Source: https://b-ok.xyz/book/3682486/239138
Timestamp: 2019-04-24 14:06:25+00:00

Document:
Every cell in the body is designed to run at -20 to -25 millivolts. To heal, we must make new cells. To make a new cell requires -50 millivolts. Chronic disease occurs when voltage drops below -20 and/or you cannot achieve -50 millivolts to make new cells. Thus chronic disease is always defined by having low voltage. This book tells you how to measure your voltage in each organ, how to correct it, and how to determine why your voltage dropped enough to allow you to get sick.
The information provided in this book is intended to educate the reader about certain medical conditions and certain possible solutions. It is not a substitute for examination, diagnosis, and medical care provided by a licensed and qualified health professional. If you believe you or your child or someone you know suffer from the conditions described herein, please see your health care provider. Do not attempt to treat yourself, your child, or anyone else without proper medical supervision.
The materials in the book are provided to you “as is” without warranty of any kind, either expressed or implied, including, but not limited to, the implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or non-infringement.
In no event shall Jerry Tennant, his staff, heirs, or assigns nor Pastoral Medical Association, nor Tennant Institute or their associates or employees be liable for any damages or incidental damages or damages for loss of profits, revenue, use or data, whether brought in contract or tort, arising out of or connected with this book or the use, reliance upon, or performance of any material contained in or accessed from this book or our website.
Your reading of this book implies that you agree to the release of liability noted above.
My introduction to the concept of electromagnetic measurements in biological systems came while I was studying for my M.D. at Yale University School of Medicine. To graduate from this particular medical school, one must write a thesis. I chose, in 1959, Dr. Harold Saxton Burr, Professor of Neuro-anatomy, as my advisor for my thesis project. Dr. Burr, at that time, was acknowledged as a lead investigator and proponent of The Electromagnetic Field Theory in Biology. During my studies with Dr. Burr, I was exposed to the concept of taking electronic measurements with a direct current potentiometer on various living organisms, including humans, to measure electrical changes that accompanied changes in those biological systems.
Subsequently, I became familiar with the knowledge that creating an electrical field, such as that reported by Dr. Robert O. Becker and Dr. Andrew Bassett, an orthopedic surgeon at Columbia University School of Medicine, could be of assistance for healing processes in the clinical condition of nonunion of orthopedic fractures. Therefore, I understood that electronics in living systems could not only be measured but, indeed, these systems could be modified by an electrical field.
With the information provided above as a background, I was, perhaps, more receptive than most physicians would be to accept the idea that electronic stimulation could be of benefit in certain clinical conditions. My first hand exposure to the benefit of electronic stimulus as therapy was a very rapid recovery from a previous knee injury after being treated with a Russian electronic device, called a SCENAR, utilized by Dr. Jerald Tennant, in January 2003.
I had met Dr. Tennant in the late 1970s and arranged, with assistance of Dr. John Corboy, for him to present the first intraocular lens course with hands on guidance ever taught in Honolulu, Hawaii. Our friendship had been established then and, therefore, I was interested in the Energetic Medicine workshop he was presenting at the Hawaii Meeting on Maui in 2003. My inquiry about the course at the Faculty dinner led to his treating me for the injury which I had acquired while indulging in my favorite sport of surfing. The dramatic improvement in my knee function led me to buy the Russian device and take Dr. Tennant’s course taught in Dallas, Texas that year.
I do not presume to understand or profess all the concepts that are presented in this book authored by Dr. Tennant. The SCENAR, and the other electronic devices, subsequently designed by Dr. Tennant, such as the Tennant BioModulator®, are classified by the FDA as class 2 accepted devices for the relief of pain and inflammation. Over the past eight years, I have, in my ophthalmic practice personally treated with these devices over 275 patients who had painful ocular syndromes with approximately 85% success. The syndromes have included pain after corneal injury, iritis, migraine, and postoperative discomfort after strabismus and cataract surgery. The pain syndrome, known as post-herpetic neuralgia (pain after shingles), has been especially responsive. In some patients, the pain in the skin had plagued the patient for over 10 years. You can imagine the gratitude of these patients when there is a complete relief, after treatment by an electronic device, for a condition that has not responded to drugs and other modalities of treatment. I thank Dr. Tennant for introducing me to this new paradigm of medical treatment. We may not understand the mechanisms of healing at this point, but, ultimately, results trump theory in any case.
