The real Abraham Cherrix question: Does the State own your body? (opinion)

Tuesday, August 15, 2006 by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...) Tags: cancer industry, Abraham Cherrix, medical ethics

Both the conventional cancer industry and the mainstream media have so far managed to frame the Abraham Cherrix debate as one concerned with conventional medicine versus alternative medicine. But this framing of the debate is, itself, a deception. The real question is not whether alternative cancer therapies work, but whether the state owns your body and can therefore order you to submit to extremely toxic medical treatments or medical experiments against your will.

Pushers of conventional cancer treatments believe the state does own your body, especially if you're under 18 years old, and as a result, the state believe it can use any means necessary -- including the threat of violence -- to force you to submit to whatever chemicals the local oncologist has been convinced are "good for you." I call it, "Gunpoint Medicine," and it actually does involve guns, handcuffs, and jail time for those who resist, as we have already seen in multiple cases across the United States.

This distorted belief that the state owns your body, however, runs counter to everything we hold true as free citizens in modern society. We almost universally accept the belief that individual citizens have the right to eat themselves into a state of obesity-induced death, for example, or to smoke their way to lung cancer. We don't outlaw drinking yourself to death with Vodka or eating your way to heart disease by consuming fried foods at every meal. Why is this? Because we recognize that people have the right to choose how they wish to treat their bodies, even if they make decisions the rest of us disagree with.

The exception to this rule is, of course, those people who cannot make their own informed decisions such as infants and the elderly. But Cherrix, a young man who is old enough to operate a motor vehicle on public roadways, is no infant. He has survived one round of chemotherapy already, and his rational, informed reasoning tells him he may not survive another. He has accurately calculated that more chemotherapy might kill him, and thus he is doing what you, me and all our ancestors have done since the dawn of humanity: Fought to preserve our lives and distance ourselves from threats to our personal safety.

The dangerous ideas of Abraham Cherrix

The essence of freedom, you see, is that we each have the freedom to make whatever decisions we want as long as those decisions don't harm others. Cherrix's decision to reject conventional medicine and seek alternative care harms no one, regardless of whether alternative medicine is effective.

It is a threat to no other person, but it is a threat to something that conventional medicine is even more scared of losing: Power over patients. The real threat to conventional medicine in Cherrix's decision has nothing to do with the health or life of this one young man, but rather the far more dangerous idea that if Cherrix can question his oncologist, then maybe we ALL can question our oncologists!

That one dangerous idea, if propagated to the millions of cancer patients who obediently provide the repeat business for the multi billion-dollar cancer industry, is a very real threat to the financial livelihood of the industry (which thrives on profits, not cures, after all).

If patients wake up and become critical thinkers who ask smart questions, the cancer industry would collapse overnight. Why? Because by and large, the treatments it offers (chemotherapy, radiation and surgery) actually kill far more people than they save. The latest, greatest, most heavily-hyped breast cancer drug Herceptin, for example, has now been shown to cause heart damage in a whopping 28 percent of patients. Yet in one trial, the drug only helped 0.6 percent of patients. Do the math: It means the drug harms 46 times as many people as it helps! And yet this is considered a modern medical breakthrough that's being pushed on women all across the Western world!

The real danger in Cherrix's actions, you see, is simply that patients might get smart and start questioning conventional cancer treatments. That cannot be allowed to happen, and so they are making an example of Cherrix by persecuting this young man and his family, abusing the power of the courts, violating his basic human rights and threatening Cherrix with fearful language. And to think, these are the doctors who claim to be helping the young man!

Trading lives for egos

Pushers of toxic chemotherapy, you see, believe that they alone get to play God with patients. Only their own Western brand of powerful chemicals can save Cherrix, they believe, and they believe it so strongly that they are willing to put Cherrix's life on the line to prove themselves right!

But remember: The minute conventional medicine uses the power of the state to assert that it alone has the right to determine how you treat your body, you no longer have anything resembling health freedom. Instead, you are left with health tyranny, where corrupt regulators and profit-minding oncologists who proselytize outdated medicine like it was some kind of cult religion get to decide what happens to your body. Oh, and by the way, the more they "treat" you, the bigger the salary and bonuses they take home. It's a business, after all. None of this would even be happening if Cherrix was some homeless kid with no financial resources or health insurance to be tapped.

The arrogance of conventional medicine knows no bounds. Not only do doctors, drug companies and oncologists believe they alone possess supreme knowledge of medicine that makes all other systems of medicine obsolete, they also believe that they alone have the right to force their one, narrow-minded system of chemical medicine upon everyone, regardless of individual beliefs or the fact that patients often do more research and know more facts about what's available than the doctors themselves!

Conventional medicine ferociously insists that competing systems of healing developed over thousands of years (such as Traditional Chinese Medicine, Ayurvedic medicine, Tibetan medicine, Amazon herbal medicine and others) amount to nothing more than quackery and hucksterism. The real quacks, though, are the doctors who act out of such hubris -- and who place such a low value on human freedom -- that they would have a patient hog-tied to the treatment table, their parents arrested and thrown in jail, and toxic chemicals injected into the patient's bloodstream through an IV thrust into their arm, all against their will.

None dare call it medicine

To call this "medicine" is downright disgusting. To say, "It's for your own good" is the epitome of sinister arrogance. For doctors to demand the arrest of those who choose a different path to healing is to violate the human rights of patients who, of their own free will, have chosen to walk away from a system that was once believed to merely be dangerous to one's health, but is now known to be dangerous to one's freedom as well.

Conventional medicine has now proudly become a system of disease-mongering and profiteering that has so little to offer in terms of actual healing that it must administer its medicine to patients at gunpoint. It even offers no apology for this behavior, insisting that its own superiority of medical knowledge outweighs the civil rights of patients like Abraham Cherrix. Yet there is nothing unique about Cherrix that could not apply to you, your children or family members. If doctors can have Cherrix arrested and kidnapped for daring to question the efficacy of chemotherapy, what might they do to others who also dare to explore alternatives such as herbal treatments and organic diets?

By stooping to these desperate measures to control patients, conventional medicine has shown its true character. It is not a system that values patients' rights, or human rights, or the freedom for patients to make informed decisions. It is a system enshrined in centralized control, censorship, intimidation and fear that would prefer patients show up ignorant and placated, ready to submit to any drug or procedure, and agreeing to invoke absolutely no critical thinking skills in questioning what's being done to them. For oncologists, that's the perfect patient. Especially if they have good insurance. (It's curious, isn't it, how cancer patients are suddenly sent home to die only after their insurance runs out?)

Those who excuse and defend this behavior on the part of conventional medicine should not merely be ashamed of themselves; they should resign from medicine, turn in their medical licenses, and seek a new career that does not require the exercising of ethics. Perhaps they can be pharmaceutical reps or FDA bureaucrats.

Medicine is no place for those who lack compassion for the wishes of their fellow human beings, and the humility to respect those decisions. Of course, Western medicine remains dominated by those who have neither compassion nor humility, but that only further diminishes its credibility with informed health consumers.

I, for one, have rarely observed a more evil, outrageous abuse of medical authority than what is being done right now to Cherrix and his family. By any honest assessment, the conventional medical community -- which continues to loudly and proudly support this medical McCarthyism -- has now completely lost what little credibility it had left.

It's the beginning of the end of the conventional cancer industry's dominance over patients, I believe. Because now parents everywhere are starting to come to the only conclusion they can: If you don't want to be arrested and thrown in jail while your children are kidnapped by the state and forcibly injected with chemical that may kill them, don't take them to see conventional doctors.

In a very real sense, cancer doctors have now become more dangerous than cancer.

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