Excerpt from "Thugs, Drugs and the War on Bugs"

Chapter One: Genesis of the Medical Monopoly

by Dr. Brad Case

---

Monopoly, n. Exclusive control by one group of the means of producing or selling a commodity or service.

Cartel, n. A combination of independent business organizations formed to regulate production, pricing and marketing of goods by the members.

—American Heritage Dictionary, Second College Edition

There have always been multiple schools of thought in healthcare and these opposing factions have always been at war with one another. For over 150 years, however, healthcare in America has been almost completely dominated by one group of healthcare practitioners. Currently, this faction of healthcare providers holds a virtual monopoly over the competing schools of thought. They carry immense political clout through their own lobbying organizations and they are supported by the largest, richest corporations in the world. Further, those huge corporations have massive political power themselves, holding in their deep, fur-lined pockets, not only politicians, but the very organization that is supposed to be regulating them as well. They spend $11 million a day to convince the public to buy their products; and through their massive advertising budgets, which accounts for about one third of all advertising, they have major influence on the mass media and their regulating agency as well. The type of healthcare I’m speaking of is, of course, Western medicine, and their corporate sponsors are the pharmaceutical companies.

For all intents and purposes, healthcare in America is now under the control of a vast and corrupt medical monopoly. Because medicine is not run by a single company you may not think of it as being a monopoly in the traditional sense, but the effect is just the same. When multiple companies, very often competing companies, work together to create a monopoly over some product or service, we call it a cartel. These competing companies work in concert to eliminate the outside competition and thereby strengthen the cartel as a whole. A good analogy of what I’m talking about might be competing oil companies banding together to suppress alternative energy sources. In the case I’m talking about here, we have competing pharmaceutical companies (and their affiliates) working together to suppress alternative medicine.

The idea behind creating a monopoly, as I’m sure you know, is so that money can be continuously and effortlessly funneled into the pockets of those in control. That sounds great, right? Who wouldn’t want that? But there’s a downside, as I’m sure you also know. The downside of a monopoly is, by definition, there is no competition; therefore, no choice for the consumer. When there’s no competition and no choice, there is often corruption. When one group has that much power, greed inevitably rears its ugly head; and when that happens, prices escalate and quality suffers.

Those things are all bad enough, but with the medical monopoly, things are actually much worse. This monopoly isn’t just dangerous economically, it’s just plain dangerous. That’s because, the two main products/services this healthcare monopoly offers, drugs and surgery, are actually dangerous and detrimental to your health. A choice between the cholesterol drugs Lipitor and Zocor isn’t much of a choice if both of them are toxic to your liver, destroy your muscle tissue (including your heart), and do nothing but harm your body. The medical monopoly would rather you not know that there are safe, natural ways to lower your cholesterol (let alone the fact that cholesterol was never the problem to begin with). They would much rather you not see a chiropractor, acupuncturist, or massage therapist for back pain, but just go right in for the surgery. Natural alternatives such as these have an amazing safety record, but they are dangerous in one way. They’re dangerous because they threaten the unanimity of the medical monopoly—that singular voice that says drugs and surgery are the only ways to health. So, this healthcare cartel works very hard at preventing information about the benefits of alternative therapies from making it to the masses, or discrediting any positive information that ever does get out.

As scary as it sounds, the cartel that runs healthcare in America has actively suppressed, and attempted to destroy or eliminate, several valid forms of healthcare. Negative propaganda, often completely made-up information, is circulated to the media regarding competing healthcare fields. The same can be said of many safe and effective therapies, including several cancer cures, many of which have been confiscated and/or destroyed in Gestapo-like raids. Because these competing forms of healthcare and alternative therapies threaten the medical monopoly, each has been branded “quackery” and quickly pounced upon by organized medicine. Many of these alternative therapies have been hypocritically labeled as dangerous; others have simply been declared an ineffective waste of money. Still others, some of the best and safest, have actually been made illegal!

