CAFTA approved, echinacea gets bad press and
mandatory e-health records - including implanted biochips - move closer to
reality
Reporting © By Peter Barry Chowka
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Echinacea, |
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As
reported by this
author last month, Nicholas Gonzalez, M.D., among others
interested in nontoxic, nutritional, and alternative therapies, warned that Cafta might help to accelerate
efforts to reregulate and
limit access to nutritional supplements in the United States - a freedom that
was guaranteed by DSHEA (the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act), a
federal law that was passed after massive public pressure was focused on the
Congress in 1994.
The
afternoon after the House vote, I wrote: "The fact that Cafta passed the House by two
votes should give one pause. There was little organized opposition to Cafta on the part of the usual
suspects: millions of vitamin consumers, the thousands of holistic health and
Bush
signed the Cafta
legislation on August 2.
The
first, and highest profile, one was an extensive study
of the herb echinacea
that is widely used to treat colds. The headline of the Los Angeles Times
article about the study was typical of the thousands of articles and reports
broadcast about the study: "Echinacea's
efficacy for colds debunked 'No evidence that it actually does anything.'"
The
lead author of the study, Ronald Turner, M.D., a professor of pediatrics at the
University of Virginia School of
Medicine, told the media "We find no evidence that it [echinacea] actually does anything to common cold
symptoms. If that's the reason you're buying it, then you're wasting your
money."
After
a report on echinacea was
broadcast on her prime time CNN news program, anchor Paula Zahn looked into the camera and commented
"Well, I don't know what herbal supplement to turn to next. . . But we
should make this very clear once again, because herbal supplements aren't
regulated, there is no testing process before they hit the shelf. Thanks [to
Elizabeth Cohen, CNN health reporter] for the [anti-ecinacea] advice. [I am] Trying to think of how many
countless hundreds of dollars I have spent on that stuff over the years. Oh,
well."
Mark
Blumenthal, a major presence in the
An
even more negative, and comprehensive, critique came in a press
release from Factors Group of Nutritional Companies. Michael
Murray, N.D., a widely published author and the group's director of education,
and several others quoted in the release criticized the NEJM study as
deficient on a number of grounds.
The
second alarm in the New England Journal of Medicine issue of July 28
came in an article, "Studying Herbal
Remedies," which accompanied the echinacea study. The author of "Studying Herbal
Remedies" is Wallace Sampson, M.D. According to the NEJM, Sampson,
"formerly a practitioner in the Oncology Division at
It
is an understatement to say that Sampson is widely known as a persistent critic
of alternative medicine. Over the years, he has been prominently associated
with a group of alternative medicine critics known as the "quackbusters." It is not
unfair to say that the journal he edits is hostile to, or at least consistently
critical of, alternative medicine.
In
the NEJM, Sampson writes, "NCCAM, if it is to justify its existence,
must consider halting its search for active remedies through clinical trials of
treatments of low plausibility. A wealth of information also awaits discovery
in the psychology of personal beliefs in irrational proposals, in the study of
erroneous thinking, and in the study of the mechanisms behind errant
social–medical trends such as the alternative-medicine movement." (NCCAM -
the
The
selection of Sampson by the NEJM's
editors, then, to put the echinacea
study into some kind of context, instead of turning to a more objective
observer or including (for example, in a pro and con format) a
voice reflecting another point of view, suggests a considerable anti-herbal
medicine bias at the very least.
Another
assault on reasonableness and individual freedom came in a third article in the
July 28 NEJM, "Straight From The Shoulder" by John Halamka, M.D., the chief
information officer at the CareGroup
Healthcare System and an emergency physician at the
This
development comes within the context of the government and the medical
Establishment moving inexorably, and quickly, towards requiring that every
American's medical records be recorded in electronic databases controlled by
the federal government.
On
On
July 20, a company called Accenture
released the results of a public
opinion poll which claimed that a "Majority of Consumers
Believe Electronic Medical Records Can Improve Medical Care, Accenture Survey Finds; 93%
Support Emergency Room Doctors Having Access to Electronic Records to Reduce
Treatment Errors." According to its news release about the poll results,
"Accenture is a global
management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company. Committed
to delivering innovation, Accenture
collaborates with its clients to help them become high-performance businesses
and governments. With deep industry and business process expertise, broad
global resources and a proven track record, Accenture can mobilize the right people, skills and
technologies to help clients improve their performance. With more than 115,000
people in 48 countries, the company generated net revenues of US$13.67 billion
for the fiscal year ended
A
bill introduced in the U.S. Senate in July, S1418, "Wired for Health Care
Quality Act," would increase funding for e-health records ("health
information technology") and also expand funding for the Office of the
National Coordinator of Health Information Technology (ONCHIT).
ONCHIT was apparently established by an Executive
Order of President George W. Bush on
On
On
July 22, according to Knight Ridder, former
Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton
(D-NY), who is expected to run for president in 2008, appeared together at an
event in Washington, D.C. sponsored by the drug company Pfizer. The two
politicians, at one time supposed political adversaries, expressed substantial
agreement on future health care policy. According to the article, Gingrich
"and
At
the state level, governments in liberal, so-called blue, states are racing to
mandate reporting of more citizens' private health records to government. A California
Senate bill (SB 945) with broad support would require physicians
and laboratories in the state to report to county health officials the names of
all people newly diagnosed with (that is, who test positive for) HIV. An
editorial on
Flying
in the face of the government's intentions to test and database everyone's
medical records is a new study
in the Annals of Internal Medicine, described in a news
release by the American Academy of Family Physicians,
"Analyzing data from a 5-year longitudinal study of 122 diabetic adults,
researchers found that the use of electronic medical records (EMR) did not lead
to improved clinical outcomes."
It
is reasonable to assume that there are other agendas at play here that are
driving the moves on a myriad of fronts towards medically testing everyone,
electronically monitoring everyone's health, and creating electronic databases
of everyone's most personal health records in permanent files controlled by
governments. Such plans are always proposed by public officials and
representatives of the medical Establishment supposedly with the best of
intentions, as the stakeholders insist that their machinations are intended to
improve public health.
It
is worth recalling that Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis wrote
in a dissenting opinion in Olmstead v. U.S., 277 US 438, 479
(1927), "Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect
liberty when the Government's purposes are beneficient....The greatest dangers to liberty lurk
in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without
understanding."
Addendum
Shortly
before the deadline for this article, it was reported that President Bush on
August 13 signed legislation that creates, or actually expands, government
electronic monitoring of prescriptions for medication written by physicians.
According to one
news account, "The new law creates a grant program for
states to create databases and enhance existing ones in hopes of ending the
practice of 'doctor shopping' by drug abusers seeking multiple
prescriptions." The bill, titled in the House the "National All
Schedules Prescription Electronic Reporting Act of 2005" (H.R. 1132),
passed the House by a voice vote and the Senate by unanimous consent in July.
It is intended to support, with millions of federal dollars per state, each of
the fifty states' efforts to require physicians to electronically report every
drug prescription they write for every patient to a government database. There
has been surprisingly little discussion about this development. A search of
Google on August 14, in fact, yielded very little hard information about the
new law.
For
more information,
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