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Our Modern Diet - The Bad / Nutrition And Medicine? I Don't Think So
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If you look at almost any other system of medicine besides the Western, you'll find a heavy reliance on food. Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine, after whom the Hippocratic oath was named, taught, "let food be thy medicine." The "foods" of modern medicine, however are drugs. The typical American doctor completely disregards nutrition. Those who are concerned with nutrition are labeled as faddists, freaks, extremists, radicals and quacks. Why aren't our doctors telling us about these things and trying to do something to change it? Many people think that medical physicians are experts in nutrition because they seem to know some things about the human body. Well, physicians may be great at saving lives in an emergency or for relieving pain temporarily, but very few are taught to prevent illness. Hard-working and dedicated, they are highly trained to diagnose illness (symptoms), administer drugs and perform surgical procedures. Their schooling demands so much time for pharmacology (drug therapy) that they have little time for studying nutrition. What scant information they do receive is usually outdated and less detailed than that which nurses and technicians receive in their training.
When the average physician is asked, "What should I eat?" The typical answer is "Just eat a balanced diet." If you want to know what an average physician thinks a balanced diet is, look at any hospital food fed to patients, doctors, staff and visitors. The mutually-exclusive roles of dietician and cook are nowhere more apparent than in such institutions. All are identical. Iceberg lettuce, with a glob of cottage cheese, and a wedge of canned pineapple. Slices of overdone and warmed-over beef that have suffered for hours in some electronic purgatory, coated with gravy made of water, library paste, and bouillon cubes. Peas, corn, and carrots--boiled. The pie is a sickening slab of beige goo, flavored with artificial maple sugar, in a crust of reconstituted cardboard, topped with sweetened shaving cream squirted from an aerosol bomb. The problem is that the dieticians who actually supervise such "cooking"--as well as the hapless agents of the FDA and the USDA who inspect the forced and faked-up products that go into it--can indeed prove that it contains the proper amount of protein, carbohydrate, minerals and vitamins. But this is like judging the worth of music in terms of decibels and wave frequencies.
George Blackburn, M.D., an associate professor at Harvard Medical School, said that 5% of all patients who die in American hospitals--50,000 people--starve to death, and their doctors don't realize it. Less extreme malnutrition hastens death in 160,000 cases and delays recovery in 330,000 cases, Dr. Blackburn said. In other studies on hospital nutrition, it was revealed that malnutrition is one of the most common causes of death among elderly people in hospitals. Then there's the soft drink, candy and cigarette vending machines strategically placed throughout the hospital. The hospital gets a percentage of everything sold in these machines.
In 1970, Professor Richard Ahrens of the University of Maryland School of Nutrition proposed more nutrition courses for the School of Medicine and was turned down on the grounds that the medical students needed to devote still more time in their crowded schedules to learn the latest information about more and more drugs. A very small percentage of doctors specialize in preventive medicine, but most better fit the description given by Dr. Julian B. Schorr of the New York Blood Center, in a January 1971 Wall Street Journal article by Mary Bralove: "Often doctors are trained in nutrition by doctors who heard it from another doctor who made it up." Yet they believe what they say is true and get upset when they're contradicted.
The average physician is not a nutrition imbecile, he can recognize overweight, gross malnutrition and other nutritional problems. But physicians usually get out of their area of expertise when they talk about dietary cholesterol, subclinical scurvy and long-term dietary studies. Time (December 18, 1972, p. 75) quoted Dr. Michael Latham of Cornell University's Graduate School of Nutrition: "Nine out of ten doctors in New York City would give wrong answers to dietary questions."
Senator Richard S. Schweiker of Pennsylvania, a member of the Senate Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, said (in Prevention October, 1972) "I am particularly concerned about the need for better practical nutrition education for our doctors." "The advice of family doctors carries a great deal of weight with most people. But, unfortunately, most doctors simply do not receive sufficient training in nutrition while they are at medical school to enable them to give sound advice on nutrition that we urgently need..."
The 1969 White House Conference on Food, Nutrition and Health concluded, "The effectiveness of physicians in providing optimal care for the many patients who have diseases with an important nutritional component is dependent in considerable part on the kind of nutrition teaching offered them at medical school and thereafter. At the present time, nutrition teaching in medical schools and in teaching hospitals is woefully inadequate." Medical schools with nutrition departments are rare. Most don"t even offer separate courses in nutrition but mingle what little they do offer in an elementary chemistry course. Not one medical school can honestly say it teaches nutrition seriously. An open mind is needed by all, not dogmatic opinions from out-of-date "experts."
Nicolas Wade, in New Republic Magazine, wrote: "The scientific enterprise is one of the few American institutions whose inner workings have never been subjected to close public scrutiny. It has been protected by the perceived idealism of scientists and by the belief that science and technology are the engines of progress. But the cases of fraud that seem to be popping up every month or so raise uncomfortable questions about whether all is well in the scientific realm." Wade then briefly describes fabrications of research data, forged laboratory results, results of research not even conducted, dishonesty, cheating and plagiarism by leading medical researchers. Named are: J.H. Cort of Mount Sinai School of Medicine; J. Darsee at Harvard Medical School; H. Levin of Philadelphia doing clinical trials for several drug companies and used by FDA to evaluate safety and efficacy; W. Aronow, chief of cardiovascular diseases at V.A. Medical Center, Long Beach. Aronow was also Professor of Medicine, University of California; an unnamed research fellow at Harvard Medical School; A. Rincover of the Psychology Dept., University of North Carolina, found guilty of plagiarism and Industrial Bio-Test (IBT), one of the countries largest testing laboratories.
According to the Environmental Protection Agency, studies for 737 safety tests of herbicides and pesticides were found invalid. Sadly, of those "safe" chemicals represented, 15% of the pesticides were on the market...212 to be exact. J. Darsee who was found guilty of research fraud at Harvard Medical School was many years at Emory University where he was also faking research data. "His career of successful fakery spanned 14 years..." He concludes, "All of the premises of this comfortably insulating hypothesis are seriously flawed. The scientific enterprise is supposed to consist of communities of scholars who rigorously check each other's work...but...the standard checking mechanism in detecting fraud is virtually nonexistent."
From the book Confessions of a Medical Heretic, the late Robert S. Mendelsohn, M.D., 1980: "Dr. Leroy Wolins, a psychologist at Iowa State University, had a student write to 37 authors of scientific reports asking for the raw data on which they based their conclusions. Of the 32 who replied, 21 said their data either had been lost or accidentally destroyed. Dr. Wolins analyzed 7 sets of data that did come in and found errors in 3, significant enough to invalidate what had been passed off as scientific fact."
The difference between orthodoxy and the naturalist is as pronounced as the difference between black and white. The orthodox health practitioner embraces all theories of health and disease that further the interests of the food, dairy, chemical, pharmaceutical and medical-care delivery systems. This acceptance does not imply individual physician dishonesty or corruption--rather--it denotes a very good four to six years of brainwashing in a "higher institute of learning," where a preponderance of inaccurate, deceptive instruction is passed on by equally "brainwashed" professors. When a college professor diverges from the party line demanded by the school's patrons, he suddenly finds himself in want of tenure. When such inaccurate information appears repetitively in the news media, it becomes factual. As a result of unsurpassed human greed, chronic poisoning and malnutrition lead to sickness and premature death by destroying biochemical equilibrium.
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