If one looks with an objective eye, it becomes glaringly obvious that what the traditional healthcare advocates are doing is purely about eliminating the competition and has nothing at all to do with “protecting the public from quackery.” This cartel has worked hard over the course of many years to lead the public into a tunnel-visioned way of thinking about healthcare. They’ve tried very hard to convince people that there are only two valid forms of healthcare—drugs and surgery—and that all other forms of healthcare are “quackery” at worst, and “alternative” at best. And to a large extent, their plan has worked. They truly have become the dominant form of healthcare, despite the fact that their products/methods are inherently dangerous and largely ineffective.

We’ve seen some amazing advancements in medical technology in the last 60 years or so. Through the use of that technology, medical doctors can truly do amazing things in the fields of emergency medicine and surgery. Also through the use of technology, M.D.s are very adept at diagnosing certain problems and keeping sick people alive. Antibiotics, no doubt, save lives as well. M.D.s are also reasonably good at alleviating symptoms like pain or depression. All of these things I grant them. In other words, if you’re severely injured, gravely ill, or dying, medical doctors are worth their weight in gold. But none of these things actually make you healthy. Shocking your heart back to life or keeping you alive on a respirator is not health care—it’s sick care. Medical doctors can keep you on this side of the line between life and death, but in terms of actually promoting health, they have very little to offer. Prescribing a toxic medication to alleviate a symptom cannot be considered healthcare any more than removing the oil light from your car’s dashboard when it goes on, can be considered auto mechanics.

All these technical advances are great. I’m glad we have them for the people who really need them. But as you’ll read throughout this book and the ones that follow, many of the problems requiring all this technology were actually created by the system that is now being forced to handle them. In other words, the medical monopoly has begun to feed on its own carnage.

An example might go something like this: certain chemical companies produce artificial fertilizers and pesticides for agriculture. Other chemical/pharmaceutical companies produce growth hormones and antibiotics for cows and other livestock. Still other companies produce the chemical “vitamins” they spray on processed, “enriched” foods like breads and cereals. People eat all this non-nutritious, toxic food for years and eventually develop diseases because of it. These people then go to their doctors and receive a drug (another chemical) to help with their illness. That drug is toxic as well. It also suppresses the body’s symptoms so the people no longer realize they’re sick; therefore, they see no reason to change their ways. So, they continue to eat the same toxic foods and take their new toxic drugs. After a few years, new diseases crop up and more drugs are needed. Because the people have been thoroughly brainwashed, they never realize that their illnesses are being caused by the drugs and chemicals they are consuming every day. This cycle continues until a major illness hits (stroke, heart attack, cancer, etc.). Now, surgery and long hospital stays come into the picture. Eventually, organ transplant, dialysis, or other life support mechanisms may be needed just to keep the patients alive. These people are now medical invalids, reliant on a constant stream of medical care and medications made by the very same companies (or subsidiaries of the companies) that made the fertilizers and pesticides, hormones and antibiotics that started the ball rolling in the first place. This is how the medical cartel operates.

So, yes, this century has seen some amazing things in the world of healthcare. I won’t deny this, but there’s something wrong. Everyone who understands the system says that it’s broken almost beyond repair. One of the main reasons they’re saying this is because more people are chronically ill than ever before. Just look at all the different types of illness that are on the rise: diabetes, obesity, cancer, heart disease, hypothyroidism, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, autism, depression, acid reflux, AIDS, attention deficit disorder, learning disabilities, lupus, chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, allergies, asthma, environmental illness… Why, with all this expensive medical care, are so many chronic diseases on the rise?

Is it because there are no solutions to these problems? Is it because humankind is just doomed to disease? Well, if you’ve never read anything on this subject before, I can understand how you might think that, but I’m here to tell you that there are solutions to these problems and they are being kept from you by the medical monopoly. Why would they do that? Because if you knew how to deal with these problems yourself, they would no longer have any power over you. They can only control you and make money off of you if you’re sick.

Who are they? Who is this cartel? The organizations include the American Medical Association (AMA), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Cancer Institute (NCI), the American Cancer Society (ACS), and others. The corporations include all of the major chemical/pharmaceutical companies in the world, collectively known as Big Pharma. Also involved in this cartel are medical schools, research facilities, universities, hospitals, insurance companies, other doctors’ organizations, and individual M.D.s. These are the main players in this game of Monopoly^®.

