Slaughter of the Innocent
Jenny Marsh—06/2004

This is Dr. Janet Smith. She is a consultant oncologist at a hospital near you. She looks harmless enough… even respectable… but don't be fooled. She is in fact a mass murderer, but even she doesn't know it. Approach her with EXTREME caution.

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ONE DAY, not so far in the future, people will look back to these times with incredulity at how a society that presumed itself civilized could annually murder millions of its citizens for profit. And they will marvel at how these citizens would unquestioningly join the queues for the slaughter houses, meekly laying down their live — just as they had done less than a century before in two terrible world wars.

Of course, it is easy to be wise in hindsight, and those future generations will no doubt quickly realize that although it was always our choice to visit the slaughter houses, we were under the influence of heavy propaganda from the medical establishment and the pharmaceutical industry that did everything they could to instill into each one of us that the slaughter houses are necessary to counter the relatively recent cancer (and other degenerative diseases) epidemic.

Cancer rates, as well as many other degenerative diseases, exploded in the latter half of the 20th century because of the massive levels of deadly chemicals or carcinogenic compounds that humanity insisted and continues to insist on pumping into the environment for the sake of maximizing commercial profit - in fact over 60,000 toxins since World War II. Couple that with the fact that the average diet is woefully inadequate at offering any kind of nutritional protection from these toxins and you have a recipe for biological disaster. And this is exactly what has happened. Today, one in two of us will get cancer at some time in our lives whereas it was one in five only a few decades ago. This year alone 1.5 million Americans and 2 million Europeans will be diagnosed with cancer. And 750,000 will die this year alone in the US from this disease. (Isn't it ironic how shocked and outraged the US public are when just a few hundred Americans die in Iraq or a few thousand on 9/11… but three quarters of a million… every year… and there is hardly a squeak of protest.)

The response by our governments to this epidemic was to declare "war on cancer" back in the 1970s. Trillions has been spent on research and treatment and finding a cure since then, and yet, not only has this "war" been ineffective at reducing mortality, cancer rates overall are rapidly rising. Hodgkin's disease, acute lymphocytic leukaemia and some less common cancers have been treated with moderate success with orthodox treatments like chemo"therapy" (8% of children with leukaemia, for example, now live but are likely to get another form of cancer later in life), but for most of the common solid tumours, modern cancer diagnosis, screening and treatments are ineffective. (Screening can even increase the chance of cancer because X-rays themselves are believed to be the third largest cause of cancer.)

In fact, Dr. Karl Horst Poehlmann says, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, that chemo"therapy" is the only orthodox treatment that has been shown to be 100% statistically useless in all proper trials (read Ulrich Abel's excellent book Chemotherapy of Advanced Cancer). Chemo is unhelpful for 97% of cancers. And even when a patient's tumour does respond well (i.e., the tumours shrink fast under treatment) that patient has been shown to live no longer than someone whose tumour did not respond. And yet, most would never realize these facts with the deceptive manner in which the medical establishment and the pharmaceutical industry present the statistics. You would think the war on cancer was being won the way they carry on! Orthodox cancer treatments rely on 3 main methods - chemo, surgery and radiation (so called poison, slash and burn) - and even though surgery is regarded as the most successful of the three it too can actually cause cancer because it stimulates angiogenesis - the new blood vessel growth that tumours thrive on. Even taking a biopsy can cause cancer in a sixth of patients because it effectively spreads the cancer cells by breaking the tumours' protein encapsulation.

Just the other day here in London, Cancer Research was doing a poster campaign which stated that more people are hearing the words "all clear" than ever before. The implication is that cancer research is successfully reducing cancer rates. But wait a minute: if cancer rates are increasing then more people may well be receiving the all clear even though more people are dying from it as well. And one must also factor in that early cancer treatment will invariably widen the net to include cases which are questionably cancer in the first place, making treatment all the more successful and allowing the medical establishment to take credit for more "all clears". (Yet another consideration is that those diagnosed early are more likely to undergo complementary treatments, considerably raising their survival chances.) So Cancer Research's advertising campaign is deceptive - an underhanded attempt to raise more money for orthodox research against a backdrop of almost total failure.

