There are serious people objecting to Healthcare fraud.

THE INTELLIGENT REVOLUTION

How Citizens, Scientists, and Even Politicians are Saying No to Healthcare Fraud

BY HELKE FERRIE
Vitality Magazine April 2010

“He’s a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back – that’s an earthquake.”
Death of a Salesman (1949) by Arthur Miller

Saying No! is a social responsibility none of us may safely ignore. Heroes reveal the fact of oppression and demand opposition; their example helps us to build courage, but in the end each one of us must act personally.
Farmer Michael Schmidt, who was recently acquitted of all charges brought against him by Health Canada on the raw milk issue, took part in a health freedom panel at the Total Health Show in March. While there, he stated that the only way to achieve change in the current food and drug regulatory system which favours corporate interests over human rights and scientific evidence, is to say “No!” to the bureaucrats’ assumption of obedience. “It drives them crazy!”, he said. Schmidt was sharing the panel with Health Canada rebel Dr. Shiv Chopra, lawyer Shawn Buckley of the Natural Health Products Protection Association, and world-famous cancer-industry debunker Ralph Moss.
Saying No! becomes effective when one employs three tools: the uncovering of suppressed facts, the demonstration of regulations contravening mandatory procedure and current law, and the soliciting of public response to misinformation campaigns. It is this reasoned method of cutting through the BS and insisting on “informed consent” that “drives them crazy.” Complaining that the world is going to hell , or despairing over what some great cabal of crooks are going to do next merely feeds that corruption.
Over the past couple of years, public opposition to corporate agendas aiming to make people into consumers and nothing but (at great cost to health and environment) has gained momentum. Indeed, the famous Flynn Effect appears to be validated. It states that average intelligence rises with every generation in all measurable areas of cognition, language/semantics, and memory. This effect has been measured in all cultures. I am especially impressed by the intelligence that people demonstrate in the art of saying No! They trust their own judgment and ignore “experts” in droves. Here are some inspiring examples of vital significance because they are funded by governments and institutions whose focus was forced to shift by overwhelming evidence.

Patients Abandon Their Prescriptions
The University of Saskatchewan found that women, especially, have been avoiding taking their antidepressants despite the fact that the numbers of prescriptions increased: they either don’t fill them or don’t take them once filled.
Less than 1% of women who have survived estrogen-dependent breast cancer actually take their prescribed Tamoxifen, the drug that supposedly prevents recurrence of breast cancer but has a high chance of causing liver and uterine cancer instead. The National Cancer Institute in the U.S. was so astonished by this statistic, they launched a study into the reasons for this outbreak of superior female intelligence.
Not only patients are wising up. The former pundits of medical orthodoxy are announcing truths most Vitality readers have known for some time. For example, the American Cancer Society no longer supports mammograms as an effective tool for breast cancer prevention, nor PSA testing for prostate cancer screening.

Governments React to Healthcare Fraud
The European Union published the results of a multi-year mega study late last year, entitled “Healthy Living is the Best Revenge”. It showed that people who didn’t smoke, exercised moderately, ate fresh fruit, vegetables, whole grains, and nuts, and ate very little meat reduced their risk of diabetes by 93%, heart attacks by 81%, and the incidence of all cancers by 36%. Interestingly, around the same time President Obama called for a total ban on candy and soda in the nation’s schools in February and is considering crippling taxes for such products.
Some governments acted outright heroically: Sweden banned all uses of mercury last year, which means the rest of the EU will have no choice but to do the same soon. The vaccine industry must be in shock (what will they use as preservatives now?), and those 50% of EU dentists who still use mercury amalgam must be assessing their options nervously.
Republican Senator Charles Grassley recently disarmed the agenda of Big Pharma when he introduced a bill that would require Big Pharma to publish all payments made to doctors and researchers above $50. And he has bi-partisan support – Massachusetts pre-empted Congress and already requires publication of all payments over $5! I anticipate a disproportionately low death rate and dramatic decrease in healthcare expenditures for that State.
In January of this year, Senator Grassley exposed Glaxo SmithKline’s fraudulent “science”. Turns out that the diabetes drug Avandia is based on “no science at all” and GSK was proven to have lied to the FDA regulators and the public, killing thousands (Avandia increases the risk of heart attacks by 43% in diabetics). GSK now faces liability storms similar to those that shook Pfizer with a fine of $2.3 billion due to the fraud uncovered with regard to the painkiller Bextra, the antipsychotic drug Geodon, the antibiotic Zyvox, and the antidepressant Lyrica. Additional revelations included Merck fabricating an entire bogus medical journal to support its disastrous anti-inflammatory drug Vioxx, and sales for Pfizer’s rival drug Celebrex were boosted by a study which reported results gathered by a renowned expert, Dr. Scott Reuben, based on no patients at all. The entire study was faked – as were this researcher’s studies on Bextra and rival company Merck’s Vioxx. This takes science fiction to quite a new level.