While conventional medicine is a blessing beyond compare for many reasons, it is frankly undeniable that in the scientific quest to understand and control life, conventional ideas and drugs actually pose one of the leading threats to life. One needs only to review statistics to see that the entire world is facing a health care crisis never before known, and it should be obvious that if we continue on the same “scientific” path to resolve our health woes we will continue to get the same results. If the answer is not to continue the path that is clearly not working, perhaps it is to look back instead, to restore to health care the almighty’s messages for health, to restore common sense and to focus on effective and safer solutions.
It will undoubtedly be difficult to change the medical paradigm but with organizations like the Pastoral Medical Association, along with caring and dedicated medical professionals like Dr. Jerry Tennant that are willing to “step outside” that paradigm and research effective and safer options, we will certainly give hope and perhaps life to some of the millions of suffering individuals. In his remarkable book – Healing is Voltage, Dr. Tennant shares a wealth of medical knowledge and it is a “must read” for health care professionals and laypersons alike. Thank you Dr. Tennant for bringing this invaluable resource to us….
First let me express my gratitude to the thousands that have bought my book and recommended it to others. I am grateful that I may be making a difference in how chronic disease is treated here and abroad.
I wanted to make a comment about grammar and formatting. When I wrote edition one, I started in Microsoft Word. Soon it was moving my images to different pages even though I told it to lock them in place with the text. Sometimes I would find the image 10-20 pages from where I left it. When I called Microsoft for help, the agent simply told me that hers wasn’t doing that so it was my fault.
I then wrote the first edition in Mac Pages. At that time, Pages had a spell checker but not a grammar checker. I exported it from Pages to Word so I could use Word’s grammar checker. Unfortunately it moved the graphics again. After correcting grammar and punctuation, I ported it back to Pages, repositioned the images and exported it to PDF, the format demanded by Amazon’s printer. What I didn’t realize was that porting it back and forth changed the spelling and punctuation. I also didn’t realize that an image that looked great in color in Adobe PDF may be unreadable when printed in black and white.
I found that most authors of books and newspapers use Adobe InDesign for writing. I bought it and spent the time learning its quirks. I wrote the second edition in InDesign. I used its spell checker and grammar checker and used Adobe Photoshop to turn the color images into black and white. I exported it to Adobe PDF and it was printed by Amazon’s printer.
I still got criticism for the formatting and grammar. I then had Amazon’s printer staff edit it. Unfortunately and surprisingly, they don’t work with Adobe InDesign but insisted on having it in---you guessed it---Microsoft Word for editing. Of course Adobe InDesign doesn’t export into Microsoft Word but only Adobe Acrobat. I therefore had to export it to PDF and then use Adobe Acrobat to export it to Word. Amazon’s editors edited it but removed all the graphics in the process---uugggh! Now I had the text edited but Word keeps moving the graphics around and Microsoft doesn’t know why.
Eventually I ported it back into Pages, put the graphics where they belong and had another editor review it. You guessed it---they changed some of the editing that Amazon’s editors had made.
I taught English in the 1950s so I know the rules of punctuation that we used then. Back then, it was correct to say, “1950’s” not “1950s”. It was also correct to use a comma before the “and” when you say, “A, B, C, and D”. Now we are supposed to omit the comma before the “and”. Who had the authority to say that the way we used commas for the years before was incorrect? Why?
According to Wikipedia, Publishers’ style guides establish house rules for language use, such as spelling, italics and punctuation; their major purpose is consistency. There are rulebooks for writers, ensuring consistent language. Authors are asked or required to use a style guide in preparing their work for publication; copy editors are charged with enforcing the publishing house’s style.
I have discovered that there is no consistency in these rules from one editor to another.
I find all of this confusing and annoying. I am simply trying to communicate information to my audience but the message is being drowned out by those more interested in whether I followed their rulebook or someone else’s.
I have spent a lot of time and resources dealing with editors, formatting and computer software deficiencies instead of science. Three editors have reviewed it. I have done the best I can do in trying to communicate my concepts to you. I hope you will try to understand the message and not worry too much about whether my comma is in the right or wrong place according to whatever rule book you follow.
Tennant Institute is a Private Expressive Association registered with the IRS and fulfills all the legal requirements of a Private Expressive Association.
In the US, there is a separation of church and state. For example, when you apply for and sign your name to a driver’s license, you are giving the state permission to control your operation of a vehicle. However, police officers have no authority in a church, registered as a Private Expressive Association, unless they are invited in by those ordained by the church. A Private Expressive Association is exempt from secular laws because secular laws apply to the public and members of the Association are private. The Supreme Court makes it clear that private members of a Private Expressive Association may do whatever they wish as long as what they do does not create a clear and present danger that rises to the level of a substantive evil. For example, you could create a boxing club. Boxing creates a clear and present danger but does not rise to the level of a substantive evil and thus the police or other governmental agencies cannot prevent the members from boxing.
