Category Archives: Medical Censorship

How Cuba is Revolutionizing Global Health Care

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Salud! : What Puts Cuba on the Map in the Quest for Global Health

Connie Field (2009)

Film Review

Salud! Is about the global struggle to overcome health inequality and the vital role Cuba plays in this effort. Filmmaker Connie Field is totally open about her perspective that that health car is a basic right and not a commodity, as it’s viewed in the US.

In pre-revolutionary Cuba, only a small wealthy elite had access to health care. The poor, who comprised 90-90% of the population, died in droves of treatable conditions, such as malaria, respiratory infection, parasites and infantile diarrheal infections.

The Castro regime responded to this health crisis by training tens of thousands of doctors. At present, Cuba has 60,000 doctors for a population of 11 million, making their health system one of the best resourced in the world.

Ending Diseases of Poverty Worldwide

Cuba has been extremely generous in sharing this resource with other poor countries, especially in Africa and Latin America. Since 1963, over 100,000 Cuban health professionals have worked overseas. As well as performing direct patient care, they also train foreign health care professionals.

The film profiles their work in South Africa, Gambia, Honduras and Venezuela. In all four countries, the Cuban doctors have helped local health professionals establish community-based health delivery systems that focus on health promotion and disease prevention. This contrasts to health care in the industrialized north, which waits for patients to get sick and fights one illness at a time.

Cubans Healthier than Americans

Thanks to their phenomenal workforce and this common sense approach, Cuba is one of the few developing countries that has virtually eradicated malaria. Moreover Cubans experience better overall all health status than Americans. On average, Cubans live longer: 79.07 years compared to 78.74 years for Americans. Cuba also has a lower infant mortality (4.70 per 1,000 live births) than the US (6.2 per 1,000 live births).

In Honduras and Venezuela, Cuban doctors have played an essential role in setting up clinics in barrios and rural areas that are poorly served by Honduran and Venezuelan doctors – both for financial (their barrio patients can’t afford to pay them) and “lifestyle” reasons. Despite their refusal to serve these communities, local doctors responded to the presence of Cuban doctors with mass protests claiming the Cuban medics were threatening their livelihood.

Free Medical Education for International Students

In 1999, Cuba set up the Latin American Medical School, which offers free medical training to low income students from all over the world. In collaboration with the Congressional Black Caucus, they have also opened this medical school to African and Hispanic students from low income US communities.

How Gut Bacteria Control Our Health

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The Microiome Revolution: Why Microbes Control Your Life

Jack A Gilbert

The Microbiome Revolution provides a brief and user friendly introduction to the essential role the microbiome (the bacteria that colonize our gut) plays in human health. Through their research, Gilbert and other microbiologists have induced obesity, allergies, autism, depression, anxiety, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s Disease and other illnesses by manipulating intestinal bacteria in mice. Gilbert contends that specific gut bacteria can even alter behavior.

He stresses that our current obsession with eradicating bacteria (ie prescription antibiotics, antibiotics used on factory farms, antibacterial soap, toothpaste, mouthwash, etc) has dire implications for human health. The human body is an ecosystem in which microbial cells outnumber “human” cells by ten to one. Doctors increasingly view the microbiome as a vital organ, like the liver or kidneys.

Thanks to Gilbert’s crowdfunding site*, his research team has collected the microbiome profiles of hundreds of thousands of people. This baseline has enabled them to identify specific bacterial profiles associated with good health. In general, rural third world residents have the most diverse and healthiest gut bacteria, while urban residents in the industrialized world have the least diverse and the most unhealthy.

Lecture starts at 3:15.

*Ubiome – for $89 you get a Ubiome gut kit to submit a sample of your feces for analysis

 

The Fatal Soybean

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The Fatal Soybean

Press TV (2013)

Film Review

Recently 30,000 Argentinean doctors signed a petition requesting their government ban the use of Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide. The Fatal Soybean is a documentary about the large cluster of miscarriages, birth defects, cancer and autoimmune disease in villages adjacent to Argentina’s immense “soy desert.” The filmmakers interview local doctors, environmentalists and grassroots activists. They focus in on one particular activist group, the Ituzainga Mothers Club. These women mobilized after numerous family members died or developed chronic illness following repeated exposure to the herbicides and pesticides sprayed on soybean crops.

As depicted in the documentary, Silence of the Pandas, a massive swathe of Argentina’s natural forest and grassland has been cleared to plant Monsanto’s Roundup-ready soy. The latter is a genetically engineered plant specifically designed to withstand spraying with the Monsanto herbicide Roundup. Owing to the emergence of Roundup resistant super weeds, most farmers are spraying more and more frequently with heavier and heavier concentrations of herbicide.

