The medical profession has a long history of opposing alternative
healing professions. While always claiming public safety as its reasons
for the attacks, the true reasons involve protecting their monopoly of
the health care market.
In the past, medicine has fought battles to limit the practices of
such professionals as homeopaths, naturopaths, osteopaths, podiatrists,
optometrists, dentists, psychologists and chiropractors. In the case of
osteopathy and chiropractic, there are distinct differences in the
approach to healing and health when compared to medicine. The last
thing that organized medicine wants is for there doctrine of drugs and
surgery to be challenged.
Osteopaths allowed themselves to be absorbed by medicine--today
there is little difference between an M.D. and a D.O. Chiropractic on
the other hand, fought hard--through the personalities of those like
B.J.Palmer to remain a separate and distinct profession.
Medicines opposition to chiropractic was at its strongest under the
leadership of Morris Fishbein. Fishbein as Secretary of the American
Medical Association from 1924 to 1949, lead a 50 year anti-chiropractic
campaign in both professional publications and the public media.
Fishbein called chiropractors "rabid dogs" and referred to them as
"playful and cute..but killers." He tried to portray chiropractors as
members of an unscientific cult, caring about noting but taking their
patients money.
In 1949 the AMA removed Fishbein but continued its wage an
anti-chiropractic campaign. In 1971, H. Doyle Taylor, the Director of
the AMA Department of Investigation, and Secretary of its Committee on
Quackery (COQ), submitted a memo to the AMA Board of Trustees stating:
Since the AMA Board of Trustees decision, at its , meeting on
November 2-3, 1963, to establish a Committee on Quackery, your
Committee has considered its prime mission to be, first, the
containment of chiropractic and, ultimately, the elimination of
chiropractic.
The following is an excerpt form the COQ's first annual report to
the Board of the AMA:
...The Involvement (and indoctrination) of the State Medical
Society leadership, in our opinion, is vital to the success of the
chiropractic program...We hope and believe that, with continued
aggressive AMA activity, chiropractic can and will be contained at the
national level and that steps are being taken to stop or eliminate the
licenser of chiropractic at the state level.
In 1967 the COQ released its anti chiropractic campaign goals:
Basically, the Committee's short-range objectives for containing
the cult of chiropractic and any additional recognition it might
achieve revolves about four points:
1. Doing everything within our power to see that chiropractic
coverage under title 18 of the Medicare Law is not obtained.
2. Doing everything within our power to see that the recognition or
listing by the U.S. Office of Education of a chiropractic accrediting
agency is not achieved.
3. To encourage contained separation of the two national
chiropractic associations.
4. To encourage state medical societies to take the initiative in
their state legislatures in regard to legislation that might affect the
practice of chiropractic.
The AMA through its Committee on Quackery continued its war against
chiropractic through such acts as, distributing propaganda to the
nations teachers and guidance councilors, eliminating the inclusion of
chiropractic from the U.S Department of Labor's, Health Careers
Guidebook, and establishing specific educational guidelines for medical
schools regarding the "hazards to individuals form the unscientific
cult of chiropractic."
The AMA did not stop with these acts of propaganda against the
chiropractic profession. They worked both publicly and politically to
insure that chiropractic failed as a profession. But, even with all of
this negative publicity against the profession, chiropractic continued
to gain acceptance with the general public, because chiropractic got
results.
In 1975 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the case of Goldfarb vs.
The Virginia State Bar, that learned professions are not exempt form
antitrust suites. In 1982 the Court ruled that the FTC can enforce
antitrust laws against medical societies. These two suites paved the
way in 1976 for five chiropractors to file an anti-trust suite against
the AMA and several other heath care agencies and societies in Federal
District Court (known as the Wilkes Case).
Similar suites were filed in New York and Pennsylvania in 1979. The
pressure of these law suites forced the AMA even before these suites
went to court to propose a modification of their Medical Code of Ethics
which prohibited M.D.s from associating with chiropractors. But, it was
not until 1980 that the Ethics Code was changed to reflect that each
individual doctor may decide for themselves whether to accept a patient
from or refer a patient to a chiropractor or other limited practitioner.
The law suites caused so much fear in the medical profession that
Mike Wallace (of 60 minutes) was unable to find an M.D. to take the
anti-chiropractic side for a 1979 documentary piece on chiropractic.
In 1980 the Wilkes suite went to court, were the AMA and other
defendants were found not guilty of all charges. That decision was
overturned and a new trial was ordered by the U.S. Court of Appeals in
February 1983.
Judge Susan Getzendanner found the AMA and others guilty of an
illegal conspiracy against the chiropractic profession in September of
1987, ordering a permeate injunction against the AMA and forcing them
to print the courts findings in the Journal of the American Medical
Association. Several other of the defendants settled out of court
helping to pay for the chiropractors legal expenses and donating to a
chiropractic non-profit home for disabled children, Kentuckiana
Children's Center.
