• “DEAR DOCTOR”

    Posted August 15, 2013: by Bill Sardi

    RADIO BROADCAST KLAV-1230AM, Las Vegas, NV, August 15,2013

    An Open Letter To American Medicine

     

    Dear Doctor:

    If there is any doctor listening out there…

    I read your best medical journals, as I’m sure you do.

    I know the difference between statistical and clinical improvements.

    I know that the central focus of modern medicine in the past four decades, cholesterol reduction with statin drugs, has not significantly lowered mortality among high-risk or healthy adults (if you don’t believe what I just said, then check the bulletin just issued in the Journal of the American Medical Association). Harvard Dr. John Abramson, author of Overdosed America, has also documented that fact among healthy adults. The alarming part of the newly issued AMA bulletin is that the assumed benefits of lowering mortality among high-risk statin drug users has also been a false assumption.

    While it has long been said statin drugs reduce heart attack risk by a third, and side effects are just 2-3%, so the side effects can be tolerated given this large proposed life-saving benefit, but that is not 33 in 100 who avert a heart attack, as it is a relative number.

    Statins reduce risk of a non-mortal heart in one-half of 1% of healthy adults (1 in 200) and in 3% of high-risk adults (1 in 70) over 5 years, while the side effect ratio is skewed by the fact many abandon use because of muscle aches and memory impairment and aren’t counted in the side effect data. Among those who continue to take statin drugs, the side effect rate is as much as 15 to 17 percent.

    Higher-dose statin drugs increase the risk for diabetes – about 1 in 200 users will become diabetic due to their statin drug use. According to Dr. Eric Topol of the Cleveland Clinic, that equates to 100,000 new statin-induced cases of diabetes.

    But let me change direction. I don’t realistically expect modern medicine to abandon statin drugs and its anti-cholesterol religion, which would result in a collapse of $30 billion a year in sales of statin drugs and a collapse of the pharmaceutical sector on the stock market.

    So allow me to address some of the other past transgressions committed by modern medicine.

    Wasn’t it Dr. Ancel Keys (PhD) who in the 1950s began his campaign to use margarine over butter that was widely (and blindly) adopted by physicians over time?

    It is interesting that the most recently published paper on butter and health demonstrates that clarified butter (called ghee) elevates internal antioxidant defenses and as such “can be used as a potential food for decreasing the risk of cardiovascular diseases.”

    An analysis published in the American Journal of Public Health recently concluded that “high intake of butter is not associated with a significantly increased risk of mortality compared with low intakes.”

    It is interesting to note that 3% of butter is butyrate. When a margarine diet is given to rodents, growth of breast tumors accelerates, but when butyrate is added to margarine, this deleterious effect is negated.

    Wasn’t it doctors who warned us all away from butter?

    Never mind. Doctors say they ate sticks of margarine too.

    On another topic, I was raised in the era when it seemed every kid with enlarged tonsils was having them surgically removed.

    I thought all those tonsillectomies vanished from the practice of medicine.

    But a more recent Washington Post article says doctors are still removing tonsils needlessly. Over a half-million American kids had their tonsils removed in 2006. It is called an “epidemic of unnecessary care.”

    Tonsils don’t need to be swollen to have them removed these days. The Washington Post report says “tonsillectomies are often used to treat sleep apnea, a condition where an individual has trouble sleeping. Not a single, randomized study, however, has actually tested whether that’s true.”

    Children with tonsillitis are known to have low vitamin C levels, as well as low vitamin D levels, these vitamins are known to normalize the immune response.

    It is sad to learn, upon a search of the records at the National Library of Medicine, that no authoritative studies have been conducted on the use of vitamins C and D to treat tonsillitis, even though those vitamins have been available in supplement form since the 1930s.

    I’m wondering if any physician listening to this broadcast cares to put a dozen of his pediatric tonsillitis patients on high-dose vitamin therapy and share the results with us? It may be decades late, but there is nothing that would keep doctors from exploring that today. No FDA approval is needed to launch such a study. Vitamins C and D are largely harmless. I would hardly think an informed consent form would be needed.

    But let me move on to the subject of eggs. Eggs are known as a cholesterol-rich food.

    From 1950 to 1970 egg consumption dropped from 377 to 304 eggs per person per year while mortality rates for coronary heart disease continued to rise. [Source: National Institutes of Health, Egg Sciences & Technology, Food Products Press 1995]

    In the early 1950s it was noted in a published medical report that “cholesterol-rich foods have been consumed in large amounts by many people, throughout long lifetimes, with no apparently bad results.”

