A Potpourri of Health and
Alt Medicine-Related News as
Another Year is Almost History
© By Peter Barry Chowka

 

(December 15, 2007) As 2007 winds down with the Christmas and New Year holiday season looming, and Hanukkah just ended, it may be opportune to take a quick review of some relevant stories currently in the news relating to medicine, holistic health care, and medical freedom.

With the countdown to Election 2008 and the push for universal health care gaining momentum, as I have been noting for months, the coming year will likely be a very significant one – perhaps the most momentous year ever – for the future of medicine, especially in terms of privacy, freedom, and choice, in the United States.

 

On the theme of the evolving debate about the future of American health care and the potentially expansive role of the government, a range of impressive reporting and analysis has emerged on the Internet. As one who regularly monitors this area, I can attest that there is much more information available than any one person can keep up with.

 

Some recent highlights, germane to the political debate ahead, include “Government and Health Care: The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly” (Nov. 28, 2007) by Arnold Kling. The article starts with a table that “summarizes our experience in terms of three goals of health care policy: improving access to care; improving the quality of care; and lowering the cost of our health care system.” After reviewing the criteria in some depth, Kling concludes “I believe that there are things that government can do to enhance access, improve quality, and lower the cost of health care.

 

“However, I believe that we would be best served by having government focus on the policies that I put into the 'good' category--clinics in poor neighborhoods, vouchers, high-risk pools, and better information on the effectiveness of services and the performance of providers. If we look to government to take a larger role in running our health care system, then my prediction is that things will get ugly.”

 

I have previously written about Democrat presidential candidate former one term Senator John Edwards, including his proposal that every American be forced to undergo periodic conventional medical exams and tests, and presumably treatments, as well, if the tests so indicate. On November 29, 2007, the Political Radar blog at ABCNews.com revealed some of the draconian enforcement provisions in Edwards' mandatory national health care plan. Edwards continues to criticize his fellow Democrat candidates for not offering proposals that would mandate medical coverage for all Americans. Edwards' route to universal health care, then, is very heavy on enforcement:

 

“Under the Edwards plan, when Americans file their income taxes, they would be required to submit a letter from an insurance provider confirming coverage for themselves and their dependents. If someone did not submit proof of coverage, the Internal Revenue Service would notify a newly established regional or state-based health-care agency (which Edwards has dubbed a Health Care Market).”

 

The new IRS-linked agency would then go into action. If the individual was not eligible for either Medicare or Medicaid, “the regional-health care agency would enroll the individual into the lowest cost health-care plan available in that area. The lowest-cost option could be a new Medicare-like public option or a private insurance plan.” The individual, according to ABC News, “would be responsible for making monthly payments.” And if the individual does not comply (or pay what the government says he owes)? “The Edwards plan would empower the federal government to garnish an individual's wages for purposes of collecting 'back premiums with interest and collection costs.'”

 

Welcome to the universal health care future if John Edwards is elected.

 

Fact check time: In the lead up to the critically important and potentially determinative Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary in early January 2008, campaign commercials are flooding the airwaves in Iowa and the Boston/NH TV market and are being broadcast and dissected nationally. Cottage industries on the Internet have grown up around separating the myriad specious claims from the reality in the ads and in the candidates’ speeches and position papers. The mainstream media, meanwhile, have been largely mum in terms of exposing the untruth and absurdity inherent in many of the claims.

 

One assertion in particular, repeated endlessly on candidate John Edwards’ TV ads, is particularly outrageous and can drive one to distraction in light of the frequency of its repetition, but it has scarcely been dissected and deconstructed by the media.

 

In the commercial, a transcript of which can be found at Edwards’ Web site, Edwards is shown speaking to an audience. “When I'm president I'm going to say to members of Congress and members of my administration, including my cabinet: I'm glad that you have health care coverage and your family has health care coverage. But if you don't pass universal health care by July of 2009 – in six months – I'm going to use my power as president to take your health care away from you. [Applause] There's no excuse for politicians in Washington having health care when you don't have health care. I'm John Edwards and I approve this message.” According to CNN, Edwards made this promise in a speech to the Laborers Leadership Convention in Chicago on September 17, 2007. The AP added, “’And I don't want to hear any whining,’ Edwards told the cheering and stomping crowd.”

