increase women’s risk of developing breast and other types of cancer. This shocking fact is well-documented, but you won’t hear it from most doctors. But knowing the truth can safe your life, and sharing the truth about cancer is what my mission is all about.

A Man Ahead of His Time

To fully appreciate the information I’m going to share with you today, you first need to know about one of the most brilliant and accomplished doctors and researchers it was my good fortune to learn from. I’m talking about the late Dr. John W. Gofman. Besides being a doctor, John was also a nuclear chemist and one of the world’s foremost experts on the dangers of low-level radiation, including low-level radiation emitted by x-rays and mammograms.

You may not have heard of John before, but chances are very good that you are familiar with at least one of his scientific developments. You see, it was John who, during the 1940s and 50s, discovered the full range of lipoproteins that exist in the bloodstream. More importantly, John’s work produced the first evidence that high blood levels of certain of these lipoproteins, including LDL (“bad”) cholesterol, were an important risk factor for heart disease. John, in collaboration with his colleague Frank T. Lindgren, created a variety of techniques that led him to discover both LDL and HDL (“good”) cholesterol, as well as a variety of other lipoproteins, including those in the triglyceride-class. Thanks to John, today doctors routinely screen their patients to determine their cholesterol and triglyceride levels to help determine their risk of heart disease.

Because of his pioneering work in this area, John received numerous awards and recognition from his medical peers. In 1954, he received the Modern Medicine Award for his “outstanding contributions to heart disease research.” In 1965, the American Heart Association bestowed him with its Lyman Duff Lectureship Award for his research on atherosclerosis and heart disease, and in 1974 The American College of Cardiology selected him as one of the 25 leading researchers in the field of cardiology of the previous quarter-century.

Impressive as John’s work was in the field of cardiology, his greatest contributions came in the field of nuclear energy, which he began working in during the early 1940s, while still a graduate student at Berkeley University. During this period, John was awarded two patents for his work in developing processes that enabled plutonium to be separated from the uranium and fission products of irradiated nuclear fuel. His work in this field eventually led to him joining the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). At the AEC’s request, at the beginning of the 1960s John established the Biomedical Research Division of the AEC’s Livermore National Laboratory in order to study the effects of nuclear energy on health. As his research in this area continued, John began to focus his attention on studying cancer and chromosomes, and the effect that radiation had on chromosomal mutations and gene stability.

By 1969, John, once a strong proponent of the nuclear energy industry, had concluded that human exposure to ionizing radiation was far more dangerous than scientists, including himself, had previously realized. From that point on, he became a leading spokesman calling for a moratorium on the expansion of nuclear power plants and an end to underground nuclear testing. In 1969, he urged that federal safety guidelines for low-level exposures to radiation be reduced by 90 percent, but was ignored. He was ignored. Soon thereafter, the AEC defunded John’s research on chromosomes and cancer.

After a stint as a professor at U.C. Berkeley, John chose to spend the rest of his life conducting pro-bono (free) research into the effects that radiation has on human health. He also founded the Committee for Nuclear Responsibility. His research led him to conclude that “by any reasonable standard of biomedical proof” there is no safe threshold of ionizing radiation for any human being, and that the use of medical diagnostic tools such as x-rays, mammograms, and CT scans, all of which expose patients to ionizing radiation was a co-factor in approximately 75% of all cases of breast cancer in the United States.

Nor was John afraid to speak his mind on this important topic. Here are excerpts from an interview he gave on the subject in 1994:

“The human experimentation that has been done is bad…But for 25 years the DOE [U.S. Department of Energy] has not shown any concern for the health of Americans. Their concern has been for the health of the DOE. Their falsehoods concerning the hazards of ionizing radiation have put not thousands of people at risk, not millions of people, but billions of people.”

“They have been conducting a Josef Goebels propaganda war, saying there’s a safe dose when there has never been any valid evidence for a safe dose of radiation…We can now say, there cannot be a safe dose of radiation. There is no safe threshold. If this truth is known, then any permitted radiation is a permit to commit murder.”

In spite of these views, John was not against the use of x-rays, mammograms or CT scans altogether. He was all for them if, as he said, “there’s a diagnostic gain for you, something that can really make a difference in your health and your life.” But, as he warned, there is another important part to this equation. As John often pointed out, government studies have repeatedly shown that most hospitals and radiologists “didn’t have the foggiest notion of what dose [of radiation] they were giving you for a procedure,” and that doses could vary by as much as a 20 times higher than what was actually needed for diagnosis.

In his book The Health Effects of Common Exams, which he co-wrote with Egan O’Connor, John showed that simply reducing the average dose of radiation used in medical diagnoses by one-third would prevent 50,000 fatal cancers each and every year. That adds up to saving one million lives in every generation!

Despite John’s stature as one of the world’s leading experts on the health effects of ionizing radiation, his claims about radiation’s link to cancer were strongly refuted by the medical establishment and the nuclear energy industry. But to this day, no one has been able to refute any of John’s claims.

John’s struggle to warn us about the dangers of ionizing radiation, including from mammograms, reminds me of the 19th century physician Ignaz Semmelweis, who was the first Western doctor and surgeon to recommend that physicians wash their hands before treating their patients, and especially before surgery. Dr. Semmelweis made this recommendation after his discovery in 1847 that the incidence of puerperal fever, a common life-threatening condition that killed many women during his time after they gave birth, could be reduced to as low as 1% if physicians would simply first wash their hands before they delivered babies. For making this simple and life-saving recommendation, Semmelweis was ruthlessly attacked by the medical establishment of his time, to the point that he suffered a nervous breakdown and was committed to an asylum where he died. He was only 47 years old. It wasn’t until years afterward that Semmelweis was proven correct, when Louis Pasteur published his famous theory of germs. Think how many lives might have been saved had Semmelweis been listened to instead of mocked and destroyed!

The Medical Establishment Is Still the Same Today

Though Dr. Gofman was also mocked and attacked by his peers over his findings about the health risks of radiation, x-rays, and mammograms, fortunately he was able to live a long and productive life (he passed away in 2007 when he was 88). And, unlike Dr. Semmelweis, decades didn’t have to pass before others confirmed John’s findings. In fact, others came to his defense even while he was still alive. Among them is Dr. Samuel Epstein, another outspoken critic of the cancer establishment.

