Top Stories of 2008
Confirm Disturbing Trends

© By Peter Barry Chowka

(January 1, 2009) Top ten, top five, and other “best of” lists are very popular when the New Year rolls around. In a review of 2008, I have selected five areas that for me – a person interested in alternative medicine, health care, politics, and media – helped to define our current situation and perhaps point to future developments and trends.

In the previous edition of NaturalHealthLine, I focused on one of the five topics, HIV/AIDS in Africa with an emphasis on developments in the largest country on the continent, South Africa. The other four subjects I’ve come up with are domestically based and they are not unrelated to each other in terms of the complex and multilayered matrix that defines modern life in a technologically advanced society. In this edition, I focus on numbers four and three in a countdown to number one.

Number Four: Mandates and more control become the norm in American medicine and with them, more compulsory allopathic interventions (testing, vaccinations) under the guise of “prevention” and a disappearance of clinical autonomy, choice, and freedom.

The contrast between how medicine was practiced in the United States several decades ago and today is striking and alarming – just think of the family doctor making house calls versus the faceless bureaucracy of an HMO. In the years after World War II, individual clinical autonomy began to be eroded and replaced by one-size-fits-all cookbook practice mandates. The introduction in 1965 of Medicare – federally-mandated and -provided allopathic health care for elderly Americans – signaled the institutionalization of this trend.

Since then, the federal government’s intrusion into health care at every level has expanded until today the feds cover roughly one half of the $2.2 trillion annual total cost of medicine in the United States. Medical research – increasingly influenced by politics – has come to be dominated by the government. (This explains why politically favored areas receive excessive funding: in the case of HIV/AIDS at the U.S. National Institutes of Health, more than three times as much funding per death as all other diseases combined!)

It’s a dirty little secret that the explosive inflation in medical prices and spending across the board that we have experienced in recent decades, in fact, is closely related to the ever expanding – one might say metastasizing – government role. When an infinitely deep pocketed third party payer like the U.S. government assumes the responsibility for paying the bills, it is axiomatic that controlling costs becomes impossible. (Remember the “big dig” in Boston?) Yet, in response to exploding medical costs and other crises that the government helped to create, pro-big government universal health care zealots are proposing even more expanded roles for the government (the ultimate third party payer) at all levels.

In order to ensure that no one is able to opt out and everyone will be forced to pay their “fair share,” mandates for many things that were once left up to an individual’s choice are growing on a daily basis. The first line of experimentation in this area is being conducted at the state level, like in Massachusetts which in 2007 mandated that all of its residents obtain allopathic health insurance. If a Massachusetts resident cannot prove that he/she has state-approved health care coverage, he/she is guilty of a crime and can be fined and punished. Recently, lower level governments have also started to get involved. In 2008, for example, Howard, a county in Maryland, began experimenting with expanding government-supplied health care. Included in the county’s plan, however, according to an article in The Nation’s Health (February 27, 2008) “is its requirement that every participant have a health action plan and a health coach” – a “health coach” to put his nose into your private life, snoop around, and tell you how to live.

Even more obnoxious and chilling are government moves to mandate compulsory vaccinations and other toxic interventions under the guise of “prevention.” In November 2007, officials in Prince George’s County, Maryland, an elite, influential suburban enclave adjacent to the nation’s capital, announced that they were “working together to immunize all school children.” In an article “Jail Time for Not Vaccinating in Maryland?,” Barbara Loe Fisher wrote:

On Nov. 17, Prince George, Maryland State's Attorney Glenn F. Ivy (D) and the county's public health and education officials are bringing the power of the State down on parents who have not gotten their children injected with vaccines for chickenpox and hepatitis B. In a Nov. 13 press release issued by the Prince George's County Public Schools) and at a press conference that day, state officials made it clear they were going to use whatever means they had to use to force the children to get vaccinated. Ivy said he was prepared to throw the parents whose children had not gotten their shots in jail: “We can do this the easy way or the hard way, but it's got to be done. I'm willing to move forward with legal action.” The parents of children, who have been kicked out of school for failing to get their shots and are subject to truancy laws for failing to get their kids shots and are subject to truancy laws, are being summoned to the Prince George’s County Courthouse in Upper Marlboro on Saturday with their children to get them vaccinated on site or face fines and jail time.

In New Jersey in October 2008, many parents rallied to oppose another new state mandate requiring that all children get a flu shot in order to attend preschools and day-care centers. According to WINS news radio in New York City:

New Jersey's policy was approved last December by the state's Public Health Council and is taking effect this fall. Children from 6 months to 5 years old who attend a child-care center or preschool have until Dec. 31 [2008] to receive the flu vaccine, along with a pneumococcal vaccine.

The Health Council was acting on the recommendations of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has depicted children under 5 as a group particularly in need of flu shots.

Politicians rarely admit openly that they support forcing medical interventions on citizens, but a number of factors are coming together to make mandates more routine. The promotion of electronic medical records or EMRs (a key feature of President Elect Barack H. Obama’s health care reform plan) makes monitoring everyone’s compliance with official recommendations, immunizations, or mandates incredibly easy. EMRs also facilitate the adoption and mandating of evidence based medicine (EBM) – which ultimately limits clinical options to ones that have been “proven” according to the “evidence.”