Most churches operate under the rules governing Private Expressive Associations. Because of these laws, public agencies like the police cannot dictate to church members how they conduct themselves within the confines of the church property unless what they are doing is a clear and present danger that rises to the level of a substantive evil. Thus the police could enter a church if a judge feels that children are being sexually abused since this is a substantive evil.
Most attorneys are not familiar with the laws regarding Private Expressive Associations. Neither are regulatory officials of cities, states or the federal government. They should become familiar since if they violate these rights, they are personally liable for their actions and their governmental immunity does not apply.
There is a separate set of case law regarding the separation of church and state. These laws often overlap the rights given to Private Expressive Associations.
First, it guarantees the Freedoms of Association and Assembly, rights which are essential for the creation and continuance of religious bodies. Second, it forbids the “establishment” of any Church as the official government religion. Third, it forbids any “abridgment” of Religious Liberty -- of the right to believe as you will.
In addition to such landmark cases as Boy Scouts of America et al. v. Dale, 530 US 640 (2000) which made it clear that Expressive Association activities are protected under First Amendment Private Association rights, other governmental actions have strengthened religious association rights.
The Supreme Court has both limited this law (doesn’t apply to the States) and reaffirmed it: “Restoration Act of 1993 (RFRA), 107 Stat. 1488, as amended, 42 U. S. C. §2000bb et seq., ... adopts a statutory rule .... Under RFRA, the Federal Government may not, as a statutory matter, substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion…” Gonzales v O Centro, No. 04–1084 - February 21, 2006.
In the case of State v Biggs (46 SE Reporter 401, 1903) the North Carolina Supreme Court dealt with a person who was advising people as to diet, and administering massage, baths and physical culture. That Court held that there could be no “state system of healing” p.402 and while “Those who wish to be treated by practitioners of medicine and surgery had the guaranty that such practitioners had been duly examined...those who had faith in treatment by methods not included in the ‘practice of medicine and surgery’ as usually understood, had reserved to them the right to practice their faith and be treated, if they chose, by those who openly and avowedly did not use either surgery or drugs in the treatment of diseases...” (p.402). “Medicine is an experimental, not an exact science. All the law can do is to regulate and safeguard the use of powerful and dangerous remedies, like the knife and drugs, but it cannot forbid dispensing with them. When the Master, who was himself called the Good Physician, was told that other than his followers were casting out devils and curing diseases, he said, ‘Forbid them not.’” (p.405).
In the Texas Supreme Court case: WESTBROOK JR v. PENLEY; C.L. WESTBROOK, JR., Petitioner, v. Peggy Lee PENLEY, Respondent.; No. 04-0838. Argued Sept. 26, 2006. -- June 29, 2007. They concluded: “The religion clauses are designed to “prevent, as far as possible, the intrusion of either [religion or government] into the precincts of the other,” Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U.S. 602, 614, 91 S.Ct. 2105, 29 L.Ed.2d 745 (1971), and are premised on the notion that “ ‘both religion and government can best work to achieve their lofty aims if each is left free from the other within its respective sphere.’” Aguilar v. Felton, 473 U.S. 402, 410, 105 S.Ct. 3232, 87 L.Ed.2d 290 (1985) (quoting McCollum v. Bd. of Ed., 333 U.S. 203, 212, 68 S.Ct. 461, 92 L.Ed. 649 (1948)). The First Amendment’s limitations on government extend to its judicial as well as its legislative branch. See Kreshik v. Saint Nicholas Cathedral, 363 U.S. 190, 191, 80 S.Ct. 1037, 4 L.Ed.2d 1140 (1960).
“The right to organize voluntary religious associations to assist in the expression and dissemination of any religious doctrine and to create tribunals for the decision of controverted questions of faith within the association, and for the ecclesiastical government of all the individual members, congregations, and officers within the general association, is unquestioned. All who unite themselves to such a body do so with an implied consent to this government, and are bound to submit to it. But it would be a vain consent and would lead to the total subversion of such religious bodies, if any one aggrieved by one of their decisions could appeal to the secular courts and have them reversed. It is of the essence of these religious unions, and of their right to establish tribunals for the decision of questions arising among themselves, that those decisions should be binding in all cases of ecclesiastical cognizance, subject only to such appeals as the organism itself provides for.