If you and everyone you know were to follow the advice given in this book and the books that follow, in a short time you would no longer need medical care (or only need it infrequently) and the monopoly on healthcare would start to erode. The need for heart-lung machines, dialysis machines, and many of their other forms of biotechnology would gradually decline. Very few would ever need angioplasty, bypass surgery, or to have their hearts shocked back to life again, and all this amazing medical technology would start to collect dust in the corners of our hospitals’ ERs and ICUs.

Like I said, it’s wonderful that we have such amazing technology; and there are some amazing drugs out there as well, but I don’t ever want to use them if I don’t have to. These machines, procedures and drugs are designed to save your life in an emergency—but wouldn’t you rather not need them?

Listen, I don’t want to get rid of medicine. I just want to get rid of the monopoly. I want a more logical system of healthcare. But, wait, I’m already getting ahead of myself. Before we go into all of that, let’s first take a look back at how this monopoly developed in the first place.

As I mentioned, Western medicine, also known as allopathic medicine, is made up of two distinct branches, which use two different types of treatment. There’s the medical side, which uses drugs as its main form of treatment, and then there’s surgery, which involves using scalpels and other sharp instruments to cut into the body. These two forms of treatment have not always been under the umbrella of “medicine” nor have they always been practiced by doctors. They each evolved from very humble beginnings and along very different routes, finally coming together under the banner of the M.D. fairly recently. In fact, they are still sometimes referred to separately, such as in the phrase “physicians and surgeons.”

Throughout this book, many pieces of this long, sordid story will fall into place more securely, but for now, let’s just take a brief look back at how these two diverse forms of medical treatments came to monopolize healthcare today.

A Brief History of Medicine

The Condensed Version

2000 B.C. “Here, eat this root.”

1000 A.D. “That root is heathen! Here, say this prayer.”

1850 A.D. “That prayer is superstition. Here, drink this potion.”

1940 A.D. “That potion is snake oil. Here, swallow this pill.”

1985 A.D. “That pill is ineffective. Here, take this antibiotic.”

2000 A.D. “That antibiotic doesn’t work. Here, eat this root.”

—Unknown source, found on Internet

The Slightly Longer Version

For millennia, all the world over, herbal medicine was the one universally accepted form of medicine. In those early days of medicine, women were the healers more often than not. This ancient knowledge of herbs and their healing properties was reverently passed down from one healer to the next.

In the early part of the Middle Ages, religion began its reign over the world. In those days, also known as the “Dark Ages,” the Roman Catholic Church had its hand in everything. The leaders of the Church knew that knowledge was power, so they guarded and hoarded information of all kinds with a jealous fervor. Strange as it sounds today, back then, even medicine and surgery were practiced by the clergy.

In the days of Hippocrates and the ancient Greeks, people believed illness came from an imbalance of the humors (blood, phlegm, choler and black bile). But in the Dark Ages, illness was blamed on sinfulness. In other words, it was a punishment from God.

The men who ran the Catholic Church would not allow women to read, vote, be members of the clergy or be involved in healthcare. In Christianity, only men were allowed to hold such important places of power because women have always been blamed for the fall of mankind. Because Eve ate fruit from the tree of knowledge (see box below), the Bible says that God cursed her with the pain of childbirth. It also says that because of this evil act, man should rule over her.

The original Asclepius, the Greek god of medicine The commonly used medical

medical symbol. holding the traditional serpent caduceus, the magic wand of

The staff of Asclepius on the staff Hermes or Mercury

Midwives and healers of the day knew of herbs, which would lessen the pain of childbirth. Perhaps this was seen as heretical back then. Not only did these women have more knowledge than the priests were comfortable with, but they were also interfering with God’s punishment of women for seeking out such knowledge in the first place. Since the Bible says that men were supposed to rule over women, these priests apparently saw it as their duty to put a stop to all this depravity. Whether this was the reason for their actions or not, the fact of the matter is, priests began accusing women healers and midwives of being witches.

In reality, this was the beginning of the healthcare monopoly. These healers were the Church’s competition. Those who can heal the sick have always been held in high regard, and the jealous Church could not abide in women or, for that matter, anyone outside of the clergy holding this powerful position. As a result, millions of these “witches” were hanged or burned at the stake by these religious men.

