Letters to the Editor

Contact Request for Fibroid Article

In regards to the feature in May 08 Vitality entitled Recovery From Uterine Fibroids, I wanted to ask April Bailey about the lady she saw on television and had met with for a two-hour session about her diet and exercise regime, all dealing with her blood type. I, too, have Uterine Fibroids. I had one surgery in September of 2001 and of course they grew back; I now have one as large as a semi-inflated golf ball. I currently have no abdominal pain but would love to meet with either woman, if possible. Thank you for all your help; the article was more than excellent. I learned a lot of things and realized that surgery isn't always the best answer. Any and all help is greatly appreciated.                  
         
- Ms. Paula Phillip

April Bailey’s Response

The book I used that helped tremendously was Eat Right 4 Your Type by Dr. Peter J. D'Adamo. (You may be able to check it out of the library.) The link to this diet's website is: www.dadamo.com. (You can look at recipes and get free information.) The woman I met with is an American Naturopathic, Natural Health Teacher named Medina Nance. She hosts a show called Herban Renewal on Chicago's CAN-TV. Here's the phone number I have for her: 773-324-4372. If she's not in your area, she may be able to recommend someone. I did a simple consultation with her. She also offers a more comprehensive one that involves an analysis of the client's bloodwork.

Her MySpace page is: www.myspace.com/herbanrenewal (she's not really 92 years old, as listed there). Here's another link for her monthly teleconferences: www.clickpress.com/releases/Detailed/28776005cp.shtml. Hope this helps.

Biased Reporting?

I'd first of all like to commend you on a fine magazine. It is a good source of information regarding natural medicines. However, the article Drugs Dethroned in the March 2008 issue was an anomoly in terms of article quality. While it is true that physicians do not receive extensive pharmacology training and big pharma is driven by profits, the author of the article has taken great liberties with the references being cited. In addition, terms are used incorrectly and statements about drug action and metabolism have not been properly interpreted. Certainly the alarm bell about the potential for prescription drugs to cause adverse events  needs to be rung, and a call to action is necessary regarding the over-medication of society today ... but the reporting should be done in a more balanced and less biased manner.

As someone with doctoral level training in pharmacology and toxicology, I'm all about the judicious use of drugs and chemicals in society, and am frequently disturbed by the all too quick reach for the prescription pad in many doctors offices. However, I would remind your readers that drug therapy is a complicated endeavour, in which risk-benefit for the patient needs to be considered. While drugs can lead to hospitalizations, so do the inevitable progressive courses of many poorly managed conditions such as hypertension and diabetes, and many of the studies finding increased hospitalizations from drugs include the "patient not taking chronic therapy" category. Also, in the interest of balanced reporting, the potential for natural remedies to cause adverse events (including very serious ones) should be explained.

Thank you for reading this email. I will continue to read your magazine, as I find it a useful source of information about alternative modes of treatment. I would encourage that articles about drugs be reviewed by experts in the fields of pharmacology and/or toxicology before they are printed.          

- John Kelly
   
Helke Ferrie’s Response

Hi,

I read your letter to Vitality very carefully. To answer it properly would be a dissertation-size job. However, given that you are concerned enough to write to Vitality, let me give you a very brief answer which, believe me, is given with the utmost respect for pharmacology as a science. As a business it has become murderous, but as a science it has given humanity much and may still do much more.

Your critique was not specific, but general; hence, I am not sure exactly what it is you have a problem with. Hence, my answer may not hit the mark, but feel free to respond and set me straight.

