Medical Nemesis 2006

(July 15, 2006) Thirty years ago, Ivan Illich published Medical Nemesis, a powerful indictment of modern medicine which, he wrote, had “become a major threat to health.”

In 2006, the threats posed by the medical powers that be - the alliance among medicine, industry, and – increasingly – government - have expanded and loom larger than Illich's original readers could have ever imagined.

Ivan Illich (1926–2002)

Among its faults and limitations, the American medical Establishment has come to rely increasingly on government, which now pays for over one half of the costs of all health care in America. (Total expenditures now exceed $2 trillion annually.) Government also plays a dominant role in medical research and in the setting of clinical policy, often under the heading of “public health.” Intimidation, a favorite government tactic, employed in ways both obvious and subtle, is often used to keep the show going. “Medicine at gunpoint” is an appropriate description of the tyrannical side of the American health care status quo, succinctly and accurately summarizing the thuggish coercion that is routinely employed to keep people in line with government-approved medical and public health orthodoxy.

A recent case in point involves Tina Carlsen, a 34 year old mother who was charged with – and for several days, actually jailed for – kidnapping her own infant son from a Seattle hospital. Acting on a complaint initiated by medical doctors and filed by Child Protective Services, police had seized the child from his mother and returned him to the hospital for surgery. Carlsen, who was arrested, charged, and jailed at that point, had objected to the conventional treatment and surgery the doctors had ordered. She wanted a second opinion and a chance to explore alternative medical options. She is still facing criminal charges and has lost custody of her baby.

Meanwhile, another case that has been receiving local coverage for several months finally hit the national news in the second week of July. Abraham Cherrix, a 16 year old in Virginia who has Hodgkin's disease, has been in and out of court in recent months as authorities attempted to compel him to undergo more chemotherapy treatments for his cancer. Instead, Cherrix wants to continue employing an alternative treatment, the Hoxsey herbal cancer therapy.

(Update July 21, 2006 7:49 pm EDT: Judge Orders Teen to Cancer Treatment.)

Cases like these two, involving minors, are not new. I've reported on a long list of similar ones going back to 1977. I can't think of a single example among all of the stories of sick kids that I've covered in which the young patients and their families ultimately succeeded in being able to determine their own treatment options when they were faced with the power of the combined forces of conventional medicine and the state (represented by bureaucratic agencies like child protective services and the courts).

AIDS Orthodoxy – The Greatest Threat

In addition to the many instances involving sick children and government intervention that go on every day in the United States, usually with little or no media coverage, there is a broader context emerging that is even more alarming. This context entails an ultimate form of medical control based on flawed or unproven premises and a deliberately manufactured consensus about HIV/AIDS. In the process, the coercive nature of conventional medicine is being expanded to everyone – adults as well as kids – around the world.

Unfortunately, an objective discussion of anything relating to HIV/AIDS is pretty much doomed from the start. Since the day when the mysterious retrovirus named HIV was announced as the cause of AIDS at a government press conference on April 23, 1984, it has been considered heresy to challenge any aspect of the conventional wisdom about AIDS put forth by medical orthodoxy and government bureaucrats.

During the past 22 years, uncountable numbers of vested interests of every kind have grown up around AIDS, conspiring to continually reinforce the conventional wisdom and totally limit any meaningful debate. By now, the field has been completely institutionalized, within a hegemonic, intellectually sclerotic nexus of government money, academic research, "charitable" organizations, international aid agencies, the mainstream media, attention-seeking politicians and celebrities, and big business.

Today, the area of HIV/AIDS has evolved into the largest single disease-oriented component of the bloated conventional medical Establishment.

It is simply incredible – that the biggest part of the $2 trillion-a-year business of American medicine (in terms of government-funded research and public and private infrastructure) is HIV/AIDS-related, particularly when one considers that AIDS, according to government figures, currently accounts for only about 15,000 deaths a year in the U.S. (versus over 500,000 from cancer and almost 700,000 from heart disease). In fact, AIDS isn't even on the list of the top ten causes of death in the United States. Yet, federal spending on HIV/AIDS (over $20 billion a year for HIV/AIDS research alone) dwarfs the amounts of money spent on cancer and heart disease – not to mention lower profile diseases like diabetes. Meanwhile, diabetes kills at least five times as many Americans every year as AIDS.