In his book The Politics of Cancer Revisited, Dr. Epstein estimates that a 20% increased risk of breast cancer could be expected for pre-menopausal women exposed to ten yearly mammograms with two rads per exposure. Yet women today continue not to be warned about this very serious potential risk. Instead, as Dr. Epstein writes, they are “being falsely assured of the benefits” of mammograms, which are still being highly promoted as a preventive deterrent for cancer.

So, here we are in the 21st century, faced with the same arrogance and obstinance on the part of the medical establishment and our own government that Dr. Semmelweis faced two centuries previously. With the same unfortunate results—untold numbers of women who are developing and dying as a direct result of current widely accepted medical procedures, in this case the overuse of mammograms and other diagnostic techniques that emit ionizing radiation.

Fortunately, information, as they say, is power, and my mission is to empower you so that you can escape the clutches of the medical establishment when their recommendations are harmful. Next time, I will tell you about an alternative to mammograms that are not only much safer (completely safe, in fact), but also capable of detecting cancer up to ten years earlier than mammograms can. It’s called thermography, and I will tell you all you need to know about it in my next post. Be sure not to miss it.

To find out more about Dr. John Gofman and his work, I recommend you visit www.ratical.org.

I also recommend the Cancer Prevention Coalition, which was founded by Dr. Samuel Epstein. To find out more, please visit www.preventcancer.com.

The Dangers of Mammograms: What You Need To Know (Part 1)

2011-04-01T14:00:00.000-07:00

Most women and the men who love them are concerned about breast cancer, and for very good reason. Of all cancers, only lung cancer kills more women than breast cancer each year. Not only will breast cancer strike 1 out of every 8 women during the course of their lives, today breast cancer is striking more and more women much earlier than before. Although it remains true that the risks of developing breast cancer increases with age, being young is no longer a protection against this terrible scourge. In fact, the research shows that 15% of all cases of breast cancer in the United States occur in women who are 45 or younger. More alarmingly, when breast cancer strikes earlier in life it is usually more aggressive, and more fatal than when it strikes older women.

In years past, such a high incidence of breast cancer among young women would have been unthinkable, but no longer. The reason, as I constantly point out, is that we are poisoning ourselves to death with all of the toxins that are so rampant, not only in our environment, but even in our food supply!

But environmental toxicity and poor diet are not the only things you need to be aware of. When it comes to breast cancer, there are other important risk factors to be aware of, as well. One of the most important breast cancer risks is a family history of cancer. If cancer runs in your family, then your risk of developing cancer of any kind is higher. However, 75% of all women who develop breast cancer have no family history of cancer.

Women who are childless or who have their first child after age 30 also tend to have a higher risk of developing breast cancer, as to women who have undergone synthetic hormone therapy, including the use of birth control pills, due to the hormonal imbalances that such therapy can cause. Lifestyle factors, such as smoking, lack of exercise, and poor sleep habits, also increase cancer risks, as does alcohol consumption, including wine. (According to cancer researcher Charles B. Simone, MD, drinking as little as two glasses of wine per week can increase the risk of cancer in women by as much as 50%.) Being overweight is another important risk factor.

Sadly, one of the biggest threats comes from the conventional medical establishment and is routinely used by doctors to detect breast cancer. In reality, as I will explain, the use of this diagnostic technique actually significantly increases the risk of cancer. But the medical establishment refuses to admit it.

I’m talking about mammograms.

Why Mammograms Aren’t Your Best Option

Mammograms, along with breast self-examinations, are recommended by most conventional doctors as the best way for women to detect breast cancer. They involved the use of X-rays that allow doctors to look for dense structures within the breast that can be an indication of a tumor. This form of detecting is known as structural imaging. Research shows that mammograms are useful for detecting breast cancer in 80 percent of all women over the age of 50. However, that means that 20% of women age 50 or older can have breast cancer and not have it detected by mammograms! And the problem is even worse when it comes to women under age 50. Among younger women, a shocking 40% of all cases of breast cancer will fail to be detected by mammograms. As I mentioned above, breast cancer in this age group is usually more aggressive (meaning fast-growing) and more likely to prove fatal.

On top of that, mammograms are largely ineffective for detecting cancer located in the upper area of the breast and within the peripheral areas next to the chest wall. They are also likely to miss signs of breast cancer among women who have large or dense breasts, and women who have had breast augmentation. Fibrocystic breast disease can often also prevent breast cancer from being detected by mammograms.

Based on these facts, along with the reliance on mammograms by the medical establishment, it’s no wonder that so many cases of breast cancer fail to be detected until the cancer has metastasized.

The ineffectiveness of mammograms was highlighted by a study conducted by researchers in Norway that was published last year in the New England Journal of Medicine. The study showed only a 10% decrease in breast cancer death among women who regularly screened for breast cancer using mammography. Based on these findings, Dr. H. Gilbert Welch of the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice and author of the book Overdiagnosed, stated that “2,500 [women] would need to be screened for 10 years to avoid one death from breast cancer.” In other words, those same 2,500 women, over the course of 10 years, would receive a total of 25,000 mammograms (once every year) and only one life would be saved! Dr. Welsh also pointed out that such widespread used of mammograms among the women would result in about 1,000 false-positive findings (meaning women would be told they had breast cancer when they didn’t, and would invariably then undergo painful and unnecessary biopsies).

Despite these shocking limitations of mammography, both the American Cancer Society and the American College of Radiology continue to recommend that all women 40 and over receive annual mammograms. Fortunately, other organizations, including the American College of Physicians and the U.S. Preventative Task Force, are wising up and no longer recommend mammograms for women under 50.

But that’s not enough. That’s because mammograms can actually cause breast and other types of cancer. This startling fact is something all doctors should be telling their women patients, but they’re not. Not because they are bad people. But because even they don’t realize how dangerous and ineffective mammograms are.

I’ll explain why next time.

References

American Cancer Society. Breast Cancer Guidelines and Statistics, 2009-2010.

Kalager M, et al. Effect of Screening Mammography on Breast-Cancer Mortality in Norway. New Eng J Med 2010 Sept 23; 363:1203-1210.

How Health Stories Make the News

2009-10-23T10:49:00.000-07:00

The following comes from Jon Rappoport, an investigative reporter I have a lot of respect for.

