Americans pay, by far, the highest fees in the world for health care services, and yet we simultaneously suffer the highest rates of degenerative disease in the world. Conventional cancer treatments, which essentially involve varying degrees of poisoning patients with either toxic chemicals or deadly radiation, have barely altered the survival rates for cancer in three decades. Heart disease rates continue to rise, diabetes is now an epidemic, and yet the drug companies, mass media and FDA increasingly promote new fictitious diseases in the hopes that they can sell even more dangerous prescription medications to people who actually don't need them.

Now here's the funny part in all this: Desperate defenders of conventional medicine -- with all its toxic chemicals, drug-induced deaths and fraudulent science -- have the gall to call natural medicine "quackery." Anyone who promotes good nutrition through supplements, vitamins or herbs is labeled a "quack," and anyone who dares question the sanctity of the cult of pharmacology is discredited, attacked and sometimes even arrested and jailed. (See my documented history of armed FDA raids against alternative doctors and vitamin companies in my book Natural Health Solutions and the Conspiracy to Keep You From Knowing About Them.

It's all so hilarious that it makes you wonder how the so-called "quack" police can continue to peddle their pro-drug propaganda with a straight face. According to them, sunlight is useless for human health, nutritional supplements have no impact on health, stress reduction through relaxation exercises is some sort of senseless voodoo and eating 100 calories of fresh produce has exactly the same effect on your health as drinking 100 calories of a sugared-up soda (to them, a calorie is a calorie, regardless of its source). Oh yeah, and they also say aspartame and fluoride are completely safe to swallow in unlimited lifetime quantities, with zero negative health effects.

In fact, the pushers of conventional medicine still believe that the mind has no health impact on the body -- a belief that was considered modern in the 1870's, but today, in 2007, it's downright antiquated. Don't believe me? Just ask your doctor about "mind-body medicine" and watch the condemnations roll off his tongue. M.D.s practicing today literally believe the body is divided into isolated compartments that have no effect on each other; hence the dividing up of doctor duties into roles like foot doctor, ear doctor, eye doctor, brain doctor and heart doctor. What happened to the WHOLE patient? You'd never see a Chinese medicine doctor limiting their treatment to the feet. The very idea would be considered laughable.

The entire belief system of conventional medicine truly belongs in the history books, and yet scrappy old M.D.s who probably should have retired ten years ago keep on pushing their Descartian distortions onto the world. They literally believe that if everyone in the world only had enough drugs in their bodies, we'd all be super healthy! If we just had enough vaccines to shoot up all the babies, and enough cholesterol drugs for all the senior citizens, and enough antidepressants for all the middle-aged people, we'd all be healthier, they claim. And the way to get more people healthier is to push more drug ads, to mandate more vaccinations and require more "mental health screening" of schoolchildren, just in case they might need ADHD drugs.

Sound insane? It is. And don't believe for a minute that modern medicine is based on anything resembling real science. The science was abandoned decades ago. All that's left today is an empty shell of a medical system that claims to treat patients but really just uses them as profit-generating machines to enrich some of the wealthiest corporations in the world: the drug companies. All the while, the deaths mount up... over half a million Americans killed by prescription drugs since 9/11, and the number increases by the minute. Imagine a modern nuclear missile striking a significant U.S. city, killing all its inhabitants in an instant. That's what pharmaceuticals have done to Americans over the last five years. The casualties of Big Pharma in just the last five years are now ten times larger than the number of Americans killed in the Vietnam War. And that statistic, by the way, comes straight from the Journal of the American Medical Association, which studied deaths caused by prescription drug side effects.

Today, the sick care industry is a deadly industry mired in dishonest advertising, corrupt regulators, brainwashed doctors, suppression of alternative medicine and always power, money and greed. It has become such a complete joke that modern medicine is actually harmful to the public. In other words, Americans would actually be far healthier if all the M.D.s, drug companies and FDA bureaucrats suddenly disappeared tomorrow! Pharmaceutical use would plummet, side effects would vanish, rates of fictitious disease diagnosis would drop to zero, and America would be a healthier, happier country. Our sick care system is, bluntly stated, keeping us all sick.

Doctors, of course, always talk about their evidence. "Where's the evidence that nutrition has any value?" they ask, as if drug companies would suddenly fund randomized, double-blind placebo-controlled studies on minerals that can't be patented. And yet their own medical journal evidence, to which they impart impressive degrees of reliability and stature, is almost entirely based on fraudulent science, designed specifically to achieve a statistical "success" using any means necessary: fudging the numbers, removing samples that don't fit the desired curve, burying trials that showed negative results, confusing correlation with causation and a hundred other devious tricks. The medical journals themselves, in turn, are financially supported by drug company ads, and they continue to publish studies secretly authored by the drug companies themselves (while utterly failing to disclose blatant conflicts of interest).

The so-called "evidence" supporting conventional medicine and the use of most pharmaceuticals, it turns out, is almost entirely fictional. It's as if tens of thousands of people stood around and agreed to pretend they were conducting real science, pretending to "search for the cure," pretending to regulate drug companies at the FDA, pretending to dispense medicine at the local pharmacy and pretending to be doing it all for the public good. It's all a grand pretending act -- a great hoax on the American people.

Of course, the quack defenders of conventional medicine strongly disagree with this -- and that's all part of their pretending, of course. It's their role to disagree with anything that challenges the status quo. Their jobs and egos depend on it!

Natural health is a huge threat to conventional medicine. If the American public learned the truth about nutrition, herbs, sunlight, acupuncture, superfoods and other naturopathic modalities, they would drop their drugs in a minute and pursue the safe, natural and non-patented therapies from the world of natural health. And that's precisely what Big Pharma cannot allow to happen. So drug companies continue their campaigns of influence, corruption, buying off the mainstream media and controlling the curricula at medical schools. The American Medical Association, which has been suppressing alternative medicine for literally decades, is perhaps the most visible defender of the drugs-and-surgery approach to sick care, but even the AMA is now increasingly being seen as hopelessly irrelevant and outdated.

The future of health will not be found in chemotherapy, pharmaceuticals or unjustified surgical procedures. It will be found in prevention, where people are taught how to prevent cancer, diabetes, heart disease, depression, kidney stones, osteoporosis and thousands of other health conditions to which conventional medicine has assigned names. Disease prevention is the key to a healthy nation and, indeed, a healthy world. And it is precisely "prevention" that the sick care industry is opposed to. If diseases are all prevented, where will they find paying customers? Preventing disease is the fastest way to bankrupt Big Pharma.

This "Quack!" cartoon was designed as a simple way to point out the obvious: that any doctor who hands out pills for cholesterol, blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes, depression, cancer and other such diseases is a quack. These pills are not merely useless at enhancing health, they are in fact harmful to patients, and they do absolutely nothing to address the underlying causes of these health conditions in the first place.

Quackery is so common today that it is even licensed by the state. It's called a license to "practice medicine," but it's really just a license to practice quackery.

And the truth about the whole medical hoax has become so obvious today that even a duck could tell you what it really is.

The next time your doctor tries to shove pills in your face, just say what the duck says. Quack!