by Heidi Stevenson
Gaia-Health.com
We keep hearing that modern medicine is evidence based. So why did the AMA create the new disease of obesity by popular vote? The evidence does not show that being overweight is harmful. It does, in fact, show the opposite, that being overweight raises the age of death. But that didn’t stop the AMA.
Modern medicine prides itself on being evidence based. That, at least, is their claim. However, when it comes right down to it, the reality is entirely different. This is obvious in the American Medical Association’s (AMA’s) decision on Tuesday that obesity is now a disease. It makes no difference if an obese person is perfectly healthy. As far as they’re concerned, that person suffers from a disease.
How did they come to that decision? They voted on it![1] Their own Council on Science and Public Health reported that it’s difficult to even define obesity and, therefore, makes no sense to call it a disease.[2] Nonetheless, the AMA’s House of Delegates, which determines their policies, voted to define obesity as a disease.
So, even though they can’t even define obesity, it’s now officially a disease. An overweight person may have no health problems, but the AMA has decided that they’re fair game for treatment. You know what that means: drugs and surgery, and when that doesn’t work, more drugs and more surgery. And when they’ve made the person genuinely sick, a whole new round of drugs and surgery!
Evidence Based Medicine?
What’s that we keep hearing about modern medicine? That it’s evidence based? If this doesn’t clarify how false that claim is, nothing can. The reality is that most of modern medicine has little or nothing to do with evidence. The claim is hype, a method of promoting allopathic medicine and to try to sideline all others as not being based on evidence.
Even the AMA’s own journal, JAMA, has published evidence—real evidence—showing that only those people with a BMI over 35 suffer early death! The claim that extra weight is necessarily unhealthy is utterly false, based on an assumption. As I wrote in Excess Weight Is Healthy, Even to the Point of Obesity: JAMA Study:
They assumed that certain things were true, but did so without any evidence. They assumed that a weight range they believed to be healthy was, by definition, ideal. Thus, they defined any BMI over 25 to be, at a minimum, Overweight. Then, they assumed that there must be a simple progression—that the more you weighed over your “ideal” weight, the worse your health.
They simply didn’t bother to look. If they had, they’d have seen the truth. Only the most Obese are harmed by it. Those in between are actually better off for carrying what doctors would call “excess” weight.
This new AMA edict stating that obesity is, by definition, a disease, has little to do with reality. But it does give cover for their treatments. They’ve started drugging fetuses in the womb to prevent obesity. In spite of the enormous dangers in bariatric surgery, it’s growing ever more common.
The use of bisphosphonates to treat and prevent osteoporosis was never based on evidence. It was based on an assumption, the belief that, because phosphorus is a component of bones, then giving it in drug form would be beneficial. Indeed, they even invented a new disease so there would be a whole new class of people to take their poisonous bisphosphonates: osteopenia, people whose bones are less dense than some arbitrarily defined amount.
The result has been disastrous for a number of women. Had the medical system actually looked at evidence, they’d have known that phosphorus can cause bones, especially the jaw bone, to disintegrate. It’s been known for centuries. The term “phossy jaw” referred to unfortunate match factory workers whose jaws had crumbled as a result of phosphorus exposure. Nonetheless, there was money to be made in selling bisphosphonates to women—even when there was no disease present. Those women whose legs suddenly snapped or whose jaws crumbled, disfiguring them for life and even making it difficult or impossible to eat normally, are simply collateral damage in the rush to profits.
Fake Treatments for Fake Diseases
Massively overprescribed treatment after treatment has proven to do far more harm than good, primarily because real evidence was ignored in favor of junk science and the profits in the treatments were enormous. Hormone replacement therapy for the nonexistent disease of menopause and statins for the nonexistent disease of high cholesterol are two such examples.
The reality is that most of the studies that modern medicine relies on for its “evidence” are not based on a genuine search for truth. Rather, they’re based on getting the results that the funder wants. As a direct result, a huge proportion of the “evidence” that is used to support treatments has little to do with evidence, and everything to do with selling drugs.
So, the AMA has just defined itself a new disease, obesity, and everyone who is over some arbitrary weight is a target for treatment. The fact that real evidence shows that most of those who are defined as obese are actually healthier for carrying the extra weight is irrelevant.
The evidence based medicine mantra is a ploy. It’s chanted over and over, until it’s believed to be truth. But its purpose is not to provide the best possible medicine. The reality, as we can see by the AMA’s utterly callous and enormously greedy decision to define obesity as a disease, is that profits are what drive the profession.
Read the full article here: http://gaia-health.com/gaia-blog/2013-06-19/with-no-evidence-ama-votes-that-obesity-is-a-disease/
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