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[這篇文章最後由mensch在 2004/12/29 04:13pm 第 2 次編輯]ay!`
http://www.vitalitymagazine.com/node/view/297p
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Return of the Light – At Look Back at 2004J
Authors, Filmakers, and Physicians Shine the Cold Light of Truth on the Dangers of Our Modern Food and Medicine Supplyo &kJ|
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By Helke Ferriekv
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“I say: Fear not! Life still leaves human effort scope.”
— Matthew Arnold
Looking back over the events of 2004, I was reminded that intertwined with all the terrible events of the year were the beginnings of a new world to which human effort, working with and for nature, may yet give birth. As I began to make a list of those events that invoke the “Wow!” response, the image of the Christmas carol, “The Twelve Days of Christmas” came to mind repeatedly. In it, each item “my true love gave to me” appears in ever-increasing multiples, and all are re-connected to the original gift — the partridge in the pear tree — which unites this profusion of gifts into one celebration. The year 2004 brought us many such gifts, and each is already in the process of rapidly multiplying itself. These gifts all share one important characteristic: they tell the truth so compellingly as to be jaw-droppers.
If I were to pick that “partridge in the pear tree” for 2004 to which the carol always returns and which unifies all that follows, I would say it was the documentary “Supersize Me”. It conveys the central truth to which all other healing developments are connected. It is the year’s great gift to humanity. The fact that documentaries have become blockbusters in movie theatres shows that the public’s appetite for facts, and a corresponding boredom with spin, are bringing about a new public mind. The message of this film is terrible and often downright disgusting, but the truth and the solutions it offers are healing and nourishing — and we are all hungry for real food, for the truth.
“Supersize Me” serves literally as an index for all the core problems with health and the environment. The metaphor “you are what you eat” becomes physical reality as Morgan Spurlock, the hero of the film — and he is a hero if ever there was one — decides to eat only McDonald’s food for 30 days. His decision is prompted by a suit filed against that corporation a couple of years ago on behalf of two children claiming that their horrendous obesity and attending health problems stemmed from this food. The court dismissed the case saying that proof was needed that McDonald’s food “is dangerous to health.” This film provides that evidence, and in doing so changes our perspective on health and what medicine ought to be.
Morgan’s dietary adventure was supervised by a cardiologist, gastroenterologist, general practitioner, and a nutritionist who monitored his weight, the functioning of his liver, heart and brain, and regularly checked his blood for vitamin and mineral levels.
By day three of the diet, Morgan feels sick and throws up, but he perseveres. By day nine the addiction response sets in with general depression and headaches as soon as he gets hungry, and which disappear when he eats at McDonald’s. By day 18 he has chest pain and palpitations, feels weak, and the vitamin and mineral levels in his blood are down to less than half of the bare minimum standard medicine considers necessary for survival. His doctors tell him to stop the experiment. On day 21 Morgan has what his doctors consider “obscene and outrageous liver values,” stating that they, “never thought it was possible to get into such a state with this diet! You are as sick as a binge alcoholic!” One of his doctors doubts such damage is reversible. Yet, Morgan persists and by day 29 can barely go up the stairs to his apartment where he finds his girlfriend, a professional vegetarian gourmet chef, at the computer working out his “detox diet” starting the next day. It took eight months to restore his health — with decent food. 9\"is
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The final medical assessment reveals that he gained about eight pounds a week, sustained serious liver damage, raised his bad cholesterol such as to double his chances of heart disease, developed central nervous system problems such as palpitations, addiction, headaches and depression, and his sex life has been “non-existent” since week two of the experiment, indicating serious hormonal imbalances.All this was caused by a pound of refined sugar a day, 12 pounds of fat a week, and an unknown quantity of artificial food additives, growth hormones, antibiotics and pesticides which are all part of fast foods and their flavouring and preservatives. <&d
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At the beginning of his experiment he placed each of the McDonald’s menu items in a separate glass jar to observe their rates of decay. Serving as controls were a hamburger and French fries made from fresh, organic ingredients. The McDonald’s foods decayed very slowly in comparison to the “real stuff.” The french fries did not decay at all and looked exactly the same as on the day they were purchased 12 weeks later!3g
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Woven into the 30-day experiment are interviews with addiction, nutrition, and medical experts, visits to school cafeterias, prisons and institutions for emotionally disturbed and violent teenagers (organic food calms them down completely), and the offices of industry lobbyists who, in one case, readily admitted that they were “part of the problem.” The problem being that America is the fattest nation on earth, with 60% of the population now being dangerously obese; every fourth child is now expected to become diabetic. The film’s opening credits gave a list of all the diseases currently known to be caused by this type of nutrition; they include cancer, heart attacks, diabetes, and most chronic diseases. Thus, the film takes you through the causes and prevention of all these illnesses: everything boils down to the quality of the food, and that quality involves the way the food is grown, the animals are treated, the processing, packaging, and delivery. Food is an organic labyrinth where the dead-ends are disease.jZ
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Hippocrates stated two and a half millennia ago: “Let food be your medicine.” This film’s demonstration of the truth of food as the foundation of health was greatly amplified by the revelations about drugs in this summer’s bestsellers by Marcia Angell’s The Truth About The Drug Companies and Merrill Goozner’s The $800 Million Pill.