I was surprised about your assertion that I used the concept of non-linearity incorrectly. I spent about ten years studying Chaos Theory and eventually used this research also for my 1994 Master's thesis on its relevance to the biological evolution of humans at the University of Toronto. I refer you specifically to J. West's Fractal Physiology and Chaos in Medicine, Erik Mosekilde & Lis Mosekilde et al's Complexity, Chaos and Biological Evolution, and James B. Bassingthwaighte et al.'s Fractal Physiology for in-depth treatments of the non-linearity in all processes that involve biochemistry, including especially drugs, which cannot ever just hit one target and which are confronting targets that invariably interact in unpredictable ways and cause exponentially increased responses. The whole point of non-linearity is that 1 plus 1 does not make 2, but could make 10, and one almost never knows what the other 8 items are going to be or do. Not only that, from my study it seems clear that because synthetic materials rarely if ever actually "fit" correctly into the receptor sites for which they are intended (being synthetic and not made by nature, this is unavoidable), they not only cause non-linearity within the complex biochemistry they are meant to work on, but generate unexpected complex responses that also interact with each other (I mean: the drugs themselves interact in unexpected and unexpectable ways within the human biochemistry). We call all this "chaos" side-effects, and they are generally deadly or cause chronic illness.

My study of pharmacology textbooks is obviously not on the same level as yours and I would not presume to argue with you in this superficial forum of an e-mail exchange; I can only tell you what I relied upon to write what I did write.

I used the latest edition of Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine, which I am sure we can agree is the minimal, most basic standard that can be accepted universally. It specifically provides the details of the non-linear (and hence uncontrollable) nature of drugs in a most admirable manner. What the author of that section does especially well is the elucidation of what is known as slow and fast metabolizers, right down to the known genetic differences between people that make these responses somewhat predictable in the sense of at least knowable. Today we can figure this out before we give the drug, but it is still expensive and not generally available to find out who will react to what drug in which way. That is an area where pharmacology has a huge amount of work to do and is in fact doing it. Because it is not standard practice to take slow and fast metabolizers into account, and because most doctors don't even know what that is because they are not taught it, that is why we have all those dead bodies and those debilitating side-effects, to which the disease is in most cases preferable.

I also used the second edition of The Organic Chemistry of Drug Design and Drug Action by Richard B. Silverman and the immense volume The Liver - Biology and Pathobiology, third ed. edited by Arias et al. The first source consulted on any drug issues is always the CPS, of course, and even though it is woefully lacking in "the whole truth and nothing but the truth", it at least provides a baseline for what the manufacturers must admit to be true. I also receive pharmacological journal material through an internet service to keep me up to date on drug design, liver research and genetic engineering research. In addition, I read what's relevant to my research in about two dozen medical journals every month.

I am more than willing to be corrected on anything specific, so please do not hesitate to do so.

I really am amazed at your suggestion that the "potential for natural remedies to cause adverse events (including very serious ones) should be explained." First of all, whatever adverse reactions natural remedies may have, they are explained thoroughly and very well understood (e.g. loose stool if too much vitamin C is ingested - a reversible irritation of no harmful consequence; at least this doesn't cause diabetes or cancer like the SSRIs often tend to do in the long run). Many people have tried to make this point about natural stuff having problems associated with it, but the body count never turns up to support such assertions. Currently, the body count is solely in the camp of Big Pharma's products. You do seem to agree, though, that we have a serious problem with that body count now. When an institution of the caliber of Johns Hopkins Medical School asserts that the primary cause of death is properly taken and prescribed drugs, we had better listen.

That synthetic drugs are necessary in short-term situations and emergencies is simply beyond doubt; only a total idiot or willfully ignorant person would say otherwise. However, all those truly beneficial drugs are off patent (as the World Health Organization's List of Essential Drugs proves) and the manner of their action (efficient and safe when used properly) is no longer the basis of further research at the moment in pharmacological research. Virtually every registered clinical trial for a new drug that I read about every month, in the notices provided in the pharmacological publications, is focused on nothing but further, fancy ways of controlling symptoms for the purpose of producing yet another drug that will cost a lot of money and targets some lucrative chronic illness. The trials themselves do not even compare the new, proposed drug with older non-patent drugs that have shown benefits! To make matters worse, all this research is sold under the grand lie of finding a cure - for example to cancer, the grandest deception of all. I refer you to the National Institutes of Health researcher Guy B. Faguet, The War on Cancer.

The current situation is a disgrace to medicine and an insult to the serious and legitimate discipline of pharmacology which has been forced into prostitution to serve the pimps on the stock market. Drugs as a business, and nothing but, is obscene to me.

