Pharmaceutical giant Wyeth is trying to make your influence disappear. You see, Wyeth has a problem: 50, 000 irate consumers who have written comments to the FDA to make it clear what they think about Wyeth throwing its weight around and using the FDA to shore up their failing market in deadly synthetic hormones by making safe, natural bio-identical ones illegal. The response was so strong that they actually amended the original Citizens Petition to try to make it seem as if they were not doing exactly what they were doing: trying to kill a natural health option to protect their market share for a group of dangerous and ineffective drugs. And, as long as they were at it, they decided that they would kill the profession of compounding pharmacy. Those are the specially trained pharmacists who custom make personalized prescriptions for patients on the order of their doctors. Instead of counting out pills into bottles, they compound exactly what a particular patients needs.
Since compounding pharmacists can create what a patient needs, not what a big company decides to market, these advanced pharmacists are your doctor’s partners in bringing safe, natural and personalized formulations to patients. Millions of women depend on their skills to provide their individualized doses of the natural female hormones which they need. Many of them used to take synthetic hormones like Wyeth’s Prempro (C), imitation progesterone mixed with Wyeth’s horse urine (honest!) from pregnant mares, Premarin (C).
For many years, the dogma of conventional medicine was that menopausal women needed to take hormones and stay on them for the rest of their lives since doing so would prevent the heart disease which so often afflicts women after the end of their reproductive years. It was also supposed to protect them from senile dementia, Alzheimer’s Disease, osteoporosis, wrinkles, dry mucosa (especially vaginal dryness) and on and on and on.
Remembering to forget that hormones are tiny molecules which act at ultra low concentrations on every single cell of the body and that they are highly structurally specific (so a single atom’s difference could mean the difference between safe and wildly dangerous), doctors pushed with all their might for women to take structurally altered synthetic hormones made by companies like Wyeth. The fashion — or perhaps the rage — as to get women on the synthetic versions and either dismiss or skip any mention of the natural alternatives which some doctors prescribed for women. These natural hormones were prescribed by a small number of doctors who understood the importance of using molecules which are identical to those that nature makes inside the body. Patients appear to experience fewer side effects from taking them and, critically important, fewer deadly problems like cancer.
But natural molecules cannot be patented so they are quite cheap. And natural molecules therefore do not generate the revenue to create fancy advertisements and expensive medical courses and glossy brochures, and expensive dinners for doctors and desk toys and calendars and pens and attractive drug reps and trips and…. and…. and …. In fact, even compounded for each patient, they are still considerably cheaper than synthetic hormones.
And then the 2002 shock that sent millions of reeling women looking for a doctor who knew how to prescribe natural hormones: a huge 15 year National Institute of Health study involving 168,000 + women called “The Women’s Health Initiative”, designed to establish the protective impact of Wyeth’s synthetic hormones Premarin (c) and Prempro (c) was shut down nearly 3 years early because these synthetic chemicals, either alone or together, increased women’s risks for heart attacks, breast and uterine cancers, senile dementia and other deadly diseases. Nearly as bad, the supposed protection against these and other catastrophic conditions was just not there.
Wyeth’s market share of the “Premarin Family” of drugs plummeted by more than 60%.
After letting the dust settle a bit, Wyeth decided to fight: On October 5, 2005 they entered a Citizens Petition to compel the FDA to put compounding pharmacists into the dust bin of history (despite the fact that the Supreme Court has ruled that the FDA has no jurisdiction over this profession) AND ban the molecules that compete with their deadly drugs: estrogen and progesterone. The original 6 month comment period was set to expire on April 4, 2006. When health freedom activists asked people to register their opinion with the FDA, the outpouring was so great that the FDA server, we understand, was overwhelmed. For that reason or for some other reason, the comment period was extended by 30 days until May 4, 2005.
More than 50,000 comments have been registered with the FDA. If you have already written a comment in support of your right to make your own health decisions and do what you and your doctor believe is best for you, thank you.
If, on the other hand, you have not yet done so, now, now, NOW is the time. Simply click here (http://www.democracyinaction.org/dia/organizationsORG/healthfreedomusa/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=3356) to let the FDA know that your health freedom is important to you!
Wyeth’s amended Citizens Petition attempts to put a very different spin on what it trying to do. But, regardless of the PR dance, killing the competition and calling it “consumer protection” strikes me as corrupt as disease mongering by making up diseases and selling dangerous compounds that consume precious resources and expose people to iatrogenic (doctor caused) side effects up to and including preventable death.
Here is what Andy Komuves, R.Ph.of the International Association of Compounding Pharmacists has to say about Wyeth’s Citizens Petition and amendment:
Wyeth Backtracks; But Second Verse Same as the First
On Tuesday, Wyeth issued a press release announcing that it recently filed supplemental comments on its petition. The new Wyeth comments attempt to reframe the BHRT issue and to create the impression that those opposing the petition are merely confused about Wyeth’s intentions.Wyeth is feeling the heat. We’ll stop nothing short of complete victory, but we’re encouraged today that we’ve got Wyeth’s PR team on its heels. They’re trying to revise history and say that their petition isn’t what we say it is: an attempt to rob women of access to bioidentical hormones.
According to news service Reuters, Wyeth filed supplemental comments with FDA this month and issued a press release to respond to some of the “misunderstandings,” as Wyeth calls them, about its citizen petition. You can read the Reuters article here.
Six months after it filed its initial comments, Wyeth finds itself up against about 50,000 people mostly patients and physicians who are upset with what the company is doing. So it’s no surprise that Wyeth feels compelled to re-frame its position.
They’ve just put lipstick on a pig. It’s a kindler, gentler attack on pharmacy compounding. Wyeth’s PR team drafted some platitudes about the value of compounding to adorn its supplemental filing, but the underlying legal theory is no less restrictive and harmful to patients than the original petition.
And its motives definitely haven’t changed. Wyeth is still seeking a political solution to a business problem to remove from the market an alternative to its flagging products.
If you haven’t written to FDA to oppose Wyeth’s comments or if your patients or their physicians haven’t either it’s not too late. Make sure there’s no misunderstanding at FDA: Wyeth’s petition will harm patients and must be rejected. … Tell the FDA to protect patient health, not Wyeth’s wealth.
Health freedom is not good for big pharma but it is good for you. Please send this blog to everyone you know and urge them to send a comment to the FDA urging them to protect their right to make natural health choices for themselves.