During the Renaissance, certain people, men mostly, began experimenting by using poisons or toxins in small quantities in an attempt to cure different ailments. These people were viewed by most as “charlatans” or “snake oil salesman.” One of the poisons these charlatans would use quite frequently was mercury, which was sold as a salve. It was a popular remedy for syphilis, but was sold as a cure-all. You may know that mercury also goes by the name of quicksilver. You may also know that mercury is a neurotoxin and is one of the most toxic elements on earth. Because many of these charlatans sold quicksilver salve, people began referring to them as “quacksalvers” or simply “quacks.” ² Thus, “snake oil salesman,” “charlatan” and “quack” became synonymous terms.

The murdering of healers and midwives by the Church worked gloriously to the advantage of the quacks. Thanks to the Church’s efforts, over time, traditional herbal medicine began to be seen as “folklore,” “witchcraft” or “voodoo.” Those healers who weren’t killed, either abandoned the practice of herbal medicine or practiced it very quietly “underground.” And with all these healers out of the way, the profitable practice of medicating people with poisons could kick into high gear. As a result, despite the fact that these quacks’ poisons were dangerous and many people died as a result of them, this vastly inferior alternative to herbal medicine managed to gain a foothold in healthcare.

Besides fast-talking sales pitches and pie-in-the-sky promises, this group of charlatans had some major support. As luck would have it, the makers of these poisons were very shrewd businessmen. With the investments of some well-known international businessmen (J. D. Rockefeller among them) and lots of deception, suppression, cover- ups and lies, the pharmaceutical industry grew into what is today the biggest industry on earth. (For more detail on how this happened, see Appendix A: “How Big Business Took Over Medicine.”)

In order to continue growing, these pharmaceutical companies needed a more credible sales force than “snake oil salesmen,” so medical schools were taken over. The physicians who attended these “allopathic” medical schools were taught how to use pharmaceuticals (i.e., chemicals), or mild poisons to treat the sick. These schools were, of course, run by men. Women were not allowed in. Just as in the Dark Ages, women were to be subservient to men and were only allowed to be nurses. With some education, a clean white coat, and a stethoscope draped casually about the neck, suddenly the image of these poison peddlers went from dastardly to dashing. These “quacks” were now “Doctors of Medicine.”

The history of surgery follows an interesting path as well. As mentioned previously, during the Dark Ages, God was given credit for much of the illness of the day; however, bad humors, or an imbalance of the humors, were still known to get much of the credit as well. Blood was the humor blamed most often, so many of the early medical treatments involved ridding the body of excess blood. Thus, bloodletting and leeches were popular medical treatments back then. Bloodletting involved opening up the veins and draining a certain amount of blood from the victim. This was an early form of surgery and like all medical treatments of the day it was performed by the clergy. In 1215, however, the pope ruled that priests could no longer perform surgery.

Early physicians disdained surgery, perhaps because they felt it was too barbaric and somehow beneath them, or perhaps they just didn’t believe it worked. But regardless of the reason, they refused to do it, so the job of surgeon often fell to the barbers because it was assumed that they were good with a razor. (Barbers were the original dentists as well.) There were surgeons who were not barbers, but they were the minority in those days. The surgeons and the barbers maintained a constant feud with one another for many years, but the two groups were officially united under Henry VIII in 1540 under the name “The United Barber Surgeons Company.” They remained thus united for two centuries.

Speed, strength and a strong stomach were the skills most needed to be a surgeon back then. Before the advent of anesthesia in 1842, patients would often use whiskey as an anesthetic. Assistants would then hold the screaming, writhing, oftentimes vomiting patients down. If the patients managed to survive the operation, many of them died from infection.

During bloodletting, the barber would use a bandage as a tourniquet and patients would squeeze a pole to encourage blood flow. When not in use, the barber would wind the bandage around the pole and hang it outside as a “sign” that he was available. This was the origin of the striped barber pole we know today. Though it is now a patriotic red, white, and blue, it was originally just red and white, which signified blood and bandages.

Eventually, as knowledge progressed, surgeries became more complicated. The barbers were forced to rob graves in order to study anatomy and couldn’t keep up with the surgeons. By then, surgeons were receiving some medical training and were attempting to establish themselves into a distinct, separate profession from the barbers. Some surgeons began referring to themselves as “surgeons of the long robe” to distinguish themselves from the barbers, who were called “surgeons of the short robe.” In 1745, the surgeons officially separated from the barbers and became a distinct profession.

