Based on a newly published report, some doctors are now actually calling for the nationwide, mandatory testing of all adults for AIDS. When I hear ridiculous public health ideas like this one, I have to stop and consider: what's the real motive behind this? It seems clear to me that the motive for this one is to sell more AIDS drugs. Because the first thing that will happen if you start testing the entire adult population for AIDS is you will get a lot of false positives.
In fact, there are an increasing number of doctors who say that AIDS isn't even caused by HIV. There's a great book on this subject by Dr. Gary Null called "AIDS: A second opinion," where Dr. Null says that AIDS is really just an immuno-suppressed state. There's no hard, scientific diagnosis for AIDS in the medical community: a doctor can assemble a list of symptoms related to poor immune system function and call that AIDS.
So if you have mandatory nationwide testing, you're going to get a lot of people who are inappropriately diagnosed with AIDS and who get scared out of their minds and start taking anti-AIDS prescription drugs, which of course boosts the profits of prescription drug companies. If all of this sounds like some grand conspiracy, don't worry, it isn't. It's more like a bunch of bumbling medical authorities making silly suggestions about testing the entire population for a disease that isn't even close to the top of the list of public health concerns. The mainstream media has blown the AIDS myths all out of proportion. Let me explain...
I'm not saying that the HIV virus doesn't exist or that lots of people aren't suffering from immune system suppression. But what I am saying is that the label "AIDS" is rather loosely applied to a great number of people who are really only suffering from correctable biological side effects of making poor lifestyle decisions (food choice, diet, lack of exercise, use of recreational drugs). If you'd like to see some supporting information from doctors and researchers who have looked into the AIDS question in great detail, check out Dr. Peter Duesberg's website. Dr. Duesberg is the professor of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and is one of the most outspoken whistleblowers on myths about AIDS. There's also a great book on Amazon called, What if everything you thought you knew about AIDS was wrong?" that goes into more detail.
I've personally talked to several people who were diagnosed with AIDS and then later found out that they didn't really have AIDS at all. All they had was a suppressed immune system, and by changing their diet and taking a few herbs, including immune boosting substances such as reishi mushrooms, garlic and a variety of rainforest herbs, were able to restore full immune system function and no longer showed any symptoms of AIDS whatsoever. In fact, when they went back to another doctor and asked to be checked out for AIDS, they were told they didn't have AIDS and that they'd never had AIDS.
So to me, this whole idea of testing the entire nation for AIDS is utterly ridiculous, because you're going to get a whole lot of false positives. And besides, there are far more important things to be testing for.
Why don't we test people in this country for nutritional deficiencies? That would do a lot more good than testing people for AIDS; we have well over half the population now suffering from chronic vitamin D deficiencies, and that number is even higher in those with dark skin pigmentation because of its UV blocking effect. Why don't we test people for that? I'll tell you why we don't: because if you test the country for vitamin D and you find that half the population doesn't have enough vitamin D, then you can't sell them overpriced pharmaceutical products to solve their "disease." To solve the vitamin D problem, the only thing the people need to do is start drinking cod liver oil by the tablespoon, or exposing their skin to natural sunlight on a regular basis.
Our medical community doesn't test for nutritional deficiencies because nobody makes any money when the tests come back positive. Anybody can sell nutritional supplements, of course, but what I mean is that there's no controlling interest of the drugs that would be used to treat vitamin D deficiencies as in the case of AIDS. AIDS drugs are patented, so they can be controlled and marked up to produce tremendous profits. Hence the push for AIDS testing.
But you can bet that if vitamins were patented and controlled by Big Pharma, we'd have nationwide, mandatory testing of nutritional deficiencies rolled out almost overnight. When there's money to be made, the diagnostic tests will magically appear to create demand for those products. After all, nobody needs AIDS drugs if they aren't labeled with the AIDS disease name. If you want to create demand for AIDS drugs, you first have to point your finger at a bunch of people and tell them they have AIDS. (And most people are stupid enough to actually believe their doctors on this one, go figure...)
The same scheme worked with ADD and Ritalin. The organized medicine industry just flat-out invented a fictitious disease and created a billion dollar industry selling drugs to "treat" it. Why wouldn't the same gig work with AIDS, too? Heck, why not create a whole slew of fictional diseases like Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and milk people for money selling quack treatments through the channels of organized medicine? In fact, that's exactly what's happening. (Or, if that doesn't work, you can always just redefine diseases. A year ago, if your LDL cholesterol was 110, you were considered normal. Today, you're considered diseased and will be put on a statin drug. Same LDL cholesterol, new definition. Neat medical shell game, huh?)
So whenever I hear someone suggesting that we should require mandatory testing for a certain disease, I have to ask myself: what's the economic incentive here? Are there other diseases or vitamin deficiencies that we should be testing as a higher priority? Because you could do a lot more good in this country and dramatically reduce health care costs by testing for nutritional deficiencies like magnesium, zinc, vitamin D or the B vitamins. If you want to talk about public health, let's talk about public health that works. Let's talk about being able to prevent diseases with a nickel's worth of nutritional supplements per day per person. Because that's what you can do with simple vitamins and minerals. Zinc alone, if given to expectant mothers, can reduce the incidence of low birth weight infants by nearly one third. Vitamin D supplementation can prevent prostate cancer, breast cancer, osteoporosis and many other disorders. And magnesium, of course, can greatly improve cardiovascular health and actually help prevent heart attacks. And we haven't even talked about the healthy oils and how supplementing with omega-3 fatty acids or macadamia nut oil can greatly enhance cardiovascular health while improving nervous system function.
If you want to talk about public health and what kind of testing we should be doing, let's start with the things that can create the greatest positive public health impact. But you see, those aren't the things that the health authorities want to test for, because once again, they really have no desire to send a bunch of people to the health food stores to buy nutritional supplements. It's all about testing only for those things they can treat with drugs, surgery or radiation.
