I recall a conversation with a young newly graduated doctor a few years ago where we discussed what I considered a very effective natural remedy. The doctor did not want to listen but insisted that in mainstream medicine, we stick to methods and treatments that have shown evidence! This is a concept that one constantly encounters from representatives of conventional medicine. To understand the significance of medical evidence, one must know the history behind the concept.
At the beginning of the last century, the world’s then-richest man, John D. Rockefeller, decided to invest in what he called the pharmaceutical investment business. John D.’s core business idea for making maximum profit was to eliminate his competitors. He coined the phrase that ”competition is a sin.” He thus devised a plan to eliminate all competition faced by the pharmaceutical products he intended to launch. At that time, the medical sector was characterized by significant and unregulated diversity of various proven natural medicines and treatment methods that competed for patients.
John D. hired a man named Abraham Flexner to compile a report aimed at tightly regulating healthcare’s use of various medically effective products and methods. The proposal was to approve only those whose efficacy had been proven in scientific studies – those that showed evidence. These studies were to be submitted to a government agency for approval before a product could be used. Flexner’s proposal was presented to the U.S. Congress in 1910 and was adopted as law without any changes.
This sounds very reassuring and should be appreciated by everyone, you might think. There’s just one problem. Conducting a scientific study to prove the medical efficacy of a chemical product is a highly complicated and expensive process. The prerequisite for financing such a study is that the studied product can later be patented so that the cost of the approval process can be recouped. Since it is essentially only large pharmaceutical companies that can finance these types of studies, the approval requirement means that all competition from well-established natural remedies, which may have been used for millennia for various ailments, is eliminated. These cannot be patented because they are natural. In this way, John D. also succeeded in eliminating competition in this area and thus opened the door to the pharmaceutical industry’s future multi-billion-dollar income.
However, there was another threat to the pharmaceutical investment business, and that was the treatment of diseases through diet. Since it was not reasonable to impose strict regulations on what people ate, a different strategy was chosen here. Through its philanthropic foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, they provided funding to medical universities in exchange for a seat on their board. This way, they gained influence over medical education and could control its curriculum. As a result, they largely eliminated all knowledge within the medical profession about the obvious connections between people’s diets and various ailments. The young Swedish doctor I spoke to, who had just graduated from KI (Karolinska Institutet), had received only a two-day orientation during his 7-year education on the importance of diet for our health.
With this very creative strategy outlined a hundred years ago, the pharmaceutical industry has since had a very firm grip on its market. This has been further strengthened by the fact that experts in various regulatory agencies such as the FDA and the Swedish Medical Products Agency, responsible for approving new chemical products for use in healthcare, are recruited from the same social circles as the pharmaceutical industry’s researchers. In practice, the approval authorities have come to live in symbiosis with the industry. There have often been revolving doors between the industry’s experts and the regulatory agencies.
The process of getting a newly researched chemical product approved as a medicine is, as I mentioned, both complex and time-consuming. There is a significant scope for manipulating the results of such studies. Since it is the industry itself that conducts the studies, they can prematurely terminate a study that does not seem to yield the intended results, often with alleged ethical motives. They can also control the design of the studies to obtain the desired results. Patients who exhibit serious side effects are often excluded from studies for ethical reasons, which naturally skews the studies and does not provide the full truth about the actual effects of a product. This is why there are constantly medications with extremely serious side effects on the market, as clearly demonstrated by Professor Peter Gøtzsche in his book on deadly medicines.
Statin studies are a textbook example of the industry’s ingenuity when it comes to statistical data manipulation and cherry-picking to desperately try to show that statins have a positive health effect. My conclusion after in-depth studies is that for every patient who experiences a minor positive effect, there are over 20 serious side effects. The fact that the statin industry refuses to release its raw data is a violation of a fundamental scientific principle – that all researchers should have access to all the data they have to verify or refute alleged scientific conclusions.
Because this industry is deeply rooted in the upper echelons of society, no leading director or shareholder is ever held accountable for the havoc their products cause. Instead, they settle for fines, which have become something of a routine cost of doing business within the industry.
A new threat to Big Pharma’s protected market
The pandemic of metabolic illness that began in 1977 and is raging worldwide with increasing intensity, as I write about in the book ”The Metabolic Pandemic,” is primarily caused by two of conventional medicine’s hypotheses that have formed the basis for dietary recommendations around the world. Despite later research debunking these hypotheses, they still govern dietary guidelines in many countries because both Big Food and Big Pharma have enormous investments in these false beliefs – that high cholesterol is harmful and that saturated animal fats make us sick.
The rampant metabolic illness has given rise to a rapidly growing public awareness of the importance of diet for our health. People feel that doctors are not of much help. Bookstore shelves are full of various books on diet and health, and magazines and journals are filled with articles about nutrition. Us ordinary people who have discovered what conventional medicine doesn’t want to see are trying in various ways to share our own experiences. Suddenly, many people have changed their diets and found that they can stop taking a range of the pills prescribed by conventional medicine doctors. I have personally eliminated 8 out of 9 medications this way. This is, of course, a rapidly growing new threat to Big Pharma and the entire field of conventional medicine.
So, what is the reaction of the conventional medical establishment? Somehow, they must censor anyone who shares their health experiences with their fellow human beings. They call for an official body to fact-check what people write about their experiences. In the long run, they undoubtedly want to legislate against the dissemination of non-EVIDENCE-BASED claims about the relationship between diet and health. I wrote about a recent example of this approach the other day.
Remember that every time you encounter demands for ”fact-checking” today, it is almost invariably the old establishment trying to silence critics. They conveniently ignore that they themselves have fooled people with a lot of false beliefs for decades. And if someone in conventional medicine refers to evidence, you should always suspect an attempt to protect Big Pharma’s pill sales.
Conventional medicine, which has caused the metabolic pandemic and the soaring mortality due to pill poisoning, wants to silence ordinary people’s ability to help their fellow human beings lead a healthy life without pill side effects and harmful diets. We, ordinary people, must mobilize against this shameless attempt to silence us so that we don’t harm Big Pharma’s profits. One way to do this is to join us in the National Association for Metabolic Health so that we become a voice in the public debate that is heard.
anthropocene.live, Medical evidence – a deceptive concept