Ezard Ernst

The rise of EBM should be of great concern to fans of CAM and alternative medicine: Note that Ezard Ernst, the UK's first professor of complementary medicine, said in an interview with the New Scientist in April 2008, “What we've found is that about 5 per cent of alternative therapies are backed up by evidence.” In the same interview, in response to a question of why alternative medicine enjoys “huge popularity,” Ernst said “The real reason, I have come to conclude, is that people are being lied to. Practitioners of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) often fail to explain what the evidence shows and does not show. It is a triumph of advertising over rationality: many of the 40 million or so websites on alternative medicine promote outrageous lies. People seem quite gullible, and the situation is not helped by high-profile supporters of CAM.” The relevance of Ernst’s opinions, and the UK experience, to the U.S. is that many proponents of forthcoming health care reform in America cite the socialized health care system of the UK as one of the best models.

With thinking like Ernst’s coming to the fore (among CAM’s so-called leaders!), look for 95 percent of alternative medicine practices to be declared “not backed up by evidence” as a first step to their being outlawed.

Number Three: Alternative medicine disappears.

For a number of years, I’ve been writing about a disturbing trend – the watering down, cooptation, corruption, and eventual disappearance of alternative medicine mostly from within especially because of the rise of CAM (complementary alternative medicine). Initially, I posed the dilemma as a question: “Is Alternative Medicine Dead?” Recently, I have had to conclude that all of the signs point to an affirmative and probably irreversible answer of “yes.”

In the 1970s, when I first started reporting on, and from, the frontlines of the American medical field, alternative medicine was a vigorous area of scientific inquiry and clinical practice. The researchers and practitioners of that time included many brilliant leading lights of conventional science and medicine whose experiences had inspired profound professional reevaluations and in many cases personal transformations. A number of alt med pioneers began their careers in the conventional realm and ultimately discovered the promising world of alternatives. The people I’m thinking of included two-time Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling, Ph.D., National Cancer Institute founder Dean Burk, Ph.D., Hoxsey therapy practitioner Mildred Nelson, R.N., antineoplaston cancer treatment founder Stanislaw Burzynski, M.D., Ph.D., and many others.

For the most part (Burzynski is the exception in the above list), these kinds of pioneers and their peers are long gone now and the generation that followed them, largely uneducated and unaware of the rich history of their field and the hard fought battles that were always required to advance natural healing, has been susceptible to the seductive, self-serving siren call of “CAM.” To use a baseball metaphor, it’s a particularly weak bench in the CAM field these days especially in terms of the self-selected leadership of CAM/“integrative” medicine, the field that has emerged as the purported heir to alt med.
Among the many events that shifted the ground in American alternative medicine and set the stage for its transformation (or demise), two immediately come to mind: The medical Establishment’s 180 degree turn in 1982 away from its knee jerk anti-diet and -nutrition stance to the (ultimately self-serving) position in which it was finally grudgingly admitted that diet plays a major role in disease; And the previously hostile federal government’s entry into alt med starting in 1991 via the Office of Alternative Medicine (expanded in 1998 to the National Center for Complementary Alternative Medicine or NCCAM).

The NCCAM’s agenda entails a time honored, proven strategy of seduction and cooptation, essentially institutionalizing and federalizing what had previously been decades of private sector anti-alt med or pro-quackbusting efforts. (Often, when negative but typically highly flawed studies of nutritional supplements or other alt med modalities are published in medical journals and subsequently hyped in the media, the NCCAM is listed as a sponsor of the study – for example, the November 2008 study of Ginkgo biloba in JAMA and the October 2008 claim of no benefit for the use of selenium and vitamin E supplements in prostate cancer prevention.) Meanwhile, seductive influences from abroad, particularly emanating from the socialist and royalist UK, promoting CAM over alternative medicine, have also been having deleterious impacts on U.S. alt med.

If a fan of alt med had fallen into a coma in the 1980s and awakened in 2008, he or she might well have looked around and asked, “What happened to alternative medicine?” Today, alt med isn’t easy to find. This fact was confirmed in a report published in Cancer Monthly on March 28, 2008, “Few Clinical Trials Focus on Alternative Approaches to Cancer,” which looked at the numbers:

Alternative therapies represent a small minority of cancer clinical trials and only a smaller number of these are focused on whether they are viable treatments. While there were 3,198 chemotherapy trials, a treatment that has been experimented with for over fifty years, less than 30 trials were focused on natural approaches. [emphasis added] This analysis suggests what many observers have been reporting for some time that alternative therapies – stand alone natural cancer treatments have been co-opted into the conventional paradigm. They are no longer seen as potentially powerful treatments in their own right, but rather “add-ons” to ameliorate the side effects or improve the quality of life for patients who receive the toxic conventional treatments.

Next time: The #2 and #1 stories of the past year.