Study shows the public is turning to alternative medicine and away from dangerous prescription drugs

Monday, April 17, 2006 by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...) Tags: alternative medicine, dangerous drugs, organized medicine

A study published in April 2005 revealed that more than 70 percent of adults aged 50 or older are now using some form of alternative therapy. This includes medicinal herbs, meditation and chiropractic care. The fact that these people are adopting alternative medicine and using it in their own lives is fascinating in and of itself, but what is really fascinating about this research is the response it has been getting from the conventional medical community.

The co-author of this study, Gong-Soog Hong, professor of consumer sciences at Ohio State University, said she was quite surprised herself by how many people were turning to alternative medicine. Here is the really funny part: Hong said she is concerned about interactions, and that these alternative medicines are unproven and they could cause "any kind of side effect." She describes that as being "pretty scary." It must be frightening for doctors to think how risky it is for patients to engage in health-enhancing therapies and nutritional strategies that make drugs irrelevant. All that health-centric philosophy must interfere with their highly toxic prescription drugs.

I find it fascinating that, when talking about drugs and herbs in the same person's body, the doctors always phrase it as if the herbs are interfering with the drugs. You notice it is never the other way around? Maybe it is the drugs interfering with the herbs, because the herbs are supporting healthy immune function, detoxification of the body and a healthy nervous system with mental awareness and lucidity.

Prescription drugs try to hijack your body's biochemistry

The drugs, on the other hand, try to take over the body and hijack the biochemistry. They try to force blood pressure to be lower or force the liver to not manufacture cholesterol. In fact, prescription drugs interfere with normal human metabolism, and that is one reason why prescription drugs are killing people. Yet all the conventional medical doctors are terrified about the unknown side effects of alternative therapies.

Today, conventional doctors are finally admitting that people over 50 are turning to alternative medicine because conventional medicine isn't giving them answers. When people are in chronic pain because they have inflammation and joint pain, and when they find out that the drugs that were supposed to be safe are actually killing them at a truly terrifying rate, then of course they are going to turn to alternative medicine. They find out that drugs cause dementia, skin disorders, low sex drive and all these other side effects and think maybe there is something better to be found in the world of alternative medicine.

Old school medicine is harmful and outdated

If one school of thought on medicine is failing the people, then of course people are going to turn somewhere else for answers. Those answers are found in the universe of nutrition and natural health, which I like to call "advanced medicine." Organized medicine, or old school medicine, is really outdated. It is on its way out. Thank God, because it has killed so many people that it has made the wars of the last century look like playground skirmishes.

If you look at how many people have been killed by prescription drugs and organized medicine, you will realize that organized medicine is not the answer. If you look around at the population and see how diseased we are -- with diabetes, cancer, dementia, Alzheimer's disease and so on -- you will realize our medical system is not working. It hasn't produced any cures for the diseases we were promised we would see cures for. It hasn't extended the lifespan of our population. Certain statistics might make it look like we're living longer today, but that's just because fewer infants are dying now than in the 1950s, for example. So the average age of death appears to be higher, even when adults are dying younger.

Also, organized medicine is bankrupting our nation, one family at a time. Half of personal bankruptcies are now due to the high cost of medical insurance and health care. Employers can no longer afford medical insurance and remain competitive in the global marketplace. You see, a lot of jobs are leaving the country simply because the health care and health insurance costs are skyrocketing to the point where we can't compete in the global economy.

Organized medicine has given us a system of disease and bankruptcy, and all it can do is worry about the "pretty scary" side effects of alternative therapies that might actually help people be healthy. You must live in another reality to believe pharmaceuticals are the answer to everything, including diseases that have nothing to do with infectious pathogens or microbes. You have to be from the universe of Western medicine to believe that vitamins are useless, that healing therapeutic touch has no benefit whatsoever and that the mind and body are disconnected. Yet those are things that Western medicine devoutly believes. You have to be living in an alternate universe -- the universe of organized medicine -- to believe all of these things.

I love the fact that all of the organized medicine researchers and med school doctors who graduated from these alternate realities say that alternative medicines and therapies are unproven. What are they talking about? We have more than 5,000 years of documented history of herbs being used safely throughout China, Japan, Europe and even South America. We have acupuncture and its proven clinical use in China. We have naturopathic physicians, massage therapists and chiropractors today with literally millions of hours of clinical observations on what works for patients.

Organized medicine takes all of that evidence, throws it out and says it doesn't count. To organized medicine, in order for something to be proven true, it has to be published in its pharmaceutically motivated medical journals. Information must pass through the gatekeepers of its alternate universe. The gatekeepers are, of course, the heads of the American Medical Association and American Heart Association and people who decide what gets printed in medical journals. Meanwhile, the only organizations that can afford to conduct studies that are considered valid are the highly profitable drug companies. So, of course, the only thing that is "proven," according to organized medicine's twisted version of scientific proof, is pharmaceuticals.