That's why there's the big push for mammograms, by the way. Mammograms actually cause breast cancer because they emit so much radiation. Dr. John Gofman, author of Radiation from Medical Procedures in the Pathogenesis of Cancer and Ischemic Heart Disease, says that 83 percent of all breast cancer is actually caused by mammograms and other forms of medical radiation. (Read more about the uselessness of mammograms here.)
Yet there's always this breast cancer prevention push, and there's a message that if you don't get mammograms, you're not taking care of your health. Why do you think mammograms are so heavily pushed by organized medicine? It's because if you come up with a positive, they've got drugs to treat breast cancer. And that's the first thing you're going to be shuffled off to do if your test comes back positive: you're going to find yourself talking to an oncologist who's likely to recommend chemotherapy.
Why do you think they're still using PSA tests for prostate cancer, even though the very inventor of the PSA test announced in late 2004 that the test was utterly and completely worthless? Dr. Thomas Stamey of Stanford University says that it has no scientific basis whatsoever and doesn't correlate with prostate cancer. (Click here to read more articles on the demise of the PSA test.) Yet it's still being used all around the country to scare men into thinking they have prostate cancer, and to get them to submit to expensive, invasive therapies like radiation, chemotherapy and surgical procedures that are quite often medically unnecessary. What the men need, again, is sunlight and vitamin D. You can eliminate the vast majority of prostate cancer in this country by getting people to take in a healthy dose of sunlight and giving them basic nutritional supplements like cod liver oil, zinc and selected herbs.
So out of the long list of things that we could be doing to enhance public health, to eliminate chronic disease and to improve nutrition, the only thing that these doctors can come up with in terms of a suggestion is to test the whole country for AIDS. On my list of the top 1000 things that we need to do to improve the health of our population, testing the whole country for AIDS is somewhere down around #972. There are so many other things that we should be doing first. If we want to invest the effort of testing the whole population for something, let's start by testing for nutritional deficiencies and treating those with low-cost, commonly available vitamins, minerals and food supplements that can not only prevent chronic disease, but can actually help reverse diseases. Let's start there.
See, don't make the mistake of thinking that public health policy is driven by genuine public health needs. It's actually driven by the mindset of conventional medicine, which is to treat everything with drugs, surgery, radiation and chemotherapy. It's driven by intellectual property: who owns the drugs, who owns the patents, who owns the lab equipment used to diagnose these diseases, and so on. It's all about power, profit and control. It's not really about public health. Because, again, if it were about public health, we'd be testing people for things like nutritional deficiencies that are responsible for so many of the chronic diseases now ravaging our nation.
If it were really about public health, we'd be spending 2 to 3 percent of GDP on education to keep people healthy, rather than what we're doing now, which is spending 25% of GDP treating chronic disease in this country. If it were really about public health, every time a woman gave birth to a child, we'd hand them a manual called "Nutrition For Your Baby," and we'd teach them the basics of how to keep that baby healthy and prevent chronic disease. But we don't do any of that. We don't educate mothers in this country about nutrition and how to protect the health of their babies. We don't educate our children in public schools, and astoundingly, we don't even teach our doctors about nutrition in our medical schools! How crazy is that?
So the only ideas they can come up with are things like, "Hey, let's FORCE the entire adult population to submit to an AIDS test!" What are they going to do, throw you in jail if you refuse? If they pass a federal law mandating national AIDS testing, I promise I'll be at the head of the march on Washington, holding up the banner of health freedom and demanding the law be ruled unconstitutional. It is, technically, a violation of the 4th Amendment, because mandatory AIDS testing is an illegal search of your body. For those who may have forgotten that the Bill of Rights actually exists (I know, it's been difficult to remember in the post 9/11 era), here's a reminder of what the 4th Amendment says:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated...
With that said, consider how crazy this whole AIDS testing proposal is: conventional doctors want to violate your body by forcing you to take a test for a disease that's largely fictional, which will undoubtedly produce false positives, which will earn you the label of "diseased," which will practically force you into a regime of high-cost AIDS drugs, which will enrich the pharmaceutical companies and, meanwhile, transfer even more power to doctors who could then DEMAND that you submit to all sorts of additional tests.
That's the kind of power some U.S. doctors are now demanding over your body. And they're going to frame the whole thing as a "public health" benefit! Gee, it's all for YOUR own good!
No thanks. I'm quite healthy without the meddling of conventional doctors, their warped public health policies, and their egomaniacal ideas of subjecting the population to procedures that are essentially harebrained medical experiments.
About the author: Mike Adams is a consumer health advocate and award-winning journalist with a mission to teach personal and planetary health to the public He has authored and published thousands of articles, interviews, consumers guides, and books on topics like health and the environment, and he is well known as the creator of popular downloadable preparedness programs on financial collapse, emergency food storage, wilderness survival and home defense skills. Adams is an honest, independent journalist and accepts no money or commissions on the third-party products he writes about or the companies he promotes. In 2010, Adams created TV.NaturalNews.com, a natural living video sharing site featuring thousands of user videos on foods, fitness, green living and more. He also founded an environmentally-friendly online retailer called BetterLifeGoods.com that uses retail profits to help support consumer advocacy programs. He's also the CEO of a highly successful email newsletter software company that develops software used to send permission email campaigns to subscribers. Adams volunteers his time to serve as the executive director of the Consumer Wellness Center, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization, and pursues hobbies such as martial arts, Capoeira, nature macrophotography and organic gardening. Known as the 'Health Ranger,' Adams' personal health statistics and mission statements are located at www.HealthRanger.org
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Wednesday, February 16, 2005
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