08 October, 2005
The DOCTOR YOURSELF NEWSLETTER
(Vol. 5, No.13 for October, 2005)
Free of charge, free of advertising, and free of the A.M.A.
Copyright 2005 by Andrew W. Saul of http://www.doctoryourself.com
, which welcomes over 1.5 million visitors annually. Commercial
use of the website or the contents of this Newsletter is strictly
prohibited.
HOW TO DESTROY CONFIDENCE IN VITAMINS
WHEN YOU DO NOT HAVE THE FACTS
by Andrew W. Saul
Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to this year's annual meeting of
the World Headquarters of Pharmaceutical Politicians, Educators,
and Reporters (WHOPPER).
Let us get right to the point. Many of our members and affiliates
have complained about what is, for us, an alarming and dangerous
segment of health care: so-called orthomolecular medicine. We
want to assure you that, although this therapeutic approach is,
unfortunately, very effective in preventing and treating disease,
that we will make sure the public will never learn of it.
We can say this with considerable confidence, since for over
50 years we have managed to keep virtually all psychiatrists from
using niacin to treat schizophrenia; we have kept cardiologists
from prescribing vitamin E; and we have kept general practitioners
from prescribing vitamin C for viral illnesses.
Yes, it's really been a triumphant half-century. How did we do
it, you may ask. It is really quite easy. Here is a summary for
those of you that may have missed the last WHOPPER meeting.
Our guiding principle is, keep the public afraid. Any fear will
do, but we have been especially pleased with, and therefore recommend
instilling, the fear of new strains of flu viruses; the fear of
vaccine shortages; and most especially, the fear of vitamin toxicity.
Our success with this last one has been nothing short of spectacular.
Of course, you know that decades of poison control center statistics
show that there have been virtually no deaths from vitamins. You
also know that properly prescribed drugs, taken as directed, kill
at least 100,000 Americans annually. Clearly, the last thing we
want is for the public to actually figure out that vitamin therapy
is tens of thousands of times safer than drug therapy.
Therefore, we endorse the following tactics:
1) Always demand 100% safety and 100% efficacy from nutritional
therapy. This is particularly effective when you, at the very
same time, continually remind the public that they have to expect
and accept a reasonable amount of dangerous, even fatal, side
effects with drug therapy. And, if one drug does not work, there
is always another, still more expensive drug that might.
2) Always give priority to publishing research that shows that
vitamins are ineffective, or outright harmful. Select the low-dose
vitamin study; ignore the high-dose study. Pick the one negative
vitamin study; ignore the hundreds of positive vitamin studies.
If a positive megavitamin study is submitted to your department,
medical society or journal, reject it on a technicality, and take
a year or two to do so. Better still, make the authors publish
in the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine. After all, whatever
is published there will not be indexed by the National Library
of Medicine. Therefore, the public's annual 700 million MEDLINE
searches will utterly fail to find it. You cannot read what cannot
be located.
3) Obfuscation works. Cloud and confuse the issue. Never let
the truth stand in the way of a good press release. This we learned
from the tobacco industry: If you cannot wow 'em with wisdom,
baffle them with baloney. Remember, with vitamins, always highlight
the negative; ignore the positive.
4) Never let the facts get in the way of a good argument. A good
argument is one that you win. It's about politics, not health.
Remember that, ladies and gentlemen. Don't worry about accuracy.
Here is a perfect model for you:
"Dietary supplements cannot make up for poor food choices.
They have not been proven to boost energy or prevent or cure diseases."
(The American Dietetic Association. Dietary Supplements: Do You
Know All the Facts? March 24, 2004.
http://www.eatright.org/Public/NutritionInformation/index_19201.cfm
Take heed of what behaviorist B.F. Skinner said: Education is
a very large number of very small steps. The secret is to keep
plugging away, every chance we get. Every time we tell a WHOPPER
in the news media, it is one additional, accumulative step towards
washing the public's mind clean as a whistle, and stamping out
nutritional medicine for good.
Remember, half of America takes vitamins, but fewer than 1% of
physicians practice orthomolecular medicine. How hard can it be
to shut the rest of them up? After all, look what we did to Linus
Pauling. When he spoke out for vitamin C, we got the entire medical
world to openly snicker at the only person in history to win two
unshared Nobel prizes. Talk about a WHOPPER!
Now go back to your word-processors and get to work. Wade through
those nutrition studies and latch onto the negative ones. The
news media are waiting to hear from you.
OK: my story of WHOPPER may be (slightly) fictitious, but the
problem is real enough: Negative stories about vitamins
indeed have been front-page leads, yet vitamin cures have rarely
made the evening news.
This is changing rapidly. The media are now regularly hearing
from orthomolecular medicine. One way is through the Orthomolecular
Medicine News Service (OMNS), a project of particular interest
to the late, great Dr. High Riordan. OMNS began full operation
on March 23, 2005; today, OMNS press releases go out to over 3,000
media outlets, including newspapers, radio and TV stations worldwide.
OMNS asserts and reasserts the positive messages:
1) Orthomolecular medicine saves lives.
2) The number one side effect of vitamins is failure
to take enough of them.
3) Vitamins are not the problem; they are the solution.
Additionally, OMNS press releases are peer reviewed. The editorial
board consists of Abram Hoffer, M.D., Ph.D.; Harold Foster, Ph.D.;
Bradford Weeks, M.D.; Eric Paterson, M.D., Carolyn Dean, M.D.,
N.D.; and Thomas Levy, M.D., J.D.
Dr. Hugh Riordan wanted to promote "an awareness of orthomolecular,"
saying often that he wanted orthomolecular medicine to be a household
word. OMNS intends to accomplish precisely that. Today.
RECEIVE OMNS FOR FREE
If you would like to receive this wire-service style email newsfeed
without charge, please go to
http://www.orthomolecular.org/subscribe.html .
Submissions and suggestions are welcomed at omns@orthomolecular.org
To read all previous OMNS releases, please go to http://orthomolecular.org/resources/omns/index.shtml
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