by Dr. Mercola

In 1776, Dr. Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, foretold a grim scenario that has now taken shape right before our eyes. He said:

“Unless we put medical freedom into the Constitution the time will come when medicine will organize itself into an undercover dictatorship. To restrict the art of healing to doctors and deny equal privileges to others will constitute the Bastille of medical science. All such laws are un-American and despotic.”

Now, in 2012, we are very much facing this reality, as we live in an era where our medical freedom is increasingly under attack, and “healing” has been replaced with “treating” disease, most often with toxic chemicals and surgery. This drug-driven medical paradigm not only depends on the sacrifice and, some might say, torture, of animals in medical research, but also in many ways uses humans as sacrificial lambs.

Modern Medical Care is a Leading Cause of Death

There were nearly 4.6 million drug-related visits to emergency roomsⁱ in the United States in 2009, with more than half due to adverse reactions to prescription medications – most of which were being taken exactly as prescribedⁱⁱ. The fact of the matter is, as echoed by a study released by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMSHA)ⁱⁱⁱ, it is a mistake to assume there’s no risk in prescribed medicines! As Sayer Ji writes on GreenMedInfo.com^iv:
“The “medicines” themselves are often devoid of intrinsic value, being nothing more than rebranded and re-purposed chemicals, intended (though all too often failing) to be administered in sub-lethal concentrations. Indeed, many of these chemicals are too toxic to be legally released into the environment, and should never be administered intentionally to a human who is already sick. You need look no farther than a typical drug package insert to find proof that the side effects of most drugs far outnumber their purported beneficial effects.

These chemicals, in fact, are so highly leveraged against their true value (or lack thereof), that they can sell for as much as 500,000% percent from cost! Only medical/pharmaceutical and financial institutions (e.g. Federal Reserve) are legally empowered to generate the illusion that they are creating something of value out of nothing of value, on this scale.”

Medical care is actually one of the leading causes of death in the U.S., with medical errors, adverse drug reactions, and hospital-acquired infections^v killing an unacceptable number of Americans each and every day! Drug-related ER visits jumped by more than half between 2004 and 2008^vi, stirring health officials to look for ways to stop what has become a near-epidemic that often ends in death^vii.

And when you consider that 2.7 million of those visits^viii involved prescriptions for largely preventable health issues, you can’t help but wonder why we have strayed so far from true health care in lieu of health treatments.

You may be tempted to point your finger at your physician. After all, he or she is on the “front lines” doing most of the prescribing and advising. But whether or not doctors succeed in upholding the Hippocratic Oath — the promise to Do No Harm — is not always entirely in their own hands.

The conventional medical system is simply not designed to give them that freedom. It’s VITAL that you understand that regardless of their personal opinions, many times they’re simply not allowed to offer you any other alternatives than what the “standard protocol” demands. As written on GreenMedInfo.com^ix:
“Within our present dominant medical system, healing has not simply been forgotten but intentionally exorcized as it represents the antithesis of perpetual profitability which requires the incurability of the human body. Were the truth be told, and the body’s self-regenerative capabilities acknowledged, the entire superstructure of drug-based medicine and hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue it generates annually, would crumble overnight.”

Are You Intentionally Being Misled about Your Body’s Innate Healing Abilities?

This issue runs much deeper than your physician’s office. The entire medical system as it currently stands has been quite carefully orchestrated to make you believe that drugs, vaccinations, screening tests, and surgery are what is required to be well, while an assault has been launched against natural strategies and supplements that have proven vital to well-being for centuries.

For instance, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has launched a full-fledged war against the sale of raw milk, a substance that provides many natural beneficial and healing properties, even though between 1999 and 2010 there was an average of only 42 cases of illness per year attributed to raw milk, and that includes both “confirmed” and “presumed” cases. Meanwhile, they have allowed livestock producers to continue to add low doses of antibiotics to animal feed for growth promotion, even though this practice is undeniably linked to the spread of deadly antibiotic-resistant disease!

They have also issued new Draft Guidance on New Dietary Ingredients that threatens to remove some of your most commonly used supplements from the market, all while approving drugs, prescribed by doctors every day, that kill over 125,000 Americans a year.

They are but one government agency that is so thoroughly enmeshed in the drug-medical paradigm that they are utterly unable to protect you. The American Medical Association (AMA) has maintained a decades-long battle against “alternative” healing traditions, dating back to the 1920s and arguably even earlier. The courts eventually ruled in favor of the chiropractors in 1987, finding the AMA guilty of a conspiracy to take down the chiropractic profession, but their battle has continued on anyway.

