I had no clue then about the scams underpinning Big Medicine and that it was focused on symptom control and profit from disease and death, nor did I know then about Big Agriculture being hell-bent on profits.
Nov 7, 2009
Time for
Celebration
By Helke Ferrie
Vitality Magazine, November 2009
You are invited
to a great annual bash this month, namely Toronto's Whole Life EXPO (November
27-29), where for the 23rd year we can celebrate health, critical
thinking, and the inexhaustibility of good ideas. I intend to be there with a
great, big organic, home-made carrot cake at the Kos Publishing booth to
celebrate the fact that I have been writing for Vitality for 10 years! If
you got shocking, empowering, and thought-provoking information from my
articles, I am very happy - but just
think what a dizzying learning curve it has been for me! Writing for an
information-hungry audience imbued with doubt, and ready to question any claim
to authority, has been a journey towards enlightenment and an exercise in
humility. It has also been a
breathtaking trip through medical politics as it unfolded – with editor Julia
Woodford hot on my heels wanting it all in print for you.
1999 was an
important year in the politics of medicine. The events set in motion then have
caused fundamental changes in the way people perceived food, drugs, doctors,
and government, and I reported on many of these changes. I had no clue then about the scams
underpinning Big Medicine and that it was focused on symptom control and profit
from disease and death, nor did I know then about Big Agriculture being
hell-bent on profits - never mind the health of soil, water, and
essential bacteria. I knew nothing about
the abysmal ignorance of our doctors who are super-educated in mostly what
doesn't much matter to human survival. I knew hardly anything about nutrition
and its primary roles of preventing and curing illness. As for environmental
toxins, I had to get sick myself first. I groan when I remember having allowed
in the early 1980's my own kids to have their fluoride treatments in school,
never having worrying about mercury amalgam fillings, and trustingly followed
medical advice I would now classify as bordering on the criminal: I was on
Premarin hormone replacement therapy for 17 years, following an unnecessary
hysterectomy during which the surgeon removed my ovaries for good measure!
Thanks to my discovery of mega-vitamin therapy, after reading Linus
Pauling, I did not become a HRT statistic, and
thanks to an environmental medicine physician, I found out about non-toxic
bio-identical hormones. That's how I also learned that doctors who cure
patients and protect them from harm tend to wind up in disciplinary
investigations and even lose their licenses.
When somebody once
mentioned to me at the Consumer Health of Canada office that the cure for
almost all cancers was known since about World War II, I smiled and said, "Oh,
really…" as one does with a nutcase from whose company one wants to escape
quickly. That same guy handed me a copy
of Dr. Max Gerson's 1958 book, A Cancer
Therapy – Results of Fifty Cases. I read it, and everything I had once
believed evaporated.
Journalism works
with the 5 W's and the 1 H: Who? Where? When? What? Why? and How ? Investigative journalism adds a
crucial 7th question: Is it true? Working for Vitality started in the summer of 1999 with a call from editor
Julia Woodford who asked me if it was really true what she had read in an Alive issue about the Ontario College of
Physicians and Surgeons. She, who had by
then worked for over a decade for the promotion of natural medicine, knew a
thing or two about scams. Nevertheless, she was floored by my story about how
the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario (CPSO) had, a decade earlier,
deceived its own physician membership by sidestepping all discussion about
scientific evidence for chelation therapy and then asserting to the government,
that there was no scientific of clinical justification for it; this resulted in
chelation therapy, without the CPSO membership's knowledge, being outlawed in Ontario. Using it, instead of drugs for heart disease
cases and to prevent the loss of limbs from diabetic neuropathy, cost some
doctors their licenses.
In 1999, the new
Regulated Health Professions Act had just come into force and suddenly
chelation was no longer illegal; the Ray government had cut that odd
section. Julia wanted the documentation
on which my Alive article had been
based. I provided it to her, and she
asked me to write for Vitality about
chelation and the CPSO's determination to silence doctors who then had begun to
take Multiple Chemical Sensitivity seriously. Pesticides were still good for
us, and doctors stating otherwise were in deep trouble. It is only ten years
ago that doctors were routinely expected to refer people complaining about
feeling sick from pesticide or perfume exposure to psychiatrists. Today, even the CPSO offices have a no-scent
policy! Quebec, Ontario, and a few other provinces now have bans on the use of
cosmetic pesticides. But dinosaurs are a
hardy bunch whose predatory-focused brains resist anything new: now the CPSO is
after doctors diagnosing and treating chronic Lyme disease which, in contrast
to the rest of the world, is for them not a "proper diagnosis". See my new book at the EXPO: Ending Denial – The Lyme Disease Epidemic –
Canada's Public Health Disaster (order from 519-927-1049).
