Article reference: http://www.laleva.org/eng/2008/02/healthy_bodies_are_no_good_to_big_pharma.html

Healthy bodies are no good to Big Pharma

HEALTHY BODIES ARE NO GOOD TO BIG PHARMA
by Beldeu Singh*


Can your politician save you from the agenda and designs of Big Pharma? Will your health authorities bother to understand their designs and stand for your health interests?

I do not think so.

They have too much money to throw around and they have in some cases conspired to create organizations to front for them. They have been very successful in getting more and more toxic chemicals into human bodies in the name of treatment. Some of these chemicals are only marginally more effective than placebos, giving rise to the very good prospect of placebo therapy. No one has bothered to consider this, even though a placebo costs a tiny fraction compared to the drug and it comes with a bonus – no side effects.

Preventive medicine based on nutrition and high antioxidant intake from food sources does not seem to interest anyone except the science-literate consumer because healthy bodies do not contribute to the bottom-line of Big Pharma. On the other hand, toxic drugs, once they are legally categorized as medications, can create side-effects to be treated by more drugs that impact their bottom-lines positively. It is a gravely vicious cycle nurtured through a “cosy” relationship between Big Pharma and the regulatory authorities.

Officials have become so adversarial to ensuring health benefits that they have issued statements to the effect that doctors must only give pharmaceutical benefits to their patients and not health benefits. And, quite naturally, the number of deaths and hospitalizations from adverse drug reactions is increasing every year. But banning toxic drugs for therapy is out of the question. The system has many supporters and these people are in a position to ask for bans on clinical nutrition and to press for those in order to promote their business interests through legislation. Those ridiculous laws and legal definitions will help to stifle the application of nutrition and edible herbs to promote health and for use in therapy unless they are sold by Big Pharma!

The FDA would also like to harmonize our dietary supplement laws with the evolving international standards set by Codex, thus branding therapeutic nutrition as dangerous and risky and needing to be sold by Big Pharma or removed from the market altogether (if it competes with a blockbuster category of drugs). Codex is planning to use the same proteomics and biomarker technology that will be used by the FDA’s Critical Path Initiative to remove therapeutic dietary supplements from the international market and force their policies on America, thereby superseding the sovereignty of American law on threat of trade sanctions. The FDA fully supports draconian Codex guidelines to regulate dietary supplements and is working with the Germans to concoct technology to brand nutrients as drugs. (Life Extension Foundation as quoted in: Health Supreme, Oct 15, 2007, Codex Alimentarius: Will EU Laws Become World Standard).

The law can define animals as traffic as in the Road Traffic Acts in commonwealth countries. It can be used to distort and warp the natural order of things and a definition can be introduced to even say that vitamin C from fruits is a drug. Where will it all stop? If selling fruits is lucrative, the business can be put in the hands of Big Pharma, by changing the legal definitions. Anything that can be consumed that benefits health, whether it is a supplement or food or anything edible can be redefined in such a way as to make it a business solely of Big Pharma. If it makes money, it can be turned into a monopoly or controlled by changing the legal definitions.

Pharma has embarked on a dirty game because their drugs are not getting any better; they are getting more toxic. And more and more research is showing that these drugs do not work within the natural and healthy biochemistry to provide a health benefit. Hence, the Big Pharma producers are working hard to press for laws and regulations to ensure pharmaceutical benefits instead of health benefits. Let’s examine the issue of competition from natural medicine, clinical nutrition, ayurveda and their therapeutic and health benefits that improve quality of life or help to slow down the progression of degenerative conditions. This competition can be killed by legally defining nutrients as drugs so that only pharmaceutical companies can sell them. This becomes all the more critical for them to do as more and more people realize that drugs are D-form chemicals that cause harm in the mammalian L-form biochemistry. Many of these drugs disrupt healthy biochemical pathways by blocking the formation of the ATP molecule or the formation of antioxidant enzymes in the body. They deplete mitochondrial DNA in cells and stores of minerals in the body especially copper, manganese, zinc and iron. Those minerals work catalytically with the glutathione-catalase system to convert hydrogen peroxide produced by the cells’ metabolism into water and oxygen, a critical function for maintaining and restoring health. They also deplete magnesium or otherwise suppress your immune system. Some drugs that aim to deliver a pharmaceutical benefit, for example to reduce blood glucose levels by blocking the conversion of lipids into glucose, may end up altering the blood lipid profile, thereby creating a new risk for the patient especially if the patient’s antioxidant intake and consumption of soluble fiber through foods is low.

