WHAT'S WRONG WITH AMERICA'S HEALTHCARE SYSTEM

Politics and healing might be thought of as a contradiction in terms. Surely there can't be politics in cancer and healing; surely when breakthroughs are made, the medical profession puts them to use. That's the way it is, isn't it? It would be nice if it were that simple.

In most fields, competition usually arranges for the best product to prevail - not always, but usually. In ten stories, Politics in Healing shows that a free market in health products does not exist in the U.S. Effective and non-toxic products (many for cancer) have been shoved aside during most of the 20th century. Pushed forward in their stead have been "approved" therapies, usually extremely toxic, which did not win their spurs in the open competition of a free market.

Instead, approval was dictated and administered from the top down by "Official Medicine". Official Medicine consists of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the American Medical Association (AMA), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which contain the National Cancer Institute (NCI). In addition, there are the American Cancer Society (ACS), the Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital, the Mayo Clinic, the M.D. Anderson in Houston, Roswell Park in Buffalo, N.Y., and others. These organizations constitute Official Medicine, the American medical establishment. It decides, yes, pontificates what medicines and therapies will be available to Americans, and harshly disciplines doctors who venture outside its guidelines.

This book is a collection of stories which should not have happened, stories which will not be heard from Official Medicine, stories about dark undercurrents in American medicine. Political patterns of misuse of both public and private power are seen through what happened to ten little-known healers of the 20th century. Many of them produced breakthroughs of Nobel Prize quality. Most of these therapies are no longer available to help with our numerous health challenges as we begin the new millennium - not because they didn't work, but for political reasons. These stories show how governmental and prestigious private institutions have deliberately misrepresented, held back, discouraged, ignored, and suppressed important inexpensive and non-toxic healing breakthroughs. While government can be expected to be inept, the decisions and actions described in this book were intentional and deliberate, and many people have died as a result.

This book puts it as a postulate that there is a war going on (of which the public is largely unaware) between toxic and non-toxic therapies, and that the non-toxic ones have been getting clobbered. There has been a long attempt to sell a bill of goods that the only real medicine is strong, toxic medicine, almost always patented, produced by pharmaceutical companies, and that only this should be used by doctors or paid for by health insurance programs either public or private. Key to maintaining this status quo is the FDA, which tilts predictably and continuously against nontoxic medicines. Created in 1906 by the visionary Dr. Harvey Wiley, the FDA throughout most of the 20th century had little in common with what Dr. Wiley intended. Its original purpose was to make sure that foods are pure and drugs are safe, but it has drifted way off course. The FDA frequently appears less interested in protecting Americans from harmful drugs than from harmless ones, especially those capable of competing with prescription drugs.