I am licensed as an M.D. in the state of Texas. Holding this license brings me privileges, responsibilities, and limitations placed upon me when I applied for a medical license and signed that I accepted that license. My activity as an MD may be controlled by state and federal laws. However, when I function as a Pastoral Health Practitioner and Counsellor, state law has no jurisdiction over me but instead I am responsible to the ecclesiastical organization that ordained me and by God. In the Private Expressive Association, Tennant Institute, I have been selected by its members to provide medical advice and therapies to our members free from comment or supervision by organizations created by state legislators and/or federal regulations as long as our members do not create a clear and present danger that rises to the level of a substantive evil.
MDs are no longer able to treat patients according to scientific literature, the experiences of the physician, or the desires of the patient. MD’s are required to treat patients according to what are called “standards of care”. These guidelines are not really guidelines at all, but are considered mandatory edicts by medical boards.
One of my patients was hospitalized. He developed constipation and requested that he be given vitamin C to solve the problem. He was told that the hospital could not give him vitamin C as it was not considered standard of care for constipation. He refused the pharmaceutical treatment for constipation, had his wife bring some vitamin C from home, and the problem was solved.
Most people have heard of Andrew Weil, MD, the famous professor at the medical school in Tucson AZ. His teachings about the use of nutrition to support health is widely known, respected, and practiced. In spite of that, the FDA and the FTC told him that if he didn’t stop suggesting that improving your immune system would help prevent you from getting the flu, he would be put in jail and fined!
This is to advise you that the United States Food and Drug Administration (“FDA”) and the United States Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”) reviewed your website at the Internet address www.drweil.com on October 13, 2009. The FDA has determined that your website offers a product for sale that is intended to diagnose, mitigate, prevent, treat or cure the H1N1 Flu Virus in people. This product has not been approved, cleared, or otherwise authorized by FDA for use in the diagnosis, mitigation, prevention, treatment, or cure of the H1N1 Flu Virus.
This product is your Immune Support Formula. The marketing of this product violates the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (FFDC Act). 21 U.S.C. §§ 331, 351, 352. We request that you immediately cease marketing unapproved, uncleared, or unauthorized products for the diagnosis, mitigation, prevention, treatment, or cure of the H1N1 Flu Virus.
In addition, FTC staff reminds you that the FTC Act, 15 U.S.C. § 41 et seq., requires that claims that a dietary supplement can prevent, treat, or cure human infection with the H1N1 virus, must be supported by well-controlled human clinical studies at the time the claims are made. More generally, it is against the law to make or exaggerate health claims, whether directly or indirectly, through the use of a product name, website name, metatags, or other means, without rigorous scientific evidence sufficient to substantiate the claims. Violations of the FTC Act may result in legal action in the form of a Federal District Court injunction or Administrative Order. An order also may require that you pay back money to consumers.
You should take immediate action to ensure that your firm is not marketing, and does not market in the future, products intended to diagnose, mitigate, prevent, treat or cure the H1N1 Flu Virus that have not been approved, cleared, or authorized by the FDA. The above is not meant to be an all-inclusive list of violations. It is your responsibility to ensure that the products you market are in compliance with the FFDC Act and FDA’s implementing regulations. We advise you to review your websites, product labels, and other labeling and promotional materials to ensure that the claims you make for your products do not adulterate or misbrand the products in violation of the FFDC Act. 21 U.S.C. §§ 331, 351, 352. Within 48 hours, please send an email to FDAFLUTASKFORCECFSAN@fda.hhs.gov., describing the actions that you have taken or plan to take to address your firm’s violations. If your firm fails to take corrective action immediately, FDA may take enforcement action, such as seizure or injunction for violations of the FFDC Act without further notice. Firms that fail to take corrective action may also be referred to FDA’s Office of Criminal Investigations for possible criminal prosecution for violations of the FFDC Act and other federal laws.
FDA is advising consumers not to purchase or use H1N1 Flu Virus-related products offered for sale that have not been approved, cleared, or authorized by FDA. Your firm will be added to a published list on FDA’s website of firms and websites that have received warning letters from FDA concerning marketing unapproved, uncleared and unauthorized H1N1 Flu Virus-related products in violation of the FFDC Act. This list can be found at www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/h1n1flu. Once the violative claims and/or products have been removed from your website, and these corrective actions have been confirmed by the FDA, the published list will be’ updated to indicate that your firm has taken appropriate corrective action.
If you are not located in the United States, please note that unapproved, uncleared, or unauthorized products intended to diagnose, mitigate, prevent, treat, or cure the H1N1 Flu Virus offered for importation into the United States are subject to detention and refusal of admission. We will advise the appropriate regulatory or law enforcement officials in the country from which you operate that FDA considers your product listed above to be an unapproved, uncleared, or unauthorized product that cannot be legally sold to consumers in the United States.