Thanks for your activism,
Rima E. Laibow, MD
Medical Director
Natural Solutions Foundation
www.HealthFreedomUSA.org
The medical industry has allowed itself to become the drug distribution system of the Pharmaceutical industry. And the prestigious and supposedly neutral medical journals are prime tools in that distribution system since they appear objective and are consulted by doctors for trustworthy and accurate information which they can rely upon to guide the treatment of patients. It is therefore both dangerous and ominous to consider the profound lack of objectivity and corruption which permeate even the most respectable of medical journals.
Advertising revenues for drugs keep them in business. Peer reviewers (who are supposed to keep the system honest) have considerable financial ties with pharmaceutical companies – the more revered the reviewer, the more lucrative the ties. “Research studies” are funded by the companies that stand to benefit from positive outcomes with predictable results. In fact, in many cases, senior authors put their names to research they did not conduct and articles written by company ghost writers. To make matters worse, the data of the studies are owned by contract not by the author (as the case used to be) but by the funding organization so results can be manipulated by the funder despite what the did or did not show.
FDA committee and task force members, too, have significant financial ties to industry. Drug related objectivity is, for the most part, in the mind of the beholder since it is not in the bank account of either the journal or the scientist.
Is it any wonder, then, that highly prestigious and [supposedly] objectivemedical journals participate in propagating the on-going poison press designed to wear away America’s allegiance to natural health options?
Our $20 billion per year supplement spending means that people don’t buy as many expensive and dangerous drugs as they would if they were not protecting their health naturally. That is a real problem for the illness care industry since healthy people are bad customers for the illness industry. That means that our supplement habit must be broken for current profits and the future. The Codex agenda is to making nutrients available only at doses so small they have no impact on any human being is to be brought to the US.
You see, the will of the American people and their legislators to keep DSHEA (the 1994 Dietary Supplements Health and Education Act) intact has to be broken, too. DSHEA says that nutrients are considered as foods and, as such, have no upper limit. The Codex Vitamin and Mineral Guideline says that nutrients are to be considered only in terms of their risk; the WHO guidance on the matter says that ANY CHANGE IN A BIO-MARKER (e.g., anything that can be measured) CAUSED BY A NUTRIENT IS AN ADVERSE EVENT!
The propaganda war is on, big time. Read what Peter Chowka, long time health journalist, has to say about the latest participation by the medical journals.
Saturday, Apr. 15, 2006
Recent Negative Studies of Alternative Medicine:
Bad Medicine or Bad Reporting?
© By Peter Barry Chowka
(April 15, 2006) In recent weeks, the news hasn’t been good for alternative medicine. First came the stories, reported prolifically in the mainstream media, that low-fat diets don’t help to prevent breast or colon cancer or heart disease. This reporting was based on three studies that were published in the February 8, 2006 issue of JAMA (the Journal of the American Medical Association), one of the world’s leading medical journals. That same week, another prestigious scientific publication, the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), in its February 9 issue published a study contending that one of the most commonly used herbs, saw palmetto, was no better than placebo for the treatment of benign prostatic hypertrophy or enlarged prostate.
That article was the opening salvo in a new, ongoing series of critiques of alternative medicine in the pages of the NEJM. In the February 16 issue, two studies called into question the effectiveness of using vitamin D and calcium to reduce the risks of bone fractures and colorectal cancer – conditions that have been found in previous studies to benefit from calcium and vitamin D supplementation. The following week (the February 23 issue of the NEJM) another study appeared, proclaiming the uselessness of the nutritional supplements glucosamine and chondroitin for osteoarthritis.
What these negative studies have in common is that the diets or supplements that were being tested have all been previously studied or subjected to review, with consistently positive findings. In fact, a list of the positive studies and references indicating the benefits of low-fat diets, calcium, vitamin D, saw palmetto, glucosamine, and chondroitin sulfate would be quite extensive.
But typically, as soon as the media catch wind of (or read a press release about) a negative study, they tend to exhibit selective amnesia, forgetting or ignoring all of the positive studies that preceded it.
The recent negative studies may have attracted the media’s attention because they appear to go against previously held beliefs – particularly in regard to the presumed benefits of low-fat diets and calcium/vitamin D supplementation. If the results of a new study had indicated instead that low-fat diets prevented heart disease or calcium supplements provided bone protection, they would probably never have made it on the nightly network TV newscasts or in wire service stories. Such news would have been met with a ho-hum, “What else is new?” shrug from most mainstream media producers and editors.
As in the case of any scientific study, however, the published results of these recent negative ones were not as black and white as the media portrayed them to be. The inaccurate or incomplete reporting is partly the result of the limitations of the sound-byte driven news business and also accountable to the somewhat misleading way that the researchers reported the conclusions in several of the studies.
Low-fat Diet Effects on Heart Disease and Cancer
The Women’s Health Initiative Dietary Modification Trial (which began in 1991), the source of the conclusions in the February 8 JAMA articles, was designed to determine the potential long term effects of a low-fat diet on the risk of heart disease, stroke, breast cancer, and colon cancer in 48,835 postmenopausal women, ages 50-79. The study goal was to decrease total dietary fat to 20% and increase the consumption of fruits and vegetables to five servings daily and whole grains to six servings daily. The dietary intervention group was then compared to a control group of women who were not asked to make dietary changes but who were given diet-related educational materials.
This type of study is problematic for many reasons. In the real world, an individual’s dietary changes are usually made gradually, over a long period of time. In fact, in the JAMA articles, by the sixth year of the study the participants in the low-fat dietary intervention group had only decreased their fat intake by 8.2% and the saturated fat intake (the fat most often associated with heart disease) by only 2.9%. In addition, in the low-fat group there was an average daily increase of only 1.1 servings of fruits and vegetables and 0.5 servings of whole grains. Even with these somewhat subtle dietary changes, however, there was a trend toward decreased heart disease and breast cancer incidence in the study participants who consumed the lowest levels of saturated- and trans-fats and in the ones who ate at least 6.5 servings of fruits and vegetables daily. These positive trends are important since the protective or preventive effects of a low-fat diet can take many years, if not several decades, to be fully realized.
Another significant problem with the negative JAMA studies is that the participants in the dietary-change groups were asked to reduce total dietary fat to 20%. Such a blanket recommendation does not take into account the fact that there are “good fats” and “bad fats.” Thus, this group may have been decreasing heart-healthy omega-3 fatty acids, such as the ones in salmon and other cold water fish. These same fatty acids have been found in numerous studies to help prevent cancer.
