Alternative Medicine
2007
Part One

(January 1, 2007) In this space early in 2005, I asked the question “Is Alternative Medicine Dead?” My analysis then was somewhat equivocal. As the New Year 2007 dawns, however, the answer, in my opinion, would have to be an unqualified “yes.”

Throughout the past year the signs of alternative medicine's demise were increasingly unmistakable, although, for most interested observers, they were probably well below or completely off the radar screen of awareness. That's because the non-threatening, watered down hybrids, called “CAM” (complementary alternative medicine) or “integrative medicine,” that have virtually replaced primary alternative medicine are now entrenched and well accepted – providing people who are inclined to, or profiting from, natural healing with a false sense of reassurance.

weil

Andrew Weil, M.D. Original department store display advertising caption: “What does a 63 year old man with a white beard know about beauty?”

A sign of this phenomenon might be my experience in walking through a large Macy's department store at the fashionable Fashion Valley mall in San Diego last month. Plastered on a floor to ceiling advertising kiosk in the cosmetics department was a larger than life black and white photo of “the foremost authority on integrative health,” Andrew Weil, M.D., selling skin beauty creams. Clearly, CAM (or “integrative health”) has arrived.

One reason that accounts for true alt med's decline or disappearance being under the radar is the fact that almost all of alternative medicine's original pioneers are gone from the scene, replaced by new generations of self-selected leaders (like Weil) who long ago made peace with the co-optation of alt med by conventional mainstream medicine, including changing its name to “CAM” or “integrated medicine.”

Books could be written on the relatively brief history of the rise and disappearance of alternative medicine. In consideration of the limited space here, and the short attention span of most of today's readers, I will merely mention some anecdotes, high points (or low points), and touchstones from the past year to illustrate my thesis – and continue the reporting and analysis in part two.

AIDS, Inc. Triumphs

The year 2006 witnessed the near total victory of the conventional HIV/AIDS paradigm, in the U.S. and in every other country. This development bodes extremely ill for what's left of alternative and natural medicine, as well as for personal freedom, autonomy, and choice, all of which are essential to alternative medicine's survival and flowering. In South Africa, the last country that managed to resist the HIV/AIDS juggernaut, the government's reasonable, moderate, go-slow approach – proceeding cautiously in implementing the Orwellian test everyone for HIV status and treat everyone who tests positive with antiretroviral drugs paradigm – and Dr. Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, the principal proponent of that strategy and its treatment aspect which included using traditional natural foods as medicines, finally fell victim to the unremitting international Anschluss engineered by big pharma, big governments, big media, influential international celebrities, and other seriously conflicted conventional players.

The ramifications of the latest triumphs of AIDS, Inc. go well beyond the issue of HIV/AIDS itself. Routine, and eventually mandatory, HIV testing is looming for everyone around the world. The chorus of influential players that is now demanding that everyone, everywhere be tested for HIV is growing, from the elites of conventional medicine to celebrities, opinion makers, the media, and now many Western governments.

In the United States, first term Sen. Barack Obama (D-Il), who in three months has been catapulted from obscurity to a supposedly leading contender for the 2008 Democrat presidential nomination, has made advocating testing and treating everyone for HIV a central part of his political program. In 2006 Obama had at least three tests himself for HIV – two of them purely for public show with the media's cameras rolling – and he has used the tests, one of them in Africa (he tested negative, needless to say) to pitch his plan to test and treat everyone (with the costs of treating everyone in the Third World, estimated at $30 billion a year, to be picked up U.S. taxpayers according to Obama's plan).

In a speech on the occasion of his latest HIV test on December 1, 2006 – World AIDS Day – at pastor Rick Warren's Saddleback Church Campus in Lake Forest, California, Obama said “We need to show people that just as there is no shame in going to the doctor for a blood test or a CAT scan or a mammogram, there is no shame in going for an HIV test. Because while there was once a time when a positive result gave little hope, today the earlier you know, the faster you can get help [drugs]. My wife Michelle and I were able to take the test on our trip to Africa, after the Center for Disease Control informed us that by getting a simple 15 minute test, we may have encouraged as many as half-a-million Kenyans to get tested as well. Rick Warren has also taken the test. Sam Brownback and I took it today. And I encourage others in public life to do the same. We've got to spread the word to as many people as possible. It's time for us to set an example for others to follow.

