Tracking the Real Progress in Medicine: A Snapshot of Advances in Healthcare

Progress tends to be mostly in the slow lane. Nonetheless, it progresses.

Vitamin C is now being used intravenously in clinical trials to treat pancreatic cancer. Most interesting of all, the mechanism by which vitamin C “stops cancer” has been discovered by Johns Hopkins Medical School oncologists “nearly 30 years after Nobel laureate Linus Pauling famously and controversially suggested it.” It turns out that vitamin C does not just support correct DNA replication, but this antioxidant actually destabilizes a cancer tumour because it can act in the oxygen-deprived environment in which all tumours grow.

George Jonas, of the National Post, hit the nail on the head in his April 16, 2014 editorial when he took on the concept of ‘settled science.’ Jonas wrote that “settled science simply doesn’t exist. If it’s called science it isn’t settled, and if it’s settled it isn’t science. It’s only science if it’s unsettled; that is – ready, indeed eager, to have itself proven wrong.” Indeed, science is the exploration process itself. It never arrives. If anybody claims it has, we are in the domain of politics and power. Jonas put it perfectly: “When a politician or opinion-maker talks about something being ‘settled science’ or endorsed by 97% of serious scientists, just remember it was ‘settled science’ that certain mental conditions respond well to surgical treatment, which is why patients were routinely lobotomized … as late as the 1950s.”

Add current chemotherapy and psychiatric drug use to that frontal lobotomy craze of the past and all one finds is a lot of hot air, usubstantiated opinion, and fiercely defended markets.

In science, just one single replicable disproof of previously held views is destructive to the status quo. Real science, especially in medicine, is the ultimate zone of discomfort. One of my favourite teachers at the University of Toronto was voted ‘least popular prof’ in the mid-1980s, primarily because he used to say: “If you don’t actually enjoy being proven wrong, don’t study science.” He insisted on us including in our presentations the ways by which our conclusions could be disproved.

Curing just one schizophrenic with B vitamins and essential fatty acids disproves everything previously thought about the cause of this disease. Likewise, curing even one pancreatic cancer patient with Dr. Gonzalez’s and the Gerson Institute’s nutritional approach is an achievement worthy of our utmost attention, especially since these patients routinely survive past the 5-year mark.

Finding the Borrelia burgdorferi pathogens in multiple sclerosis patients, and restoring those patients to health through Lyme-appropriate treatment, ruins the theory that MS is ‘idiopathic’ (of unknown cause), just as finding the disintegrating myelin sheaths in these patients ruined the even older assertion that MS was due to nothing more than hysteria.

In the late 1970’s, one of the most famous rejections of a progressive cancer therapy came to light. This was the case of Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski who developed the antineoplaston therapy that can cure otherwise untreatable glioma (brain tumours) caused by cell phone radiation.

The U.S. government made every effort to stop this therapy from being recognized in order to protect the mighty cut-burn-and-poison cancer industry. But in June of 2014, the final ban on research and availability was lifted.

Antineoplastons are currently on their way to becoming mainstream therapy – offering hope to those suffering from gliomas that are caused by their cell phones. Even the cell phone industry has had a slap in the face from ‘Mother Progress’ – the U.S. Centers for Disease Control issued a formal warning about cell phone radiation on August 13, 2014, “following many organizations worldwide,” and asked for a review of the 1996 guidelines that had told us “not to worry.”

Recently, I went to a government laboratory for a blood test and found myself face to face with a large poster suggesting that I might need to have my mercury amalgam fillings removed as they can cause many chronic diseases. I nearly fell off my chair. I have spent about 20 years in the war against toxic dentistry after the removal of my amalgam fillings cured my Myasthenia gravis and gave me back my life. Progress indeed! But think of all the re-training and examination of conscience that dentists are forced to undergo, to say nothing of the (still ongoing) egg-wiping from those dental professors’ faces who kept reassuring us that mercury fillings were just fine.

No doubt the aspartame industry is also currently unhappy about the fact that their products have been found to cause diabetes and cancer due to their gut-bacteria altering effect – progress reported on CBC radio on September 17 of this year.

On Lyme Disease, GMOs, Gut Bacteria and More ….

It seems that whenever the effort is made to assure everyone that some specific issue is finally settled, it has the exact opposite effect. For more than two decades, public health authorities, governments, and most of the medical profession simply denied the reality of Lyme disease. But now it is recognized as the world’s fastest spreading infectious disease whose chronic form can trigger everything from Alzheimer’s, autism, and multiple sclerosis to psychiatric conditions, heart disease, and arthritis – all of which are subject to misdiagnosis and ineffectual treatment because the differential diagnosis of the patient left out the causal possibility of a chronic Lyme infection. This ‘comfortable’ fiction is now on its way to destruction; that is to say, progress is happening.