Saw Palmetto and Enlarged Prostate
The New England Journal of Medicine kicked off its latest series of articles on alternative medicine on February 9, 2006 with the publication of a study on the herb saw palmetto for the treatment of enlarged prostate (benign prostatic hyperplasia or BPH). The study’s design looked good, the dosage of saw palmetto seemed appropriate, and the herbal product that was used appeared to be of high quality. The study may have been compromised from the outset, however, by the choice of study participants – men with moderate-to-severe prostate enlargement. Previous studies on saw palmetto have usually looked at men with mild-to-moderate BPH.
The design of the February 9 NEJM study brings to mind an earlier one, published in 2002 in JAMA, on St. John’s wort for moderately severe major depression in which the dosage used was one that had been found in previous studies to benefit people with mild-to-moderate depression. Rather than confirm these findings in a group with milder depression or increase the dose to one that had been noted in clinical reports to benefit people with more severe depression, the researchers used the lower dose and then concluded that St. John’s wort was useless for the treatment of depression. A similar negative conclusion (including the failure to indicate that the study was in men with moderate-to-severe benign prostatic hyperplasia) was drawn by the saw palmetto researchers: “In this study, saw palmetto did not improve symptoms or objective measures of benign prostatic hyperplasia.” This conclusion, of course, is the bottom-line one that was fed to the media, most of whose representatives no doubt did not read or carefully analyze the study itself.
It is not unusual for the conclusions of a medical journal’s article or study, or the press release issued by the publication promoting it, to be negative, while the details of the complete study suggest a more nuanced, inconclusive, or even positive picture.
In the case of the NEJM saw palmetto study, it seems doubtful that men who have found that the herb helps to keep them from having to get up five times a night to urinate will stop taking it because of this single study. But the negative reporting will likely deter others who might have experienced benefits from using this safe and effective herbal alternative.
Calcium and Vitamin D for Decreasing
Fracture Risk and Preventing Colon Cancer
The fact that calcium and vitamin D are important to bone health is fairly well established accepted. Less widely known, but supported by significant positive research, is the fact that both calcium and vitamin D appear to offer protection against certain types of cancer, including colon cancer. Therefore, it was surprising when the news reported that a study in the February 16 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine had concluded that calcium and vitamin D do not prevent colorectal cancer or bone fractures.
One of the more questionable reports in the print media about the February 16 study was published in The New York Times on February 15. The Times article, “Study Finds Calcium Supplements Don’t Prevent Broken Bones,” opened with the following statement: “Calcium and vitamin D supplements increased the risk of kidney stones but did not prevent broken bones or colorectal cancer in middle-aged and elderly women, according to an extensive study whose results are to be published Thursday.”
It’s not hard to understand why the media would get it so wrong since the concluding statement in the official abstract of the published study, “Calcium plus Vitamin D Supplementation and the Risk of Fractures,” states: “Among healthy, postmenopausal women, calcium with vitamin D supplementation resulted in a small but significant improvement in hip bone density, did not significantly reduce hip fracture, and increased the risk of kidney stones.”
A closer look at this study reveals that it was also part of the Women’s Health Initiative (described above in the section on the low-fat diet studies). The bone fracture-colon cancer study included 36,282 postmenopausal women, ages 50-79 years. They were randomly assigned to receive either 1,000 mg of calcium in the form of calcium carbonate and 400 IU of vitamin D or placebo pills. The study’s protocol was confusing and the conclusions raised more questions than they answered.
Many of the women (16,089) were also enrolled in the hormone replacement arm of the study, confounding the results because hormone replacement can have a significant effect on bone density. Women in both the calcium/vitamin D group and the placebo group were also allowed to take personal calcium supplements (up to 1,000 mg daily) and vitamin D supplements (up to 600 IU daily – 1,000 IU daily after 1999) outside of the study as well as other medications for bone health.
Despite all of these significant variables, the study resulted in a 12% overall lower rate of hip fracture in the calcium and vitamin D treated group compared with the placebo group. The study’s authors deemed this result to be not statistically significant. However, when the supplement group was analyzed for compliance it was determined that participants in the group who took at least 80% of the assigned supplements had a 29% decrease in hip fractures. A major question is why non-compliers were even included in the final analysis. In addition, when the women were stratified according to age, those age 60 and older – the group most likely to suffer from hip fractures – experienced a 21% decrease in hip fractures, even when the study didn’t remove the non-compliers.
The calcium/vitamin D group had a 17% greater likelihood of kidney stones. While the increase in kidney stone rate was reported widely, none of the positive results reached the attention of the mainstream media, even though the increased likelihood of kidney stones was less than the improvement in the hip fracture prevention rate. It should also be noted that the form of calcium used in the study was calcium carbonate, one of the more poorly absorbed forms of calcium. Had the researchers used a more absorbable form of calcium, for example, calcium citrate, they would probably have gotten better results and even decreased the risk of kidney stones, since citric acid (citrate) has been found to help prevent the most common type of kidney stone.
Since this same group of people was analyzed for the effects of calcium and vitamin D on colorectal cancer, some of the same problems with the study design apply – for instance, the fact that the placebo group was also allowed to take significant amounts of personal vitamin D and calcium. In addition, the study lasted seven years and, due to the length of time it takes for cancers to develop, this may have been too short a period to observe a truly beneficial effect of vitamin D and calcium in preventing cancer – a fact that was acknowledged by the researchers (but not in most media reporting).
Glucosamine and Chondroitin for Arthritis
In the study on glucosamine and chondroitin published in the February 23 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, these two commonly used nutritional supplements for arthritis were compared to the anti-inflammatory medication celecoxib or to placebo. The study randomly assigned 1,583 people with osteoarthritis of the knee to receive 1,500 mg glucosamine HCl, 1,200 mg chondroitin sulfate, a combination of glucosamine and chondroitin, 200 mg celecoxib, or placebo for 24 weeks. People in all groups were allowed to take up to 4,000 mg acetaminophen (Tylenol) daily if necessary. The groups were further divided according to pain severity with 1,229 in a group with mild pain and 354 in a group with moderate-to-severe pain.
The study design was reasonable, although one might ask why glucosamine HCl was used, rather than glucosamine sulfate, since the majority of positive studies of glucosamine for arthritis used the sulfate form. The results reported by the researchers seemed accurate and relatively unbiased, and included the following conclusions: “Glucosamine and chondroitin sulfate alone or in combination did not reduce pain effectively in the overall group of patients with osteoarthritis of the knee. Exploratory analyses suggest that the combination of glucosamine and chondroitin sulfate may be effective in the subgroup of patients with moderate-to-severe knee pain.”
