I was trying not to get started on this topic, but resistance is futile and I wound up writing an essay-length post anyway.
There are people out there who will develop cancer and will decide to treat it with some kind of alternative medicine.
Worse still, there are people out there who develop cancer and decide to treat it using conventional chemotherapies, most of which have no science behind them, have no anecdotes behind them, do not work, and wind up killing many before the cancer does.
People are looking to alternative medicine because orthodox medicine has not lived up to its billing as the be-all and end-all in health maintenance. Maybe 15% of conventional medical treatment is effective. The other 85% is either ineffective or proven harmful. Traditional medicine does a superb job in certain crisis-oriented spheres (e.g., trauma, strokes, organ transplants and burns). But an objective, detached review of overall care paints a different picture. In the management of chronic conditions (e.g., heart disease, cancer, arthritis, mental illness and diabetes), traditional medicine has fallen short.
Despite this being co-opted by hucksters and charlatans, it really is true that the pharmaceutical industry has leveraged medical treatment and knowledge. They often decide what gets funded, and it’s not alternatives to toxic drugs. With misplaced pride, the medical establishment tells us that we are in the midst of a war on cancer, a war on AIDS, a war on mental illness, a war on diabetes, a war on heart disease, and a war on arthritis.
In reality, what we are in the midst of is a medical Vietnam. This medical Vietnam produces 780,000 casualties each year in the US alone—people dying because of medicine. The number-one cause of death in America is bad medicine—the traditional kind. If homeopathy or all alternative treatments combined were killing 780,000 people each year, there would be hangings on each corner.
So, no, medicine does not use the best science. It can’t think outside the box of politics and profit that it’s intimately locked into, and hence, it’s compromised and limited. Medicine has held on tightly to its current paradigm. Look at Vioxx, Celebrex, Ritalin, and Prozac. Look at the Dalcon Shield and DES. Look at all the things that medicine has said would make things better. They have made things worse—far worse. And yet the medical community has continued on with no change in their protocols.
Conventional medicine is based on a flawed model, one oriented toward acute illness rather than chronic illness. It’s a model based on often unrelated, pharmaceutically motivated scientific studies that have no cohesive framework or purpose, a haphazard collection of scientific data that leaves both patient and doctor without an organizing principle around which to think problems through.
And yet all along,
science has been saying that you can slow down and even prevent most diseases if you just pay attention to what you are putting in your body. I’ve referenced more than 545,000 studies in peer review journals just on the use of vitamins and minerals in treating various diseases alone. The studies describe their biochemistry, their safety, and their efficacy. If you ask the average doctor, they are ignorant of nearly all of these studies. Their profession can’t afford to even know about it, let alone use it.
Many excellent treatments have been ignored by the medical community for long periods of time, even in the face of their efficacy. Why? Because doctors are not taught, much less encouraged, to think out of the box. Instead, they are trained to discard or ignore therapies and approaches that have not been proven beyond a reasonable doubt, even if these therapies or approaches make sense from the context of what is known about a particular condition or disease.
What’s needed is a paradigm shift. We need to create a public health science with public health practitioners—people specifically trained in the art and science of rejuvenation, detoxification, and utilization. Your physician has no background in this, and medical science is in no position to tell us what alternative therapies have efficacy or not. Remember, medicine is not a science; it’s a profession. One that’s short sighted and manipulated.