Many studies and meta studies (studies of studies) show just how ineffective orthodox cancer treatments are (and often how they are not only ineffective but make matters a lot worse, decreasing survival chances). Their aggressive approach temporarily kills many cancer cells, and sometimes that is occasionally necessary for fast growing tumours, but most would agree that a true measure of a treatments success is survival probability after a five year period, as well as quality of life. What is the point of extending a person's life by a few months if those few months they are spent in terrible suffering from the side-effects? What usually happens is that the treatment kills 90% of the cancer cells but leaves the 10% that are more resistant to treatment and more aggressive to proliferate afterwards with fewer constraints because the immune system was shot to pieces in the process. In the words of Ulrich Abel, a German biostatistician, "Many oncologists take it for granted that response to therapy prolongs survival, an opinion which is based on a fallacy and which is not supported by clinical studies." Taking comfort in a shrinking tumour at the cost of serious and often fatal destruction to the body and its immune system is insanity. If treatments do not increase long-term survival then why undertake them, especially as they have such awful side-effects?

A few years back Ralph Moss, the author of Questioning Chemotherapy, gave a lecture in London in which he stated that his studies on the effectiveness of chemo"therapy" came up with the overall success rate of only 7%. A newer 2004 study by two oncologists in Australia, however, published in Clinical Oncology 2004 16:549-60 reveiled that chemo improves survival by only 2.3% in Australia and 2.1% in the USA. [The methodology of this study was criticised however by a leading oncologist who said that the actual figure was as high as 5 or 6%!] Other researchers like Ulrich Abel would put the figure lower than that. Dr. Pfeifer, for example, has stated that once a cancer has metastasized, chemotherapy is only of long-term survival benefit to 2% of cases! (As almost all chemo"therapies" have never been through proper double blind trials on humans for ethical reasons, this may be entirely a placebo effect, or the placebo effect is much higher and chemo is worse than useless.)

The generous 7% average success rate that Ralf Moss has come up with for chemo"therapy" does not reflect the greater successes of this treatment with blood cancers (especially in children — although it has to be said that there is a large chance that the cancer will reoccur when the child is an adult), but if any alternative or complimentary treatment showed a similar level of overall "success", the medical establishment would rise up in outrage and get such a dismal and barbaric therapy banned immediately and those who administered it prosecuted. But this is not going to happen to an establishment protected by a rich and powerful pharmaceutical industry which makes billions in profit each year from these "treatments". (A few years back single course of Taxol costs £10,000… it is probably more now.)

Walter Last in his excellent article "How Scientific Are Orthodox Cancer Treatments?" published recently in Nexus Magazine states, "An investigation of the records of 1.2 million cancer patients [published in 2002 by J. Nat. Cancer Inst.] revealed that the death rate attributed to non-cancer death shortly after treatment was 200% higher than would normally be expected. Two years after diagnosis and treatment, this excessive date rate had fallen to 50%… This means that, instead of dying several years later from cancer, these patients died from the effects of treatment." He goes on to report that because they strictly died of treatment rather than cancer per se, these deaths actually helped to improve the cancer statistics.

Of course, "death by doctors" is nothing new and is rife in modern health "care". Null and Dean reported astonishing figures in their paper "Death by Medicine" published in the Nutritional Institute of America in November 2003. They showed that in 2001 the number of deaths attributable to medical interventions in the US was a staggering 783,936, whilst that for heart disease was 699,697, and that for cancer, 553,251. Dr. Vernon Coleman, an experienced doctor comments in his book, Betrayal of Trust, that one in six British hospital patients are in hospital because they have been made ill by their doctor. He also outlined a study in Australia that showed 470,000 men, women and children are admitted to hospital because they have been made ill by their doctors. In America, 200,000 people die each year as a result of medical accidents.

Coleman illustrates these worrying statistics by the fact that when doctors in Israel went on strike for a month in 1973, admissions to hospitals fell by 85%, and the overall death rate in Israel dropped by 50%. The same thing happened in Colombia in 1976 where a 52 day doctor's strike resulted in an 18% reduction in the death rate and 60% fewer operations. And when physicians went on strike in the United Kingdom for a month in 1978, deaths dropped by 40%. When all these striking doctors returned to work, the death rate rose again to its pre-strike level. Of course the doctors were embarrassed by these statistics and tried to deny them. (A very well-read naturopathic doctor told me that this reduction of the death rate during a doctor's strike also occured in Italy, although I can't confirm this one.)

