Page 8 - Summer 2017 Journal

MEDICAL COMMUNICATION COMPANIES
I recently ran across an impor- tant Journal of the American Medi- cal Association article (JAMA. 2013;310(23):2554-2558) entitled “Med- ical Communication Companies and Pharmaceutical Industry Grants.” It is about a new form of medical propa- ganda, physician conflicts of interest, the cunning of Big Pharma’s advertis- ing and how most physicians become mis-informed and mis-educated while at the same time pressured to spend less and less time with their patients and to rely on the over-prescribing of Big Pharma’s synthetic chemical drugs. As I often told my patients, it only takes two minutes to write a prescription but it takes twenty minutes not to write a prescription.
The article exposes the under-the- table flow of money that keeps popular online medical communication com- panies (MCCs) full of plausible (but often misleading) information that is consistently favorable to the dis- informational agendas of Big Pharma. These sites never mention the multitude of iatrogenic disorders (diseases that are caused by doctors or Big Pharma’s prescription drugs). Iatrogenic diseases are a seriously taboo subject that Big Pharma and the medical establishment want to keep hidden from their drug- taking patients.
These MCC online sites maintain the ignorance Big Pharma desires for us too-busy prescribing physicians and our often “desperate-for-unbiased- information” patients who suspect that they are being sickened by the synthetic chemicals and vaccine ingredients
Letters
that have been prescribed for them, substances that can be addictive, neu- rotoxic, dementia-inducing and a cause of mitochondrial toxicity, especially in the case of psychiatric drugs.
The article summarized below reveals the actual names of the biggest culprits: the amoral, for-profit, multi- national Big Pharma corporations that annually hand out tens of millions of dollars to their co-opted and obedient MCC recipients who are—unfortu- nately—trusted by both physicians and their confused patients.
What may be worse is the fact that these for-profit MCCs are respon- sible for providing dis-informational “content” for the thousands of health “journalists” (who are notorious for having little or no medical science background).
One sees those health journalists all over the newspapers, radio, TV and Internet with their ubiquitous and very plausible articles that are often directly fed to them from the MCCs and their sugar daddy, Big Pharma. The health journalists, in reading the prepared-for- immediate-re-publication content, feel that they are doing research, whereas what is actually happening is deception and indoctrination.
The same thing happens on the nightly news when Big Pharma’s MCC- generated videos are shown on the TV news without the local station ever mentioning the gross conflicts of inter- est. This common tactic does represent “easy journalism” for our too-busy health writers who have deadlines to meet.
A decade ago, when medical estab- lishment and lobbying groups like the
AMA, APA, AAP, AAFP, etc., warned us about getting our information from the Internet, they were afraid, some- times with justification, of the influence of the complementary and alternative medical community that was out there. Many consumers found out that what was out there was frequently useful and sometimes curative—a big threat to more than one medical establishment group. These self-help sites were often nutrition-based and often provided education and information that could make unnecessary an unaffordable phy- sician visit that usually ended with an unaffordable prescription or two. Real cures—rather than perpetual, lifelong drug or disease “management”—often could be found online. It was only later, when the establishment came to domi- nate the Internet with their propaganda (and Google’s ranking system, which always puts Medscape and WebMD on top), that I came to agree with their warnings about online medical disinformation. Only now, we have to be worried about what the medical establishment is trying to convince us to do.
Remember the truism: “Whoever pays the piper, calls the tune.” This has never been more true than at this time of astronomical health care and bankrupt- ing prescription drug costs.
Gary G. Kohls, MD Duluth, Minnesota
Gifts and bequests to the Weston A. Price Foundation will help ensure
the gift of good health
to future generations.
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Wise Traditions
SUMMER 2017