 

Interestingly, the unconstitutional nature of Edwards’ proposal has been pointed out, not only by bloggers, but by none other than the Hillary Clinton campaign. The Clinton campaign’s Web site, in a post dated November 13, 2007, notes “The problem is, Sen. Edwards doesn't have the power to take health care away from Congress unilaterally—he'd have to propose a law. . . And a law that takes away health coverage from Congress in July 2009 is unconstitutional according to the 27th Amendment. . . Since the law would change compensation for Congress before the next Congressional election (2010), it would violate the 27th amendment. The Atlantic's Matt Yglesias and All The President's Spin author Brendan Nyhan agree. Today, Sen. Edwards is proposing unconstitutional gimmickry to pass universal health care.”

 

Clinton herself, the author of the failed 1993-’94 (Bill) Clinton administration health care reform plan, has her own new plan for mandatory universal health care if she is elected president in 2008.

 

For 48 hours each weekend, the national cable TV channel C-Span 2 becomes Book TV, and presents some of the best programming on television, focusing on non-fiction, political, and history books and their authors. Like everything that is carried on the C-Span networks, all of the Book TV programming is totally and refreshingly non-commercial.

 

Recently, Book TV presented an hour long talk by Shannon Brownlee, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan New America Foundation, a widely published journalist, and the author of Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (Bloomsbury USA, 2007).

 

Brownlee claims that about one-third of the nation's annual health care costs, or $700 billion, is unnecessary. This is a point similar to ones that I have been making since the 1970s. In an article published in 1994, I quoted the late Robert Maver, a vice president and director of research of Mutual Benefit and Life (a major insurance company). At the time, the height of the debate about the proposed Clinton national health care reform, Maver said “The popular wisdom is that American health care is the best in the world, and that we just have to figure out a more efficient way of delivering that health care. [Medical] Alternatives really start from a completely different point. They say, ‘There's a far better health care that's possible.’”

 

Like the D.C.-based foundation she works for, Brownlee does not appear to be an ideologue of the left or the right. Nonetheless, her critique appears to add to the weight of the warnings about the increasing calls for universal health care. For instance, in an interview published April 29, 2007, Brownlee said “Universal coverage on its own will not solve our quality and cost problems; in fact, it will make them worse. . . The idea that covering everybody will magically solve our quality and cost problems is pure fantasy. Unfortunately, very few policy makers and lawmakers have grasped the enormity of overtreatment, and until they do, we won't be able to move forward on a coherent plan for improving quality and bringing down costs.”

 

In contrast to what Brownlee is asserting, most of the 2008 candidates for president – all of the Democrats and many of the Republicans – are calling for massive increases in funding for medical care and research (like doubling the bloated research budget of the National Cancer Institute). It is also politically correct and therefore popular to support increasing the funding for AIDS research, which is already astronomical, inflated way beyond what the actual problem of HIV-AIDS may actually be.

 

Speaking of HIV-AIDS, we're within sight of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the April 1984 press conference at which HIV was identified as the cause of AIDS, which was the opening salvo in the decades long, multi-billion dollar HIV-AIDS War boondoggle.

 

As one who (since 1987) has followed, and often written about, the HIV-AIDS controversies, the growing power of the conventional HIV-AIDS meme, and the near-mythic hold that the HIV-AIDS group think propaganda matrix has come to exert on the entire world, can be frustrating and depressing in the extreme to consider as a quarter century of this nonsense has gone on with no end in sight.

 

A long time writer, activist, and critic of the HIV-AIDS Establishment, Christine Maggiore, recently distributed an e-mail titled “Lots of New News” and much of it is good news, at that. (Maggiore's regular e-mail updates are available at her Web site, Alive & Well AIDS Alternatives.) Over the years, I have increasingly appreciated Maggiore and her indefatigable efforts to bring clarity and focus to the myriad issues surrounding HIV-AIDS, an amazing achievement in light of her own family's personal tragedy in 2005.

 

The fact is that, while the AIDS Establishment has grown to be bigger, more powerful, and more deeply entrenched every year, the challenges to its closed-minded, fanatical hegemony have also continued to increase and diversify. The outlines of the HIV-AIDS debate are too complex to delineate here. But some recent highlights of the challenge side are worth noting.

 

On November 20, 2007, the Washington Post reported, “The United Nations' top AIDS scientists plan to acknowledge this week that they have long overestimated both the size and the course of the epidemic, which they now believe has been slowing for nearly a decade. . . The latest estimates, due to be released publicly Tuesday, put the number of annual new HIV infections at 2.5 million, a cut of more than 40 percent from last year's estimate, documents show. The worldwide total of people infected with HIV – estimated a year ago at nearly 40 million and rising – now will be reported as 33 million.”

 

This news flies in the face of dominant international, and U.S., policy in recent years which is based on the mythology that AIDS is spreading and that everyone on the planet needs to be tested for HIV and, if testing positive, deserves to have free access to antiretroviral drugs paid for by the U.S. and other Western countries.