“Of course, even as we work diligently to slow the rate of new infection, we also have a responsibility to treat the 40 million people [in Africa] who are already living with HIV.” [emphasis added]

obama

Sen. Barack Obama and rapper Ludacris leave the senator's
Chicago offices Nov. 29, 2006 after a meeting on HIV/AIDS.

In November, Obama met with gangsta rapper Ludacris (Brian Bridges) in Chicago, according to local news accounts, to promote AIDS awareness and discuss strategy. An article on November 30th reported “After meeting with the senator, the entertainer would only say, 'We talked about empowering the youth,' likening the meeting to that of family.” Obama's spokesman commented “They [Obama and Ludacris] just basically shared their views on not only AIDS in America, but the AIDS epidemic in Africa. . . the senator applauded Ludacris for using his stature and his celebrity to bring attention to the issue.”

In Canada, meanwhile, Julio Montaner, M.D., president-elect of the International AIDS Society, in an interview published November 30th, 2006, said, according to the writer of the article, that “HIV testing (s)hould be as routine as getting your blood pressure taken.”

In 2006, pressure mounted to control reporting on HIV/AIDS in the media. At the International AIDS Conference in Toronto in August, leading AIDS experts and, incredibly, representatives of the mainstream media (including The Wall Street Journal), participating in a public forum, HIV Science and Responsible Journalism, suggested that journalists who stray from the official party line and report on challenges to the dominant scientific paradigm should be censored. The roots of this attitude can be traced as far back as the year 2000. In an article in Newsday on March 29th of that year, Laurie Garrett quoted prominent AIDS researcher and policy maker Mark Wainberg, M.D. who said that HIV/AIDS dissidents are “contributing to the spread of HIV” by promoting mass denial about the disease. Wainberg, according to Garrett, suggested that their actions warrant criminal prosecution.

At the August 2006 AIDS reporting forum in Toronto, John Moore, Ph.D., Professor of Microbiology and Immunology at Weill Medical College of Cornell University said “Anyone persuaded not to take antiretrovirals and use instead alternative medicines — lemon and garlic, potatoes and whatever — is also dying unnecessarily. Anyone persuaded not to be screened for HIV status and deprived of the chance of treatment or counseling dies unnecessarily. . . [About people who challenge the HIV/AIDS hypothesis, Moore said] It’s sort of like a Hitler/Stalin pact. . . Science and health journalists should talk to the editorial desk and letters editors and vice versa to ensure that AIDS denialist letters are spotted on arrival and spiked, not published.”

Another speaker, Nathan Geffen of the Treatment Action Campaign in South Africa, said “One can compare AIDS denialism to denialism on global warming, denialism on evolution and natural selection and denialism on the Jewish holocaust, which thankfully the last of these is almost never seen in the newspapers anymore. But these are all scourges. . . But what I want to ask, and what I want to propose, is should we be having a new ethic in journalism? Is it really the role of the media to challenge scientific consensus? Is it really the role of the media to say well the scientific consensus is wrong — the scientists have got it wrong? . . It’s not the role of journalists to be challenging the scientific consensus. . . Should we be seeing articles in the general media that challenge science? And in my view it isn’t the role of journalists to do that.”

Freedom of Choice or Medicine at Gunpoint?

On July 1, 2005, I wrote:

“Incredibly, the conventional war on AIDS, like no other issue in history, has succeeded in uniting and mobilizing left and right, liberals and conservatives, and evangelicals and nonbelievers in a lock-step march toward institutionalizing the pharmaceutical drug treatment paradigm worldwide right down to every last person on earth. If this sounds like an exaggeration, consider the fact that the expressed objective of policymaking HIV/AIDS control proponents is to test everyone on the planet for HIV so that everyone who tests HIV positive can be treated with antiretroviral drugs, even infants who test HIV negative if their mothers test positive. It is an absolute act of modern heresy and guaranteed career suicide for anyone in any position of power and authority to challenge the dominant HIV/AIDS mega-spin including the belief in the monolithic HIV/AIDS-test-and-treat-with-drugs strategy that is now completely operant at every level of public policy around the world.”