In fact, the combination supplement was significantly effective in the group of participants that needed it most – the ones with the most severe pain. On the scales used to analyze benefit, those taking the combination of glucosamine and chondroitin experienced significant benefit – 24.9 percentage points higher than placebo. This improvement was compared to the effects observed in the group taking the anti-inflammatory drug celecoxib that resulted in only 15.1 percentage points improvement over placebo. Yet, the mainstream media reportage on this study was simply that glucosamine and chondroitin don’t work for arthritis. There was no mention that it does work in those who need it most or that celecoxib may not work so well, either.
Recently the Wall Street Journal published the most outrageous print attack yet on your health and mine. This ordinarily respected newspaper chose to tout highly questionable science to tell us that vitamins pose dangers to our health and chances of survival. BALDERDASH
I hope that the article that follows will spur you to take vitamins and minerals to protect your health and well being. Please be aware that the level of under nutrition which follows from bad science like this and treating vitamins and minerals as dangers the way the Codex Vitamin and Mineral Guideline does, is the best way I know of to insure that you will develop otherwise preventable serious diseases, get sick and stay that way. The propaganda machine is working hard to convince you that nutrients are somehow bad for you. This is part of the effort to soften you up to accept a “harmonized” approach to Codex. That way, when you can’t get effective nutrients you won’t miss them because the big lie (“Nutrients are dangerous since they cause changes in the human body”) has become the way most people have been trained to view things. Those who lament their loss will be marginalized by mass media propaganda pieces like the one in the Wall Street Journal. Never mind that they are based on bad (or no) science. They are part of a magnificently orchestrated campaign to make optimal nutrition (which I believe requires nutrient supplementation in a toxic world) a non-option for you and your family.
Just as I was sitting down to write a response to this poppycock, I received an email which contained an excellent summary of why this is bad science and very, very poor public policy. This article was written by Jean Carper and forwarded to me by Elwood Richard, a long time supporter of health and health freedom.
I include the complete article here: it is well worth reading and sharing with your friends and those in your circle of influence.
Special Report : The media strikes again
A report in the Wall Street Journal unfairly attacks vitamins as doing more harm than good, adding more fuel to the vitamin wars and getting many facts wrong. Here’s the real truth.
http://www.stopagingnow.com/pages/specialreport/wsj
The WSJ’s Fictitious “Case Against Vitamins”
By Jean Carper
Vitamin opponents’ efforts to steer you away from supplements have taken a frightening new direction. Attacks on vitamins are escalating from allegations of merely “useless” to “extremely dangerous.” This alarming message is central to “The Case Against Vitamins,” in the Wall Street Journal, March 20, 2006. The subhead sets the tone: “Recent studies show that many vitamins not only don’t help. They may actually cause harm.”
Should you throw away your vitamins? No. In assembling its “case,” to scare people away from vitamins, the WSJ said much that is not scientifically accepted and left much unsaid. It cites carefully selected and sometimes outdated studies without proper perspective; misses or omits studies that contradict the premise, and fails to give a fair analysis by respected vitamin experts, choosing instead, sources of lesser expertise, credibility and credentials. Whether the bias is careless or reflects a mindset friendly to extensive pharmaceutical advertising, is impossible to tell.
Here’s how the Wall Street Journal got it completely wrong about vitamins E, A and C, on which they based the major part of their “case.”
Vitamin E in Wonderland
You might suspect the fix is in when the first person quoted by the WSJ is cardiologist Edgar R. Miller, author of one of the most criticized and denounced studies ever done on vitamin E. Eminent vitamin E researchers called his analysis, claiming common doses of vitamin E boosted death rates 4% to 6%, a case study in the misuse of statistics with laughable conclusions. If it were true, this absurd conclusion means taking vitamin E is more deadly than smoking, points out Jeffrey Blumberg, chief of antioxidant research at Tufts University. Dr. Blumberg and other vitamin E luminaries were so appalled, they signed a full page ad that ran in the New York Times, the Washington Post and USA Today, denouncing Miller’s assertions that vitamin E was unsafe.
Dr. Blumberg also teamed up with 12 other international authorities to refute that vitamin E is unsafe at doses under 1600 IU a day, in the April, 2005 issue of the prestigious American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
Among those condeming Miller’s conclusions are world-renowned antioxidant and vitamin E researchers, Lester Packer PhD, University of Southern California, and Maret Traber, PhD, Oregon State University and authority on vitamin E toxicity for the National Academy of Sciences. NIH’s head of alternative and complementary medicine also told me he didn’t believe the study.
Miller’s study, in fact, was exposed as bogus soon after it came out, its credibility destroyed by a major NIH study that found NO serious adverse effects, let alone death, in 40,000 women who took 600 IU of vitamin E every other day for ten years! If vitamin E was harmful or deadly, it surely would have shown up in this largest, longest vitamin E test ever done. Such a massive clinical trial overwhelmingly trumps previous studies like Miller’s, and is irrefutable testimony to the utter safety of vitamin E at common doses, says Dr. Traber.
More remarkable, contrary to Miller’s false predictions of death from vitamin E, the NIH study revealed it as an astonishing lifesaver. “It’s the most exciting findings about vitamin E in 10 years!” said Dr. Traber.
The truth is heart deaths dropped 24% in women who took vitamin E. And it gets better. In women 65 and over, prime targets of heart attacks, vitamin E slashed death rates an incredible 49%–nearly in half!, the NIH study showed. This means taking vitamin E might save over 200,000 women a year from heart disease deaths, figures Dr. Traber.
Imagine. If a drug did that, it would be heralded as a miracle cure; doctors would wildly prescribe it, and its stock would soar, says Traber. But without huge drug money behind it, vitamin E is unfairly trashed as dangerous by the press and blacklisted by doctors, all to the detriment of people who could benefit greatly from it.
The Vitamin A Tales:
After repeating the widely-published hazards of high doses of beta carotene for current smokers, the WSJ “Case Against Vitamins,” takes on vitamin A as cause of hip fractures, citing a 2002 Harvard nurses’ study, that “associated” high vitamin A from foods, multivitamins and supplements, with a 48% higher risk for hip fractures. It is naive to use this study to slam supplements, since the greatest vitamin A threat came from consuming too much liver, not supplements. Nor was vitamin A a fracture hazard to women on estrogen, suggesting more complex factors than vitamin A.
