“The problem with doctors starts with their education. The whole system is paid for the the drug industry from education to research. The drug industry has bought the minds of the medical profession, and it starts the day you enter medical school.” Author T. Colin Campbell.
Allopathic medicine is pharmaceutical-based medicine
As of 2009, the global market for pharmaceuticals was worth more than $837 billion and is expected to reach $1.1 TRILLION by 2014. The pharmaceutical industry is involved in every aspect of the training of medical students and doctors, and all of this training is geared towards promoting a pharmaceutical- based agenda.
This indoctrination of doctors by big pharma begins in medical school by providing funding and materials that will dictate how medical students are taught. This indoctrination then moves into the continuing education credits courses that doctors are required to take throughout their careers and by providing research dollars that continue to push a pharmaceutical- based agenda. Once doctors are established in a practice, pharmaceutical representatives continually call on them often spending millions of dollars providing meals and perks to influence how these doctors will practice medicine.
What about Nutrition?
You might expect that a doctor has taken nutrition courses as a basic part of the med-school curriculum, right? But the answer is actually no. According to various surveys, only 30-40% of medical schools offer a basic nutrition course. So at most, only 40% percent of physicians may have taken a single course, and most often this class is taken in their first year when it is least relevant to their training.
When asked why hospitals don’t offer nutrition or cancer prevention education to their cancer patients, former American Cancer Society president Robert J Mckenna responded. “It’s not sexy, its not economically sensible. Insurance companies pay for treating sick people- they don’t pay for treating well people.”
Most doctors believe there is no relationship between nutrition and cancer because that is what they are taught to believe. Patients report that doctors tell them, “it doesn’t matter what you eat, nutrition won’t matter.” But as you can see NUTRITION DOES MATTER.
What Your Doctor Won’t Tell You, a short documentary on nutrition and cancer
“People think the FDA is protecting them – it isn’t. What the FDA is doing and what people think it’s doing are as different as night and day.” – Herbert L. Ley, Jr., M. D., former Commissioner of the FDA
The FDA- The FDA is an agency of the Public Health Service, and its primary mission is to improve the health of the public. They often face an uphill battle in fulfilling that mission since a majority of their funding comes directly from the same pharmaceutical companies they are supposed to be regulating. This funding comes in the form of “user fees.”
For the first 86 years of FDA’s existence, from 1906-1992, all of FDA’s funding came from the U.S. Treasury….in other words from taxpayer dollars. Starting in 1992, a law was passed that said that the majority of funding would come directly from pharmaceutical companies in the form of user fees. Currently this fee is 300 million dollars per drug application, and the review consists of looking over materials submitted by the drug companies. FDA does not independently test drugs as you may expect. This high fee also limits those who can apply to have materials tested and approved.
“I would argue that FDA is currently configured in such a way that it is incapable of protecting the American people from another Vioxx. We are virtually defenseless…. Simply put the FDA and the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research are broken…The FDA is responsible for 140,000 heart attacks and 60,000 dead Americans.” Deputy Director of the Office of Drug Safety David Graham right before he was stripped of his duties.
How the medical establishment is influenced by the pharmaceutical industry
Revolving door policy– FDA employee’s with connections to pharmaceutical companies, or those who leave their FDA positions for lucrative positions within pharmaceutical companies, can influence objectivity when reviewing drug applications. In response to a questionnaire sent out to physicians working at the FDA, they responded that industry influence was operating on the people working above them, and this influence sometimes played a role in the approval of a drug.
Influencing Lawmakers– Pharmaceutical companies also have the largest political lobby in the U.S., spending millions of dollars to spread their influence over lawmakers by offering campaign donations, providing funding to their non-profit organizations, and offering paid positions to sit on PHARMA company boards when their public service has finished. All of these activities influence how law-makers regulate the healthcare industry.
Misleading Statistical information: “The five year survival statistics of the American Cancer Society are very misleading. They now count things that not cancer, and because we are able to diagnose at an earlier stage of the disease, patients falsely appear to live longer. Our whole cancer research in the past 20 years has been a failure. More people over 30 are dying from cancer than ever before….More women with mild or benign diseases are being included in statistics and reported as being “cured”. When government officials point to survival figures and say they are winning the war against cancer they are using those survival rates improperly.” Dr J. Bailer, New England Journal of Medicine, Sept/ Oct 1990.
When cancer isn’t cancer- in a new report commissioned by the U.S. National Cancer Institute (NCI). Published online in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), identifies both overdiagnosis and misdiagnosis of cancer as two major causes of this growing epidemic, which together have led to the needless treatment of millions of otherwise healthy individuals with chemotherapy, radiation or surgery.
The report drops a few major bombshells on the way that many cancers are diagnosed. Breast cancer, for instance, is sometimes not breast cancer at all but rather a benign condition such as ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS). However, untold millions of women with DCIS have been misdiagnosed as having breast cancer, and subsequently treated for a condition that likely never would have caused them any health problems. And similarly in men, high-grade prostatic intraepithelial neoplasia (HGPIN), a type of premalignant precursor to cancer, is commonly mistreated as if it was actual cancer.
“The practice of oncology in the United States is in need of a host of reforms and initiatives to mitigate the problem of overdiagnosis and overtreatment of cancer, according to a working group sanctioned by the National Cancer Institute,” explains Medscape.com about the study. “Perhaps most dramatically, the group says that a number of premalignant conditions, including ductal carcinoma in situ and high-grade prostatic intraepithelial neoplasia, should no longer be called ‘cancer.'”
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Dr Mark Hyman- the FDA and Big Pharma hide negative studies
Additional Resources
How drug makers have taken over medical training
Could 89% of Landmark Cancer Research Be Untruthful?
Radical Remission by Kelly A. Turner, PhD