Reactive Pharmaceutical Consumerism VS Proactive Living

One of the largest issues with modern medicine is the preoccupation with treatment causing neglect for preventative actions. Billions of dollars are thrown into medical research on a yearly basis. Unfortunately, most of that money falls into research programs looking for cures in the form of chemical compounds, and not those looking to find what qualities of our lifestyle cause these ailments to begin with. If there is something wrong with you (physical or even mental) odds are it's because of something you have subjected your body to (ie. poor nutrition, contaminated respiration, exposure to radiation, and the list goes on). This established, medicine should be what it was centuries ago when natural healers would sit down with "patients", get a concept of the individual's lifestyle, location, eating habits and precribe a solution that would not only remove the illness but prevent it's return. But due to the profit driven nature of medicine, today's physicians cannot expend the time to truly delve into a patient's issues/lifestyle and see causation factors. So, we're left with easy answer diagnoses in the form of long-ass greek or latin names, each with it's own solution in easy-to-swallow pill form.

"In the official histories of contemporary medicine, the denial of the sorceress and witch as healer forms an important link in the fateful transformation of the physician's role from individual entrepreneur to bureaucratic employee."
— Dr. Thomas S. Szasz, The Manufacture of Madness

Time and time again the profit minded medical community turns it's cheek on life-saving findings of the preventative variety. For hundreds of years they have exclusively selected to publish and publicize documents that drive consumption. You see, preventative medicine cannot rake in the money that a diabetic's insulin regimen can. But you know what? I don't believe in trusting anyone who can't provide me with the facts so here it is; a brief list of examples throughout past and present of medical and pharmaceutical professionals in executive positions appraising discoveries that can be sold at a (high) cost and ignoring, abhorring, and discrediting findings of natural, self-issued health maintenance.

CRYSTALIZED VITAMINS VS WHOLE GRAIN RICE
The medical community ignored Joe Goldberger's research and findings stating that "pellagra" was not an infectious, contagious disease, but rather a result of eating habits and could be avoided by emersing oneself in a diet of whole foods and vegetables. The American Medical Association continued to claim that pellagra was a plague like typhoid fever despite the fact that Goldberger injected himself with blood from pellagra victims, and ate their intestinal discharge and never contracted the disease. Instead of awarding Goldberger's research they saved their accolades for Robert R. Williams and his colleagues. With the knowledge that whole grain rice contained properties that sustained healthy operations in the human body — properties that are removed when creating polished rice — Williams and company set out to extract these healthy properties from the rice grain. That way, people could eat their shitty Westernized polished rice that contained essentially no nutritional benefit and then purchase their Vitamin B in pure crystalline state for $400 a gram. Ironic that separately purchasing white rice and the vitamin stripped away from it would run you up over $400 for small quanities when unpolished rice (vitamins in tact) was available at 10 cents a pound. And then lo and behold the medical community and beyond fucking worshiped Williams. Many credible publications (including The New York Times) released articles about the magical isolated vitamin; no one ever mentioning the ease at which one can acquire it's source.

RITALIN AND PROZAC VS ERADICATION OF REFINED SUGAR
For a very long time scientists have been well aware of the relation between blood-glucose levels and mental health. The American Journal of Psychiatry published an article in 1999 noting the high rate of diabetes in patients diagnosed with bipolar disorder. The American Journal of Public Health documented a study in which the soda drinking habits of 5,000 10th-grade Norwegian students were monitored, the results go as follows: "High consumption levels of sugar-containing soft drinks were associated with mental health problems among adolescents even after adjustment for possible confounders ... The effects of sugar consumption on mental health need to be explored further within ongoing international efforts to map sugar’s harmful health consequences." In addition, hundreds of books have attributed rise in mental illness in recent centuries with the advent of refined, white sugar. Despite this, prescriptions for psychotropic "mental health" drugs (e.g. Ritalin, Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, etc.) can be acquired without any probing into the patient's dietary or general health habits. For example, it often takes very few visits to the psychiatrist to walk out with a prescription for common anti-psychotics — Ritalin, Prozac, Paxil, etc. — despite the dangerous side effects (suicide, rage, cancer) that they may cause. The reason these psychotropic drugs are pushed by psychiatrists is the same reason that we never hear much about the scientifically proven link between sugar and mental illnesses like depression, ADD, and anxiety: Eli Lilly. Eli Lilly is a multinational pharmaceutical company and — no fucking surprise here — one of the largest and most successful corporations on this planet. The Eli Lilly company is responsible for the rampant conmercial consumption of such products as Prozac, Cymbalta (both for depression), Strattera (for adult ADHD), and many more. Lilly is also known to run extensive advertising campaigns raising awareness a particular condition prior to released a drug that "treats" it. It's no wonder that Dr Candice Pert, one of the developers of the serotonin binding process that made serotonergic medications like Prozac possible, said in a Time Magazine article in 1997 on the results of her contributions, "I am alarmed at the monsters I have created."