Nor is the Harvard indictment of vitamin A the last word on the issue. Much research contradicts it. A 2004 large-scale, 9.5-year study of 34,703 postmenopausal women by the University of Minnesota, cleared vitamin A, in both supplements and food, of promoting fractures. Specifically researchers made clear there was “no evidence” that women who took the highest doses of vitamin A supplements were most apt to break a hip. (Lim LS, Osteoporos Int, 2004 Jul;15(7):552-9)
Most important, better-designed studies overshadow and refute the 4-year-old Harvard study that the WSJ relied on to build its anti-vitamin A case, and even suggest the opposite: that higher vitamin A, surprisingly, may also be tied to fewer fractures.
The difference comes from the way the study is designed. More current sophisticated research compares an individual’s actual blood level of vitamin A with his or her bone density and fracture history. The Harvard study simply asked women what foods they ate, then estimated their vitamin A intake based on food-nutrient tables, and compared this with the number of fractures in the women. Obviously, this is a crude and unreliable measure of vitamin A status, compared with actual blood tests.
In several studies using blood tests, the vitamin A threat disappears or is turned upside down. At least, three recent studies that sampled blood for vitamin A content, either find no bone-hazard from vitamin A–or a LOWER risk of fractures.
British researchers at the University of Sheffield, scrutinized the blood of some 1200 women over age 75, searching for evidence that vitamin A induced fractures. No such thing. Women with the highest blood levels of vitamin A were 15% LESS apt to suffer a fracture of any bone, including the hip, than those with the lowest blood vitamin A. Women taking multivitamins (including vitamin A) or vitamin-A-dense cod liver oil were even better off–24% less apt to break a bone. (Barker ME, J Bone Miner Res.2005 Jun;20 (6):913-20.
At New York’s Columbia University, a similar 22-year long study of 2799 American women ages 50 to 74, found that fracture risk nearly doubled in women with both the lowest and highest blood concentrations of vitamin A, adding more confusion and controversy to the debate. (Opotowsky AR, Am J Med 2004 Aug 1;117(3): 169-74)
In a side note, a recent Italian study showed that women with osteoporosis had lower blood levels of vitamin A, as well as vitamin C and E, suggesting lower antioxidant defenses against free radical damage may be involved in bone destruction and accelerated aging. (Maggio D.,J clin Endocrinol Metab 2003 Apr;88(4):1523-7).
Bottom Line: The issue of vitamin A and bones is unsettled and highly debatable. The evidence is conflicting and confusing. The WSJ’s black and white “Case Against Vitamins,” gave no indication of this. It presented vitamin A as a bone-hazard, case closed, hyping a fear of vitamin A among readers, when that is not an accepted scientific finding by any stretch. The jury is still out, and it could go several ways.
Vitamin C as Villain? Amazing
“Like other vitamin studies, research into vitamin C has been disappointing,” recites the WSJ’s Case Against Vitamins” saying it might not prevent colds or fight cancer, as Nobel prize-winner Linus Pauling promised it would 30 years ago. To press the point further, the WSJ article resurrects studies, asserting vitamin C can promote cancer and even death.
On the contrary, a new Japanese study says taking 500 mg of vitamin C daily cut odds of getting three or more colds over 5 years by 66%.
But that’s of small consequence compared with dazzling new research identifying vitamin C as a promising new cancer drug. Excitement over the anticancer properties of vitamin C is dramatically escalating, rather than diminishing, among top-drawer scientists. It’s hard to fathom how the Wall Street Journal missed this fact, since a quick search turns up dozens of studies of vitamin C’s remarkable abilities to stop cancer.
Far from encouraging cancer growth, as the Wall Street Journal’s outdated information asserted, vitamin C selectively targets and kills cancer cells, leaving normal cells unharmed, says groundbreaking research by Mark Levine, MD at the National Institutes of Health. High doses of vitamin C rapidly killed 100% of human lymphoma cells, reports Levine, as well as 9 other cancer cells, including breast, ovarian, lung, kidney and colon.
Moreover, Levine notes that some doctors already give high- dose intravenous vitamin C to help stop cancer. The evidence for increased survival and safety is so impressive, even in advanced late-stage cancer, that Levine has called for a “re-evaluation of vitamin C as cancer therapy.”
Levine explains that for years researchers missed Pauling’s point and failed to understand precisely how vitamin C destroys cancer cells and why very high doses are needed. In original studies, Pauling administered 10,000 milligrams of vitamin C a day intravenously to terminal cancer patients for about 10 days, and then high oral doses of C afterward. Those on vitamin C improved and survived longer. When Mayo Clinic researchers set out to verify Pauling’s findings, they gave high oral doses, not intravenous doses, and concluded it didn’t work. However, it is impossible, Levine notes, to raise vitamin C blood levels to cancer-lethal doses orally. The vitamin C vanishes too quickly. Doses deadly to cancer cells can be achieved only intravenously by jacking up blood levels of vitamin C 25 times higher than oral doses do.
For example, doctors at the University of Kansas gave two women with stage 3 ovarian carcinoma 60,000 mg of vitamin C intravenously twice a week, as well as conventional chemotherapy. Their tumors vanished and they showed no signs of cancer 3 1/2 years later. The doctors are now conducting a randomized test of high vitamin C (and other antioxidants) along with chemotherapy in women newly diagnosed with ovarian cancer.
More amazing: Dr. Levine and NIH colleagues personally documented three cases of advanced cancer in which vitamin C shrank tumors, dramatically increasing survival.
• A 49-year-old man diagnosed with terminal bladder cancer in 1996 declined chemotherapy in favor of high-dose vitamin C infusions. Nine years later he is alive and cancer-free.
• A 66-year-old woman with an aggressive lymphoma and a “dismal prognosis” in 1995, also rejected chemotherapy, but had radiation, and intravenous high-dose vitamin C. She, too is alive 10 years later.
• A 51-year-old woman with kidney cancer that had spread to her lungs, opted for alternative therapy, including high-dose intravenous vitamin C given twice weekly for 10 months. Two months later, scans showed the tumors were gone. Her cancer remained in remission for four years. A smoker, she died of lung cancer that did not respond to the same therapy.
The Wall Street Journal is correct in saying that many doctors oppose use of antioxidants, including vitamin C, during chemotherapy, fearing interference with treatment. But experts point out the idea is only “theoretical,” and has no evidence to justify it. The WSJ assertion that antioxidants may “promote some cancer and interfere with treatments,” is without scientific merit. The one study that tested the theory found no difference in outcome–and certainly no worsening from antioxidants.