It further needs to be kept in mind that testing everyone for HIV and coming up with a positive test result do not occur in a vacuum. Testing HIV positive can have immediate, draconian ramifications for the person unlucky enough to test positive.

On June 27, 2006 the New York Times published a prominent op-ed essay by an influential professor at Columbia University, Barron H. Lerner, M.D., who suggests that people who test positive for HIV and who decline or refuse to take their prescribed antiretroviral drugs might be locked up in “detention wards” at places like Bellevue Hospital and, similar to people with tuberculosis, forcibly medicated with HIV/AIDS drugs for up to two years.

Even when there is no clear evidence but only a suspicion that a person, in this case a minor child who died, might have been HIV-positive, his or her relatives' lives might be made much more difficult. The survivors might even be investigated for criminal prosecution.

Christine Maggiore and her daughter Eliza Jane

An example of this Kafkaesque scenario, involving Christine Maggiore and her husband Robin Scovill, first began in 2005 and didn't end until over a year later. Maggiore and Scovill were the biological parents of Eliza Jane Scovill, a healthy child who became ill and died suddenly at age three in May 2005. A decade earlier, Maggiore had tested HIV positive and in the ensuing years had become a prominent critic of the entire HIV/AIDS paradigm. She never had her daughter tested for HIV nor did she take the toxic drugs that, according to the medical Establishment, allegedly help to prevent the transmission of HIV/AIDS from mother to child.

When Eliza Jane died, then, police authorities in Los Angeles started an investigation – a highly invasive fishing expedition, really – of the parents, looking for evidence to prove possible criminal neglect by Maggiore and Scovill (for failing to have Eliza Jane tested for HIV). Not until one year later did the Los Angeles Times report that the county District Attorney had concluded, according to the Times article published on September 16, 2006, that “there is too little evidence to charge Christine Maggiore in the death of her daughter.”

This story, of Maggiore's and Scovill's loss of their daughter and what they were subjected to afterwards, has direct, if not obvious, ramifications to the field of alternative medicine. In avoiding conventional testing and potentially toxic and unproven drug interventions for their family (interventions based solely on the questionable conventional presumptions involving the HIV/AIDS hypothesis), and by relying instead on health promoting behaviors and natural therapeutics, the parents were representative of an alternative medicine lifestyle at its best. For following this practice, they risked criminal prosecution.

Another person who barely escaped the long arm of the law for his, and his family's, preference for natural therapies is Abraham Cherrix. The sixteen year-old Virginia resident's case achieved major national attention this past summer when he attempted to use the Hoxsey herbal cancer therapy instead of a second round of chemotherapy for his cancer. On the morning when his case was to be heard in court before a judge (who could have ordered him into a hospital to undergo chemotherapy), Cherrix and his parents compromised with the prosecutor. Cherrix agreed to be treated by a Greenwood, Miss., radiation oncologist who uses an approach, according to news accounts and the physician's Web site, that combines conventional treatment and immunotherapy. Last fall, Cherrix underwent the treatment that included radiation (but apparently not the Hoxsey herbs). For the time being he was not forced to undergo more chemotherapy.

The family was quick to claim victory, but the fact is that Abraham Cherrix was not free to choose his own preferred nontoxic therapy and his subsequent medical care is still under the review and supervision of a state court which has reserved the right to order him to take chemotherapy later.

Unlike in past decades, for example, the late 1970s when several freedom of medical choice cases similar to Cherrix' grabbed the headlines, few words of support, or even informed analysis, were heard from the large (much larger than the 1970s) alt med or CAM community.

This fact – of a curious and ominous silence – was brought home to me because, just as the Cherrix case was winding down, I heard from Diana Meyer. Thirty years ago before she remarried, when her name was Diana Green, Meyer had become, reluctantly, a national figure, engaged in a two-year-long battle with the medical Establishment over the treatment of her young son Chad, who had leukemia.

In reconnecting with Meyer, who has written a book about her experiences, Chad's Triumph (scheduled for publication in early 2007), and in reviewing the extensive files I have held onto all of these years about the story, which I covered intensively between 1978-1980, I was reminded of how active and vital the nationwide grassroots support for Chad Green and his family was among alt med's proponents at the time – and how conspicuously absent any kind of grassroots support for people involved in similar cases like Abraham Cherrix is today.

To be continued on January 15th, 2007.