New Research Exposes Pharma Fraud
The complex edifice of lies, which often fatally misled many desperate patients for many years, is crumbling so fast that I find it difficult to keep up with the relevant publications.
The American Journal of Psychiatry recently published the results of a huge study showing that sudden death in children increases by about 500% when taking ADHD drugs, of which Ritalin is the best-known. The researchers who undertook this study set out, explicitly, to disprove such a connection and were forced by the evidence to admit the opposite. This data caused something of a house-fire in the mansions of psychiatry: researchers Greenberg and Kirsch published bestselling books showing that a whole class of antidepressant drugs are actually not much different in their effects on depression than placebo – i.e. sugar pills. However, what they do cause is personality changes, including extreme violence and a dramatic increase in the rate of suicide, as psychiatrist Peter Breggin testified a few weeks ago before the U.S. Congress.
Last year, The New England Journal of Medicine, the British Medical Journal, the Mayo Clinic, JAMA, the Lancet, the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Cancer, and the PLoS-Medicine (open-access on-line journal), all published exhaustive re-analyses of large databases showing that the most vital information on the dangers of drugs mysteriously is missing in virtually all patient information, that 94% of all positive information on Big Pharma products comes from authors who are financially compromised, nearly 29% of all cancer studies are thus financially conflicted and unreliable, and the claims for survival in cancer therapy studies were essentially wishful thinking at best.
The proposal that caused my jaw to drop and left me (almost) speechless appeared on April 1 last year, but it is was not a joke. Published in the Journal of the American Medical Assn, it was authored by the editors of the world’s leading medical journals and provided a “proposal for controlling conflicts of interest”. If anybody had asked me how to accomplish such control, I would have recommended “a complete ban on pharmaceutical and medical device industry funding …”. To my astonishment, that is exactly what these editors recommended! The above is a quote from them, not from yours truly. JAMA’s list of revolutionary demands included the following: that the education of doctors “must be carefully distinguished from marketing” (who will fund medical conferences?) and that medical organizations should no longer accept money from Big Pharma at all; such “fundamental reforms” were stated as being imperative because otherwise “the public trust” is, well, down the toilet. I didn’t think I would live long enough to read something like this in JAMA.
Speaking of public trust, here is a zinger! Early in March, Dr. Poul Thorsen disappeared along with $2 million in research money. The money is nothing compared to the importance of the doctor. He published a series of studies, starting in 2003, that supposedly proved that the MMR vaccine cannot cause autism. Using the large government database of Denmark as his source, Thorsen misrepresented the data showing that Denmark supposedly experienced a 20-fold increase in autism after mercury was banned there as a vaccine preservative. Therefore, mercury could not be the cause of childhood autism. In March, new reports appeared showing Thorsen’s studies to be fraudulent; so he took off with what money was still in the cash box.