It says it only accepts what is proven and rejects everything else, and, yet, when you ask a surgeon where the clinical trial on a surgical procedure is, he or she will say there are none. "There are no trials. We just start doing them." So you ask, "You mean there wasn't a study done on 10,000 patients to see if the surgical procedure you're using is actually useful and that it will do what you promised the patient it will do?" They say, "No, we just started doing it." It doesn't have to be proven at all.

I believe the vast majority of surgical procedures are medically unnecessary. Probably tens of thousands of unnecessary hysterectomies are still being performed today. How about the gastric bypass surgery? They basically rip out part of your digestive system, staple it back together and call it a weight-loss plan. Now you can't eat and you wonder why. This is called "heroic medicine." It looks courageous, but it's really just barbaric. The patient wakes up -- well 99 percent of them do -- and suddenly they can't eat as much. Is this a weight-loss program and strategy? Is this how you support the human body?

You don't support human health by ripping out parts of the body that are necessary to sustain human health. All that does is enrich the surgeons and hospitals that happily host such procedures. When doctors say they only use medicine that has been proven, what they mean is that it has been proven according to their peers who filter out everything that doesn't fit their current medical dogma. They say that everything else is not proven and there is no evidence. But then these studies appear that say 70 percent of adults are using something else. This is scary to people who live in the alternate reality of organized medicine.

The defenders of organized medicine are terrified because statistics like this tell them people are exercising their free will and choosing something that actually works. They are terrified because the institutions of disease and "sick care" have invested billions of dollars trying to build a system of control. They don't want people to have a choice. They want people to rely on MDs, surgeries, drugs, radiation, chemotherapy and other barbaric methods to treat symptoms that they call diseases, but which really aren't.

They have invested a lot of time, energy and ego into this. In fact, the only reason people use old school medicine is because insurance pays for it. If insurance covered vitamins, therapeutic touch, disease-fighting nutritional therapies, anti-cancer foods and supplements, therapies to reverse nervous disorders, acupuncture, Chinese medicine, Reiki and energy healing, then virtually everyone would switch over and start using natural therapies. Why? Because they work. You don't have to spend the rest of your life in a hospital, wired to a feeding tube, paying $10,000 a day, with pain and suffering until your dying day, trapped in a system of medicine that looks at you as nothing more than a profit generating machine.

Conventional medicine is profit-driven, which is why insurance doesn't cover healthy alternatives

Organized medicine doesn't want insurance to cover nutritional therapies, chiropractic services and acupuncture because if people could get those therapies and not shell out money from their own pockets, they would leave the medical clinics en masse. They would line up at the naturopathic doctors. Wouldn't you? Most people would, except those who are too brain dead from taking statin drugs and antidepressants to realize what they are doing.

Organized medicine is outdated and will soon be relegated to history. In the meantime, it is going to hold on as tightly as it can to avoid lose control. To do that, it is going to discredit everything that is alternative by saying things like, "We are really scared of the side effects of herbal medicine and alternative health therapies. We don't know how they are going to react to our toxic prescription drugs." This is how conventional medicine creates doubt in the minds of customers who, out of fear, continue to suffer the harm of prescription drugs, chemotherapy and other barbaric medical procedures. You see this all the time with cancer. An oncologist is talking with a patient, trying to convince them that they have three to six months to live, but if they get chemotherapy, he says, they will live six to 12 months. Of course, the patient wants to live six to 12 months, so the patient says, "Go ahead, doctor. Put in the IV and pump me up with toxic chemicals."

Somewhere during that devastating treatment for cancer, the patient might say that he or she wants to take some antioxidants to protect the healthy cells in the body while the chemotherapy is killing the cancer, but many conventional doctors will say, "No, don't take antioxidants. How dare you think about supporting your immune system with nutritional therapies and life-saving supplements! You will interfere with the chemotherapy!" The patient says, "Oh, I'm sorry for trying to make a choice to support my own health outcome. Please shoot me up with that chemo before I get any more strange ideas about health." The oncologist will happily oblige.

Organized medicine, or what I like to call Dark Ages medicine, doesn't like you to be informed, because if you are, you might make the choice to go somewhere else. As we are seeing today, people are going somewhere else. Seventy percent are going somewhere else.

To wrap this up, I suspect those who are younger tend to be more open to alternative medicine. In fact, I have spoken to a lot of people under the age of 30 and they are very open to alternative medicine. To them it is not alternative medicine; it is advanced medicine. It is the new wave -- holistic, naturopathic, mind and body, nutrition -- all of which seems quite normal to many younger people. So it is very interesting that we are seeing people over 50 turning to alternative medicine, too.

Organized medicine will soon become another sad chapter in the history of medical experimentation. Those who continue to follow organized medicine, take lots of drugs, undergo multiple surgical procedures and chemotherapy will themselves be part of that history, too, as conventional medicine is currently killing more than 750,000 Americans each year. That is supported by statistics found in the report Death by Medicine, available at Dr. Gary Null's website at www.GaryNull.com.