One of the doctors interviewed talks about the recent Dutch ban on Roundup and GM soy imports. Prior to 2014, the Netherlands imported GM soy animal feed from Argentina to feed their 250,000 pigs. After Dutch farmers found 20-30% of their piglets were born dead or with birth defects, research revealed that GMO soy absorbs traces of Roundup from repeated spraying.

 

Mushrooms, Bees and Cancer

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Paul Stamets – How Mushrooms Can Save Bees & Our Food Supply

Bioneers (2014)

Paul Stamets is a mycologist who studies the complex role played by the vast network of fungal mycelium that underlies all natural forests and grassland. As many organic gardeners are learning, deforestation and plowing, herbicides and pesticides associated with industrial agriculture are killing this mycelium. It’s in this way that important antibacterial (most antibiotics are derived from fungi) and antiviral properties are lost that are vital to both the plant and animal kingdom

Stamets first became interested in the role of fungi in bee health when he saw honeybees sucking the mycelium out of wood chips on his farm. Through subsequent research, he would learn that specific fungi contain compounds that suppress the virus carried by veroa mites – implicated in colony collapse syndrome. The same antiviral fungi are also play a role in protecting animals against zoonotic* viruses, such as bird flu and H1N1.

Stamets believes that wide scale deforestation has destroyed the fungi that bees have traditionally relied on and this is partly responsible for the 40% reduction in bee populations. He also blames deforestation for growing pandemics of zoonotic illnesses like bird flu, H1N1, MERS and possibly ebola.

In the second video, Stamets discusses his research into turkey tail mushrooms as an adjunct treatment in terminal breast cancer.

More about the successful $2.25 million National Institute of Health Study at the link below. Owing to their positive effect on the microbiome (intestinal bacteria), turkey tail mushrooms are also helpful in

  • Infections and inflammations of the upper respiratory tract
  • Infections of the urinary tract
  • Infections and irritations of the digestive tract
  • Pulmonary diseases
  • Chronic congestion
  • General lack of energy and malaise

*A zoonotic disease is one that can be passed between animals and people

The Ugly Story Behind the Laetrile Cover-Up

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Second Opinion: Laetrile at Sloan Kettering

Eric Merola (2014)

Film Review

Second Opinion is a documentary about the deliberate cover-up of an alternative cancer treatment by Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, America’s foremost cancer research institution, and Dr Robert Moss, the Sloan Kettering science writer who exposed the cover-up.

As strange as it may seem Sloan Kettering themselves did the definitive research showing that Laetrile (aka Amygdalin and B17) is effective in small tumors in early stage cancer. Sloan Kettering even went so far as to apply to the FDA (in 1974 and 1975) for permission to conduct human Laetrile trials.

A year later, under massive pressure from the National Cancer Institute and American Cancer Society (both receive major funding from Big Pharma), the top brass at Sloan Kettering reversed themselves and falsely claimed that twenty laetrile studies over four years showed no beneficial effect whatsoever. As one commentator observed, if cancer patients could buy laetrile (made from apricot pits) for seventy-seven cents, they would never pay $70,000 for cancer chemotherapy.

Sloan Kettering Researcher Kanematsu Sugiura

The chief laetrile scientist at Sloan Kettering was an eight-five-year-old Japanese researcher named Kanematsu Sugiura. Sugiura was with the Center for over sixty years. His twenty studies showed that laetrile slows tumor growth, reduces lung metastases and relieves pain with small cancerous tumors.

Neither Sugiura nor Moss ever claimed that laetrile is a “cure” for cancer. Like chemotherapy, it merely slows the progression of the disease. However, unlike chemotherapy, it doesn’t cost tens of thousands of dollars. Nor does it cause hair loss, extreme nausea and lethargy or immune shutdown.

Americans Defy FDA Ban on Laetrile

Although laetrile is far safer than the poisons used in chemotherapy, the FDA banned in in 1962. In the late seventies when Sugiura was doing his research, more than 70,000 Americans (one-tenth of all cancer patients) were illegally smuggling laetrile into the US from Mexico. There was also an extremely strong grassroots pro-laetrile group affiliated with the John Birch Society. They successfully lobbied 19 states to pass legislation authorizing laetrile use. They also persuaded Ted Kennedy to hold congressional hearing on laetrile. According to Moss, it was the pressure of these hearings that led Sloan Kettering to do additional (deeply flawed) studies which they claimed contradicted Sugiura’s findings.

