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…The Real History of Medicine

Show Title: History Repeating: Empirically Minded Doctors Increasing Despite Political and Economic Disadvantages

Mainstream Doctors Join Anti-Aging Bandwagon (MSNBC.com): Highlights the “often bitter tension” between conventional medicine (rationalist minded doctors) and the empiricist minded doctors (’anti-aging’ physicians – the largest aggregate of empirically minded contemporary ‘integrative medicine’ doctors today).

Analogy: ‘Anti-aging medicine is to FDA-approval-based medicine now as homeopathy was to allopathic medicine in the 1800s. The same vested interests don’t want to see natural, integrative medicine flourish today.

Prime therapy of concern to modern day drug companies and rationalists : Bio-identical hormones.

Hierarchy of Scientific Study Types from ‘Empiricism to Rationalism’: Case studies, animal experiments, expert opinions, descriptive reports, epidimiology studies, expert concensus, cohort or case-control analyses, non-randomized and randomized controlled trials.

Greatest Obstacle to Mainstreaming Integrative Medicine: Financial Limitations. Big Pharma has more money for: 1) marketing on mainstream media, 2) FDA/AMA/medical board schmoozing, and 3) congressional lobbying. In 2007 the pharmaceutical industry was Washington’s largest lobbying force, according to report by Center for Public Integrity. What was Pharma’s ‘ROI’? They squashed recent Congressional efforts to restrict drug media advertising.

Is ‘Anti-Aging’ Medicine ‘Just About Physicians Trying to Boost Their Income’? That’s what one ‘ivory tower’ doctor said in the MSNBC.com story. Boosting income is part of it, but more important is the steadily growing public demand for therapeutic approaches that promote health.

Are the Rationalist Drug-Oriented Doctors More Mechanically Minded/The Empiricist Integrative Medicine Doctors More Bio-Energetically Minded? One thing the MSNBC story got right was that “most conventional doctors are mechanics. They fix things.” Those are the rationalist physicians of today. Most empirically-minded doctors tend to be healers of the psyche, the nervous system, the endocrine system and the all-important immunological system ( Psychoneuroimmunology, PNI as it’s called). And which therapeutic approaches probably hold greatest promise for the future of our health, healing, prevention and ‘anti-aging’? Bioenergetic approaches.

Good Medicine Word of the Week: Anti-Aging Medicine – the realm of modern-day empiricists. But a better name is Integrative Medicine.

Next Week’s Show: 4th installment of History of Healing – History of Killing. We’ll explore how Big Pharma is in cahoots with the FDA, violating our constitutional rights.

Send TGM #6 to a friend: click here.

 

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Critiques and Criticisms of the Dis-ease Management System

Title for this episode: Reflections on Dr. Wright Interview OR If It Isn’t Biological, It Isn’t Logical!

Drugs – pharmaceuticals – are ’space alien molecules’: As Dr. Jonathan Wright described them on last week’s show, drugs are foreign to earth and foreign to our bodies. Drugs aren’t ‘just another consumer product’ advertised on TV. They affect our metabolism – our ‘bio-chemistry’ – powerfully and profoundly.

Will the Real Alternative Medicine Please Stand Up? Drugs – as recent inventions – are the real ‘alternative medicines’ (alternatives to natural therapeutics).

Alien Molecules Have Alien Effects: Dr. Wright asked: “Any time we take a molecule that has never been found naturally on the planet (and thus never found in the human body) and give it to humans, what should we expect?” Answer: Expect ‘alien effects’ on our chemistries (our biochemistries). We can’t and shouldn’t throw out all drugs, but it’s time to put more emphasis on science-based natural therapies.

If It Isn’t ‘Bio-Logical, It Isn’t Logical: We think our baby boomer listeners need to remember that we’re all animals living in nature, and we need to start integrating into our own health care plans a lot more of the molecules and modalities which nature has to offer, including lifestyle medicine approaches (we’ll cover lifestyle on upcoming Start-a-New installments).

Control Means Power, Power Means Control: Listen and learn why patent medicines – pharmaceuticals, drugs – give the FDA extensive power, and why the FDA and the pharmaceutical industry have so much control over our health care choices. Why are drugs so entrenched into US health care, while many effective, inexpensive natural products continue to struggle for a place in the market? And why do patent medicines set the FDA up for corruption by pharmaceutical companies? We discuss why.

Approval Power Means Control: We highlight the natural omega-3 fatty acid, DHA (docosahenoic acid) as an example of a natural product (for prevention of Alzheimer’s dementia) which – due to FDA politics – is unlikely to ever get FDA approval, and thus to ever become ’standard of care,’ and covered by our health insurance policies.

We Become Silent (the movie): click here. Government intrusions into our freedoms and privacy aren’t just from of the effects of 21st century religious terrorism, but also from issues around natural therapies. See why our federal government and global forces – the W.T.O. and U.N. – want to take control of the supply of natural products with Codex Alimentarius. What’s the simplest way to acquire that control? Simply reclassify natural products as drugs. Now there’s a twist.

Good Medicine Word of the Week: Patent Medicines – human-altered or human-synthesized chemicals, designer drugs, which can be patented. Nature holds the ‘creative rights’ to natural molecules, which therefore cannot be patented.

Next week’s show: 1st installment of History of Killing/History of Healing – the real history of medicine – to continue laying the foundation for That’s Good Medicine.

Send TGM #3 to a friend: click here.