This decision was upheld in the U.S. Court of Appeals in 1990 and
again by the U.S. Supreme Court that same year.
Even with success of the Wilkes Case and other anti-trust
litigation, the AMA continues to this day to wage a campaign against
chiropractic. Today the attacks take the form of over-stated concerns
for the safety of chiropractic health care. The truth is that
chiropractic has proven it self over the last 100 plus years, to be a
safe and effective means of maintaining health and treating
musculo-skeletal injuries.
JAMA Stats Tell
the Tale
(Journal of the American Medical Association)
Doctors kill more people than guns and traffic accidents: by Don
Harkins
In the last century we chose the wrong fork in the road with regard
to our health care paradigm.
Most people have been conditioned to believe in what is called the
germ theory of disease -- that germs cause disease. The truth is that
germs are everywhere and they are attracted to and proliferate in
diseased tissues.
Bacteria decompose dead matter. That is their job. For instance,
when a tree dies, bacteria come in and eat the tree and it eventually
becomes soil. Bacteria does not eat a live, healthy tree.
The same thing is true in people -- bacteria are attracted to dead
matter. Therefore, if you have dead matter in your body, bacteria will
get to work decomposing the dead tissue so that it may eventually
become soil. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
In the mid 1800s, western medical science had the choice of going
one of two ways. Antoine Bechamp's theory of disease maintained that
every living thing has arisen from the microzyma (the fundamental unit
of the corporate organism ) and every living thing is reducible to the
microzyma. Bechamp believed that microzymas secrete fermentative
substances that aid in digestion in a healthy body and evolve into
bacteria when they encounter dead or damaged cells. This theory has
been tested and amplified by a string of scientists since then,
including Carl Edward Rosenow, William F. Koch, Otto Warburg, Gunther
Enderlein, Royal Rife, Alexis Carrel, Rene Dubos and Gaston Naessens.
Louis Pasteur's competing germ theory of disease maintained that
diseases come into our bodies from outside germs, so that we must fight
to kill them.
Bechamp's theory placed all of the responsibility of disease
prevention on the individual and his lifestyle. In a practical sense,
there was no money in that because people would be able to resist
disease simply by taking care of themselves, and would require no
store-bought potions.
Western medical science went with Pasteur's theory because it
opened the door which created the world's medical and pharmaceutical
industries, and because it seemed to support Darwin's new theory of
survival of the fittest. Since the 1850s, we have been developing new
drugs to attack and kill the disease invaders and the result has been
epidemics of sickness and disease -- and a very rich and powerful
pharmaceutical industry.
Last year, the pharmaceutical industry did $182 billion in drug
sales world wide. In contrast to that figure, it cost approximately
$183 billion to treat adverse reactions from all of those drugs. The
following admissions were taken from JAMA (Journal of the American
Medical Association) : The top five causes of death in the United
States, in order, are: 1) Tobacco 2) Alcohol 3) Medical malpractice 4)
Traffic accidents 5) Firearms
According to JAMA, doctors kill more people than auto accidents and
guns put together. With that in mind, one has to wonder why gun control
is such a hot legislative issue when, perhaps, we should be more
concerned about doctor control.
Statistics show that when allopathic doctors are on strike, fewer
people die from disease.
The number of people that doctors kill per day from allopathic
medical malpractice is roughly equal to the amount of people that would
die if every day, three jumbo jets crashed and killed everybody on
board. Just imagine what headlines would result if a chiropractor or a
naturopath accidentally killed just one patient?
Another JAMA statistic stated that 20 percent of all people who see
an allopath will suffer an iatrogenic (doctor-induced) injury.
Again, according to JAMA, 16 percent of all people who die in the
hospital are determined by autopsy to have died of something other than
their admission diagnosis. In other words, the doctor had no idea what
was really wrong with the patient and, therefore, the patient may have
died for want of appropriate care that would have been subsequent to an
accurate diagnosis.
Another trade publication, American Medical News, stated that 28
percent of people admitted to hospitals are there because they have
suffered an adverse reaction to prescribed drugs.
Allopaths are miserably losing the battle against viruses and
bacteria. Antibiotics do not work. We need to take a different tack
because this is obviously not working. Only ozone therapy offers hope
against the increasingly resistant 'germs'.
The British Medical Journal Lancet states that only one percent of
all scientific research papers which explore medicine are
scientifically sound. So, if that is true, then not only are allopathic
doctors incorrect in their understanding of the basic nature of
disease, they are basing their conclusions, and therefore their
diagnosis and treatment of people, on flawed science. And it is killing
us.
