Associated Press declares war on alternative medicine (opinion)

Saturday, November 07, 2009 by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...) Tags: alternative medicine, news, trends

(NaturalNews) The Associated Press has declared war on alternative medicine, publishing a series of stories attacking everything from nutritional therapies to bioidentical hormones. These stories, which are syndicated across thousands of websites around the world, are prefaced with the following highly-opinionated "Editor's Note":

EDITOR'S NOTE: Ten years and $2.5 billion in research have found no cures from alternative medicine. Yet these mostly unproven treatments are now mainstream and used by more than a third of all Americans. This is one in an occasional series examining their use and potential risks.

What this note reveals is an extraordinary bias against natural medicine from the start. It's clear from the claim of "examining their use and potential risks" that the Associated Press isn't even looking for potential benefits of natural medicine. They're just looking to discredit it. And the part about "Ten years and $2.5 billion in research have found no cures" is factually incorrect.

To be more accurate, the statement should have said "Ten years and $2.5 billion in research by pharmaceutical researchers who don't even know how to study something holistically have found no cures that they are willing to publicly acknowledge."

Because, in reality, natural medicine has provided the populations of the world with countless cures spanning thousands of years of indigenous use by billions of people. Oh, but wait... the Associated Press doesn't count that. The only evidence they will consider is "proof" provided by researchers on the payroll of the criminally-operated pharmaceutical industry and rubber-stamped by a corrupt, racketeering U.S. Food and Drug Administration that unquestionably pushes a pro-pharma agenda at the expense of public health.

In one story about alternative medicine, the Associated Press characterized the teaching of acupuncture as "Harry Potter medicine." The story criticizes acupuncture and demeans any mention of "energy channels" even though acupuncture has been scientifically proven to be extremely effective at managing pain. There is no mention in the AP story of the published, peer-reviewed studies that promote acupuncture's proven effectiveness and safety.

What happened to just reporting the truth?

As I've stated here on NaturalNews many times, the whole system of "evidence-based medicine" is biased against natural medicine from the start because the FDA maintains an official policy of declaring all plant-based medicines to be inert in the human body, regardless of how much scientific evidence demonstrates otherwise.

In the FDA's eyes, there is no such thing as a food, herb, dietary supplement or nutrient that has any beneficial effect against any disease or health problem in the human body. And you know why? Because according to the FDA, only "drugs" can be used to prevent, treat or reverse any disease or health condition, not nutrients. All nutrients are inert by decree.

So the simple truths that vitamin C cures scurvy or that vitamin D prevents cancer are censored out of existence by the FDA and its media cohorts. So the AP, instead of reporting to the American people what works to make them healthy, spends its time attacking Suzanne Somers over her new book featuring interviews with doctors who have cured cancer using nutritional therapies and other forms of alternative medicine. (http://www.amazon.com/Knockout-Interviews-Do...)

When it comes to health, the Associated Press apparently isn't interested in reporting what works. It's not interested in educating the public how to be healthy, how to avoid cancer, or how to explore natural therapies that might support their health rather than destroying it (like chemotherapy does). Instead, the AP has taken the side of the criminally-operated pharmaceutical industry to discredit and destroy anything that offers the American people freedom of choice in their medicines.

The AP is a powerful, global news manufacturer. Its stories are picked up and republished by thousands of newspapers around the world. Because it is creating "ready-for-publication" news to be dropped into newspapers and magazines, it is supposed to write objective news, without the level of editorializing that you might expect from blogs or sites like NaturalNews. AP is supposed to be leave editors' opinions out of the stories and just print the actual news.

But instead, AP is now prefacing many of their health stories with this stilted, opinionated and completely inaccurate statement attempting to trash the entire alternative medicine industry. That's not a news service... that's just a highly opinionated smear against the only industry that offers any real solutions for lasting health.

Knowing the association's outright bias against natural medicine, now you have to wonder about everything they publish: Are they censoring success stories about natural medicine? Are they collaborating with drug companies to hype up the supposed "benefits" of pharmaceuticals? Are they twisting stories to try to discredit natural medicine in the minds of readers?

I've been watching both the AP and Reuters very carefully for the last several years. I've never seen Reuters pull the kind of stunt AP has just committed. Although Reuters covers conventional medicine, it also covers breakthroughs in natural medicine, so even though I don't agree with everything Reuters says, that news organization at least takes their objectiveness seriously, and they seem to do a good job providing some balanced mainstream coverage of health issues.

The AP, though, has lost all credibility on health issues. It's just another Big Pharma mouthpiece, spouting out the same babble we get from FDA cronies and crooked drug company CEOs. It's all the same broken record: Plants don't contain medicine, take your vaccine shot, take your prescription drugs, patented chemical pills will cure you, and so on ad nauseam.

So I have a question for the AP editors who are writing their opinions-parading-as-news stories: You say $2.5 billion has been spent on alternative medicine with almost no cures found. Do you have any idea how much money Americans are spending on pharmaceutical medicine every year with absolutely no cures being offered?

In 2006, the world spent $643 billion on pharmaceuticals. Where are the cures?

• There are no pharmaceutical cures for cancer.
• There are no pharmaceutical cures for heart disease.
• There are no pharmaceutical cures for diabetes.
• There are no pharmaceutical cures for kidney disease.
• There are no pharmaceutical cures for depression.
• There are no pharmaceutical cures for liver disease.
• There are no pharmaceutical cures for Alzheimer's disease.

... in fact, if you add it all up, the pharmaceutical industry is the biggest rip-off in the history of medicine! The world spends nearly a trillion dollars a year on pharmaceuticals now, and yet there hasn't been a single cure found by the drug industry for any major disease or health condition.

Not a single cure.

Where is the cure for cancer? For diabetes? For heart disease?

Alternative medicine offers cures for all three. You can cure cancer using the natural medicine described right here on this website. You can reverse diabetes through simple changes in diet and exercise. You can reverse heart disease with nutritional strategies such as shifting to a plant-based diet. Pharmaceuticals can cure none of these things, even after trillions of dollars have been spent trying to "find cures."

If the Associated Press had any interest at all in printing real news, they might want to report on how the pharmaceutical industry is the greatest medical hoax ever perpetrated in the history of the world. They might be interested in the trillions of dollars being wasted on false hope from dangerous pills that cure nothing. Maybe the AP would want to report on the price fixing, the bribery of doctors, the fraudulent science, the hidden studies showing harm, the fact that 80% of drug ingredients are made in China and India, or any of a hundred other areas of concern about the criminal pharmaceutical industry.

But no, the AP chooses to attack Suzanne Somers instead. Instead of reporting actual news that might be important to your health, the AP is manufacturing its own agenda-driven opinion pieces and passing them off as real news.

Maybe the Associated Press should change its name to "The AP Blog."

Sources for this story include:
Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharmaceutical_...

AP story attacking bioidentical hormones:
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/...

AP story attacking Suzanne Somers:
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/...

Suzanne Somers' new book that challenges the conventional cancer industry:
http://www.amazon.com/Knockout-Interviews-Do...

AP story attacking acupuncture:
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/...