Please direct any inquiries to FDA at FDAFLUTASKFORCECFSAN@fda.hhs.gov or by contacting Kathleen Lewis at 301-436-2148.
It is also your responsibility to ensure that the products you market are in compliance with the FTC Act. FTC staff strongly urge you to review all claims for your products and ensure that those claims are supported by competent and reliable scientific evidence. The FTC also asks that you notify it via electronic mail at flu@ftc.gov within 48 hours of the specific actions you have taken to address the agency’s concerns. If you have any questions regarding compliance with the FTC Act, please contact Karen Jagielski at 202-326-2509.
Thus we see that even in a medical school professor backed by reams of scientific literature proving the efficacy of herbs in improving immune function can be threatened with fines and imprisonment by our government.
In writing this book, I am not writing as an M.D. I am writing as a Licensed Pastoral Health Practitioner And Counselor under the Texas Occupational Code Section 503.054 and under rights guaranteed by the First and Ninth Amendments of the United States Constitution. This allows me to discuss medical concepts that my MD license prevents me from discussing.
Although modern medicine provides ever-increasing efficiency in emergency medicine (once you get out of the waiting room and actually get care), the results of care for chronic disease in the US is on par with third world countries according to the World Health Organization.
This book suggests a different paradigm for the care of chronic disease based on the recognition that we must constantly make new cells to replace those that are worn out or damaged. Chronic disease occurs when we lose the ability to make new cells that work.
To reverse chronic disease we must look for the reasons that we have lost the ability to make new cells that work. Making new cells requires -50 millivolts of energy, amino acids to make the inside of cells, fats to make the outside of cells, vitamins and minerals to make the metabolic processes work, oxygen, a fuel system (fats and glucose), a sewage system to get rid of waste proteins (lymphatic system), a system to protect us from infections, and a way to get rid of toxic substances.
Almost all chronic diseases are characterized by low voltage. Just as a new Mercedes without a battery isn’t going anywhere, a body without a functional electrical system doesn’t work either. Therefore, the title of this book is Healing is Voltage.
The main things that control voltage are thyroid hormone, fulvic acid, dental infections, scars and exercise.
The body’s primary source of amino acids is stomach acid breaking proteins into amino acids. You cannot be well without stomach acid.
The body’s source of fats is bile from the liver/gall bladder system allowing fat to be absorbed. Surprisingly, production of bile is based on stomach acid.
Humic and fulvic acid are in control of vitamins and minerals as well as being a source of amino acids. Because of our farming practices there is little humic and fulvic left in our food supply.
Oxygen is dependent upon iron in hemoglobin to carry it to the cells. Again humic/fulvic are in control of minerals including iron. Vitamin C is also necessary to absorb iron. Circulation is also necessary for the blood to carry oxygen. Much of the circulation is controlled by nitric oxide.
Much of the digestive process that provides fats and glucose is controlled by stomach acid since it is stomach acid that tells the pancreas to make the enzymes necessary to digest our food.
Since we are a portable system we must have a battery system that provides voltage as we move about. Our muscles are voltage generators as well as rechargeable batteries. However this system only works when we are moving/exercising. Without exercise, our battery system goes dead. In addition, it is exercise that activates our lymphatic system to remove waste proteins from dead cells from our body. Without exercise, our sewage backs up.
This book begins the process of your understanding what things you must do to make new cells. Making new cells that work is the key to curing all chronic disease. You must stop thinking about having heart disease, indigestion, headaches, a gall bladder problem etc. and trying to find a solution for that particular disease/symptom. You must ask the question, “Why can’t I make new cells that work?” When you find the answer, you know what to do to get well. It all starts when you start thinking like an electrician instead of a physician. Check the voltages in the wiring system of the body (the acupuncture system) and you will be on your way to finding the problem and its solution.
1 Who is Jerry Tennant?
I graduated as valedictorian of high school at age sixteen. I completed my junior and senior years simultaneously by taking home study courses. I completed college except for three hours in two and a half years at Texas Tech University. I received the Phi Kappa Phi Award and the premed of the year award.
I attended the University of Houston School of Optometry before medical school. I was accepted into Southwestern Medical School at age nineteen. I graduated in the top ten at age twenty-three.
I completed a residency in ophthalmology at Harvard Medical School/Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary and the Southwestern Medical School/Parkland Hospital system between 1965 and 1968.
I am board certified in ophthalmology and ophthalmic plastic surgery.
I was the director of the ophthalmic plastic surgery clinic at Parkland Hospital.