PROMOTING SWINE FLU FOR FUN AND PROFIT

Jon Rappoport
nomorefakenews.com

OCTOBER 23, 2009.
***

During my 20 years of working as a reporter, I have seen public relations efforts gain more and more power over the press.

I’ve uncovered some simple common denominators when it comes to PR. I’m talking about the kind of PR that provokes reporters into doing pieces that adhere to a planned message.

I’ll boil it down.

First, you have a Group. That Group has some combination of prestige, money, and cultivated authority. It has connections.

The Group has a goal. And it wants the public to agree with the goal.

For example: EVERYONE SHOULD GET VACCINATED.

So the Group formulates a PR plan. It doesn’t operate randomly.

There are meetings and conferences, and a Group leader lays out the steps of the plan.

The plan will involve telling certain stories to reporters. These stories will feature hooks that evoke feelings in the public consciousness. Fear and sympathy, for instance.

Designated members of the Group will contact a list of reporters with these stories. The list is time-tested: the reporters will be friendly. They won’t want to dig deeper or ask embarrassing questions.

Because after all, the stories contain lies.

That’s why there is a need for PR.

A PR agency might be hired, or the PR might be run by the Group’s specialists, who already have good media contacts.

Now, by and large, mainstream medical reporters are lazy when it comes to discovering facts and details on their own. They spend a lot of time talking to experts who can feed them fully formed stories.

Therefore, to serve the reporters, the Group has to have these experts on tap. The experts can be Group members, or they can be friendly outsiders.

BUT THEY MUST BE RECOGNIZED EXPERTS IN THEIR FIELD.

In this case, professors of medicine, researchers, medical bureaucrats, prestigious doctors.

Experts are absolutely vital to the Group’s PR plan. As I say, medical reporters, on the whole, love experts, because then the work is easy. There is no need to question the expert’s reliability or look beyond his statements. There is a rarely a need to find an opposing view to “balance out” the piece.

Medical reporters become pets. They open their mouths, and their owners put food in.

The Group anticipates some degree of resistance from less friendly reporters and from the public. The Group’s plan won’t be a complete cakewalk. But by inundating the friendly reporters with stories that have the ring of authority and evoke fear and sympathy, the Group believes it will carry the day.

There is an interesting wrinkle on the “expert strategy.” The Group funds an advocacy organization, and that advocacy organization will assume the status of an expert, cultivate media contacts, and give statements to reporters who are writing stories on certain issues.

For example:

New York Times
Drug Makers Are Advocacy Group’s Biggest Donors
By GARDINER HARRIS
October 21, 2009

WASHINGTON — A majority of the donations made to the National Alliance on Mental Illness , one of the nation’s most influential disease advocacy groups, have come from drug makers in recent years, according to Congressional investigators.

The alliance, known as NAMI, has long been criticized for coordinating some of its lobbying efforts with drug makers and for pushing legislation that also benefits industry.

End NY Times clip

Then we have the infamous case of CHADD. I wrote about that advocacy group ten years ago, and to give you the flavor of how egregious such a situation can get, I’ll quote myself on it at length:

The PBS television series, The Merrow Report, produced in 1996 a program called "Attention Deficit Disorder: A Dubious Diagnosis?" The Educational Writer's Association awarded the program first prize for investigative reporting that year. The piece managed to catch a government official in the act of realizing he had made serious mistakes.

In the film, John Merrow, the series' host, explains that, unknown to the public, there has been "a long-term, unpublicized financial relationship between the company that makes the most widely known ADD medication [Ritalin] and the nation's largest ADD support group."

The group is CHADD, based in Florida. CHADD stands for Children and Adults with ADD. Its 650 local chapters sponsor regional conferences and monthly meetings---often held at schools. It educates thousands of families about ADD and ADHD and gives out free medical advice. This advice features the drug Ritalin.

Since 1988, when CHADD and Ciba-Geigy (now Novartis), the manufacturer of Ritalin, began their financial relationship, Ciba has given almost a million dollars to CHADD, helping it to expand its membership from 800 to 35,000 people.

Merrow interviews several parents whose children are on Ritalin, parents who have been relying on CHADD for information. They are clearly taken aback when they learn that CHADD obtains a significant amount of its funding from the drug company that makes Ritalin.

CHADD has used Ciba money to promote its pharmaceutical message through a public service announcement produced for television. Nineteen million people have seen this PSA. As Merrow says, "CHADD's name is on it, but Ciba Geigy paid for it."

It turns out that in all of CHADD's considerable literature written for the public, there is rare mention of Ciba. In fact, the only instance of the connection Merrow could find on the record was a small-print citation on an announcement of a single CHADD conference.

In recounting CHADD's promotion of drug "therapy" for ADD, Merrow says, "CHADD's literature also says psychostimulant medications [like Ritalin] are not addictive."

Merrow brings this up to Gene Haslip, a Drug Enforcement Agency official in Washington. Haslip is visibly annoyed. "Well," he says, "I think that's very misleading. It's certainly a drug that can cause a very high degree of dependency, like all of the very potent stimulants."

Merrow reveals that CHADD received a $750,000 grant from the US Dept. of Education, in 1996, to produce a video, Facing the Challenge of ADD. The video doesn't just mention the generic name methylphenidate, it announces the drug by its brand name, Ritalin. This, at government (taxpayer) expense.

We see a press conference announcing the release of the video. The CHADD president presents an award to Dr. Thomas Hehir, Director of Special Education Programs at the US Dept. of Education.

This sets the stage for a conversation between Merrow and Dr. Hehir, providing a rare moment when discovery of the truth is recorded on camera.

MERROW: "Are you aware that most of the people in the film [Facing the Challenge of ADD---referring to people who are giving testimonials about how their ADD children have been helped by treatment] are not just members of CHADD ... but in the CHADD leadership, including the former national president? They're all board members of CHADD in Chicago. Are you aware of that? They're not identified in the film."

HEHIR: "I'm not aware of that."

MERROW: "Do you know about the financial connection between CHADD and Ciba Geigy, the company that makes Ritalin?"

HEHIR: "I do not."

MERROW: "In the last six years, CHADD has received $818,000 in grants from Ciba Geigy."

HEHIR: "I did not know that."