In June of 1999,
the CPSO, after an investigative process and trial that had begun in 1988,
found environmental medicine physician Dr. Jozef Krop "guilty" of diagnosing
and treating environmental illness. Ironically, that was the same day on which
the international medical journals published the diagnostic criteria for MCS,
developed jointly by Canadian university professors and doctors with medical
researchers at Johns Hopkins medical school and MIT in the US. This needed
publicity and the defense needed financial support, both of which Vitality contributed to consistently.
I was one of Dr.
Krop's patients, having been poisoned by pesticides, specifically Roundup from
our neighboring golf course and DDT while growing up in
India, and a
life-time of mercury amalgam tooth
fillings. I became sick with a severe neurological disorder called Myasthenia
gravis – supposedly "idiopathic", i.e. cause unknown. I was unable to drive, vacuum my house, read,
or answer the phone. When my physician
husband and I figured out, with the help of the then chief toxicologist for the
World Health Organization, Dr. Boyd Haley, that one frequent cause of MG was
heavy metal poisoning, we presented the scientific literature to our dentists
and asked for my 17 mercury fillings to be removed according to the protocol of
the International Academy of Oral and Medical Toxicology (IAOMT) which Dr.
Haley had co-founded. She said that she could not do so, because the College of
Dentistry would go after her, and she would probably lose her license. The
joint efforts of a dentist trained by IAOMT and who openly defied that college,
Dr. William Pressy, and Dr. Krop who defied the CPSO, I recovered – and have
since then cultivated a cool, determined, and creative rage. Today, more than 52% of all North American
dentists have mercury-free practices.
In 1999,
Ontario's Health Freedom
Bill, called the Kwinter Bill after Liberal MPP Monte Kwinter, was unanimously
passed by the Harris government. MPP
Kwinter conceived the idea for this amendment to the Medicine Act when he met
Dr. Jerry Green who had lost his license, following a classic CPSO kangaroo
court investigation, for merely supplementing standard toxic cancer therapy
with helpful non-toxic nutrition. Today, the cancer societies around the world
not only agree that cancer is caused by environmental carcinogens like
pesticides, but urges cancer patients to supplement with high doses of
nutrients, especially vitamin D3. Indeed, on November 3, the University of
Toronto hosted a conference on how vitamin D3 prevents cancer. Attending physicians get continuing education
credits. Ten years ago, most of us did not even know what D3 actually is and
does, and the idea that a vitamin prevents cancer was then heresy.
The Kwinter Bill
became law in 2000, amending Ontario's Medicine Act. Many provinces have since
then made the same legislative change which, essentially, decriminalizes
progress and change in medicine and protects the doctor-patient relationship
from third party interference (i.e. from the interests of political and
financial bottom lines). In each province, the Establishment powers fought to
the last to prevent it.
That same year,
Dr. Shiv Chopra, then still with Health Canada, and
his colleagues Drs. Gerard Lambert and Margaret Haydon, caused the federal
Senate to hold hearings into the appalling practice of our federal government
to force carcinogens into our food supply and pharmacies in clear contravention
of the absolute safety requirement of the Food and Drugs Act. These hearings caused bovine growth hormone
and many other drugs to be stopped across the world. A decade later the Senate is now investigating
Bill C-6 which represents the government's renewed attempt to make us into
compliant consumers of all things profitable – be they toxic or not
Also in 1999, in
Europe, that infamous semi-secret multi-national brotherhood of government
bureaucrats and corporate honchos, which we all know as Codex, was startled
when the public finally got it and mounted a series of successful legal
challenges over the next 10 years to that stealthy corporate take-over of food,
drugs, water, genes, medicines, and farming.
I kept you informed on those unfolding stories; the war is not over, but
it will be. Unlike wars with guns and
bombs, wars for truth and liberty leave behind deeper understanding and
transformed minds even among those who once were enemies.
In 1998, I met
Dr Abram Hoffer for the first time, and in 2005 was privileged to publish his
scientific memoirs. He died in his nineties on May 27 this year. All my
articles, one way or another, over the past decade, reported on what he and
Linus
Pauling called "orthomolecular
medicine", meaning the "right molecule" (nutrient, not synthetic toxin) which
sets healing in motion. The conceptual basis applies to everything from
farming, to disease, to mental health. Orthomolecular thinking is
reality-based, not profit-based. That is the challenge of our time.