The truth is that orthodox medicine is relatively ineffective for many health problems, and patients would be much better off making lifestyle changes and seeking alternative treatments. In his book, How to Live Longer, Coleman gives a rating out of 10 for orthodox treatments, alternative treatments and self-help/lifestyle changes in both prevention and treatment for many of our most common ailments. Coleman admits that these figures are somewhat subjective but has tried to tie them in with the evidence available. For the prevention of anxiety and depression he give orthodox medicine 0 out of 10; alternative medicine 4 out of 10; and self-help 7 out of 10. For treatment of anxiety and depression he gives orthodox medicine 3 out of 10, alternative practitioners 8/10, and self-help 8/10. For the prevention of arthritis the figures are 0:6:6; treatment of arthritis 5:6:7. Asthma prevention - 1:6:6. Asthma treatment - 5:6:6. Cancer prevention - 0:8:9. Cancer treatment - 1:8:8. Eczema / Dermatitis prevention - 0:0:6. Eczema / Dermatitis treatment - 5:8:8. Headache / Migraine prevention - 1:6:7. Headache / Migraine treatment - 3:6:9. Heart Disease prevention - 2:6:9. Heart Disease treatment - 2:5:8. High blood pressure prevention - 0:4:9. High blood pressure treatment - 3:5:8. Irritable Bowel Syndrome prevention - 1:3:8. IBS treatment - 2:2:8. Osteoporosis prevention - 0:0:9. Treatment - 0:0:9. In other words, modern orthodox medicine is disastrous for preventing disease and not much better at treating it.

Walter Last references Hildenbrand's paper, "Five-year survival rates of melanoma patients treated by diet therapy after the manner of Gerson: A retrospective review", in which he compares the success of the Gerson diet against conventional treatments for treating a sample of 153 melanoma. For Stage I and II, 100% of those on Gerson therapy survived, whereas only 79% of those on conventional treatments survived. With Stage III, the figures are 70% and 41% respectively. And with Stage IVa they are 39% and 6%. He goes on to say that "Many natural cancer therapists claim a success rate of more than 90% in arresting and reversing cancer, provided that patients have not been subject to orthodox treatments beforehand. The most damaging treatments appear to be chemotherapy and radiotherapy." And yet Gerson, with it relatively good track record, is continually maligned by orthodox doctors.

In addition to being relatively ineffective, there are also huge levels of incompetence in orthodox diagnosis. Coleman reports that "a report published after pathologists had performed 400 post mortem examinations showed that in more than half the cases the wrong diagnosis had been made." He goes on to write that in a study of 131 randomly selected psychiatric patients, three quarters may have been wrongly diagnosed; and when researchers examined the medical records of 100 dead patients which post-mortems had identified as heart attack victims, only 53% had been diagnosed correctly, despite the fact that half that patients were seeing cardiologists (not just normal doctors but experts in heart disease). The list goes on and on, and Coleman gives the reason for this unacceptable failure rate as the "lamentable education" that modern medical students are receiving, and their reliance on technological gadgetry and drug solutions.

Bryan Hubbard tells us in his excellent book, Secrets of the Drug Industry, that at least 106,000 Americans die every year as a result of some adverse reaction to "correctly" prescribed drugs, and that a further 7000 die from incorrectly prescribed drugs. In the UK, 40,000 die every year as a result of reactions to prescription drugs, and a further 150,000 are disabled or need hospital treatment after taking a drug. He also reports how another study found that 2,216,000 Americans are permanently disabled or spend time in hospital as a direct result of prescription drugs. And considering that doctors are reluctant to report adverse reactions to orthodox drugs, these deplorable figures are no doubt an underestimation.

In fact, even the pharmaceutical industry itself admits that drugs are largely ineffective. Dr. Allen Roses, worldwide Vice President of Genetics at GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and a pre-eminent figure in the field, stated in 2003 that more than 90% of drugs work in only 30-50% of people. Whilst this may seem a shocking admission by an industry insider and expert, and whilst it is no doubt a conservative overestimation of the benefit of drugs, he does not even mention what negative impact these "ineffective" drugs are having. So doctors have been subscribing ineffective drugs for most of their patients! Recently, even Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) was found to cause cancer, heart disease, strokes and dementia. And this was after it was lauded to not only be the answer to menopause but "proven" safe and effective by "medical research". (Did doctors apologize for so arduously promoting HRT and no doubt killing many women in the process? Of course not… it is just business as usual with the next wonder drug.)