MERROW: "Does that strike you as a potential conflict of interest?"

HEHIR: "That strikes me as a potential conflict of interest. Yes it does."

MERROW: "Now, that's not disclosed either. Even though the film talks about Ritalin as [one way of] taking care of treating Attention Deficit Disorder. That's not disclosed either. Does that trouble you?"

HEHIR: "Um, it concerns me."

MERROW: "Are you going to look into this, when you go back to your office?"

HEHIR: "I certainly will look into some of the things you've brought up."

MERROW: "Should they have told you that all those people in that film are CHADD leadership? Should they have told you that CHADD gets twenty percent of its money from the people who make Ritalin?"

HEHIR: "I should have known that."

MERROW: "They should have told you."

HEHIR: "Yes."

This funded video, in which CHADD devotes all of twenty seconds to mentioning Ritalin's adverse effects, is no longer distributed by the US Department of Education.

CHADD has now told its members that it receives funding from Ciba. It says it will continue to take money from Ciba.

This is an example of how a corporation can, behind the scenes, bend and shape the way the public sees reality.

So that’s what I wrote ten years ago. An advocacy organization can become a very powerful “expert” for the Group and thereby influence the public. In CHADD’s case, it managed to work directly through a government media outlet, the US Department of Education.

For a third example, one could do far worse than highlight the fundraising machine called the American Cancer Society (ACS), a billion-dollar non-profit. ACS exerts its considerable influence along many fronts: promoting chemotherapy and funding chemo research; affecting media reporting on cancer treatments; and diverting attention away from non-drug cancer prevention that involves removing chemical carcinogens from the environment. ACS also has become a self-proclaimed authority on alternative cancer treatments---which it labels Quackery.

The ACS has, of course, intimate connections with pharmaceutical companies. Saying the ACS fronts for these companies vastly underplays the power it has gained over the years. ACS has risen to the position of equal partner with the cancer-drug industry and, indeed, the US National Cancer Institute, world center for toxic chemo research.

Which brings us to the CDC PR plan for inducing millions of Americans to receive vaccinations for Swine Flu. Or any flu.

A 2006 article in Harper’s lays it all out. The author, Peter Doshi, focuses on the 2004 National Influenza Vaccine Summit, a conference at which Glen Nowak (CDC) used slides to present messages the CDC would project to the public through US media outlets.

Doshi writes, “The [CDC] recipe, as Nowak revealed, relies on creating ‘concern, anxiety, and worry’---its main ingredient, in other words, is fear.”

Doshi continues: “Government officials and health experts following the recipe are instructed to ‘predict dire outcomes.’”

This recipe was, in part, based on experience garnered two years earlier. Doshi: “From a 2002 focus group, the CDC determined death statistics in its flu-prevention literature were ‘eye catching and motivating.’ Participants in the study [focus group] believed ‘20,000 deaths was compelling, frightening,’ and ‘should be part of the headline.’”

Doshi continues: “Another way to ‘motivate behavior,’ the CDC recipe notes…is to describe a flu season as ‘very severe,’ ‘more severe’ than previous years, and ‘deadly’…Yet that winter’s flu season was later ruled typical and ‘medium in terms of impact.’”

Then Doshi unleashes a different kind of blockbuster in the article. Speaking to the CDC ‘deadly’ label, he notes: “After looking at more than three decades of data, scientists at the National Institutes of Health last year [2005] concluded, ‘We could not coordinate increasing vaccination coverage after 1980 with declining mortality rates in any age group.’”

The year 2004 was a strange one for the CDC flu-promotion efforts, and it reveals how disconnected CDC PR can be from the notion of truth. Doshi describes the situation:

“…the [CDC] recipe emphasizes that the public must be made to grasp the ‘seriousness of the illness.’ When 50 million doses of vaccine suddenly became unavailable in 2004, Americans understandably panicked…and medical experts predicted a public-health ‘catastrophe.’ The CDC, with its knowledge of PR, downgraded its scary portrayal of the flu [in general] to ‘an annoying illness’ from which most people ‘will recover just fine.’ It stressed the protective benefits of regular hand washing. And once the alleged crisis abated, the agency [CDC] returned to its strident communications plan. By the next fall, the CDC director was publicly stating that the flu is not ‘a benign illness. Many people don’t appreciate that it can result in hospitalization, various complications. For about 36,000 people every year, death.’”

A few final points. The CDC, through one of its departments, the Epidemic Intelligence Service, sometimes nicknamed “the medical CIA,” recruits young doctors who do a period of work in the field, with various health departments, looking into potential disease clusters and possible epidemics.

After this time of service, these doctors, returning to their practices, remain on call. They are trained to remain loyal to the CDC, and it’s likely that, wherever they work---for health agencies, in other government positions, in hospitals---they push the party line. They promote adherence to CDC PR. They are useful PR alumni.

Some years ago, I learned that the CDC sends a certain number of its people to the CIA for training. (I confirmed this with a Health and Human Services employee.) These people return to the CDC with higher security clearances. In 2009, with the PR lines between “epidemics” and bio-terrorism blurring, it’s certain that the CDC-CIA connection has become more solid and unified.

What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. Every (fake) CDC pronouncement of an epidemic or pandemic, by association, becomes a kind of reference point for the CIA, as it promotes (to the Congress) its own need for greater funding to combat potential bio-terrorism.

Having an ally like the CIA can’t be bad for the CDC. When it comes to telling lies and launching propaganda, the CIA has a great deal of experience. And CIA media contacts are legendary.

Jon Rappoport has worked as an independent investigative reporter since 1982. The LA Weekly nominated him for a Pulitzer Prize, for an interview he did with the president of El Salvador University, where the military had taken over the campus and was disappearing students and burning books. He has written for In These Tines, Village Voice, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, CBS Healthwatch, Stern. He is the author of AIDS INC., The Secret Behind Secret Societies, and Oklahoma Bombing: The Suppressed Truth. His website is nomorefakenews.com

More Proof the FDA Protects Big Pharma and Other Special Interests, Not Your Health

2009-09-02T09:15:00.000-07:00

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has long been in the pockets of Big Pharma and other special interests opposed to the public’s right to access non-drug-based health care methods of their choice. Sadly, however, most people today believe that the FDA lives up to its mandate to protect them. While there are certainly many dedicated and conscientious scientists and researchers employed by the FDA who are attempting to do just that, their efforts are often thwarted at the FDA’s administration level, due to the cozy and incestuous relationship between FDA higher ups, including many of its commissioners, past and present, and the special interest groups the FDA is charged with regulating.