When the apocalyptic predictions in the late 1980s that AIDS would spread into the general population and kill millions of Americans by the 1990s never materialized, the AIDS Establishment shifted much of its focus abroad, to Africa and the Third World. The health problems afflicting millions of people in Africa, especially sub-Saharan Africa, and elsewhere in the underdeveloped world, were no longer to be associated with political instability, poverty, and malnutrition or a lack of sanitation, clean water, or infrastructure, but instead with HIV and AIDS. Millions of Africans, clearly living lives of suboptimal health under represessive and undemocratic regimes, didn't need to have their environments attended to or their overall health care improved; rather, they required guaranteed access to antiretroviral drugs, considered by orthodoxy to be the best treatments for HIV and AIDS.

Used in various combinations, these same drugs, highly toxic and immunosuppressive, and originally priced at $10,000 or more per patient per drug per year in the developed countries, had been credited (falsely, in the view of many critics) with cutting the death toll from AIDS in the West. Now, with the potential of a new, exponentially larger market for the drugs emerging in the countries of the Third World, the pharmaceutical companies could be convinced to lower their prices for people in poor countries (from $10,000 to, say, around $600 per patient/per drug/per year). This change made sense to the pharmaceutical companies in light of the fact that the market for HIV/AIDS drugs would go overnight from a few hundred thousand people (mostly homosexuals) in the West to potentially scores of millions of customers, primarily heterosexuals, abroad. Meanwhile, AIDS drug prices in the West would remain high.

Even though the Third World countries in question were dirt poor, lack of money was not a problem – wealthy Western governments could be guilt-tripped and shaken down by the United Nations and celebrities like rock star Bono to contribute billions of dollars a year so everyone on the planet could have “universal access” to the drugs.

Bill Gates, Bono, Melinda Gates Time Magazine January 2006

In recent months, a new cast of luminously influential players, seemingly above reproach, has entered the picture – including billionaires Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett (the three richest people in the world), and former president Bill Clinton – enthralling the mainstream media and policy makers alike. All of them are reinforcing (and in the case of the Gateses and Buffett, helping to fund at levels governments can’t match) the plans to test and vaccinate everyone on the planet for HIV/AIDS and to treat HIV-positive people with toxic drugs.

What makes this picture truly a scenario from hell is the fact that the forces behind it – “AIDS Inc.,” the international medical Establishment, and their arrogant hangers on (including the four high-profile players mentioned above) – are acting like they are intoxicated with their new power to manipulate, coerce, and compel literally billions of people to follow their questionable lead. More to the point, the players have been emboldened to expand their agendas into influencing and controlling the health care and personal freedom of virtually every person on earth, demanding a level of compliance with medical orthodoxy that was previously unheard of.

Mandatory Testing and Treatment

Part of the AIDS-government-industrial complex's plan for Africa is to expand HIV testing to entire national populations and then to get everyone who tests HIV-positive to take antiretroviral drugs. Beyond the appalling denial of personal autonomy and choice and the trampling of civil liberties and human rights that accompany this policy, there is also a minimal role in these designs, or no role at all, for alternative medicine. (Efforts by the government of South Africa since 1999 under the country’s president, Thabo Mbeki, to define and treat HIV/AIDS differently, including with traditional, nontoxic healing methods, have been consistently ridiculed and dismissed by the powers that be in the West.)

Part of the plan for North America, where AIDS has largely fallen off the radar screen (notwithstanding the never-ending metastatic growth of the AIDS Inc. infrastructure) and many formerly red ribbon-wearing celebrities have moved on to other causes, is similar: to ratchet up both fear and hope in the population. Now that there is supposedly “hope” for managing HIV/AIDS because of the introduction and widespread availability of antiretroviral drugs, according to the spin, Americans must increasingly be tested for HIV and then strong-armed into taking the drugs in order for them to avoid getting and spreading deadly AIDS.

The emphasis today, in mid-2006, is on the “must be tested” part – testing for HIV-antibody status is now becoming routine and is rapidly moving towards mandatory – but once the door to routine and mandatory testing is opened, there is little to stand in the way of making treatment mandatory, too.