Moss Starts Underground Newsletter

Since mainstream media refused to interview Sugiura or publish his findings, Moss decided to bring them to public view by starting an underground newsletter for Sloan Kettering employees called Second Opinion. In addition to exposing the Sloan Kettering campaign to discredit Sugiura, it also published articles about labor disputes, nursing and patient complaints and a clearly racially based dismissal.

Owing to its immense popularity, Second Opinion attracted mainstream media attention. In 1977, this culminated in a press conference in which Moss was forced to go public. Predictably he was fired and blackballed from the industry.

His wife helped out by getting a job, and Moss became a free lance writer, publishing The Cancer Industry in 1980. He has published a total of fifteen books about the capture of cancer treatment by the profit interests of powerful pharmaceutical companies. In 1991 he became an (unpaid) adviser to the National Institutes of Health on alternative and complementary cancer treatments.

In 2014, two German researchers finally (after forty years) replicated Sugiura’s findings. They have plans to launch human studies.

Unfortunately, since I first watched this documentary, the producers have made it pay per view. People can either pay $4.99 or wait till one of the Torent sites makes a free download available.

California’s Smart Meter Conspiracy

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Smart Meter

 

According to Josh Del Sol (Take Back Your power) writing for Activist Post, evidence has now been made public of illegal actions and collusion between former California Public Utilities Commission president Michael Peevey and utility PG&E, as criminal investigations continue.

As part of a federal and state investigation into what appears to be systemic corruption involving former senior executives at PG&E and the California Public Utilities Commission, 65,000 emails have been publicly released, revealing collusion and conspiracy.

Former commission president Michael Peevey and former PG&E Vice President Brian Cherry are wishing investigators would have been kept in the dark. The pair privately discussed problems with so-called “smart” meters, violating their own rules of procedure while admitting to health harm and overbilling problems – which several thousand Californians had been warning about since 2010.

Details continue to surface, as press and researchers continue to delve into the mountain of collusion.

It is perhaps justly ironic that we now see, made public, the private email correspondence of those who have teamed up to deploy technology which, according to a 2012 US Congressional Research report, facilitates unprecedented in-home surveillance.

Here are some highlights from their correspondence:

1) Peevey knew – since 2010 – that “smart” meters can cause physical harm.

And he believed PG&E should do something about it, albeit “quietly”. However, instead of regulating the utility to ensure public safety, he deferred his lawful duty to PG&E – the entity causing the harm. Here are some highlights from their correspondence: From a 2010 email:

peevey-email-1-smart-meters*

“Peevey wanted PG&E to keep it quiet,” writes Sandi Maurer, Director of the EMF Safety Network. “He didn’t want other customers, or the rest of the world to know there’s a problem with smart meters causing customers pain.”

Read more here

 

As Del Sol rightly points out, former Public Utilities Commission President Michael Peevey had a legal responsibility to protect California residents against the health risks of smart meters. Instead he colluded with PG&E in their determination to strong arm unsuspecting households (using local police in Naperville) into installing them.

 

Photo credit: Tom Rafferty (http://www.flickr.com/photos/traftery/4493063693/) [CC BY-SA 1.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/1.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

The Smart Meter Scam

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Take Back Your Power: Investigating the “Smart” Grid

Josh Del Sol (2013)

Film Review

This is a documentary about the Smart Grid and the Smart Meter scam and its effect on the US and Canadian public. The Obama administration has subsidized power companies to the tune of a billion dollars to roll out Smart Meters. The President claims they will reduce electricity demand by a whopping 4% by 2030 – despite the lack of any research regarding their safety and a World Health Organization finding that radio frequency (RF) radiation produced by Smart Meters is a class 2 potential carcinogen.

The film follows Del Sol’s extensive investigation into the amount of RF (aka microwave) radiation produced by Smart Meters; the tens of thousands of human guinea pigs made ill by them; how the Smart Meter roll out sacrifices the public interest for the benefit of power companies; the laws protecting consumers who opt out; and the growing grassroots movement seeking to ban Smart Meters altogether.

How Smart Meters Damage Health

Power companies are deceiving consumers with the claim that Smart Meters only produce radiation for sixty seconds a day. In actuality, they emit 14,000 – 90,000 millisecond radiation pulses everyday. Tens of thousands of Americans and Canadians have developed chronic conditions from Smart Meter exposure, including headaches, anxiety, insomnia, impaired memory, nausea and cancer. Scientists who expose red blood cells to Smart Meter radiation find they begin to rupture degrade after a few seconds. After six months of Smart Meter exposure, even people who appear healthy will manifest DNA damage, increases in inflammatory markers and changes in neurotransmitter and hormone levels. One study showed pregnant women sleeping in bedrooms in close proximity to Smart Meters were at increased risk of having an autistic child.