Federally, Elizabeth May’s Bill C-442, which mandates correct Lyme testing, diagnosis, and treatment for Canadians, was supported unanimously in the House of Commons this past summer and is now on its way to becoming law. Provincially, Ontario’s Bill 27 (MPP T. Barrett) had its first reading in the legislature. If passed, Lyme would have to be taken as seriously as Ebola, SARS, and West Nile Virus. These efforts are also timely as recent publications have confirmed that Lyme is a sexually transmissible disease, thereby making it more alarming than even the most Lyme-literate knew it to be.

– The safety of genetically engineered foods was heralded by those who profited from them as “absolutely settled” because GMO foods were deemed as “substantially equivalent”  to regular foods. That fantasy was not supported by any independent investigation of the underlying ‘tobacco science.’ As of October 2014, Senator Jon Tester (D-MT) has asked the U.S. Government Accountability Office to review all things Genetically Modified “to ensure that it reflects current science.” The scientific studies now being published, which show that conventionally grown foods are greatly reduced in nutrients when compared to organically grown ones, are also increasing steadily.

For decades, Big Pharma profited by a divide-and-conquer approach to disease, offering exclusively symptom control drugs. Now that gut bacteria are the new stars in medical research, we learn that they orchestrate health in general and work to prevent the inflammation which gives rise to all those ills from diabetes to heart attacks.

One of the ways in which those protective gut bacteria can be harmed is through herbicides, especially Roundup. Marketed for all these years as being the most environmentally friendly and agriculturally necessary herbicide, it has now been found to suppress Cytochrome P450 – the body’s primary cancer protector and detoxifying centre. In other words, if you want to prevent cancer, don’t eat foods commonly sprayed with Roundup (sugar, corn, soy, and wheat) – unless they are grown organically.

(Ed note: Research is now confirming that one of the best ways to restore the integrity of gut bacteria is through the daily use of probiotics.)

– On the vaccine front, an application filed by Merck employees to sue their former employer in 2010 received the court’s permission to proceed on October 7, 2014. These whistleblowers are now able to present the facts behind the MMR vaccine controversy regarding its potential to cause autism. They, who helped develop the vaccine, allege that not only can it cause autism, but it does, and Merck knew that it could cause autism all along. This will be progress in action, with feathers flying in all directions for the next few years.

– One example of progress unrelated to deception is the development of 3D printing in medicine. The medical adaptations of 3D printers can build missing jaws in babies with birth defects, restore a face half destroyed in a traffic accident, or build portions of a baby’s trachea which will then dissolve when the normal growth process continues to create the missing portion, as originally intended by the DNA program. Harvard’s Dr. Jerome Groopman, frequently cited in my articles, provides a masterful description of 3D printers and how they work in the November 24, 2014 issue of The New Yorker (free online).

How wonderful it would have been to have this technology available for one of our adopted daughters whose malformed jaw, due to fetal alcohol syndrome, required seven major operations to enable her to eat and speak properly. How equally wonderful would it have been to have had the collapsed heart valves of our adopted son, Manu (from Mother Theresa’s shelter in Calcutta) restored by a medical 3D printer; it would have saved his life.

Report Paints Bleak Picture for Big Pharma

The very short list of examples of progress cited so far deals only with lies being uncovered. The actual list is bigger than one can imagine, given that retractions of dishonest scientific research (funded by industry in most cases) rose by 1,900% in nine years.

Simultaneously, the leading researchers in many medical schools have gone so far as to say that “most published medical research is false,” demanding that research heading for publication should be rigorously tested for safety and accuracy, as one “should test drugs” before letting either the research or the drugs loose on the public.

Most surprising is the move, this past November, on the part of the U.S. National Institutes of Health. It is proposing to open the books on all clinical trials funded by it – this means that all the trials the industry did not want to become generally known will now hit the fan everywhere. One of the incentives cited is the millions of dollars wasted by governments on stockpiling useless drugs like Tamiflu.

Big Pharma’s very own 2014 report explains how to survive these days as a beleaguered multi-billion dollar industry. The CEOs and their boards are informed by their own researchers that drug management of chronic diseases is increasingly stressing governments financially; and that healthcare policy makers are comparing patented drugs with generic ones and no longer listen to what Big Pharma says is good for their populations.

Patients are “self-medicating” with nutrients that need no prescription. Regulators are getting harder and harder to influence, and governments are putting money into prevention programs instead of supposedly preventive drugs.

The report estimates that, by 2020, revenues will be reduced by at least $97 billion. The problem is that the drugs on the market “relied mainly on marketing,” but “now consumers want measurable outcomes.”

Governments are now aware that, in the U.S. alone, $210 billion is wasted annually due to overuse or misuse of drugs that aren’t necessary because the underlying problems could be fixed by lifestyle changes. R & D is in the worst trouble because the cost of developing a new drug has risen to $4.2 billion; it was less than a billion 10 years ago.

The curative advice? “Every company will have to make sure it behaves ethically at all times, and is an organization that others want to associate with. This means being open and honest, rather than treating compliance with the regulators as the cost of doing business. Every company will have to transform its corporate culture to address the needs of patients, payers, and providers.”

If that isn’t progress, what is?

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