Finally, the concept of risk-benefit is quite frankly beyond my comprehension. You may teach me pharmacology till the cows come home and I would listen to you with rapt attention and be most willing to learn new things and even change my mind on current drugs, if facts are shown to me to make me change my mind. Chemistry is a grand undertaking and one of the most fascinating sciences humans can explore. However, nothing will make me accept this concept of risk-benefit. The risk is almost always death or worse - a long debilitating illness caused by the drugs - and the benefit is almost always money for the manufacturer. Nobody has the right to take risks with somebody else's life and health. One may honestly talk of risk-benefit and be on the side of the angels - if one does not ALSO assert that the drug is safe, which is what is asserted when the FDA or Health Canada have been coerced or duped into passing yet another drug about which even its manufacturers know little and the patient knows nothing.

When Dr. Nancy Olivieri wanted to expand the informed consent information for the thalassimia drug she was using in a world-wide trial, the Apotex officials forbade her to do so and told her that she was misguided to think the drug didn't have benefits, simply because she was alarmed that more than 40% of recipients went into liver failure; after all, she was told, the other half benefited from it, at least for a while, and all patients would die from this usually fatal disease if nothing was done. Now, that sort of reasoning is my idea of homicidal criminality bordering on the criminally insane; the courts etc. happened to agree with me on this one.

If this was an isolated case, it would merely be black entertainment in the big scheme of medical history. However, all new drugs are in fact actually, and finally, tested through the "post-marketing" experience of patients who are the final test animals - proving that drugs are quint-essential non-linear, which is another fancy word for "unpredictable" ... unlike natural products which, in the case of essential nutrients used in therapeutic doses, are exquisitely predictable and measurable in their effects. That sort of Russian Routlette with synthetic symptom-control drugs does not happen with natural products - nutritional medicine, orthomolecular medicine, detoxification protocols and the like, which can very nicely even cure pancreatic cancer. This is fully documented, or I would not mention it. The relevant information is on PubMed and elsewhere. There is a whole world of medical research and practice out there that is based totally on mainstream research and does not have to resort to risks, but merely offers benefits.

What is as disturbing as the criminal aspect of pharmacology is its abuse as a science. Brilliant minds in this field are as abused as the receiving patients. Researchers who ring alarm bells are abused and every attempt is made to shut them up. I refer you especially to the case of one of the world's most eminent pharmacologists, Dr. David Healy (Let Them Eat Prozac) who was duped in every possible way about the true recorded results in the Prozac trials in order to make him pass the drug for sale.

The solution to this problem is not NO pharmacology, but pharmacology divorced from patents and the stock market. Pharmacology needs to be restored to its appropriate place: science and get out of business in every way possible. Good drugs are not necessarily money-makers, in fact, so far none of the money makers have been proven to be good drugs - they are the ones associated with the absurd body count because they are, without exception, based on some fraud or somebody having been silenced who actually knew his or her pharmacology properly.

You may be interested in reading the book I am publishing by Health Canada's Dr. Shiv Copra thanks to whom drugs like rBST, Revolor-H, Baytril and more either didn't make it on the market or were at last taken off.
If you have specific concerns and criticisms I hope you will answer and tell them to me because I need to know if I am wrong on facts.

With warm regards and best wishes,

Helke Ferrie

www.kospublishing.com

CORRECTION:
In juggling the voluminous information on so many vaccines for the April article entitled Whistleblower Report, a mix up occurred which is regretted and herewith corrected: the MMR vaccine is intended for Mumps, Measles, and Rubella (German measles), but the vaccines for chickenpox and whooping cough are separate vaccines.

CORRECTION:
The Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons responded to an article by Helke Ferrie printed in the March issue of Vitality pointing out that it is the medical residents, not the undergraduate medical students, who as of 2008 are required to take examinations in the clinical pharmacology of their chosen subspecialty. The impression the Ferrie article gave was this requirement included undergraduates as well, which is not the case.