What follows are two recent examples of the FDA’s abuse of its power at the expense of we the people who fund its operations with our tax dollars. The first was forwarded to me by my friend Dr. Garry Gordon, who wrote: “This is sad. We find out that the Commissioner of FDA was a director of Henry Schein, a major supplier of amalgam to the dentists. She has chosen to protect her stock value and ignore the mercury health risk to children.”

FDA’s Sharfstein Covers Up Mercury-Neurological Harm Nexus (6 August 2009)

FDA Deputy Commissioner Joshua Sharfstein has given his seal of approval to major mercury exposure for millions of America’s children and unborn children – and to covering up both the neurological risks and the flawed rulemaking process.

Despite admitting that amalgam causes mercury exposure -- and despite knowing that mercury causes neurological harm to developing brains -- Sharfstein rejects putting on contraindications for amalgam, rejects putting on warnings on amalgam and even rejects a requirement that dentists tell patients that amalgam is mainly mercury.

Sharfstein even withdraws FDA’s website warning that dental mercury can cause permanent neurological harm to children and unborn children. Sharfstein’s rule actually says FDA wants to stop a decline in amalgam sales. At Joshua Sharfstein’s FDA, commerce trumps safety.

When the Republicans ran FDA, to their real credit, they put this warning on the FDA website: “Dental amalgams contain mercury, which may have neurotoxic effects on the nervous systems of developing children and fetuses.” Upon assuming power, the Democrats withdrew this warning, covering up the fact that mercury from amalgam causes permanent harm to young children and kills unborn babies. Is this the change we Americans voted for?

Washington is famous for the revolving door -- those in the party out of power takes highly paid corporate positions, then returns to government to bail out their benefactors. The new FDA Commissioner, Margaret Hamburg, worked in the Clinton Administration, then went out and became a director at the dental products colossus Henry Schein, earning a quarter million dollars a year for the handful of hours it takes to be a director. Corporations do this because they know the other party will return to power, at which time the corporations will call in their chits.

Upon becoming Commissioner, Dr. Hamburg owned between $250,000 and $500,000 of Henry Schein stock. Certainly the Harvard-educated Hamburg knew the amalgam rule had the potential to affect her stock value. She could have done the right thing -- recuse herself from the rule. Instead, she worked on the rule for a while, then recused herself gradually, first by “deciding not to participate,” then finally “recusing.” Certainly her next-in-command, Deputy Commissioner, Joshua Sharfstein got the message that there was more at stake than good government.

On what date did Hamburg sell her Schein stock? What work did Hamburg do on the rule before she recused herself? What work did she do protecting amalgam from regulators while at Schein? Through her lawyer, Hamburg refuses to answer any of these questions. Ironically, Sharfstein heads a new a FDA “transparency task force.” A perfect first project would be to expose the Hamburg-Henry Schein links.

Joshua Sharfstein had the opportunity to protect children from amalgam, to save unborn babies and nursing babies from mercury exposure, and to warn us all that amalgam exposes us to toxic mercury. He came to Washington as a child advocate, but changed his stripes once he saw the revolving door game in action. Throwing his reputation out the window, Joshua Sharfstein chose to ally with the amalgam industry and cover up the mercury, turning his back on the children of America.

Just as Margaret Hamburg has embarrassed President Obama for bringing back revolving-door government, Joshua Sharfstein has embarrassed the President for deciding not to reduce the use of mercury in oral health care. If ever a President entered office as an inalterable opponent of mercury, it is Barack Obama, who wrote a law banning mercury exports and who is working for a treaty to phase out man-made mercury by a date certain. But at FDA, his appointee Sharfstein is sabotaging the President’s policies by hiding the mercury from Americans and hence keeping amalgam sales going into the indefinite future.

FDA doesn’t even defend its rule on the science. FDA admits it does not know if mercury fillings are safe for children six and under, or for nursing mothers whose mercury goes through the breast milk, or for pregnant women whose dental mercury No, it’s not science -- it’s about commerce. FDA wants Americans to keep buying amalgam.

The children of America have lost. Another generation will be mercury toxic.

Need further evidence on who won? Just yesterday (Aug. 5), Henry Schein’s CEO Stanley Bergman offered this salute to Dr. Hamburg:

“I would like to extend on behalf of the company, our Board and our shareholders our sincere thanks to Dr. Margaret Hamburg, who has served as the Director of Henry Schein Company's Board since 2003. Dr. Hamburg left our Board following her confirmation as Commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. We would like to thank Dr. Hamburg for the insight she shared with the Henry Schein Board throughout the years and wish her continued success.”

Hamburg claims she broke her ties with Schein three months ago. But Schein’s CEO issues his thank-you the day after the FDA rule was published in the Federal Register. Margaret Hamburg may not be in the hip pocket of Henry Schein Inc, but Schein’s CEO sure thinks she is. And he has the evidence to show it: a rule that allows Schein to sell amalgam to anyone, a rule that covers up the mercury, a rule that contains propaganda to be used by Schein to defend against the upcoming class action suits.

FDA bans mercury in all veterinary products. The new FDA, under Margaret Hamburg and her Sancho Panza, Joshua Sharfstein, have decided that children don’t merit the protection FDA gives horses and dogs.

The Washington bigshots have direct access to Joshua Sharfstein. So should you: his e-address is JMSharf1@fda.hhs.gov Why not write him yourself? Talking points follow:

Questions to consider asking Deputy Commissioner Sharfstein

(1) Dr Sharfstein, why, under your rule, are children less important than horses and dogs when it comes to mercury exposure?

(2) Why did you Democrats withdraw FDA’s website warning that dental mercury can cause neurological harm to children and unborn children, which the Republican Commissioner agreed to last year?

(3) Will your new “transparency task force” disclose the details of your boss’s ties with Henry Schein, or will she be allowed to cover it up like you cover up the risks of ental mercury?

(4) Does President Obama know that you approved a rule that will keep Americans from learning that amalgam is mainly mercury, and does the President know about Commissioner Hamburg’s conflict of interest with Henry Schein?