Many drugs generate free radicals in the body. Sometimes these dangers can be easily seen in diabetic patients with diabetic wounds who are given antibiotics resulting in blood sugar levels rising to double the original readings (eg from a reading of 7-9 going up to 16-18). On the other hand, Big Pharma companies are working to rebrand their toxic drugs and poisons into “well-tolerated” medications that somehow over time become “non-poisonous” or “cures” or are advertised to sound like supplements.

Would medical science prescribe a cancer causing drug to cancer patients? Last March, the U.S. federal government issued an unusually detailed alert to the nation’s 5.5 million health care workers: The powerful drugs used in chemotherapy can themselves cause cancer and pose a risk to nurses, pharmacists and others who handle them (The Washington Post, Tuesday, February 15, 2005; Page HE01, Jim Morris). Chemotherapy drugs in human and animal studies have shown they have the potential to cause cancer or reproductive problems, said Thomas Connor, a research biologist with the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH).

Chemo-drugs, like radiation, generate huge amounts of the highly reactive hydroxyl radical that damages cell membranes and disrupts the electron transport system in cells as well as protein synthesis. Natural enzyme and micronutrient levels drop rapidly and that accelerates cell death. Such a new surge of free radicals is generated by chemo-drugs which are cytotoxic to cancer cells as well as normal cells. Thus many young normal cells die due to the treatment. Most of the known carcinogens, including benzene and at least 40 other toxic chemicals in cigarette smoke and pesticides generate free radicals that create oxidative stress in cells, impairing their aerobic respiration or damaging DNA and mitochondrial DNA, turning them into cancer cells. It is this very same toxicity that is common to carcinogens and chemotherapy-drugs. Hence the NOISH alert really comes as no surprise (see: Dangerous Philosophy of treatment in Medical Science).

How much control do they want? That depends on what and how the substance will impact the bottom-line.

"Britain is reviewing the laws on the regulation of tailored herbal treatments, but Dr Canter wants them banned, even at the risk of a backlash from Chinese or Indian communities. In some countries doctors practice phytotherapy, which uses extracts from a single plant and closely follows the principles of pharmacology" (see: Health Supreme, Oct 15, 2007, Codex Alimentarius: Will EU Laws Become World Standard).

So phytotherapy, using "extracts from a single plant" that "closely follow the principles of pharmacology" is all right, while individual attention from a herbalist is outright dangerous. If you recommend a glass juice made of orange plus carrot plus red spinach with a spoon of coconut oil and if the health of the person improves and they also lose some fat, well there you go…it is a drug! Can you see how Codex is slowly taking control of your kitchen?

There is another grave danger. While allopathic medicine is moving towards individual customization, they want to take that principle away from nutritional interventions. Developments and research in therapeutic approaches that improve or restore health will be stifled, if the principles of pharmacology are adopted as the only way to treat diseases and degenerative conditions in the human body. The mammalian biological system does not use pharmacological principles in generating an immune response or to activate cells that target pathogens or cancer cells, or in the production of antibodies or anti-pathogenic proteins such perforin, and neither in the repair of genetic material. When you legally only provide for pharmacological principles, you only create more drugs to be put into the human body. Such a law goes against the natural health processes of the human biological system. It only works towards the bottom-line of pharmaceutical companies at the expense of health. Society and its productivity is dependent on health, not on the number of drugs or the amount of pharmaceutical benefit one gets. When a system of law is put in place that makes pharmacological principles the only system of treatment, we can say good bye to the use of an orange or a lemon to cure scurvy. By then, it will be too good to own a pharmaceutical company but too late for mankind.

By then codex would have given full control of all home remedies and your kitchen and orchard to Big Pharma. Can we change the course of the engines that are steaming in this direction? Big Pharma can bank roll what they choose and all you have is a deaf or illiterate congressman or parliamentarian. Bear in mind that lobbies against health have been very successful. Take for instance, coconut oil – your doctor or even your consultant dietician may tell you that it is bad for your heart because it contains cholesterol!

The point is that governments are no longer in control of health as the pharmaceutical agenda to promote pharmaceutical benefits is spreading like a bad cancer. Greed has become their god.


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* Beldeu Singh is a writer, researcher and physical anthropologist living in Malaysia. You can find many of Beldeu's articles linked from the following post on the Health Supreme site:

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