FROM E-MAIL SOURCE:
Scary to think, how influenced we can be, out or fear of being
ridiculed or not keeping up with the culture of acceptability.......
from
www.wholeearthmag.com
When Healing Becomes a Crime
By Kenny Ausubel
Reviewed by Dana Ullman
(Whole Earth Fall 2000 [ Buy This Issue ] )
ISBN: 0892819251
2000; 461 pp. $19.95. Inner Traditions.
Despite being involved in alternative medicine (specifically homeopathic
medicine) since 1972, I have always been strongly skeptical of
alternative therapies for cancer. I questioned their true effectiveness;
even more, I questioned the ethics of their advocates. After reading
Kenny Ausubel's newest book, I realize how effective the propaganda
against alternative cancer therapies has been on me.
I was truly blown away by When Healing Becomes A Crime. What Silent
Spring did for the environmental movement, this book does for the
alternative cancer therapies movement.
The misinformation and demonization of alternative medicine by the AMA
and the FDA is quite remarkable and sad (no, Saint-John's-wort won't
cure this depression!). This McCarthyization of alternative healers
didn't simply destroy people's lives as McCarthy did. It also led to the
earlier death of hundreds of thousands of people by foisting upon
them—as the only appropriate treatments for cancer—the notoriously
ineffective and dangerous primitive radiation and chemotherapy of the
day.
This book details the experience of Harry Hoxsey and his herbal
formulas. Hoxsey was arrested more than a hundred times in one two-year
period, and hundreds of other times before and after this, although his
leading nemesis, AMA leader Morris Fishbein, acknowledged under oath
that Hoxsey's therapy was indeed effective in treating certain types of
cancer. Fishbein's statement never changed his heavy-handed efforts to
make access to Hoxsey's treatment difficult or impossible. Hoxsey's
clinic was forced out of the US and into Mexico in the early 1960s; it
has continued to provide care for people since Hoxsey's death in 1974,
but is still not allowed into the US.
This book is riveting. It can and will lead to fits of anger at
orthodoxy's impressively effective PR efforts to turn successful
spokespersons for alternative medicine into quacks and criminals. This
book is also extremely well referenced, with both historical records and
modern scientific literature. The amount of scholarship that went into
writing it is admirable.
"Under California's new anti-quackery laws in 1959, it became a crime to
treat cancer with anything but surgery, radiation, and the emerging
chemotherapy. The only exemption was for religious beliefs and prayer
since [California Attorney General Caspar] Weinberger had Christian
Scientists in his family....The restrictive California laws were soon
adopted by other states....
As the 1950s drew to a close, the government quackdown was nearly
complete. It had taken the full power of the state apparatus to
eliminate Hoxsey and the host of other unorthodox cancer practitioners
from the medical playing field.
"Until the 1950s orthodox medicine viewed cancer purely as a local
disease. Doctors sanctioned only surgery and radiation as effective
treatments, both being localized approaches reflecting their belief that
tumors were independent growths on an otherwise healthy organism. After
decades of taking the position that "there is no known liquid medicine
which cures internal cancer," orthodoxy acknowledged a systemic approach
with the development of chemotherapy drugs in the 1950s. Even then, the
exclusive orientation was to kill cancer cells by using strong poisons.
To the contrary, Hoxsey and the lineage of natural medicine he espoused
characterized cancer as a systemic illness..."which occurs only in the
presence of a profound physiologic change in the consituents of body
fluids and consequent chemical imbalance of the organism. Its real cause
must be sought in the basic body chemistry and cell metabolism. We
believe that the organism's attempt to adapt itself to the new and
abnormal environment causes certain mutations in newly born cells of the
body. Eventually a viciously competent cell evolves which finds the new
environment eminently suitable to survival and rapid self-reproduction.
These cells are what are known as cancer."
Hoxsey believed that a systemic approach could remedy the imbalance. "It
follows that if the constitution of the body fluids can be normalized
and the original chemical balance in the body restored, the environment
again will become unfavorable for the survival and reproduction of these
cells. They will cease to multiply and eventually they will die. Then if
vital organs have not been too seriously damaged by the malignancy (or
by surgery or irradiation), the entire organism will recover to normal
health. We attempt to get at the roots of the disorder, rather than deal
merely with its end result. Our primary effort is to restore the body to
physiological normalcy."
"For decades organized medicine ridiculed the Hoxsey remedies as a bunch
of "weeds" and refused to look into them. Typifying this kind of
cavalier dismissal was a classic 1940s archival medical film we located
called Fraud Fighters. Cast in much the same style as the heavy-handed
antimarijuana propaganda film Reefer Madness, the melodramatic movie
relates the parable of "Elixerex," an ersatz nostrum in a thinly
disguised Hoxsey-like tonic bottle. Under the Dragnet-style narration,
the movie follows Elixerex through the FDA's 1950s state-of-the-arts
labs, which today look as archaic as the era's Univac computer. Elixerex
lands in the blocky hands of grim, square-jawed junior G-men intent on
rounding up the unscrupulous crook behind the scam. The medical ideology
is as black and white as the film footage.
"Internal correspondence between the AMA and news organizations revealed
carefully scripted programs designed to discredit Hoxsey, with copious
back story supplied by the Bureau of Investigation....After Hoxsey
appeared on a public debate on KCOP-TV in Los Angeles, a member of the
AMA legislative committee suggested he would speak to friends in
Congress about having the Federal Communications Commission revoke the
station's license.
Propaganda Specialist!!!!
HOME | ARTICLES | REVIEWS | COMMUNITY | MARKET | RESOURCES
FAQ | DONATIONS | ABOUT | CONTACT
©2000 Whole Earth. Email us: info@WholeEarthMag.com.
For complete contact information, visit our contact page.
Created and maintained by Mandala Designs
