Suppression of Alternative Medicine is Widespread, Dangerous

Mainstream medicine has long colluded with the mainstream media and government to deprive us of life-saving information and it has never been more prevalent and dangerous than during this coronavirus pandemic. Hundreds of thousands of lives could have been saved in the last year if this were not the case. Not to mention the social and economic disruption and hardship. Greed is the reason.

Do you find this hard to believe? In 2017, global expenditures for healthcare exceeded $7.8 trillion, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). There are people in this world who are willing to kill people in a robbery for a few dollars. It does not take a wild stretch of the imagination to conceive that, for a big piece of this multi-trillion-dollar pie, many people will do almost anything, especially if they never have to come face-to-face with their victims. 

The Earliest Efforts to Suppress Alternative Medicine

The war against natural, holistic medicine in the U.S. began before the birth of our nation and continues today with the suppression of critical information that would allow us to stay safe from COVID-19. It started with the Salem Witch Trials of 1692. The women who were tried and executed were herbalists who were accused of practicing “the Devil’s magic”.

Homeopathy was Popular and Effective Until…

Fast forward to the 1800s. Homeopathy, developed in 1827 in Germany, is based on extreme dilutions of natural substances that trigger the body’s healing response. Homeopathy was becoming wildly popular because it worked and because it was so much gentler than common treatments of the time, which included bloodletting, chloroform and mercury. Homeopathy proved much more effective than conventional treatment during the cholera epidemics of 1832 and 1849. By the end of the 19th century there were 44 homeopathic medical schools and more than 100 homeopath-supervised hospitals in the U.S. In the deadly flu epidemic of 1918, 25-50 million people died, while deaths of people treated with homeopathy were rare.

Homeopaths created the first medical association in the U.S. in 1844. When the American Medical Association (AMA) was created three years later, one of its first actions was to ban homeopaths from becoming members and expelling any members who dared to even consult with a homeopath. In 1910, the Flexner Report, commissioned by the Carnegie Foundation and supported by the Rockefeller family, resulted in standardizing the practice of medicine in a way that virtually eliminated homeopathic medicine. All the homeopathic hospitals and medical schools were forced to close. Perhaps many deaths from the pandemic of 1918 might have been prevented if homeopathy had not already been discredited.

Then They Came After the Chiropractors

If the AMA and government regulators had their way, chiropractic treatment might have met the same fate as homeopathy. The chiropractic profession was founded in the United States in 1895. During the first half of the twentieth century, with the active encouragement of the AMA, many chiropractors were prosecuted for practicing medicine without a license and many went to jail. The AMA founded the Committee on Quackery in 1963. The committee had the avowed goal of creating a health care monopoly that would eliminate the chiropractic profession. Because chiropractic made little use of technology and no use of drugs, the profession had no strong financial allies. Meanwhile, the AMA had access to the deep pockets of the pharmaceutical industry to further its goals. AMA members faced expulsion from the association not only for referring to chiropractors but even for belonging to the same country club or church or synagogue—association was strictly prohibited. As a result, chiropractors faced discrimination in not only their professional life but also their personal life.

In 1976, five chiropractors sued the AMA for libel. The suit also included as codefendants the American Hospital Association, the American College of Surgeons, the American College of Physicians and the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Hospitals. Eleven years later, a federal appellate court judge ruled that the AMA had engaged in a “lengthy, systematic, successful, and unlawful boycott” designed to restrict cooperation between MDs and chiropractors to eliminate the chiropractic profession as a competitor in the US health care system. In recent years, continued misinformation campaigns and insurance coverage restrictions (including fees that have not increased in four decades, visit limitations and unreasonable paperwork demands), continues to undermine the practice of chiropractic.

The Suppression of Alternative Cancer Treatments

Another area where mainstream medicine has undermined alternative medicine is in cancer treatment. Expenditures on cancer treatment exceed $200 billion annually in the U.S. alone and suppression of alternative medicine for cancer has been fierce. Despite the claims that we are winning the war on cancer, over 600,000 Americans are expected to die of cancer in the U.S. in 2020 alone. Cancer patients are as fearful of the treatments, euphemistically referred to as “slash, poison and burn”, as they are of the disease itself.

A well-known Park Avenue physician, Max Gerson, developed a diet in the 1950s that was curing patients of cancer. He was ostracized, lost his hospital privileges, and fell very ill from being poisoned with arsenic just as he was completing a manuscript on 50 of his successful cases. He recovered, but his manuscript was stolen during his illness. He was able to rewrite and publish it.

Also, in the mid- 1900s, Harry Hoxsey promoted an herbal cure for cancer that was discovered by his grandfather. He was having great success, with thousands of patients claiming he cured them. He hired doctors and nurses and opened clinics in seventeen states, but was arrested over 100 times for practicing medicine without a license. His treatment was banned in the United States in 1960. One of his nurses fled and opened a Hoxsey clinic in Tijuana, Mexico in 1963. Hoxsey himself became an alcoholic and died from the disease as a result of all the stress.

In the 1970s, laetrile, also known as vitamin B17, found in highest amounts in wild apricot seeds, was found to be effective in many studies for cancer treatment. The medical establishment went to great lengths to discredit it, funding studies designed to fail and lying about the results of other studies. Proponents were jailed, some were shot at or went missing, books about it were seized, and a law was passed making it a felony to treat cancer with nutrition in California.