    A report published in 1978 in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition said: “Data from the… American Heart Association … shows that up to 250 milligrams/deciliter (of total cholesterol) there is no relationship between serum cholesterol concentration and risk.”

    It also becomes apparent that cholesterol phobia was uniquely marketed to the American population. All the while, it was widely documented that as the postwar diet in Japan changed and consumption of fatty foods rose so did the prevalence of coronary artery disease. But health authorities knew then that the small increase in circulating cholesterol among the Japanese had little to do with a rise in deaths from heart disease. So the whole cholesterol phobia that was created was a purely American phenomenon and doctors fell for it hook line and sinker.

    But let’s move on to something less controversial.

    There is little question that smoking tobacco is deleterious to health. The decline in habitual smoking in recent times is largely responsible for a decline in mortality rates in America.

    Yet modern medicine continues to assert that improvements in treatment have brought about this decline in mortality rates for coronary heart disease. But there has been no substantial change or breakthrough in the treatment of heart disease in many years. What HAS changed is that tobacco use is in dramatic decline and wine consumption, known to be good for the heart, continues to rise. Is modern medicine taking false credit for a decline in American death rates?

    The track record of modern medicine regarding tobacco use is not pretty.

    Historically, a report published in a 1988 in the American Journal of Public Health found only 6 of 51 doctors’ offices surveyed that did NOT have tobacco advertising in their waiting rooms and most doctors refused to cancel subscriptions for these magazine advertisements.

    I quote from a published report: “In the 1930s and 1940s, smoking became the norm for both men and women in the United States, and a majority of physicians smoked. …. One strategic response of tobacco companies was to devise advertising referring directly to physicians. As ad campaigns featuring physicians developed through the early 1950s, tobacco executives used the doctor image to assure the consumer that their respective brands were safe.”

    But I’m sorry to hold modern medicine accountable for the sins of its past and despite millions of avoidable deaths, all this could be called excusable, if ignorance can be a defense.

    But let me get to my final topic. We live in an ominous era of antibiotic resistance. There will come a day, say infectious disease experts, when the germs have become fully resistant to every known antibiotic.

    Furthermore, American medicine is fixated on the development of vaccine after vaccine to cure all manner of disease, from shingles to polio, from cancer to HIV. American kids face 49 needle injections of 14 different vaccines before the age of six.

    All the while, it has been discovered that mega-dose oral vitamin D activates the innate immune system, and that high-dose vitamin D creates antibiotic peptides called cathelicidins that can effectively quell any virus or bacteria while overcoming germ resistance.

    Why is modern medicine relying upon old and outdated “cow pox” technology, which involves the intentional spread of a little bit of disease wrapped inside a vaccine vial, when it could just permit children to be exposed to the various childhood infectious diseases, develop natural rather than induced antibodies, and use high-dose vitamin D to quell fever and inflammation during the infectious state, thus replacing all those nasty needle jabs?

    There you have it. Modern medicine was wrong about cholesterol.

    It was wrong about eggs and butter.

    Doctors were complicit in the use of tobacco.

    Modern medicine was wrong about removing all those tonsils in kids in the 1950s, and still refuses to back away in the second decade of the 21st century.

    It was either hoodwinked or ignorant or self-serving when it came to something like cholesterol that would fill their offices with new patients.

    And it continues to adhere to archaic “cow pox” technology to inoculate children for the common infectious diseases of childhood when vitamin D stands as an untested alternative.

    I could go on and on here…… needless C-sections that appear to have helped spawn an obesity epidemic by altering the gut bacteria in newborns, the introduction of sunscreen lotions that resulted in a dramatic increase in the mortal form of malignant melanoma, excessive radiation during mammograms that exposed young women before the age of 30 to radiation equivalent to 1000 chest x-rays and actually increased their risk for breast cancer, or the 1 million American women mistakenly diagnosed with breast cancer they didn’t have, or flu vaccination that didn’t protect the highest risk groups – young children and retirees – from flu-related death.

    If you are a doctor listening to this broadcast. Just exactly what did modern medicine get right?

    I’m Bill Sardi or health journalist, reporting on the Health & Wealth show.

    ©2013 Bill Sardi, Knowledge of Health, Inc. and Bill Sardi Health & Wealth Show

    Posted in Heart, Modern Medicine ; No Comments »

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.