WHAT'S WRONG WITH AMERICA'S HEALTHCARE SYSTEM

These changes would permit open competition and a free market in NON-toxic therapies. The U.S. has had a rigidly controlled market in health products, including non-toxic ones, (to "protect" us) for most of the past century. The results are a high death toll from cancer, the absence of effective medicine against viral diseases such as AIDS and against many bacterial infections, and the most costly health system on the planet. How could we do worse with Health Freedom? While American emergency medicine is indeed the best in the world, most Americans do not die from accidents, but from degenerative disease. Many treatments for the latter are excluded from the market, or their capabilities censored by the FDA, which has usurped for itself the right to dictate to manufacturers what they can say about their products. Gradually, before anyone realized it was happening, the FDA clamped upon the U.S. a harsh regime of censorship and repression of anything that could compete with the giant drug companies.

 Prescription drugs have become so expensive that it has been proposed that the government pay for them, instead of forcing the drug companies to reduce prices to the level charged in other countries such as Mexico and Canada. But there's a better idea; let's give the drug companies some real competition by removing all governmental controls over anything non-toxic. Since this would permit truthful advertising of what non-toxic medicines (nutritional supplements, herbs, etc.) can do, it would not be surprising to see the cost of prescription drugs come down, way down, corrected in the way that free markets and open competition regularly do.

We have been warned many times about socialized medicine. The problem, we're told, is that its overly centralized control stifles innovation. With too much dictation from the top down, with over-regulation by the FDA, with doctors not free to use effective non-toxic therapies, a form of socialized medicine is just what we have, functioning just as badly as we were warned to expect.

While the computer industry is free to make breakthroughs that are the envy of the world, and which happen so rapidly as to leave people breathless, no such freedom exists in the medical field. Instead, such discoveries as the antineoplaston cancer treatment of Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski in Houston are discouraged; the FDA tried very hard to put him in jail. In contrast to so many FDA-approved drugs, antineoplastons never hurt anyone, but instead put many cancers in remission. In addition, here too, the NCI cheated in trials of antineoplastons, diluting them to the point of ineffectiveness. NCI even filed for and obtained a patent on one of Dr. Burzynski's compounds when it discovered he had not patented it (Chapter 11).

Open competition and a free market in non-toxic health products will solve a multitude of problems. In such a market, wondrous things can and will appear, many returning from the oblivion in to which they have been cast. How could there be politics in cancer and healing? Surely, one presumes, the best medical discoveries are adopted and the doctors use them. The tragic truth is that it is not that simple.