Charles G. Brown, National Counsel
Consumers for Dental Choice
www.toxicteeth.org

This next item was sent to me by Deborah A. Ray, MT of the American Association for Health Freedom, an organization I strongly support. (To find out more about AAHF, visit www.healthfreedom.net.)

FDA Attacks Natural Thyroid Millions Depend On

We have learned that Time-Cap Labs, producer of a generic version of the brand name drug Armour, a natural and bioidentical thyroid replacement, has been ordered by the FDA to stop production. The FDA has decided to classify the company’s product, available for over a century, as an unapproved new drug. Since the new drug approval process is prohibitively expensive for a non-patentable substance, the FDA is in effect banning the natural product. The purpose? Presumably to protect the profits of other, inferior drugs that have been FDA approved.

According to statistics by the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists and other medical organizations, approximately twenty-seven million Americans have a thyroid disorder. Thyroid consumer advocate Mary Shomon projects that 2 million of these patients take either Armour Thyroid or a generic equivalent.

Armour and other "whole" natural thyroid preparations (including Westhroid and Nathroid as well as Time-Cap Lab’s Thyroid) are bio-identical, complete hormone preparations, containing "T4" "T3" "T2" and "T1" in the same proportions made by the human thyroid.

The FDA approved preparations Synthroid (T4), Cytomel (T3), and Levethyroxine (T4) include bio-identical molecules, but are not complete or totally bio-identical as they do not contain "T2" or "T1". It’s no wonder so many people feel much better with the balanced natural products that have been available for generations.

As famed physician Dr. Jonathan Wright observes: “Natural thyroid has never killed or severely harmed anyone since first use in the 1890s, prior to the FDA itself. It is a mainstay not only in the treatment of hypothyroidism but also in ‘healthy aging’ therapy. That the FDA should even be its thinking of requiring a new drug approval for a safe, 100 plus year old natural treatment is outrageous.”

We will report further as soon as we confirm more of the facts, and as always, we’ll let you know how you can get involved.

And It's The Same Story in Hong Kong

2009-08-28T08:06:00.000-07:00

More than half of health care workers surveyed in Hong Kong said they would refuse to be vaccinated against swine flu, according to a study released Wednesday.

Fear of side effects and doubts as to efficacy were the two main reasons cited, said the study, published online by the British Medical Journal (BMJ).

UK Doctors and Nurses Refuse To Take New Swine Flu Vaccine

2009-08-27T09:28:00.000-07:00

More than half of doctors and a third of nurses in the UK say they would not take the new swine flu vaccine when it becomes available this autumn.

They are concerned that the vaccine may not be safe, as it will not have been thoroughly tested, and it may not work. They also feel that swine flu is a more benign virus than early reports suggested.

A survey of 216 family doctors has discovered that nearly 60 per cent would refuse to have the vaccine – even though they are considered ‘front line’ workers who should be protected – and a third of 1,500 nurses polled also said they would not want to be vaccinated.

The public also has its reservations, a study in a Canadian journal has found. It would take a big PR campaign to convince them to have the vaccine, researchers found.

(Source: The Guardian, 25 August 2009).

Larry Flynt Tells It Like It Is

2009-08-21T08:12:00.000-07:00

This is a must read editorial:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/larry-flynt/common-sense-2009_b_264706.html

Connecting the Dots: Swine Flu, Global Warming, Goldman Sachs

2009-07-23T09:10:00.000-07:00

As the media continues to bombard us with fear-laden stories about swine flu, global warming, the economic downturn, etc, I’ve become increasingly aware of the very same underlying theme behind such stories that writer Steven Grant outlines below. This is taken from his most recent column, Permanent Damage, which appears each Wednesday at www.comicbookresources.com (yes, I’m an avid fan of comic books, but I primarily read Steven’s column because of his insightful views on world events). I was planning to write a piece about what Steven discusses myself, but he did such a cogent, intelligent job of it that I’m sharing his version instead. Here it is:

“Back in the real world, all kinds of interesting and bizarre things seem to be going on. The new swine flu continues to generate urgency and panic, mostly among governments and news agencies, with several European and American state governments gearing up for mandatory vaccinations (for anyone who doesn't voluntarily get one, of course, so they can maintain the illusion that vaccinations are voluntary), and various members of the federal government have been putting forth the idea that mandatory vaccine shots are entirely Constitutional, suggesting the Feds are considering it as well. Meanwhile, the virus seems not to be cooperating very well in the production of sufficient volume of vaccine (everyone needs two shots, apparently), and levels aren't rising fast enough for interested parties' tastes. There's also much talk of bypassing FDA testing and approval procedures – emergency, you know – to speed delivery, while exempting vaccine manufacturers from lawsuit in the event vaccines. (There are several different ones being made by different companies, all of them qualifying as experimental at best.) While such exemptions are fairly standard, historically swine flu vaccines have done more harm than good, as in 1976, when public outcry forced the government to abandon vaccinations after deaths and the paralyzing Guillain-Barré syndrome were connected to the vaccinations.

That year swine flu came and went without much widespread effect.

What makes this year's version interesting isn't so much the flu itself – the deaths associated with it so far appear to only result in people with already seriously compromised immune systems, meaning that in symptom and effect it's pretty much like any other flu – but that the promotion of a vaccine has followed almost exactly on the 1976 script, with dire warnings that, after a very mild spring and summer as far as flu cases go, it will mutate and return with a vengeance in the fall. But why are they so sure it will mutate, and if it does, why so sure it'll mutate into a devastating variety? A slew of contradictory messages from the World Health Organization hasn't helped much. News that they're "tweaking" the virus, ostensibly to help antivirus manufacture, comes on the heels of news they're investigating reports the flu is man-made, in labs in, of all places, my alma mater, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where samples of the horrific 1918 Spanish flu drawn a couple years ago from a frozen Inuit corpse of that era have been experimented with. (A genetic similarity of the "Mexican" flu, as it's called in Europe, to the Spanish flu is the legitimate concern in all this.) Meanwhile, WHO also quietly (or, rather, barely) announced they will no longer tally swine flu-related deaths. No reason was given, but the implication is clear: there aren't enough deaths to support the hysteria campaigns surrounding the flu.