Time Magazine listed Angell as one of the 25 most influential people in the U.S. For 20 years she was the editor of the world’s most prestigious medical journal, the New England Journal of Medicine. Angell’s book is an earthquake for medicine, and Goozner’s is a hurricane for its corporate counterpart, Big Pharma. Frankly, I have never read anything like these two books. Angell describes an almost surreal world of deception and corruption, from which drugs emerge to treat those very diseases caused by the standard North American fast food diet. This corrupt approach to human health is so vast as to engulf everything from the original research (usually a good discovery) to the totally distorted programs for the continuing medical education of the prescribing doctors, who are as duped as their patients.SE("
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Goozner, a financial analyst, reveals how the drug industry’s mantra about the high cost of drugs supposedly being a function of R&D costs (research and development) is a Big Lie: Big Pharma developed none of the drugs currently on the market. All were developed at taxpayers’ expense by government labs or universities, and were then taken over by the industry with obscene profits for themselves and their shareholders.ZG fv%
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Light of Truth Shines on Drug Industry
Truth once released, like the proverbial genie escaping from the bottle, is out for good. Truth has the quality of purifying fire and moves as fast now as it did in the 1980s when it was impossible to keep up with political change and the re-drawing of national boundaries. Truths have been emerging this year about drugs and medicine at a similarly breath-taking pace: one German study showed that only 6% of all drug advertising is based on any kind of verifiable fact, scientific or clinical. That really tells it all.mqS=
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In rapid succession the public learned that the world’s pricey medicine cabinet is filled with chemicals of deception, and Health Canada and the FDA struggled mightily (and unsuccessfully) to keep up with world-renowned researchers blowing whistles on three continents. Only a few samples can be mentioned here for reasons of space:zEJLa{
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• We learned that anti-depressants increase the risk of suicide and cancer;
• That the cancer-drug Tamoxifen increases the risk of liver cancer and is not protective against breast cancer after all — a fact well-known at the time the drug came to market. XE3Ai
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• Ritalin is bad for kids because its cocaine-like chemistry literally shrinks their brains over time. w[
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• Both U.S. presidential candidates called for the removal of neurotoxic mercury preservative from all vaccines within only weeks of all those official denials about the dangers of vaccines. Lf+g3
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• The Cox-inhibitor Vioxx turned out to be deadly for the heart and no good for arthritis after all, sending its manufacturer Merck into a financial tailspin it may never recover from. <FAXm_
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• Top FDA officials testified before the U.S. Congress that there are lots of equally and even more dangerous drugs on the market that should never have been released. These include the cholesterol drug Crestor, the weight-loss Meridia (which is actually Prozac), the painkiller Bextra, the liver-toxic acne drug Accutane, and the asthma drug Serevent. Os]
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Even the comparatively less corrupt part of medicine — high-tech surgery — was not spared: as reported in the New York Times in September, some of the world’s leading heart surgeons confessed thatby-pass surgery, angioplasty and stents “do not benefit” patients after all, and that those arterial plaques aren’t the real problem after all. This information was too late for junk-food addict former president Bill Clinton who was put through this useless surgery.Hopefully, he has by now seen “Supersize Me.”Hu
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The editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, Dr. Drummond Rennie, observed in the Los Angeles Times on April 9: “Research is going down the toilet if nobody can believe it, or if it has been distorted.” Yes, indeed and well — wow! — what a bunch of exploding supernovas we have seen this year!