Scientists, Soldiers, and Citizens Revolt
Unlike Dr. Thorsen, one of the key researchers into the Gardasil vaccine Cevarix, Dr. Diane Harper, said No! to her employers and went public. She had worked on the development of this vaccine, which supposedly protects against cervical cancer. But then she became a whistle blower and informed the UK’s Sunday Express and the New York Times that this vaccine does nothing but possibly prevent genital warts and “will not decrease cervical cancer rates at all.” She also stated that this vaccine was being “over-marketed” and that parents of young girls should know that it carries the danger of serious side effects. Dr. Harper recalled that “Merck had lobbied every opinion leader, women’s group, medical society, politician, and went directly to the people … it created a sense of panic that says you have to have this vaccine now …”
The last place I would have expected a resounding No! to come from is the German army. In Germany, obedience to authority is a virtue. Last September, when the H1N1 hysteria gripped the world, Germany’s soldiers said “Nein, danke!” and refused the vaccine. That prompted Germany’s Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg, chair of the Council of Europe’s 47-nation Sub-Committee on Health, to launch an investigation into the vaccine and the pandemic’s origins. Its findings included testimony from key researchers of the World Health Organization. The Sub-Committee ended up declaring that the “pandemic” is a “hoax” and the vaccine is a bust. Dr. Wodarg said that “people are much cleverer than the government and figured it out for themselves”, and so less than 6% of the citizens of France and Belgium, for example, took the vaccine. Even in Japan, where obedience also tends to be regarded a virtue, only a tiny minority took it.
With regard to food safety, refusal to put up with business as usual was also unexpected and dramatic. The National Cancer Institute took on the food industry, declaring that restaurant meats are high in carcinogens and that foods rich in omega-3 fatty acids “essentially reverse the risk” for prostate cancer.
The U.S. food industry voluntarily stopped the use of bovine growth hormone – a cause to which Dr. Shiv Chopra devoted most of his rebellious career at Health Canada. That long battle which he and his colleagues waged also publicized the cancer-producing effect on humans from food-producing animals given prophylactic antibiotics throughout their lives, as is the norm in industrial farming. The research supporting these findings has increased all over the world, and now this practice may soon be history because a natural substance, chitosan, appears to be a great deal better.
Monsanto was hit as hard as Big Pharma: the BBC reported on October 15, 2009, that the Supreme Court of France found Monsanto had lied all along about the safety of its flagship herbicide, the allegedly environmentally safe and harmless Roundup; the European Union classified it as “dangerous to the environment” because it is a carcinogen and environmentally unsafe.
The next blow came from an international team of researchers who proved that genetically modified corn causes damage to “the heart, the adrenal glands, the spleen,” the blood, and is toxic to the liver. This study certainly was welcome support for a chorus of No! that greeted the EU’s approval of a GM potato for certain restricted purposes; several countries announced their absolute refusal to cooperate with this EU decision.
In India last fall an eggplant war broke out, the fires of which were fanned by our very own Dr. Shiv Chopra who traveled throughout India explaining GMOs to the crowds. India has several hundred varieties of this vegetable, a staple in the Indian diet. When India approved a GMO variety, 11 States declared themselves GMO-free zones, and a dozen federal cabinet ministers expressed their unconditional refusal to cooperate. A proposed law limiting freedom of speech on GMO issues was publicly dismissed as lunacy and is now under review; although Dr. Chopra suggested it might be useful because millions of people would crowd the jails and information on the truth of GMOs would spread unchecked and then pour forth from India’s jails to rid not only that country, but possibly the world of this science fiction nightmare.
One of the greatest successes was scored by the American people who rose in protest against a bill proposed by Senator McCain that would have essentially handed over the natural supplements industry to Big Pharma and abolished the current protective legislation. Bill S. 3002 was killed on March 10th.

Public Action Makes a Difference
What can we do to further this process of truth and freedom in Canada? We can support MP Alex Atamenenko’s federal bill C-474 (via www.cban.ca) which would make it mandatory to consider the trade implications for any genetically modified food product before it gets Health Canada approval. The fact is, nobody wants to buy this stuff in Europe, so why grow it?
We can support the NHPPA, which is poised to take legal action against Health Canada for its arbitrary abuse of natural health products. Visit their website and consider their requests before you pop that next vitamin capsule. There is intelligent life on planet Earth, and you can be proof of that fact.

Resources:
www.nhppa.org and www.charterofhealthfreedom.org
www.cban.ca
www.ssristories.com
www.ageofautism.com
http://vaccineresistancemovement.org
Partial List of Sources
Ames, B. N., Low nutrient intake may accelerate the degenerative diseases of aging through allocation of scarce micronutrients by triage, PNAS, vol. 103 (47) Nov. 21, 2009
Ames, B.N & McCann, J. C., Vitamin K, an example of triage theory: is micronutrient inadequacy linked to diseases of aging?, American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, vol. 90:889 ff, August 19, 2009
Basch, E., The Missing Voice of Patients in Drug-Safety Reporting, New England Journal of Medicine, vol. 362 (10):865 ff, 2010
Benjamin, C. L. et al. Stimulating the GPR30 Estrogen Receptor with a Novel Tamoxifen Analogue Activates SF-1 and Promotes Endometrial Cell Proliferation, Cancer Research, vol. 69, July 1, 2009
Brawley, O. MD, chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society on mammography and the PSA test found to be useless: New York Times, October 21, 2009
Breggin, P. MD, on the negative health effects of psychiatric drugs, including the drugs used for ADHD, go to www.breggin.com see also report in The Washington Post, June 16, 2009, article by S. Vedantam
Fanelli, D. et al. How Many Scientists Fabricate and Falsify Research? A systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Survey Data, PLoS ONE, vol. 4 (5), 2009 (open-access e-based international medical journal family)
Ford, E.S. et al. Healthy Living Is The Best Revenge: Findings from the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition – Potsdam Study, Archives of Internal Medicine, vol. 169 (15): 1355 ff, 2009
Epstein, L. H. et al. The Influence of Taxes and Subsidies on Energy Purchased in an Experimental Purchasing Study, Psychological Science, February 2010
(For the complete list of sources, see the extended version of this article at www.vitalitymagazine.com)
Helke Ferrie is a medical science writer and publisher and can be reached at helkeferrie@gmail.com see www.kospublishing.com