The latest evidence from the top experts at the National Institutes of Health not only rebuts the fictitious danger of vitamins to cancer patients, but shows that antioxidants, notably vitamin C, have the power to shrink cancer, produce remissions and dramatically extend life of even advanced cancer patients. Although it is still unclear how effective lower doses of vitamin C may be in preventing or fighting cancer, it is implausible that they could be harmful, considering that massive doses are not and, in fact, are so beneficial.
Should we hold our collective breath for the WSJ to do a major story on the ascent of vitamin C as a potentially powerful, inexpensive and incredibly safe cancer “drug?” Imagine the impact of that on pharmaceutical profits.
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In the US we have a precious (and much attacked) law called DSHEA (the Dietary Supplements Health and Education Act passed in 1994) which holds that nutrients are foods and, as such, can have no upper limits set upon them. Codex holds the opposit: the Vitamin and Mineral Guideline says that nutrients should have upper limits assessed by Risk Assessment, a technique designed to determine just how high a toxic dose can be before it produces changes in your body and then set limits 100 lower than that.
The World Health Organization (WHO) recently produced a Workshop document to help [sic] Codex with the application of Risk Assessment to nutrients. This document defines an
as ANY change in ANYTHING that can be measured in a human (a biomarker). So any change, whether positive or negative, which is brought about by a nutrient is an adverse event under Codex!
What to do? Several things.
First, inform yourself. Make sure you watch “Nutricide: the DVD” and tell your friends about it or arrange a public showing in your church, club or school. Download a copy of the highly informative Codex e-Book which was presented to decision makers in Africa last month. It contains a wealth of information on the solution to the Vitamin and Mineral Guideline and an in-depth essay on nutritional medicine you need.
Second, take action. Sign the Citizens Petition and join the thousands of others who are challenging the US Government’s Codex policy. Then “Ride the Freedom Mouse” to let Congress know that your health and health freedom is really important to you.
Oh, yes, one more action step: send a letter to the FDA and one to Congress to prevent Wyeth from smashing the competition that natural molecules offer to toxic synthetic hormones. You see, pharmaceutical giant Wyeth (which makes Premarin and Prempro) is attempting to pressure the FDA to ban its competitors, Bio-Identical Hormones. Premarin (synthetic estrogen made from pregnant mares urine) and Prempro (the synthetic estrogen plus synthetic progesterone called “progestin”) are so toxic that a National Institutes of Health drug trial using these two hormones which involved 168,000 menopausal women was halted early (2002) to protect women from the increased risks of heart disease, breast cancer, blood clots, blindness and strokes which they carry with them although they have no clinical benefit whatsoever.
Millions of women got the message and switched to safe, natural hormones which do protect them but don’t carry the risks of the synthetic hormones. Now, four years later, Wyeth has hijacked the Citizens Petition process to work its corporate magic: wave a wand and take away safe, inexpensive options leaving only dangerous, expensive drugs.
Hmmm. Sounds a lot like Codex to me.
Not happy with this turn of events? Support the Natural Solutions Foundation with your contribution or monthly pledge (donate $50 or more and we will send you a letter for your tax records stating the contribution is tax deductible).
Thanks. Your activism is essential to our success.
Yours in health and freedom,
Dr. Laibow
PS: More on Africa to follow. I’ve been really, really swamped!
Because there was no way for me to post our daily log of our adventures in Africa during this past month, I was not able to share these days and nights with you. So I will be posting the day’s events one day at a time for the next month. That way, you can share the feeling of the unfolding progress and context of our African trip. For a recap of the successes and progress we made, go to https://staging.drrimatruthreports.com/resources/newsletter.shtm and check out the entry for February 26, 2006, “Shall We Dance?“.
In the meantime, here is day one of the Natural Solutions Foundation’s first trip to Africa.
January 20, 2006
Bert and I took off a US airline, but clearly at the bargain basement level, based on what we experienced and what a stewardess told us: “We are “too cheap” to purchase paper containers instead of lower tech (and lower toxicity) Styrofoam” So, on the plastic and Styrofoam containers we ate plastic food (but did not drink the styrofoam-surrounded beverages” and shared the flight with West Africans and their children who, up to about 2 years of age were carried on the backs of their mothers and grand mothers held in place with cleverly wrapped rectangles of fabric over their chests. I have yet to figure out how those children did not fall off given that the rectangle was not tied, just tucked. The larger the child and the older the woman, the more the woman had to bend forward to walk. Since the access to and from the plane was stirs and steep ramps, this seemed to me to be extremely difficult.
At no time did I see a man attend to a child although fathers and grand fathers were traveling with the attentive women.
Once we arrived in West Africa the next phase of our journey began: no one was there to meet us and we did not know the name of the hotel that had been booked for us. We walked expectantly to the meet and greet area expecting our extremely efficient contact person to be there. We were not correct. Although there was a quiet, orderly mob of men and women is western and Middle Eastern garb (including some lovely Moslem women in magnificent silk robes and head scarves with embroidery and beading (which were beautiful, spotless and, to my thought, unbearably hot in that equatorial furnace), there was no one to greet us.
Eventually a police man asked if he could assist us and lent us his cell phone to call our contact person’s cell phone. That we reached her was the good news. That he then demanded a “tip” of $20 “to buy units for my cell phone” (which would buy a zillion units) was the bad news. We settled on $10 and he was disgruntled but quieted.
When our friend arrived (since the hotel had forgotten to pick us up), we wheeled our luggage carts to the car (which was forced into the pay lot so they could collect the parking fee although our friend’s husband had not parked, just waited) and about 8 men attached themselves to the luggage carts by touching them while we wheeled them over rutted, unpaved areas, across 12″ drops and stones. The did nothing in particular, just touched the carts. At the car, each of them demanded what we now knew was the usual: $20 as a “tip”. Bert had already tipped 2 of them $5 to make them go away. It was a learning experience: now we let our friend take care of the problem since she knows the culture: we do not.
Then we got into the car and got to the hotel, a simple, clean and pleasant hotel (which was, thank God, air-conditioned) with a bathroom large enough for a sizable party. That’s the good news: the bad news is that even in a hotel of this caliber, it is important not to let the water reach your lips, even when you shower.
Filtration? We prepared very well for it except for the fact that in the chaos of packing (when every schedule we created for ourselves was foreshortened by unforeseen events and requirements and, at the end, we had about 2.5 hours to pack for a month long trip), we forgot our electrostatic water purifiers, our Vitamin C, Olive Leaf Extract, Oil of Oregano, Homeopathic Travel Kit and other natural essentials. Thanks to Bob Mawson, one of our Board members, however, who was thoughtful enough to give us a filtration pump for water which did get into the suit case, we can double filter our water: the filtreation pump from Bob and our own travel filter. Between the two of them we figure we’ve got at least a chance.