I was the founder/director of Dallas Eye Institute. I have a doctorate of natural medicine license from the Pastoral Medical Association. I am licensed in Arizona by the Board of Homeopathic and Alternative Medicine.
I hold patents for medical devices including intraocular lenses, surgical instruments, etc.
I was co-founder of the Outpatient Ophthalmic Surgical Society, and I taught most of the ophthalmologists how to do outpatient eye surgery in the 1980s.
I was one of the first surgeons in the United States to place intraocular lenses in eyes after cataract surgery. I taught those techniques around the world.
I am one of the few in the world to receive the Corboy Award for Advancements in Ophthalmology.
I received the American Academy of Ophthalmology Award for my contributions to ophthalmology.
I’ve written several books about cataract surgery and lifestyle management.
The Order of Saint Sylvester is intended to award Roman Catholic laymen who are actively involved in the life of the church, particularly as it is exemplified in the exercise of their professional duties and mastership of the different arts. It is also conferred on non-Catholics, but more rarely than the Order of Saint Gregory.
I am not Catholic. However, I was awarded the Order of Saint Sylvester by Pope Benedict XVI in July 2008 for my contributions to medicine.
I received a PhD (hon.) in anthropology and education from the ORDEN DE SANTIAGO APÓSTOL, an ancient religious order of Spain, under the priory of Monseñor Basilius Adao Pereira, Priorato Real de los Caballeros de Jerusalem, Pontífice Instituto de Estudios de la Religión under the Order of Santiago, more properly the Military Order of Saint James of the Sword.
I currently work at the Tennant Institute for Pastoral Medicine, an Ecclesiastical Private Expressive Association, as defined by law, and provide service as a pastoral health practitioner and counselor.
I practiced ophthalmology from 1964 to 1995. I did much of the FDA study for the VISX excimer laser. I performed about one thousand cases in the United States and about two thousand cases abroad from 1991 to 1995.
What we didn’t know at the time was that the laser did not kill viruses. The laser would strike the cornea, release viruses, and they would float upward through my mask into my nose and into my brain. I developed encephalitis, neuropathies, a low platelet count, and other nervous system defects in 1994. I could see a patient to diagnose what was wrong with them, but I couldn’t remember how to write a prescription. I also developed spastic movements that prevented me from safely performing eye surgery. I had to quit work on November 30, 1995.
For almost seven years, I slept about sixteen hours per day. Remember that I had viruses in my brain and viruses in my spleen. Note in the picture that my dog Tigger would sleep on my head, and my dog Pooh would curl up next to my spleen. They seemed to know where my voltage was low, and they were my constant “electron donors”!
The purpose of this book is to suggest a new paradigm for western medicine. Many think that the paradigm we have is the best in the world. That simply isn’t true. Our health care system is a disaster, both in outcomes and affordability.
It is true that we have some amazing techniques to help people, such as trauma surgery, cataract surgery, imaging techniques, etc. But our results in chronic disease and cancer are a dismal failure at best.
A set of assumptions, concepts, values, and practices that constitutes a way of viewing reality for the community that shares them, especially in an intellectual discipline.
Despite the popular myth that the United States has the best medical care in the world, the opposite is true. We are ranked thirty-seventh in the world by the World Health Organization! The World Health Organization’s ranking of the world’s health systems was last produced in 2000, and the WHO no longer produces such a ranking table, because of the complexity of the task.
The World Health Organization has carried out the first ever analysis of the world’s health systems. Using five performance indicators to measure health systems in 191 member states, it found that France provides the best overall health care followed among major countries by Italy, Spain, Oman, Austria, and Japan.
The U. S. health system spends a higher portion of its gross domestic product than any other country but ranks 37 out of 191 countries according to its performance, the report finds. The United Kingdom, which spends just six percent of gross domestic product (GDP) on health services, ranks eighteenth. Several small countries—San Marino, Andorra, Malta, and Singapore—are rated close behind second-placed Italy.
WHO Director-General Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland says: “The main message from this report is that the health and well-being of people around the world depend critically on the performance of the health systems that serve them. Yet there is wide variation in performance, even among countries with similar levels of income and health expenditure. It is essential for decision-makers to understand the underlying reasons so that system performance, and hence the health of populations, can be improved.” See www.who.int.
Our western medical paradigm assumes that when an organ fails to perform adequately, it can only be corrected by finding a chemical (drug) to make it work or to remove it surgically. As we will discuss, the western medical paradigm is based in chemistry and on Newtonian concepts.