"American's spent $250 billion in 2005 on prescription drugs ... They paid twice as much for their prescription medicines that year as they spent on higher education."
— Melody Petersen, Our Daily Meds

CHEMOTHERAPY VS NATURAL TOBACCO
In a time before the internet, before Cancer became an epidemic and, more importantly, before Europeans raped and pillaged North America, Native Americans had been blowin' the good old peace pipe for centuries. Tobacco was regularly used in tribal religious ceremonies and yet no one hears ancient stories of cancer or severe respiratory ailments. So how did the seemingly harmless tobacco came to be attributed as the largest cause of cancer deaths? Simple answer: drying techniques and chemical additives. Originally, tobacco was sun dried and smoked in a pipe with no additives. Today, most cigarette tobacco is flue cured (tobacco is strung on sticks which are hung from tier-poles in curing barns, these barns have flues which run from externally fed fire boxes, heat-curing it without smoke exposure, producing tobacco that is high in sugar and nicotine) and subjected to the addition of many toxic chemicals as well as more sugar. Flue cured tobacco is then wrapped in toxic, bleached paper and provided to you for $9.95 in your local convenience store. This is the method of choice because it only takes one week to dry the tobacco, rather than the three months it takes to dry using only sunlight. And as we all know time is money and money is everything. in 1973, Richard D. Passey published an article in Medical World News comparing cigarette quality and type with cancer rates across Europe. He determined that cancer is far more prevalent in flue cured tobacco smokers than other types, and found France to have the lowest rate of cancer per cigarette smoking individual — France at the time of his survey sold air dried tobacco in their cigarettes which were wrapped in unbleached paper. Passey's finding seem to go unmentioned in the medical and tobacco communities today and it's not hard to see why: flue curing saves tobacco companies oodles of money while lung cancer treatments such as pneumonectomies, radiation or chemotherapy rake in huge amounts cash for the medical and pharmaceutical communities.

INSULIN VS DIETARY AWARENESS
"The discovery of insulin was the kind of modern miracle which the diseasestablishment knew how to exploit" (William Dufty, Sugar Blues).
In 1923, when Frederick Banting determined a way to extract insulin, proving it could control blood glucose levels, he was awarded with a Nobel prize. But somehow when other individuals such as Seale Harris (doctor), Nyoiti Sakurazawa (Eastern educated naturalist), Stephen Gyland (doctor), A.E. Pezet (writer), E.M. Abrahamson (doctor), Cartlon Fredericks (nutritionist), Herman Goodman (doctor), Banting himself, and many more attempted to add that excessive eating habits caused diabetes and that insulin was a PALLIATIVE not a cure their theories were denounced by the American Medical Association whom refused to publish their findings in their journal (Dufty). The AMA retaliated by publishing article in the Journal of the American Medical Association that claimed that the link between refined food consumption and diabetes was "not supported by medical evidence." The physicians, researchers and nutritionists listed above had a fuck-load of medical evidence, but that was irrelevant because the AMA knew one thing: a diabetes diagnosis means that an individual must regularly purchase insulin for the rest of their life. That's millions upon millions of people feeding money into the pharmaceutical system, why would they want to ruin that?

In the end, all I'm trying to say is this: pharmaceuticals is a booming business, so GET INFORMED; read, be skeptical, don't except the first answer. What you put into your body can have so much more effect than your trip to the family doctor. Search for your own answers, don't trust your doctor just because she/he has the ability to administer drugs. Be weary of prescriptions; keep in mind that drugs have side effects, potentially worse than your original condition; and always be aware of the fact that doctors get bonuses for prescribing certain quantities of certain medicines.

It's better to prevent illness than rely on faulty medical systems, right?

— michelle.