Not to worry, though, we could find American Vitamin C 1 g tabs at about 3 times the price they cost in the US. Of course, after bying them we opened them to find that they were totally rotten.
Many foods and goods are available in restaurants and home inUS brands (e.g., Heinz ketchup and mustard, Knott’s Berry Farms jam, etc) but we did not see anything labled “organic”. Part of the reason is that preservation is a tremendous problem here and EU, Chinese and US goods are technologically superior in preservation techniques (of course, that includes not only packaging and sterility, but preservatives and all the other weaknesses of the conventional food supply, including GM constituents.
Our friend asked if we would like to come to her home for a home cooked meal. We were very glad to do so for several reasons including the pleasure of being invited to someone’s home and the pleasure of knowing that the food and water would be safe, not a “sure thing” otherwise. (She boils and filters the water, grows her own cattle, fruit and vegetables, etc, using organic techniques.
When she arrived to pick us up we showed her the book which we had prepared, the pens and the key chains as gifts for people. She was very pleasantly impressed and felt that they were perfect for the task.
Her home, children and husband were lovely. Naoim, her 7 year old girl duaghter came up to us as we ate and asked if we would like her to share her packet of biscuits (i.e., cookies) with us. We accepted with pleasure. It was a sweet and gentle moment.
Our afternoon meeting vaporized in a way that we learned was best described by the universally useful (and helpless) phrase, “It’s Africa!” What that means is that the Western notion of a schedule has absolutely no meaning whatsoever. None. Nada. Zip. Airplanes leave hours early with no warning. Firm appointment are about as firm as a jello ring mold in the equatorial sun. “It’s [absolutely] Africa!”
Following our dinner (which we ate alone since our hosts had already dined and this gave them a chance to relax and watch some African football (i.e., soccer), we hot-footed it off to the shopping center (the largest in the country) to buy our forgotten Vitamin C. When we emerged from the shopping center, there was a lady leaning on our car making a phone call. I thought that she was just using the car as a leaning post. When we approached the car, however, our friend and she embraced warmly. It turned out that the lady had been waiting since just after we arrive(well over an hour) for us since the afternoon meeting with her that had been scheduled did not happen because her furniture or her new apartment had not been delivered for a very long time. This is Africa.
So she waited by our car for over an hour to have the meeting with us anyway.
When we greeted her she had just learned that a young man in his 20s who worked in her office and with whom she was close friends, had been killed on his motor bike that day. Motor accidents are tremendously common. All of the roads, with one or two exceptions, are deeply rutted, unpaved and dangerously uneven. Traffic is horrific during commute times and difficult the rest of the time. Traffic accidents are extremely common.
It is dry here now and I can only imagine what these red packed, rock filled dirt roads are like during the rainy season.
People fill the roads and rapid movement with a car on them is perilous. Part of the reason that they are in the street is that down most streets, on both sides, are small kiosks selling everything from food to clothing, shoes to hats to cell phone units to drugs (often counterfeit) and herbal remedies to anything else you might need if you do not have a car and it is hard to get anywhere. They fill any available space where people might otherwise walk so they use the streets instead.
These are often sheds in front of shanties. While we were in the shopping mall, a friend of our hostess cashed a traveler’s check for us. He cheated us badly, it turns out: he cashed our Euro travelers check as if they were $ ones. Thus, a 50 E check was treated like a $50 check. This was clearly not unintentional. We did not mention it to our friend since this fellow was warmly greeted and addressed by her and we did not want to embarrass either one of them. Face is a big deal and causing someone to loose it is disastrous for a relationship.
After we hooked up with the lady who wanted the late meeting when we came back to our hotel and Bert, who, like me, had been up for over 5 days with only the sleep on the airplane and an hour on the floor of the living room a few nights ago (aside from the times we fell asleep at meals or on the computers) collapsed into bed. I continued to the meeting and we explained to the lady (a nutritionist and the number two person in the government on nutrition, fortification and supplementation) what Codex has in mind for the world and she instantly saw what it would mean. She was appropriately and gratifyingly horrified and immediately saw that we must meet with her boss and with others. She is now making those arrangements for us. I believe she is completely on our team because of her professional expertise and her good heart. Of course she knew that Codex existed but was not aware of what it really means to her people. She often interjected responses like, “But that is crazy!”
To top off the success of the evening, when I got back to the room I discovered that my cell phone works here, at least for calls to the US as local numbers. Go figure that one out: no country code, no addtional numbers, just regular US calls.
It did not work at the airport or we would not have discovered the “tipping” system with the cop.
Our friend did not come to the airport initially herself since her 2 year old son, Joshua, had a fever and she took him to the hospital since the fear was that he had contracted malaria which is endemic here. He had been put on chlorquine prophylacticly some days ago. His symptoms sounded to me like they could be due to liver impairment from the drug but the physician did not check his liver enzymes.
Post meeting: bed and more of it. Thank God for the air conditioner. Did I mention that I really, really hate the heat?
More meetings tomorrow.
Let’s not get confused here. The prize that the Natural Solutions Foundation has its eye firmly fixed on is nothing short of victory in the complex and multi-sided war on our Health Freedoms, all of them. Keeping your eye on the prize means remembering that the members of our team, all of them, are NOT the enemy. But our team, the Health Freedom team, frequently spends our precious resources (time, effort and credibility) on diversions (e.g, turf battles and uncivil, nasty nonsense and meaningless attacks). Our team’s effort should be totally focused on defeating the enemy, not turning allies into enemies. It’s sort of like “Dallas comes to Health Freedom”.
And now, for something completely different, let me propose a level of civility heretofore unknown by a number of the members of our team: wasting time attacking each other is NOT useful in winning the war, even when another member of the team disagrees with a position you might hold dear.
If you don’t know what I am talking about, that’s great. It means that the tempest in the turf teapot has not reached you. Don’t even bother reading further: your eye has not been distracted from the prize and you are marching in the correct direction.
If, on the other hand, you are tired of getting e-whipsawed by a flow of intellectual sewage, please read on. You won’t find any such attack or defamation here: the Natural Solutions Foundation will continue to take the highest road. What you will find, however, is a discussion of what civility and meaningful discourse means and what it does not.
On June 16, 2005 I wrote to Jonathan Campbell, (http://www.cqs.com/) and introduced the Natural Solutions Foundation to him, writing,
While searching the web for material for my blog I encountered your site and the excellent piece “50 Harmful Effects of Genetically Modified Foods” by Nathan Batalion. I am very impressed by your site and the material on it and I would like the opportunity to make contact with you and see how we might support the work that each of us is doing.