Among the most recent developments that should be raising concerns:

In May 2006, the Centers for Disease Control of the U.S. government recommended that HIV tests be made routine for all Americans.

It is now part of standard clinical practice to test all newborn babies and their mothers for HIV, without notifying the mother. If either the baby or the mother tests HIV-positive, antiretroviral drugs are given to the baby. If the mother or family objects, the parent(s) will most likely lose custody of the child and the drug therapy will continue.

In Washington, D.C., a program is now underway at government expense to test every resident between the ages of 18 and 84 for HIV and to encourage people who test positive to take antiretroviral drugs.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has demanded that his staff be tested for HIV.

A feature story by ABC News on July 12, 2006 is titled “Should Every American Adult Be tested For HIV?” (Accompanying the story is a Web poll that asks, “Should All Adults Be tested For AIDS” [sic]. In fact, current tests do not confirm the presence of "AIDS," but the presence of HIV antibodies.)

Perhaps most alarmingly, on June 27, 2006 the New York Times published a prominent op-ed essay by an influential professor at Columbia University, Barron H. Lerner, M.D., who suggests that people who test positive for HIV and who decline or refuse to take their prescribed antiretroviral drugs might be locked up in “detention wards” at places like Bellevue Hospital and, similar to people with tuberculosis, forcibly medicated with HIV-AIDS drugs for up to two years.

It may be hard for most people to believe, but the examples cited above are all part of the officially-sanctioned, present and future domestic HIV/AIDS scenario. Although the plans may seem better suited to an authoritarian regime, they are in fact already in place in the U.S., on the drawing boards for future implementation, and being discussed openly in plain sight in mainstream media like the New York Times and ABC News.

To date, there have been limited public policy discussions about the serious ramifications of, or even the needs for, such plans and only a modicum of citizen concern about and opposition to them has been heard. It's a fair assumption that, amidst the myriad distractions of the times, most people are not aware that these things are happening

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Writer and investigative journalist Peter Barry Chowka has been reporting on the politics and economics of conventional medicine and alternative therapies in a variety of print and electronic media since the early 1970s. Hundreds of his articles have been published in periodicals in the U.S. and abroad. Since 1995, he has been writing prolifically for Internet publications.

Along the way, Peter has broken many original and important stories, including investigative pieces about the National Cancer Institute's thirty year-long cover up of its own research on diet and cancer, the questionable practices of the American Cancer Society, the government's efforts to marginalize Nobel laureate Linus Pauling, Ph.D., and the promise of blacklisted alternative cancer treatments like the Hoxsey therapy.

In his role as an information activist and a medical-political analyst, Peter has been a consultant to network television documentaries and has been a guest on several hundred local and national radio and television talk shows in the U.S. and Canada. From 1992-’94 Peter was an adviser to the National Institutes of Health and he was invited to testify at a hearing of the White House Commission on Complementary and Alternative Medicine Policy in Washington, D.C. in 2001.

Prof. David Hess, Ph.D. included a chapter on Peter and his work in his book Evaluating Alternative Cancer Therapies (Rutgers University Press, 1999).

Peter's first reporting on HIV-AIDS was published in 1987. Back then, he compared the new War on AIDS with the failed War on Cancer that began in the early 1970s and noted with concern that the AIDS War was being designed by many of the same people responsible for the Cancer War.

Another highlight of his early reporting on AIDS came on January 15, 1990. On that day, Peter was a guest for two hours on The Tom Leykis Show on KFI AM 640, a top-rated 50,000 watt talk station in Los Angeles. Peter had suggested to the program's producers that a debate between Peter and Michael Gottleib, M.D., the author of the first report on AIDS (before the condition had a name) in the scientific literature in June 1981, might be interesting. For two hours that afternoon (ironically, the annual Martin Luther King holiday), with scores of thousands of people from San Diego to Santa Barbara listening in, Peter and Gottleib went at it in KFI's studios, debating the topic that Peter had suggested: “The War on AIDS Is Becoming Another Failed War on Cancer.”

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Revised September 4, 2007