Walter Last attributes these shocking figures to the fact that orthodox medicine is largely unscientific. He quotes Richard Smith in the British Medical Journal as saying, "… only 15% of medical interventions are supported by solid scientific evidence" and "This is because only 1% of the articles in medical journals are scientifically sound, and partly because many treatments have never been assessed at all." This is especially relevant to cancer treatments where there is the added problem of the ethics of double blind trials. One percent scientifically sound?!! Can you believe that… and we all thought that orthodox medicine, which wastes no opportunity to denounce unorthodox medicine as unscientific, was based on careful research and clinical studies. And this was reported in a prestigious orthodox journal!

If orthodox treatments are so ineffective and dangerous, why is it then that they continue to be used? The reason for this is that they are completely funded, backed, controlled and supported by the massive pharmaceutical industry which makes billions of dollars profit from peddling them. This industry has the clout to influence doctors through training school and in general practice — usually with free gifts, grants, sponsorship, drug rebates and high salaries (more accurately called bribes) — loading them up with pro-drug and pro-orthodox treatment propaganda until they become its sales agents.

Not only does the industry influence doctors, it naturally influences the research that they do. Money takes much of the objectivity out of clinical research, a fact recently reported by New Scientist. Research funded by the pharmaceutical industry (as the majority now is) is far more likely to produce favourable results than independent research. When Oxford University academic An-Wen Chan recently analysed 102 clinical trials, he found that researchers changed the primary outcomes in their published reports in 62% of the cases. In other words they modified the results to please their sponsor. Researchers are not necessarily being dishonest; it is just that human beings have a natural and mostly unconscious urge to please their paymasters. And it is well documented that research showing negative results is much more likely to be buried by the sponsor, so that the public and doctors remain unaware of potential drug dangers.

What is most worrying, however, is that the pharmaceutical industry is sowing up its monopoly on health"care" in the legal system. By lobbying governments (in the US alone the industry has 7 full-time lobbyists for every member of congress) and using its financial clout to warp the processes of democracy, it has managed to severely restrict safer and more effective alternative treatments — treatments that are undoubtedly more successful than the pharmaceutical ones. It is even working on outlawing the majority of vitamin, mineral and other natural supplements, reducing maximum doses to ineffective levels. This is already scheduled to come into effect in the EU in April 2005. For example, Brussels has dictated (there is no other word for it because it was certainly not a democratic decision) that it will be illegal to sell Vitamin C in strengths over 200mg… why?… well high dose Vitamin C (several grams a day) is vital for optimum health, and most alternative cancer regimes include high quantities of this vitamin because it significantly increases survival. In other words, something as innocuous as Vitamin C is in direct competition with drugs, and the pharmaceutical industry, like all big business, likes to protect its profits. Healthy people are bad for business!

The approach the pharmaceutical PR machine uses to denigrate natural health supplements is safety. Every few weeks there seems to be another major piece in a national newspaper and on television warning the public of the dangers of vitamin and mineral supplements. Yet, in the US, the place where the public take the most health supplements, the number of deaths attributed to health supplements in 2001 was 16 against the 106,000 people killed by correctly prescribed pharmaceutical drugs. (Click here for a safety comparison graph.) Medicines are therefore equivalent to 35 x 9/11 attacks every year, or 212 jumbo jet crashes every year in terms of fatalities. This should be front page headlines… and yet, all the media seem to do is to obediently focus their attention on how dangerous natural supplements are instead. But as prescription drugs are nearly 7000 times more dangerous than natural health supplements, clearly the drug company's massive PR campaigns are working well (which isn't surprising considering their multi-million dollar budgets and their media contacts). Money talks.

The pharmaceutical industry is the most profitable industry sector in the world with the top 20 drug companies making sales of $200 billion in 2000 with an average growth of 11 per cent. Even during world economic recessions, this industry still manages to make "healthy" profits. Hubbard reports that the top ten drug companies made a return of 18.5 cents for every $1 in sales - which is eight times higher than the combined return of every other sector. GlaxoSmithKline, the second largest in the world, alone made a 31 per cent return on $20.5 billion sales.

Only the very naïve would believe that corporations would put the interests of their customers before the interest of their profits. The two are not the same: the true interest of the customer is to actually take as few drugs as possible, and to make lifestyle changes instead. The pharmaceutical industry knows this, which is why it does everything it can to brainwash new doctors into its drug paradigm. If much of the information a doctor receives is drug-focused pharmaceutical propaganda, is it really so surprising that drugs are so dangerously over prescribed? (In recent UK survey, which was reported on national television, 8 out of 10 doctors admitted to over prescribing tranquillisers. And that is just the ones that admit it.)