Physicians and Medical Editors Bring New Integrity to the TableP-rC-t
As in our Christmas carol, there have also been a lot of ‘lords a’leaping” and “maids a’milking,” which is to say, the medical profession has admirably begun to meet these challenges and started to strut their combined creative stuff. Led by the editor of the Canadian Medical Association’s Journal, Dr. John Hoey, the editors of the world’s medical journals decided that their initiative of 2001 just wasn’t enough to stop the corruption. Back then, they had ordered all authors to declare their financial connections with industry. But as Dr. Hoey explained in a CBC radio interview, this didn’t really get to the heart of the matter, which was the industry itself.
So, in September of this year, in “A Statement from the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors,” the industry was informed that from now on at the onset of all clinical trials all participants must be registered. That way there can be no phantom patients anymore such as in the case of the original trials for the anti-depressant Prozac (there never were some 10,000 patients involved, but less than 300 healthy people carefully selected for not having ever had a history of depression). Furthermore, Big Pharma won’t be able to stop a trial and release drug, but not the information, when too many people get nasty side-effects (as in the case of Tamoxifen and many other drugs — see Goozner’s book). Finally, all the names of the researchers conducting the trial will be known from now on, so they can no longer be bought or intimidated. The World Medical Association followed this lead and in November published their ethical guidelines for MD-pharma relations. Trouble is, this fair new world of transparency doesn’t start till March 2005. On April 1, the fools and the geniuses will at last begin to become distinguishable. This will not improve Big Pharma’s stock market value.
Emerging in celebratory unity, Ontario’s College of Family Physicians published their impressive report condemning pesticides, and laying out in meticulous detail the proof of how they cause asthma and cancers, and advocating organic food. The Italian government, relying on their own doctors, made 100% organic food mandatory in all educational institutions from kindergarten to university. The U.S. Centre for Disease Control published their report demonstrating that everybody on this continent carries at least 13 carcinogenic chemicals, none of which should be there, all of which come from an industry that makes money over all our dead bodies, and to all of which the regulatory authorities turn a blind eye.
Two important legal victories will doubtlessly give natural medicine a break at last: the infamous industry front organization “Quackwatch” had their key “expert witnesses,” such as Stephen Barret and his colleagues, totally discredited by several U.S. courts, so they can’t testify against homeopathic and naturopathic doctors anymore. In British Columbia, the Strauss Herbal Company scored a total court victory over Health Canada whose 73 charges were all dismissed. Funny, this didn’t make the front page of the Globe and Mail. In Ontario great tidings of joy include the fact that the College of Physicians and Surgeons, following enormous public and governmental pressure, did not renew the contract of their Deputy Registrar, Dr. John Carlisle, who for the past 20 years had masterminded the many improper persecutions of environmental, alternative, and pain physicians.
There are 78 items in “ The Twelve Days of Christmas”, and my list is even longer. As my cup runneth over, I shall close with one delightful item that has wonderful and far-reaching implications for the toxic drink industry, and dims the outlook for the pesticide industry in a most unexpected way: Farmers in India noticed that Coca-Cola and other carbonated soft drinks are a most effective and cheap pesticide,the UK’s Guardian reported on November 9. One litre of concentrated pesticide costs 10,000 rupees (about $200 — a horrendous amount of money in such a poor country), but one and a half litres of “the real thing” costs only 30 rupees. It kills the bugs just fine without ruining the water supply anywhere near as badly. While spokespeople for Coca-Cola were not amused, leading Indian agricultural analyst, Devinder Sharma observed, no doubt tongue firmly in cheek, “I think Coke has found its right use."Z+cN
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Happy New Year!R
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Resources:
• Marcial Angell, The Truth About The Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It, Random, 2004 (the book of the decade)
• Merill Goozner, The $800 Million Pill, University of California Press, 2004 (the ultimate indictment)
• Harold Kushner, The Lord is My Shepherd, Random, 2004 (everybody needs this book)
• Helke Ferrie, Dispatches from the War Zone of Environmental Health, Kos, 2004 (a roller-coaster ride through the politics of medicine)
NOTE: Any public health organization that wishes to use Helke Ferrie’s new book, Dispatches from the War Zone of Environmental Health, for fundraising purposes can obtain the book at a 50% discount from KOS Publishing. Call (519) 927-1049 for details, or email Helke@inetsonic.com, or see advertisement on page 135. The book retails for $25 plus shipping and gst, or purchase a bulk order of 10 books for $200, no gst, no shipping charge.http://www.vitalitymagazine.com/node/view/297http://www.vitalitymagazine.com/node/view/297IE
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2004/12/29 04:02pm 
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