An often overlooked truth is that we tend to get well by making new cells, not by correcting those that are malfunctioning. We replace the rods and cones in our retina every forty-eight hours. The lining of our intestines is replaced every three days. We replace our skin every six weeks, our liver every eight weeks, our nervous system every eight months, and our bones every year. This brings nutrition into a clearer focus. If we are going to make good cells, we must have good raw materials to make them. In addition, we must not be missing necessary components.
If we build a new house from material taken from a house that was torn down because of termite damage, the new house will not be a very good one. If we build new cells from recycled materials, the new cells may not be any better than the ones that were worn out.
If we build a house but we don’t have any shingles, the house won’t be a good house. If we build a cell that is missing a critical component like vitamin C, it may not work correctly. To be healthy, we must eat quality food that is not filled with preservatives and toxins. When was the last time that your doctor told you about the dangers of trans fats, synthetic sweeteners, fluoride, etc.?
Many doctors are required to see fifty to sixty patients a day to have enough income to keep their offices open and pay the corporations that hire them. It is impossible to do much more than write a prescription and move on to the next patient.
When you go to a doctor he/she will likely order a complete blood count, a urinalysis, a comprehensive medical profile (tests for liver and kidney function, glucose, minerals, etc.), and a blood fat analysis. If these tests come back normal, the doctor will tell you that you are fine and that your complaints are all in your head. If you persist in complaining about your health, you will likely be sent to a psychiatrist!
BACKGROUND: A 1999 study found no decrease in breast cancer mortality in Sweden, where screening has been recommended since 1985. We therefore reviewed the methodological quality of the mammography trials and an influential Swedish meta-analysis, and did a meta-analysis ourselves.
METHODS: We searched the Cochrane Library for trials and asked the investigators for further details. Metaanalyses were done with Review Manager (version 4.0).
FINDINGS: Baseline imbalances were shown for six of the eight identified trials, and inconsistencies in the number of women randomized were found in four. The two adequately randomized trials found no effect of screening on breast cancer mortality (pooled relative risk 1.04 [95% CI 0.84–1.27]) or on total mortality (0.99 [0.94–1.05]). The pooled relative risk for breast cancer mortality for the other trials was 0.75 (0.67– 0.83), which was significantly different (p=0.005) from that for the unbiased trials. The Swedish meta-analysis showed a decrease in breast cancer mortality but also an increase in total mortality (1.06 [1.04–1.08]); this increase disappeared after adjustment for an imbalance in age.
INTERPRETATION: Screening for breast cancer with mammography is unjustified. If the Swedish trials are judged to be unbiased, the data show that for every 1,000 women screened biennially throughout 12 years, one breast cancer death is avoided whereas the total number of deaths is increased by six. If the Swedish trials (apart from the Malmo trial) are judged to be biased, there is no reliable evidence that screening decreases breast cancer mortality.
So if mammography for breast cancer is unjustified and actually increases deaths from breast cancer, why are we still doing them? Why are our medical societies and governmental agencies insisting that American women get mammography? One can only conclude that it is because doctors and the corporations that hire them make so much money doing mammography.
Another example is the use of the hepatitis B vaccine for newborns. Infection with hepatitis B virus usually occurs in those using IV street drugs like heroin or with multiple sexual partners. It can also be a problem with blood transfusions. A mother with the disease can pass it to her unborn child and thus one must consider the health of that fetus.
However, most children born in the United States are not at risk for hepatitis B. It would be easy to identify those at risk by simply testing pregnant women for the virus. Instead, U.S. health policy requires that every newborn baby be given the vaccine for hepatitis B!
Any event listed in the Reportable Events Table that occurs within the specified time period after vaccination. The data are stored electronically by the CDC in the Vaccine Safety Datalink.
1996 data from VAERS shows 872 serious events in children under age fourteen that received the hepatitis B vaccine. These children were either taken to an emergency room, had life-threatening health problems, were hospitalized, or were disabled following the vaccination. Of the 872 events, 214 had the hepatitis B vaccine alone while the rest had it in combination with other vaccines. Of the 872 events, 48 kids died from the vaccine reaction.
In 1996, only 279 cases of hepatitis B were reported in children under age fourteen. None of them died.
In 2007, there were 1,219 hepatitis B reactions reported to VAERS, about fifty percent more than in 1996!
So the current U.S. policy that requires every newborn to receive the hepatitis B vaccine kills forty-eight kids and injures another 824, with some of them permanently disabled. In those fortunate enough to escape vaccination, only 279 got hepatitis and none of them died.
So why are we forcing all our newborns to be exposed to this risk of death and disability with no benefit to anyone except Merck, which makes almost $1 billion per year from these vaccines? Economics vs. Science?