Surgeons eventually became full-fledged physicians, attending medical school alongside their medical colleagues. Both now use the designation Doctor of Medicine, or M.D., but there is still some competition and rivalry between the two factions of “medicine.” In other words, many physicians still disdain surgery.

Medical doctors like to think of themselves as practicing scientific medicine, but this is not really the case. In fact, much of what medical doctors do is actually in direct contradiction to what science is telling them. Another large portion of what they do is simply not backed up by any science whatsoever, such as the prescribing of drugs for “off label” uses. In reality, medicine is a profession based largely on faulty logic, bad science, and dogma. In fact, as you’ll read in the chapters on vaccines, M.D.s are still using quicksilver, one of the most toxic elements on earth! Using “scientific medicine,” they kill, by their own admission, over 280,000 people every year. That’s more than all other accidental deaths combined.⁴ Yet this medical cartel has the gall to call anyone who opposes their deadly “all for drugs and drugs for all” approach to healthcare “quacks!” It’s hypocrisy in its purist form.

“Only 15 percent of all medical procedures are scientifically validated.”

—David Eddy, M.D., Ph.D.⁵

So yes, the face of medicine has changed dramatically since the snake oil days and the days of the barber surgeons, but these quacks are still just peddling poisons, despite what the slick TV ads for pharmaceuticals try to convince you of.

Dogma & the Religion of Medicine

As you will see throughout this book, organized medicine bears a striking resemblance to both organized crime and organized religion. Allopathic medicine has such a monopoly on healthcare today, that to oppose them is practically professional suicide, and to challenge their authority or philosophy is tantamount to heresy. In essence, they have become just like the religious leaders were back in the Dark Ages. They’ve traded the black robes of religion for the white coats of medicine, but the rest is virtually identical. No one must speak out against the dogma of the religion of medicine!

“Science” has become institutionalized and is largely regulated by an establishment community that governs and maintains itself…. In recent times there has been a narrowing of perspectives resulting in a growing dogmatism, a dogmatic scientism. There is arrogance bordering on worship of contemporary scientific concepts and models…taught in our schools in a deadening way, which only serves to perpetuate the dogma…

Strangely, the contemporary scientific establishment has taken on the behavior of one of its early oppressors: the church. Priests in white lab coats work in glass-and-steel cathedral-like laboratories, under the rule of bishops and cardinals who maintain orthodoxy through mainstream “peer review.”

—Beverly Rubik, Ph.D., director of the Center for Frontier Sciences at Temple University⁶

New ideas have always been a threat to the establishment; therefore, there are always groups bent on suppressing the free flow of such information. In the days of Copernicus, Bruno and Galileo, it was the religious leaders who were in control and who stood to lose if new ideas were allowed to enter the people’s minds. Ideas of a solar system that revolved around the sun rather than the earth threatened the status quo, and, therefore, the power and authority of the Church which had believed and taught otherwise for so long. These men, these thinkers, these scientists had their very lives threatened for their ideas. Many were imprisoned, such as Galileo, and some, such as Bruno, even died because of their ideas—ideas that threatened the Church’s dogma—ideas, which we now know were correct.

Today we have the same thing going on, but instead of, or rather in addition to the Church’s suppression of the free flow of new ideas, now we have medicine’s as well.

Whenever money or egos become invested in a certain way of thinking or doing, anything that opposes that action becomes dangerous. It’s dangerous to the establishment because it threatens its monopoly, and because of that, it can often become dangerous to do as well. It matters not what profession we’re talking about here. We tend to think of church people as having our best interests at heart, just as we do people of medicine. However, these two fields are not immune to the lure of power, money and ego any more than other professions are. As a result, both of these powerful institutions, religion and medicine, have greatly hindered advances in science because of their participants being so entrenched in an old way of thinking.

For centuries after the heliocentric universe had been proposed, despite overwhelming evidence in support of it, the Church continued to deny this theory. Only recently did it admit to the mishandling of Galileo’s case. Likewise, for hundreds of years after it was discovered that foods containing vitamin C would prevent and cure scurvy, the medical community denied that this horrible disease, which killed millions, could be caused by nutritional deficiency and continued to search in vain for a germ or some other cause to explain it. Other diseases, such as pellagra, have very similar histories.