For me the most
important development in the past ten years, regarding food and drugs, was the
Human Genome Project. Big Business was certain that "cracking" the DNA code
would lead to enormous wealth and control. Well, undoubtedly lots of people are
trying, and in part succeeding, to making money out of this project. However,
the big surprise was that most of the regulatory genes (which control entire
systems) are exquisitely vulnerable to environmental toxins, and so those
toxins will have to go if we want to keep those genes working. Not much profit
there. Furthermore, the nice, neat fit hoped for between genes and specific
diseases did not materialize either. Testing people for their allegedly
genetically-anchored disease is a pipe dream, too. Every disease, with or
without a genetic anchor, needs a trigger to start it, and those triggers are:
(1) environmental toxins and (2) lack of the right molecules decreed by nature
as essential, namely nutrients. Indeed, the genetic code cracked us. In June
2008, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reported that taking
vitamins and minerals can actually "fix genetic defects". Well, the ghosts of
Linus
Pauling and Abram Hoffer must
be having a great belly laugh!
Looking back on
the letters I received over the years from Vitality
readers, I notice that they used to be requests for information on "good"
doctors or dentists. While those are still in high demand and still often
embattled, now the letters are far more often about specific nutrients, how
they work, which alternative cancer therapy clinic I recommend - not:
whether "alternative" is a good idea; that's taken for granted in such
inquiries. Collective attitudes have
undoubtedly changed. Blind faith in medical authority is diminishing
rapidly. Back in 1998, when a University
of Toronto and FDA research project investigated how many people were using
"alternative medicine", the answer was about 50%. Today, about 92% of Canadians
find especially herbal medicine acceptable and two thirds use it and other
forms of alternative (to synthetic drugs) therapies. Indeed, within just a
decade, Canadians understood the fraud involved with genetically engineered
foods, and polls consistently show that close to 98% of us don't want the
stuff, and for all the right reasons, namely immune dysfunction and cancer.
It is,
therefore, interesting that the government's main worry about the H1N1 vaccine
(unnecessary, untested, and dangerous) is that most people might not want it.
Politically, that new skepticism in the public mind is reflected in the recent
letter many of us received from the federal Minister of Health assuring
Canadians that there are absolutely no plans for implementing a program of
compulsory vaccinations. The public has
become rather like a mouthy teenager – impossible to control, but sometimes can
be persuaded to comply. In this case, however, the teenage "f-off" approach
might be the wiser choice.
Another
astounding development over the past decade has been the phenomenal increase in
medical fraud – and its relentless public exposure and equally determined
pursuit by the courts. Big Pharma cannot make drugs that heal and must resort
to pretense, fraud, and glitzy propaganda. Dictatorships and tyrannical systems
are always the most vulnerable in their propaganda departments. Public opinion shifts when the lies become
obvious. The giant pharmaceutical companies have been crippled by multi-billion
dollar liability rulings that have run out of appeals. True, they are
explicitly protected from liability with regard to the H1N1 vaccine – but our
government remains liable and answerable to the courts, should this become a
public health disaster. Indeed, the courts even rule frequently against patents
for genetic engineering, making the whole GMO food enterprise increasingly
vulnerable to collapse. World-class researchers, who were once duped into
cooperating with Big Pharma scams, spill the beans, blow the whistle, come out
of their laboratory closets, and raise hell. Corruption is as old as human
institutions. I am sure Neanderthals cheated each other over choice mammoth
steaks. Nothing new there. What is new today is the hunger for truth – no, for
not scandal, but for the truth, facts, verifiable information.
In this context
I find one of the most helpful developments the rise of the documentary film.
Documentaries have become truly educational. I am thinking of the 2001 with the
National Film Board's "The Genetic Takeover" which made a splash around the
world. One of the greatest ones surely is the 2004 film, "The Corporation".
Most of the scientists featured in it I got to interview and report on their
work in Vitality. Since then, we have had fantastic revelations
through "Supersize Me", the various GMO and Monsanto films, and now "Food Inc."
Ten years ago,
the medical, dental, regulatory Establishment was firmly in charge and – like
most of us, myself included – often were innocently unaware of the fact that
they were in the most horrendous conflicts of interest between their duty to
their patients and the industries that got rich on product lines which we now,
without any irony, correctly call the Death Industry. When awakening strikes, everybody ceases to
slumber, one way or another.
Two hundred
years ago we lived in a world in which human beings were sold in open markets.
Those who questioned such practices were harshly treated because slavery was
perceived as indispensable to a thriving economy. When slavery was outlawed in
1832 in Britain, it still took the American Civil War to stop it in this
hemisphere, and I was in high school when African Americans finally got the
vote. Yet, the change that began in 1832 is inexorably continuing. We are in
the midst of such a fundamental change of perception with regard to food and
medicine. The Sickness Industry will cease to be the basis of our economy. We have millions of years ahead of us because
we are getting smarter.
Resources:
Two of my books are available for
free downloading on www.kospublishing.com.
They contain many of my Vitality
articles published over the last decade.
[back to articles]
|