He responded the next day, saying “I agree with you 100% and I will do what I can to spread the word to my clients and my lists.” So far so good. Building bridges is a good thing and I believe that our side is only strengthened by alliances and mutual support. Concering the most negative of the Health Freedom activists (who irrationally attacks others continually if they commit the sin of disagreeing with them in any way), Jonathan writes “….how unfortunate. He can’t see his own sectarianism drives people away, and he thinks his little website is going to stop CODEX. Slightly short-sighted, and politically very naive.”
Then the next day, Jonathan wrote to tell me that while he agrees with part of what we are doing, he has misunderstood to whom the Citizen Petition is intended and therefore does not understand its import but thinks that by opposing CAFTA/FTAA we will solve the Codex problem. I wrote back explaining why I did not share this analysis.
Now here is an important point: in my mind this is perfectly OK: we disagree on our analysis of the problem and we are in a respectful dialogue about it. As I keep saying, this is a really big playing field and there is room for lots of different players using different strategies to deal with the immense Health Freedom assaults coming at us from many different directions.
On 10/23/05 I published a newsletter called Good News About Pandemic Flu in which I included a number of immune enhancement strategies which came from many, many different sources. Jonathan wrote me stating that a few of the items which I recommended were, in fact, published on his site and demanded a citation. My suggestions, which included various amino acids, Olive Leaf Extract, High Dose Vitamin C, garlic, Oil of Oregano, elderberry extract, etc., and which cited numerous references, were more diverse than his reccomendations. I did not even know that any of them had come from Jonathan since I received an email from a correspondent with some recommendations, but with no citation. Those with which I agreed I added to my list because they made sense and were easily available materials which could be added to a regimen with good effect.
I wrote back to Jonathan and told him that while I did not know he was the author of the regimen from which I drew some items (and still don’t, by the way, despite his claim), the next time I wrote about health issues I would mention that Jonathan asked to be cited as the source for the use of these particular items. Of course, I am not aware that he has done the basic research on these items and, as far as I can tell, did not cite the research from which their recommendation came but, none the less, as a courtesy, I have no problem indicating that the proximate source for the information on the inclusion of a few of these items was Jonathan’s website.
Since my newsletter contained items not contained in his article, Jonathan demanded an attribution for, I suppose, those parts for which he claims ownership. I have no problem with this: assuming that he really did publish these nutritional suggestions before anyone else, he should receive credit for that publication.
That is where things stood until several of our correspondents sent us an absolutely astonishing, widely disseminated letter written by Jonathan in which he, on the one hand, complements my effective writing style and on the other hand, libels me by absurd accusations that I am using some nasty, nefarious and underhanded technique of which I had, in fact, never heard AND that I learned this technique from, of all places,the US Army via, he says, my husband, a retired Army officer. Just in case there is any doubt, this is nonsense: I never learned any technique in any area from the US Army (or any other military organization from here or elsewhere, for that matter). Never.
As a College English Major who intended to write the Great American Novel (never dreaming that I would write the Great American Polemic instead) and takes pride in my writing skills, I am flattered. I guess my writing style derives from Mrs. Feaster, my 6th grade teacher and from Dr. Wilson, my college advisor, but the Army?
My writing style is far more graceful and fluid than my husband’s: I write in sentences, he writes in bullets (what else?)
A little substantiation would do nicely here, Jonathan, thank you. In fact, it would provide a welcome relief and a refreshing change from the assertions, allegations, smear and slander, to say nothing of the libel, flung at those of us who are effective in this Health Freedom advocacy. I suppose that if there were no intentional dissemination of dissent in this field, Big Pharma would have to invent it. Have they?
It is tempting to wonder whether that might account for some of the nastiness and distraction in this arena or whether personal pettiness and dysfunction are sufficient to account for it without outside influence.
Back to the specific matter at hand, though: Having taken, as usual, the High Road of civil response to civil discourse and ignoring anything else, I was shocked to receive the following rather astonishing (and factually inaccurate) email from Jonathan today:
Dr. Laibow,
It has now been some time since you published a copy of my avian flu preparation regimen without attribution, and you agreed that you would send a notice of attribution to your subscribers. You have acknowledged that you obtained from someone and re-published it without checking out the source or doing a simple google search, and that is an infringement of my copyright. I have not seen your acknowledgement sent to your list. I now request that you do so, and will contact my lawyer if you do not do so within 10 days.
Sincerely,
Jonathan
So, Jonathan, you have had an acknowledgement of the fact that I unintentionally incorporated something that you claim to have originated into a larger article, although I do not have any substantiation of the fact that you are, in fact, the author of the protocol you published. (And do not understand how doing a “simple google search” would prevent a violation of your copyright.” My protocol differs in substantial areas from yours but that is, as far as I can tell, a good thing. Here my civil and fact-based questions to you:
1. Where is the substantiation of the allegations which you have made about me and my writing techniques? Please provide it to me.
2. When can I expect your public acknowledgement of the fact that you have publicly defamed and libeled me? Should I give you a deadline threatening to contact my lawyer if you do not provide it? Is that how you prefer to carry out discourse?
3. What is your motivation for this defamation and liable?
4. What possible positive outcome does publicaly attacking another member of our team serve when I had already assured you that I was prepared to cite your material when I next wrote about the topic? Are you looking to create trouble, get your ego stroked or do you, in fact, have another agenda in mind?
5. Your sudden switch in attitude and cooperation suggests that you have been compromised by “disinformation”. Since there is more than enough disinformation going around from a number of different sources (with a number of different agendas driving it), I suggest that the members of our team develop the habit of scrupulous accuracy rather than witting or unwitting dissemination of it. Is there a reality-based reason for the sudden switch that you want to make public or is it a private matter? If public, please supply the information, if private, why would you impose a private issue on the general public?
I suggest that you (and other members of the Health Freedom team) refrain from public assault on those of us who form the Health Freedom team. Given your early high praise for our work before you decided that you could not tolerate any dissent from your position on CAFTA/FTAA (which we oppose but do not see as a major health freedom threat: Codex is the threat: CAFTA/FTAA are, from a health freedom perspective, derivitive problems) and our earlier civility, I would suggest a return to that mode of behavior.
I know that is the path I have chosen. There’s plenty of room up here on the High Road. Y’all come.
Yours in health and freedom,
Rima E. Laibow, MD
Medical Director