“The heresy of one age becomes the orthodoxy of the next.”

—Helen Keller

In the early 1800s, 16 percent of women who gave birth died from a disease known as puerperal sepsis, or childbed fever. Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis (1818–1865) discovered by watching midwives that simply by washing his hands and having his students do the same before handling the patient, he could reduce the death rate of these women to only one percent. This was the lowest mortality rate ever experienced in his hospital.

In 1847, he proclaimed his discovery to the world, no doubt expecting the world to embrace him. But instead of thanking him for his contribution to science and medicine, he was immediately labeled a “quack.” Doctors, who claimed to revere the scientific method, would not even listen to one of their own, and rejected his teaching entirely. Dr. Semmelweis went on to write a book called The Etiology, the Concept, and the Prophylaxis of Childbed Fever, which provided overwhelming proof of his theory. This heretical book caused even greater hostility by his colleagues.

Semmelweis died in obscurity, driven insane by persecution and lack of recognition from his peers. It wasn’t until several years after his death, which was around the same time that germs were being discovered, that others became convinced of his wisdom and finally began washing their hands between patients.⁷ Because of this stubborn, dogmatic way of thinking, thousands of children were brought into this world without a mother to raise them, and just as many husbands lost their loving spouses at a time which should have been one of great joy.

Unfortunately, this steadfast resistance to change, even in the face of overwhelming evidence, is a very familiar pattern in medical “science.” You will read of many others with similar stories in the pages that follow.

“All truth goes through three steps:

First it is ridiculed;

Second it is violently opposed;

Finally, it is accepted as self-evident.”

—Arthur Schopenhauer, German Philosopher

Dogma severely hinders the forward march of progress, and when that dogma pertains to our health, that hindering of progress can mean the loss of millions of innocent lives. Countless new ideas and cures to horrible diseases have been suppressed, quashed or otherwise pushed aside because they challenged the dogma and the current, flawed, incomplete theories of traditional Western medicine. Millions have suffered and died because of doctrine, or more precisely, because of money and ego.

Today, very little has changed from the time of Galileo, for pioneer scientists are still being persecuted. Some are charged with crimes and imprisoned just as he was, for presenting a new idea that challenges the dogma of the day. Healers are still being hunted down like witches and summarily put out of business. Others have died very suspicious deaths. Many healers have fled this country for Mexico and other countries where the oppression from the medical monopoly is less severe and a modicum of freedom still exists.

Without the murder of countless healers and midwives over the years; the ruthless tactics of the AMA and the FDA to crush the competition; the medical community’s monopoly on the use of antibiotics; and without some amazing marketing and brainwashing of the public, allopathic medicine would never have become the majority party it is today. In other words, if healthcare systems were judged purely by their merits instead of by the public’s deluded perceptions, allopathic medicine would have been marginalized long ago in favor of safer, more effective and more logical approaches to healing. Perhaps by the time you’ve finished reading this book, you’ll join me in this sentiment.

Dr. Brad Case is a holistic chiropractor, clinic director of the Holistic Healing Center in Prunedale, California, and author of Thugs, Drugs and the War On Bugs, How the Natural Healthcare Revolution Will Lead Us Past Greed, Ego, and Scary Germs, Book I in the Why We’re Sick™ healthcare series. Dr. Case has dedicated his life to exposing the myths and lies perpetrated by modern medicine and the mainstream media. His personal and professional mission is to revolutionize the way healthcare is delivered in this country and the world, leading to complete freedom of choice in healthcare and a common sense approach to treating and preventing disease. For more information about Dr. Case, his books, his office, or to sign up for his free health e-newsletter, please visit www.HealthIsNatural.com. He can be reached by email at drbradcase@sbcglobal.net. You can also follow him on Twitter at drbradcase.

Thugs, Drugs and the War on Bugs is available in hardcover for $29.95 at Amazon.com, HealthIsNatural.com, Borders.com, Barnesandnoble.com, or by calling 1-800-BOOKLOG.

---

Add Comment