But in England, at least, flu fever rages on, as it was revealed that Tony Blair's wife contracted the dastardly bug. The message spread far and wide by Britain's media was that even the families of the famous and powerful

That this should come at a moment when other European nations are facing their own populace resistance to immunizations and when Blair is openly politicking with the EU to effectively become president of Europe makes for... interesting timing.

Thrown into this mish-mash is Goldman-Sachs, the brokerage firm that recently infuriated the nation by posting massive profits and huge bonuses for their latest quarter after cheerfully soaking up billions in government aid after pleading impending financial disaster following last year's sub-prime crash and its fallout. Hidden for most amid all that outrage is that Goldman-Sachs is suing a former employee who allegedly stole proprietary software that a judge declared can be used to manipulate the entire market.

Aside from its status as an old and venerated investment firm with strong ties to the government (not to mention the Russians), what guarantee do we have that Goldman-Sachs hasn't been using their software to manipulate the stock market? Would they have developed this software without intent to use it? Considering the profits they seem to have cobbled together while all around them in investments are holding on for dear life. We can "blame" everything on the free market, but manipulation and free market forces are often hard to distinguish in the moment, as in the 2002 California energy crisis (from which the West has never really recovered – its effects went well beyond California – and which greatly contributed to California's current economic crisis) that was originally chalked up to "market forces" but turned out to be the work of an energy cartel rigging prices.

What ties all this together is a meme that I ran across four times while flipping channels in the last week. (Sorry, they came and went too fast to have noted references.) Russia's President Medvedev, talking to member of the EU, brought up the possibility of a world government. Discussing last October's financial collapse and the ongoing international financial crisis, a financial guru on CNBC announced another, worse financial crisis will hit within six months (he didn't specify its nature) and the only way to deal with or prevent these financial crises is a single world government – he called it crucial and necessary - with the power to control all currencies and regulate all financial transactions. A health official (not sure if he was CDC or some other organization) suggested that the current swine flu may only be the first of many "superbugs" facing us in this century and that the most effective way to deal with the impending threat is a world government that can act unilaterally to combat them. Someone promoting Al Gore's global warming agenda (which has been taking some pretty severe hits lately, seemingly making many who've warmed to Gore's ideas even more determined to enact a sweeping anti-global warming program ASAP) was lauding the virtues of the "carbon credits" idea being shoved through Congress at the moment and stated the best way to ensure carbon credits were being traded fairly (though, it should be mentioned, Gore owns the trading system and would personally profit on every trade) and keep it from becoming another bubble/bust in the making is – say it with me now – a world government overseeing the whole thing.

I'm not exactly a John Bircher, but when the same thing is mentioned in this many different contexts in such a short space of time, something's in the air, or something's in the water. What gives? The wider context most of them share is the concept of imminent and critical necessity - the same premise for the Iraq War, and while I'm generally in line with global warning crew some of them are getting pretty damn scary in a Robespierre kind of way. Anyway, in the midst of all this, it suddenly came to me what Al Gore really wants with this whole carbon credits sideshow. (The basic translation of carbon credits: you can still pollute and burn energy as much as you want, as long as you buy someone off.)

He wants to be the first President Of Earth. (Take that, land that robbed him of his triumph in 2000!)

These are the questions I'd like answered: why is everyone talking one-world government in passing all of a sudden? Why is that suddenly supposed to be the answer to all crises? Should we ever make decisions based on crisis necessity, since the tools clearly exist to generate any crisis necessary, whether political, economic, environmental or medical? And if Blair, Gore & Medvedev duke it out to be first president of the world, can we make it a cage match?

(Note: No Fox News program, personality or source was consulted in the writing of this piece.)” are not safe from the bug… What was severely downplayed in the reports was her relatively mild incapacitation – was there ever a moment when she seemed anywhere near death? – and that neither Tony nor their children (so far) contracted the flu. So how contagious is it, really?

Copyright © 2009 by Steven Grant. All rights reserved.)

All I will add to Steven’s comments is that I personally believe that the agenda for a one-world government has been in the works since at least the dawn of the 20^th century, and that things have slowly but inexorably moving in that direction primarily due to the increasingly intrusive control of government in our lives under the guise of social services and national security.Additionally, I do not believe the official stories about swine flu, global warming, or the economy. My view is that they are all media manipulations in service of an elite agenda.

World Health Org Still Beating the Swine Flu Drum

2009-06-09T11:37:00.000-07:00

The Associated Press reports today that Margaret Chan, Director General of the World Health Organization (WHO) now believes that the swine flu (H1N1) outbreak "appears to have reached pandemic proportions." Chan intends to make a conference call to government leaders around the world tomorrow once she obtains "indisputable evidence." Currently, WHO states that swine flu has affected 26,563 people in 73 countries and caused 140 deaths.

Whoa, stop the presses. What an emergency. Far less than one percent of everyone who develops swine flu dies!

As far as I'm concerned, this is more fear-mongering by WHO, happily spread by a very compliant and ill-informed media.

Tomorrow, be on the lookout for calls from WHO and others for more vaccines (possibly mandatory), etc.

What will not be mentioned, should such calls occur, is the inherent risks such vaccines have, and the far greater percentage of deaths they are likely to cause.

As always, your best protection is to be informed and educate yourself because you simply cannot trust the media to ask the right questions or provide the best answers.

NYC Swine Flu Death

2009-05-18T07:50:00.000-07:00

It's now being reported that Mitchell Wiener, an assistant principal of a high school in Queens, NY died of swine flu yesterday. Previously, when he was hospitalized last week, NY's Mayor Michael Bloomberg was quoted in the NY Post as saying that Mr. Wiener had "a pre-exisiting" health condition. As far as I've been able to find, now word of what that pre-existing condition has been stated in the media. Instead, we are being told simply that swine flu killed Mr. Wiener.

But did it?

Before that question can be answered, the following questions must also be asked:

What was Mr. Wiener's pre-exisiting condition?

How long did he have it (from the pictures of him now appearing in the media, neither he nor his wife look healthy and both are overweight)?

While hospitalized, was he exposed to infectious bacteria and/or viruses? (Hospitals are notorious for being breeding grounds for such infectious agents; as a result, many people in the US each year die from infections that they did not have prior to being hospitalized.)