The Use of Smart Meters for Surveillance

A centralized Smart Grid is extremely vulnerable to terrorist attack, as opposed to multiple separate distributed energy systems. Even more concerning, is the rollout of “Smart” appliances that track their own power use and feed it back (via the Smart Meter) to the power company. A family’s energy use provides extensive information about their personal routine and habits. Power companies have been selling this data to other Wall Street corporations, as well as sharing it with the government for surveillance purposes.

Your Absolute Right to Opt Out

Despite the arrests a few years ago when Naperville (California) women tried to block Smart Meter installation on their homes, most city councils have been responsive to growing popular unrest over Smart Meters. A few have adopted moratoriums on new Smart Meters. Others have criminalized Smart Meter installation and fine power companies who install them without residents’ consent.

Del Sol maintains that people have an absolute right to opt out of Smart Meter installation in all US and Canadian jurisdictions. In addition, it’s considered extortion (which is illegal) for power companies to charge you for opting out. People who already have Smart Meters also have a right to replace them with safer analog meters, though they may need to pay for this themselves.

Berkeley Votes Unanimously on Cellphone Danger

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cellphones

As reported in Mother Jones, Berkeley city council voted unanimously on Wednesday to require cellphone retailers to warn customers about the potential health risks associated with radio-frequency (RF) radiation emitted by cellphones. RF is also known as Electromagnetic Radiation (EMR) and Electromagnetic Fields (EMF).

The notice, which must be posted in stores that sell cellphones reads (in part):

If you carry or use your phone in a pants or shirt pocket or tucked into a bra when the phone is ON and connected to a wireless network, you may exceed the federal guidelines for exposure to RF radiation. This potential risk is greater for children. Refer to the instructions in your phone or user manual for information about how to use your phone safely.

Despite continuing denials from the the National Cancer Institute and the American Cancer society about any cancer risk from Electromagnetic Radiation (EMR), numerous epidemiological studies show a link between cellphones, wi-fi and brain and other cancers. See The Cellphone Controversy and Electrosmog

The insurance industry is well aware of of the link between EMF (produced by cellphones, wi-fi and smart meters), which is why new life insurance coverage excludes coverage for EMF-related deaths. See Natural News

The Berkeley vote comes a day after an open letter from 195 scientists from 39 countries raised “serious concerns regarding the ubiquitous and increasing exposure to EMF generated by electric and wireless devices.” The scientists called on government agencies to impose “sufficient guidelines to protect the general public, particularly children who are more vulnerable to the effects of EMF.”

At present the Federal Communications Commission requires phone companies to disclose the minimum distance from the body that users should carry their phones—yet these guidelines are typically buried deep inside phones’ menus and sub-menus, or in the fine print of user manuals. A survey conducted in April by the California Brain Tumor Association found that 70 percent of Berkeley adults did not know about the FCC’s minimum distance rule.

According to the Mother Jones article, the Cellular Telephone Industries Association plans to sue to prevent the ordinance from being implemented. They claim the law “violates the First Amendment because it would compel wireless retailers to disseminate speech with which they disagree. The forced speech is misleading and alarmist because it would cause consumers to take away the message that cell phones are dangerous and can cause breast, testicular, or other cancers.”

photo credit: Spitzgogo_CHEN (Nokia 6230i) via photopin cc

Western Medicine: Still Stuck in the 20th Century

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Origins

well.org (2014)

Film Review

In brief, Origins is a film about saving the planet by improving your diet and lifestyle. The filmmakers assert that a healthier diet will enable people to think more clearly about the imminent crises confronting civilization. While I totally disagree with the premise – I don’t believe real change is possible without confronting corporate corruption and growing inequality – I liked the film. It offers the clearest explanation yet of the fundamental role of the microbiome* in human health and the rhizophere** in plant health.

Western medicine, as currently practiced, has become totally obsolete owing to its inability to view the human body as a holistic integrated unit. The end result is that roughly half of us are in really poor health. While I disagree with the premise of the film, I’m willing to concede that many of us aren’t healthy or fit enough to tackle major social or political change.