 

In response to the news, the Daily Mail on November 21 published an article by what it described as “Britain's top cancer expert,” Professor Karol Sikora, “a leading cancer specialist and former chief of the World Health Organisation Cancer Programme,” tellingly titled “The Aids epidemic that never was and why political correctness influences too much medical spending.” In the article, Sikora writes, “Sadly, the vicissitudes of political correctness can dictate medical priorities. . . The real challenge facing us is how we deal with this dramatic change, where the elderly are living so much longer. That is by far the greatest health dilemma facing our society – not how to tackle Aids or breast cancer.”

 

In South Africa, where it is widely claimed (including in a December 11 Reuters article) that “12 percent of [the country’s] 47 million people have HIV,” the government of President Thabo Mbeki, elected in 1999, has taken a cautious approach in regard to implementing wholesale the drug-centric recommendations of the international HIV-AIDS Establishment (which essentially insists – test everyone for the presence of HIV antibodies and give everyone who tests positive powerful, toxic antiretroviral drugs). Mbeki’s, and his health minister’s (Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, M.D.), statements, policies, and efforts in this area during the past eight years have earned for them unremitting enmity and ridicule on the part of the world’s press and medical-political mainstream.

 

Undaunted, Mbeki revealed to Mark Gevisser, the author of a new biography of the president (Thabo Mbeki The Dream Deferred), according to the Guardian on November 6, that he (Mbeki) “remains an ‘AIDS dissident’”. . . and “regrets having been forced to ‘withdraw from the debate’ over the disease.”

 

Still on the HIV-AIDS theme, twenty years ago the field of alternative medicine was focusing a lot of attention on holistic therapies and alternative explanations for the then-new HIV-AIDS hypothesis. In the forefront of that work was San Francisco Bay Area clinician Robert Cathcart, III, M.D.

 

Cathcart, who trained as an orthopedic surgeon (and who was well-known for designing a prosthesis, implanted in over 100,000 patients, to replace the top of the femur bone), went on to become a leading practitioner of environmental, allergy, and Orthomolecular Medicine, the latter an area of nutritional healing first identified and named by Linus Pauling, Ph.D. Regarding HIV-AIDS, the core of Cathcart’s clinical approach involved high doses of vitamin C.

 

Recently, I learned that Cathcart died on October 17, 2007 at age 75. I met him on several occasions, including in February 1999 when I interviewed him at his office in Los Altos, California. The recordings of that interview are currently in storage on the other coast, so a more complete, original review of Cathcart’s work from this vantage point will have to wait until I can access them.

 

I do recall, without the benefit of the primary material and my notes, being impressed with Cathcart. He appeared to exemplify the best qualities of a number of leaders of alternative medicine who were active then – highly educated, sincere, principled, dedicated, open minded, compassionate, and articulate. On the scene in northern California at that time in the late 1980s were a number of the true greats of alt med, all of them recommending one another as sources of information and insight. They included the researchers and clinicians Linus Pauling, Ph.D., Ewan Cameron, the Scottish physician and surgeon who was the medical director of the Linus Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine, and Cathcart. Also on hand was writer, activist, and alt med proponent Maureen Salaman. Sadly, they, and a number of other healing pioneers from that era, have now passed on.

 

Finally, on a lighter, celebrity-centric – but potentially no less influential – front, Hilary Swank, the 33 year-old, two-time Academy Award-winning American actress, appears on the cover and in a photo spread of the January 2008 issue of W magazine. In an accompanying profile, Swank reveals that she is a follower of a healthy lifestyle and a “devotee of celebrity nutritionist Oz Garcia for the past seven years” and that that she “takes nearly 45 supplements a day. . . according to a carefully determined schedule.” According to the article, Swank at one point “excuses herself so that a visiting nurse can give her a vitamin injection.”

 

Catherine Hong, the author of the article, came away impressed: “Swank certainly looks good these days. . . The actress is strikingly feminine in person, with an ultralean yet curvaceous physique that shimmies easily into the Calvin Klein dress she dons for the W cover.”

 

The Daily Mail in London was also impressed. A December 12 article, featuring five flattering photos of Swank, was headlined “Hilary Swank downs 45 supplements a day to stay fit for the red carpet.” On the day it appeared, the article was linked from the Drudge Report, one of the most highly trafficked news sites on the Internet, ensuring extremely wide readership.

 

 

 

Peter Barry Chowka is a widely published writer and investigative journalist who writes about politics, health care, and the media. Between 1992 and 1994, he was an advisor to the National Institutes of Health. His Web site is: http://chowka.com