What was Mr. Wiener's immune status prior to being exposed to H1N1 (swine flu)?

By all accounts, Mr. Wiener was an exemplary educator who went well beyond the call of duty when it came to his job description, and his passing is a tragic loss for all who knew him. But we still do not know for certain whether or not H1N1 was the primary factor in his passing. And even if it was, there is still no call for alarm. Mahy people regularly die from "normal" flu-related causes, too. When they do, it isn't front page news.

Tamiflu And Other Fun Facts (Swine Flu Redux)

2009-05-05T19:58:00.000-07:00

The shelf life of Tamiflu is three years. After that, it cannot be used.

The last time governments around the world (especially the U.S.) stockpiled Tamiflu was in 2006 (3 years ago). Said stock piles can no longer be used.

The reason Tamiflu was stockpiled by governments in 2006 - avian (bird) flu, aka SARS.

The reason governments around the world are once again stockpiling Tamiflu - the H1N1 virus aka swine flu.

Parallels between SARS and H1N1:

Widespread fear, primarily fostered by the World Health Organization (WHO), The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), various governments and the media.

Economic and social turmoil.

Widespread slaughter of chickens (SARS) and pigs (H1N1).

World placed on alert for widespread pandemic(s).

Talk of government-enforced quarantines.

Huge financial windfall for the makers of Tamiflu (as well as for other vaccine makers). Ka-Ching! Ka-Ching!

Last swine flu outbreak - 1976.

Some noteworthy results of 1976 swine flu outbreak:

Zero to few deaths directly caused by swine flu (depending on one's source).

At least 25 people killed as a direct result of being vaccinated in order to be protected from swine flu.

Dozens of people paralyzed as a direct result of receiving said vaccinations, including healthy people in their 20s. (The paralysis was caused by Guillain Barre, a nerve disorder caused by the vaccine.)

Potential side effects caused by Tamiflu vaccine:

Brain Infections

Convulsions

Delirium

Psychotic Behavior

Death (over a dozen Japanese teenagers died as a direct result of being vaccinated with Tamiflu; for this reason Tamiflu has been banned in Japan since 2007).

Other, more common side effects of Tamiflu:

Coughing

Diarrhea

Dizziness

Fainting

Headache

Nausea

Vomiting

All of which can also be caused by swine and other types of flu.

Time decrease of swine flu symptoms Tamiflu is said to achieve by its manufacturer: 24-36 hours.

Total confirmed swine flu deaths as of this writing (last time I checked-May 5, 2009): 19

Average number of people killed by lightning strikes each year - 1,100-1,200.

Yep, we have a pandemic all right!

Primary take away message of WHO, CDC, world governments, and the media regarding H1N1 virus:

Be afraid! Be very afraid!

Your choice: To believe or not to believe.

Swine Flu-The Hype and the Hoax

2009-05-04T08:45:00.000-07:00

Last week the World Health Organization (WHO) announced that - OOPS! - there have only been 7 deaths from swine flu - not 152 or more. You can read WHO's statement here:

http://www.smh.com.au/world/only-7-swine-flu-deaths-not-152-says-who-20090429-aml1.html

I doubt that will corral the media's fear festival for a while, though. Not when the makers of the two supposedly effective drugs announced for swine flu (one of which, Tamiflu, is known to cause death and psychotic behavior in teens) are laughing all the way to the bank now that Janet (9/11 Was Caused By Terrorists Who Crossed the Canadian Border-What? I'm Wrong?-Well, I Don't Want To Focus On The Past, I Want To Focus on the Future and the Future Is that Canada Has A Border) Napolitano (Seriously, she actually said all that!) and other government puppets around the world have caused Big Pharma's coffers to go KA-CHING KA-CHING with government mandated purchases of said drugs. Nobody serves Big Pharma better after all than idiot reporters who don't know the first thing about investigative journalism and government bureaucrats in thrall to the Drug and other Big Industries.

Talk about a bad movie. One that we already experienced a few years ago. Then it was called bird flu (SARS) and after all the hoopla of that manufactured fear fest died down (no pun intended) the upshot was (and is) that a total of less than 300 people worldwide died of SARS and all of them were either living and working in highly unhealthy, unsanitary conditions (those in Asia) or already significantly immune compromised (mostly elderly patients in Toronto). That time, Napolitano's stand-in was Tommy (I Love Big Pharma) Thompson and others in the previous White House junta. (Yes, I view the Obama WH just as cynically, if not more so)

In the case of the current swine flu hoopla, only people in Mexico have died. They too live in very unfortunate circumstances, not the least of which, in Mexico City and elsewhere, is some of the worst air pollution on the planet (so thick at times that I literally could not see across the street at street level when I was there, and things have only gotten worse since then), which in and of itself is a serious suppressor of immunity. And even in the 7 cases that WHO has now downscaled to, no actual autopsy has been performed that definitely proves swine flu was the cause of death. (These days, health authorities rely on the presence of antibodies as proof of the presence of a specific disease. Such nonsense has repeatedly been debunked by investigative journalist Jon Rappoport, and you can find more about why I agree with him by reading his posts on the subject on his website, www.nomorefakenews.com. Bottom line, all antibodies prove is that your body is doing the job it was designed to do. The exact opposite of what WH0, the CDC, and others twist their presence to mean with regard to viruses.)

What's also not being much focused upon is that this is not the first so-called outbreak of swine flu in the US. A previous flare up occurred in the 1970s when Gerald (Tumbledown) Ford was prez and wanted to mandate swine flu vaccinations for everyone. Fortunately, not enough vaccine was available for him to do so. I say fortunately because no one died of swine flu back then, yet 25 people died of the vaccine, hundreds of others were seriously injured by it (including at a number of cases of paralysis), and mutliple lawsuits were brought about Big Pharma as a result.

I wrote more about swine flu in my newsletter last week (www.1healthyworld.com/ezine/vol7no12.cfm), including common sense precautions that are basically free and available to anyone who wants to take responsibility for his/her health.

The bottom line is this - don't belief the hype and hysteria. You have a choice: Become informed and follow common sense health practices, or live in fear and line up for your potentially fatal vaccine shot when our government gets around to making Ford's wish come true. (With the Dems in power, that's more likely than ever, especially with clowns like Congressman Waxman increasingly gaining control over our nation's health care policies.)