A secondary premise of the film is that we need to fundamentally rethink the way we use technology – mainly because we’re systematically poisoning ourselves through air pollution and toxic endocrine disruptors that mimic estrogen in our bodies. This heavy estrogen effect is a major factor in an epidemic of breast, prostate and other cancers, as well as infertility, obesity and anxiety/depression.

My favorite part of the documentary concerns the microbiome, which turns out to be primary source of our immunity. Owing to the overuse of antibiotics in medicine and agriculture (in livestock feed), most of us have experienced a mass extinction of our intestinal bacteria. This, in turn, plays an even bigger role than toxic chemicals in diseases triggered by inflammation, such as obesity, cancer, type 2 diabetes, heart disease and autoimmune illnesses.

Origins goes on to stress the importance of vaginal birth and breast feeding in establishing a healthy microbiome in infants and the avoidance of antibiotics, antibiotic soaps and commercial household cleaners and toxic chemicals in keeping it that way. Letting kids play in the dirt is another important source of beneficial bacteria. As are are fermented foods and fresh (unprocessed) chemical free foods.

I was also pleased to see the filmmakers brutally debunk the low fat, high sugar, high carbohydrate diet*** Food Inc and western medicine have been trying to sell us for the last fifty years. This is the number one reason half of Americans suffer from “diabesity” (aka metabolic syndrome), even though many of them may not realize it yet.

To their credit, thousands of doctors (according to filmmakers) are taking their patients off GMO foods, resulting in rapid relief of allergies, chronic illnesses and infertility.

I was also pleased to see the comparison filmmakers make between the soil rhizosphere and the gut microbiome. While we’ve been destroying our intestinal bacteria with antibiotics, Food Inc has been systematically destroying essential soil bacteria with pesticides, herbicides and GMOs.

Citing a recent UN study, Origins explodes the myth that GMO technology is the only solution to world hunger. According to the UN, we could double current crop yields in ten years simply by switching to organic farming methods that restore the health and integrity of our soil.

Ignore the background music (I hate documentaries with soppy background music). It’s worth putting up with for the excellent section on diet.

* Microbiome, as defined in this film, refers to the millions of intestinal bacteria that are essential to healthy digestion and immunity.

** The rhizosphere is the narrow region of soil that is directly influenced by root secretions and associated soil microorganisms.

***For a great book summarizing the research that debunks the low fat diet, see Why the Low Fat Diet Makes You Fat and Gives You Heart Disease, Cancer and Tooth Decay

The Sugar Conspiracy

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The Secrets of Sugar

By Fifth Estate (2014)

Film Review

The Secrets of Sugar is a Canadian documentary about the conspiracy by the sugar industry and processed food companies to conceal the damaging effects of sugar on human health. For decades, the medical establishment has led us to believe that our intake of animal fat is responsible for soaring rates of obesity, diabetes and heart disease. It turns out the real culprit all along is sugar (see The Big Fat Surprise).

Investigators have uncovered industry documents going back to the 1950s linking excess sugar intake with health problems. In 1972, researcher John Yudkin published the book Pure, White and Deadly about research linking sugar to heart disease. The response by the food industry was a vicious campaign to portray Yudkin as an incompetent quack. This, in turn, led to a thirty-year shutdown of institutional funding for research into sugar’s health effects.

For me, the film’s most shocking revelation was the immense amount of sugar hidden in so- called “healthy” processed foods, such as yoghurt, oatmeal, soup and Healthy Choice frozen dinners. In one segment, a former industry scientist nicknamed “Dr Bliss” explains the importance of the “bliss point,” the quantity of added sugar that makes you crave a particular product.

A close look at product labels suggests they are designed to confuse consumers about the actual sugar content of foods. Meanwhile like the tobacco industry, Food Inc spends billions of dollars lobbying against government (and UN) recommendations for a maximum daily sugar intake and clearer food labeling laws.

For years, doctors and dieticians have been telling us that sugar is bad because of all the “empty” calories. New research indicates sugar acts as a poison, inflicting direct damage on the liver and brain via its impact on insulin production. In addition to studies implicating high sugar intake in obesity, diabetes, heart disease and cancer, others point to its role in the development of Alzheimer’s Disease and polycystic ovarian disease.

Industry scientists interviewed in the film manifest the same “blame the victim” mentality as the tobacco industry. They maintain the responsibility lies with the consumer to choose whether to eat sugar – or to smoke. The filmmakers counter that healthy choices are impossible without good information.

The film follows an obese couple over three weeks, who achieve significant weight loss, as well as reductions in cholesterol and triglycerides, simply by eliminating all processed foods from their diet.

Also posted in Veterans Today