According to Naturopathy Digest, the AMA and other medical groups justify their opposition to natural medicine, a primary principle of which is supporting your body’s own innate healing potential, on the basis of three areas of concern^x:

• Quality of patient care
• Patient safety
• Quality of education of medical practitioners

As the article so eloquently points out, none of these arguments hold up, and most are based on medical and pharmaceutical industry propaganda. If they were TRULY concerned about patient care and safety, they would not be targeting natural medicine, which has an incredibly low incidence of adverse consequences and proven successes, but instead going after their own allopathic medical practices that are leaving a trail of death and destruction.

Other medical associations whose claims that they exist for the betterment of public health are entirely questionable include the following:

• American Dental Association (ADA): Continues to support the use of mercury fillings and demonizes biological dentists who oppose the use of mercury in dentistry; continues to support fluoridation, in spite of the evidence it does more harm than good.
• American Cancer Society (ACS): This charity has close ties to the mammography industry, the cancer drug industry, and the pesticide industry; has rampant conflicts of interest; consistently promotes drugs and screening procedures while ignoring environmental causes of cancer.
• National Cancer Institute (NCI): Has spent billions of taxpayer dollars promoting treatments while ignoring strategies for preventing cancer; abundant ties to the cancer drug industry (for more information, read Samuel Epstein’s new book, National Cancer Institute and American Cancer Society: Criminal Indifference to Cancer Prevention and Conflicts of Interest)^xi
• American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP): Claiming to be protecting your children, the AAP is largely funded by vaccine manufacturers but refuses to disclose just how much money it gets from them; partners with Congress to protect pediatricians and drug companies from liability for vaccine injuries, while preventing you from getting truthful vaccine information.

However, even the government is not at the top of the totem pole when it comes to this attack on your ability to access natural therapies and obtain optimal health. GreenMedInfo.com continues^xii:
“Although the American Medical Association (AMA) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) behave as if they are at the top of this pyramid of power relations, they serve far lower on the hierarchy. While the government of the United States and American corporate lobbying groups may appear to be behind the FDA’s shameless pandering to the interests of the drug companies, transnational corporations and organizations — and a hand full of elite governing them — are in fact pulling the strings.”

Natural Therapies are Increasingly Under Attack, or Intentionally Suppressed

Did you know a cream containing eggplant extract, known as BEC and BEC5, appears to eliminate most non-melanoma skin cancers in several weeks time? Or that studies conducted so far show significant potential for the use of cannabis in the prevention and treatment of a wide range of health conditions, including cancer?

Have you heard about Dr. Nick Gonzalez, who has had remarkable success treating patients with some of the most lethal forms of cancer that conventional medicine cannot effectively address using a three-pronged nutritional approach?

There’s a good chance you answered “no” to these questions, and that’s not a coincidence. Information like this is not easy to come by in the mainstream press or from most conventional health care authorities, which is one of the primary reasons why I started this site. Alternatives to drugs and surgery are out there, but unless there is a profit to be had, you aren’t likely to hear about them. In fact, the system is set up to make sure that you don’t.

One of the prime examples of this is vitamin D.

Over 800 studies already show that vitamin D could have cancer-prevention and/or treatment possibilities. But the problem is that it’s a natural substance that can’t be patented as a simple supplement, meaning there’s no real revenue in it, compared to a prescription brand drug. That’s why many drug studies involving vitamins of any kind hinge on how the FDA defines drugs and supplements.

A drug is defined as a product meant for the diagnosis, cure, mitigation, treatment, or prevention of a disease^xiii. A supplement is defined as a product that is meant to simply “supplement” or “enhance” a normal diet within the daily allowances recommended by the FDA^xiv. Retailers who sell supplements are not allowed to tell you that vitamin D can possibly “prevent, mitigate or cure” cancer without having the FDA accuse them of selling a drug that hasn’t been approved through the proper FDA process.

That process of getting a drug to market costs an average $359 million^xv and takes nearly 10 years – with a good portion of the money going directly to the FDA through user fees^xvi. Over the years these fees have become a major funding source for the FDA. What drug companies get in return is faster FDA reviews and drug approvals.

As a result, a kind of you-scratch-my-back-I’ll-scratch-yours scenario has ensued, with drug companies maintaining major leverage over the FDA when it comes to protecting their revenue sources, including making sure the $60 billion-a-year supplement business doesn’t get in the way of drug sales^xvii. The history of FDA laws and regulations on file at Harvard Law School, explains how years ago an FDA task force long ago established this policy…
“… to ensure that the presence of dietary supplements on the market does not act as a disincentive to drug development.”