With such huge levels of money underpinning it, the medical establishment (or "medical inquisition" as some accurately call it) maintains a ruthless stranglehold on healthcare. And it is ruthless. What would a profession directly responsible for millions of deaths around the world care about the reputation of honest and caring alternative doctors and practitioners, and the standing of treatments that directly challenge its authority and profits because they are unquestionably more effective? Alternative doctors have been hounded to death and imprisoned, just because they represented a threat to the medical establishment's authority and profits. You just have to read books like Dirty Medicine by Martin Walker (banned in many countries and forcibly out of print) to see how this industry works. It is vicious, uncaring, murderous, vindictive and cruel. Anyone who believes that the medical industry ("healthcare"!), and the pharmaceutical giants that underpin and protect it, care one iota for our health and wellbeing is living in cloud-cookoo-land along with the rest of the Flat Earth Society.

So the bottom line is that orthodox doctors can unquestionably be bad for your health. The modern medical establishment has been completely infiltrated by the pharmaceutical industry with the result that doctors and consultants peddle dangerous, expensive and ineffective treatments that serve only to line the pockets of the pharmaceutical companies. So the next time anybody rubbishes alternative treatments on grounds (usually but not always false) of being unscientific, expensive, dangerous and misleading, remember that orthodox medicine is orders of magnitude more unscientific, more expensive, more dangerous and more misleading. The difference is that the medical mafia which controls orthodox medicine have legal and government protection, making them completely unaccountable for their terrible crimes. (That is how millions of people can be legally murdered without a single perpetrator brought to justice.)

However, If just one person is inadvertently injured by an alternative treatment, no matter how beneficial that treatment is overall, no matter how many lives it can potentially save, all hell breaks loose… the treatment is severely controlled or banned, those responsible are publicly taken to court with great fanfare, the massive anti-alternative PR campaigns step up, and the whole of alternative medicine is systematically denigrated… such is the manner by which the medical establishment maintains its monopoly and spins its propaganda. The pharmaceutical industry donates huge amounts of money to ongoing disinformation and propaganda campaigns waged against the public mind (as well as the medical profession) in order to maintain the lie that alternative medicine is quackery and that drugs offer the best solution. The lie is repeated over and over, until most of the public and journalists blindly accept it as self-evident, even though the term "quackery" is by definition more appropriate a label for most of orthodox medicine itself. This is the madness in which those of us who know the game struggle to eke out as healthy a life as we are able, all the while defending our diminishing territory of health freedom from a massive corporate and legal onslaught that demands to see us sick and dying so that it can rob us blind of every last cent.

And if you think this article is biased… you are right… it is strongly biased towards health and life based on rational enquiry. So my advice to you when you are unwell and needing medical intervention, especially if you have a degenerative disease like cancer or heart disease, is to do your homework - check out just how successful orthodox medical procedures and drugs really are, make those lifestyle changes, and seriously consider alternative treatments. Otherwise, by blindly accepting any orthodox medical treatment going, perhaps because you have been frightened by your doctor into believing that it is the only viable option, you may find yourself meekly and obediently queuing up outside a slaughter house.

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Dr. Janet Smith, therefore, really is much more dangerous than she looks. In fact, for someone her age and with her professional experience, she has probably colluded in the murder of thousands of innocent lives. What makes this particularly difficult for many to accept is that she might really be a kind and considerate human being… although dangerously misguided. Janet unquestionably believes that she is doing good; she originally became a doctor because she wanted to help, and an oncologist, because she wanted to cure cancer. But unfortunately she has chosen to be indoctrinated into a narrow disease-centric paradigm, one that supports only the pharmaceutical industry's profits and the authority of orthodox medicine. She has forgotten her raison d'etre - to heal… to make whole… to put her patient's health above any medical ideology. And in forgetting that she is supposed to be a healer first and foremost, and for being closed to alternatives which are clearly in her patients' interest, she is guilty of gross negligence and professional misconduct.

Nearly all the statistics and points raised in this article originated from the medical establishment itself, based on bone fide scientific enquiry, and many of them have been reported in leading orthodox journals. Can Janet plead ignorance to these facts because she was too busy to read the journals… too busy to question the "treatments" she so freely doles out? Or will history judge her as an accomplice in in the slaughter of the innocent? Time will tell.
Jenny Marsh is a writer, activist and dreamer living in London.