Suppression of Alternative Pain Treatments

In the early 1990s, a model of chronic pain care was gaining popularity because of its safety and effectiveness. It was the multidisciplinary pain clinic, where providers from different specialties worked under one roof and provided intensive, coordinated care. The services usually included medication management, physical therapy, exercise programs, psychotherapy and biofeedback. The number of these clinics had grown to over a thousand in the U.S. Then Purdue Pharma began aggressively promoting Oxycontin, its extended-release opioid, as a safe and highly effective treatment for chronic pain. Purdue Pharma lied about the drug’s addictive potential, claiming it was extremely low. Other drug companies began making similar claims about their opioids. Insurance companies stopped covering the multidisciplinary pain clinics, which forced most of them to close. There were soon only about 50 of these clinics left.

Insurance companies continue to deny coverage for other nonpharmaceutical pain treatments, including acupuncture, biofeedback, massage and nutritional approaches and to severely limit coverage for chiropractic and physical therapy.

Today, chronic pain is even more widespread and about half a million Americans have died of opioid overdoses since Oxycontin was introduced.

The Criminalization of Health Claims for Nutrition

In 1994, the Dietary Supplement and Health Education Act (DSHEA) made it a crime for a producer or seller to make health claims for a food or dietary supplement, even if the claims are true, unless the substance has gone through the FDA drug approval process. This process costs, at a minimum, hundreds of thousands of dollars, and is beyond the means of most nonpharmaceutical companies as their natural products cannot be patented.  The FDA has shut down companies, seized products and pursued criminal charges even in cases of minor violations of this law. Purveyors of natural products live in terror of the FDA as a result. Yet, many of these products have very significant health benefits and can alleviate disease.

Suppression of Alternative Medicine is Worldwide

These are just a few examples of the historic war against alternative medicine. Though I have focused on the United States, this effort is worldwide.

Suppression of Alternative Treatments During the Pandemic

Fast forward to today when we are facing a global pandemic, the worst in over 100 years, that has already killed over 400,000 in the United States and over 2 million globally. Infections are accelerating, there is no sure cure, and vaccinations, although they are starting to be distributed, are still in the experimental stage.

Though COVID-19 is a new virus, one thing has been very obvious from the beginning—people with healthy immune systems do not get sick when exposed to the virus or have very mild illnesses, while those with weaker immune systems get very sick and many die. What has been very striking, from an alternative medicine point of view, is the complete silence of mainstream medicine and government health agencies (CDC, FDA) about known ways to boost the immune system.

Well established ways to boost the immune system include optimizing nutrition, including with diet and supplements, mild to moderate exercise, increasing sleep, reducing stress with meditation and other relaxation techniques and herbal treatments.

The FDA and Federal Trade Commission (FTC) have been going after any company or practitioner who makes any claims they can help prevent or cure COVID-19. Social media sites have been censoring similar content.

One intervention in particular can reduce deaths by 90%, reducing the carnage from COVID-19 to that of a normal flu season. If that intervention was widely implemented, we would not have had to shut down the economy and isolate. That intervention is vitamin D supplementation, an inexpensive and widely available option.

Even before the advent of the pandemic, there was an extensive body of research documenting vitamin D’s role in immune system function and, more specifically, in preventing acute respiratory infections. In the early days of the pandemic, researchers worldwide started researching the impact of vitamin D levels on COVID-19.

A study in Indonesia found that patients with vitamin D deficiency were 19 times as likely to die from the coronavirus as those who had sufficient levels of vitamin D. Even after accounting for other complicating factors such as age, sex and comorbidities, patients who were deficient in vitamin D were 10 times as likely to die of COVID-19 than those with sufficient levels.

Another study out of the Philippines found that those with higher levels of vitamin D had less severe illness when infected with the coronavirus than those who were deficient. Another study that looked at the situation from a population level found that the European countries that had the highest prevalence of vitamin D deficiency had the highest levels of infection and death.

Another recent study of vitamin D and the coronavirus found that those with sufficient levels of vitamin D were less likely to test positive than those with vitamin D deficiency. 42% of American adults are vitamin D deficient. The number is higher for Hispanics (69%) and African Americans (82.1%). About 1 billion people worldwide are estimated to be vitamin D deficient.

A meta-analysis of available data published in November, 2020 found a positive association between vitamin D deficiency and the severity of CoVID-19.

Low vitamin D levels are easily correctible with supplements that are inexpensive and readily available. So why isn’t this common-sense treatment that has no side effects being promoted? Because the profits that can be made by the medical establishment when 7 billion people worldwide are living in terror due a seemingly out-of-control virus are enormous. And government officials are in on the deal. They get rewarded by the pharmaceutical companies with lucrative jobs if they play along. Those that don’t are ostracized and their careers and lives are ruined. The mainstream media is heavily dependent on pharmaceutical advertising so they keep quiet too. WHO is also heavily funded by the pharmaceutical industry.

The Bottom Line

Anyone who wants to survive COVID-19 or any other serious health challenge needs to be aware of the limitations of mainstream medicine and search for alternative sources for health guidance.

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The author, Cindy Perlin, is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker, patient advocate and the founder and CEO of the Alternative Pain Treatment Directory