This is an example of why we spend twice the amount per capita as any other country in the world but still have the quality of health care on a par with Cuba!
The American Cancer Society released the data shown in the chart in 2006. Note that in both men and women, the deaths from lung cancer increased dramatically. Deaths in both men and women decreased for stomach cancer, and deaths from uterine cancer also decreased. Deaths from other cancers are essentially unchanged from 1950 to 2002! The War on Cancer is a dismal failure. We need to re-examine the cancer paradigm because our current one isn’t working.
This chart shows many of the chemotherapy agents approved by the FDA during the 1990s and early 2000s. What you see is that the mean time to death is 7.6 months! Few doctors tell their patients that the mean time to death from the drugs they are recommending is only 7.6 months and that much of this time will be spent in pain with vomiting and severe fatigue. Doctors are even turning to the courts to force patients to undergo this unsuccessful treatment of chemotherapy! Economics vs. Science?
The FDA requires that every drug approved be tested against a placebo—except for chemotherapy drugs. They will not allow chemotherapy drugs to be tested against a placebo. I can find only one study in the Medline database that compares chemotherapy with “supportive care.” That is a Canadian study.
What you see is that the chemotherapy group lived an average of three months longer than the supportive care group, but the price they paid was that four of them died from bone marrow damage, forty percent had lung damage, and twenty-one percent had serious lung damage. I don’t believe many would consider living three months longer not being able to breathe is a good trade-off along with being sick from the chemotherapy for the seven months they lived. And this also ignores the cost of therapy.
MATERIALS AND METHODS: We undertook a literature search for randomized clinical trials reporting a 5-year survival benefit attributable solely to cytotoxic chemotherapy in adult malignancies. The total number of newly diagnosed cancer patients for 22 major adult malignancies was determined from cancer registry data in Australia and from the Surveillance Epidemiology and End Results data in the USA for 1998.
For each malignancy, the absolute number to benefit was the product of (a) the total number of persons with that malignancy; (b) the proportion or subgroup(s) of that malignancy showing a benefit; and (c) the percentage increase in 5-year survival due solely to cytotoxic chemotherapy. The overall contribution was the sum total of the absolute numbers showing a 5-year survival benefit expressed as a percentage of the total number for the 22 malignancies.
CONCLUSION: As the 5-year relative survival rate for cancer in Australia is now over 60%, it is clear that cytotoxic chemotherapy only makes a minor contribution to cancer survival. To justify the continued funding and availability of drugs used in cytotoxic chemotherapy, a rigorous evaluation of the cost effectiveness and impact on quality of life is urgently required.
If the mean time to death with chemotherapy drugs is 7.6 months and the contribution of these drugs to survival is only 2.1 percent, why are we forcing our population to have this horrible therapy? Economics vs. Science?
Our population is becoming more obese.
You can find BMI calculators on the web so you don’t have to do the math.
As we will discuss, fluoridation causes hypothyroidism. Hypothyroidism causes obesity. The CDC data shows a correlation between the amount of fluoridation and the amount of obesity in states.
Thus we can see that the states with the most fluoridation tend to have the most obesity. Although not proof that fluoridation is causing our obesity epidemic, I think you will be convinced after reading the chapter on hypothyroidism.
Just recently on ABC News, they were discussing doing gastric bypass surgery on obese children. Are we going to do gastric bypass surgery on twenty-five percent of our population or simply take fluoride out of the water, toothpaste, and dental offices? Economics vs. Science?
Note that the third leading cause of death in the United States is medical errors in hospitals!
These are listed in the Journal of the American Medical Association: Starfield, B., “Is U.S. Health Care Really the Best in the World?” JAMA 284 (2000): 483–485.
OBJECTIVE: To estimate the incidence of serious and fatal adverse drug reactions (ADR) in hospital patients.
DATA SOURCES: Four electronic databases were searched from 1966 to 1996.
STUDY SELECTION: Of 153, we selected 39 prospective studies from U.S. hospitals.
DATA EXTRACTION: Data extracted independently by 2 investigators were analyzed by a random-effects model. To obtain the overall incidence of ADRs in hospitalized patients, we combined the incidence of ADRs occurring while in the hospital plus the incidence of ADRs causing admission to hospital. We excluded errors in drug administration, noncompliance, overdose, drug abuse, therapeutic failures, and possible ADRs. Serious ADRs were defined as those that required hospitalization, were permanently disabling, or resulted in death.
DATA SYNTHESIS: The overall incidence of serious ADRs was 6.7% (95% confidence interval [CI], 5.2%–8.2%) and of fatal ADRs was 0.32% (95% CI, 0.23%–0.41%) of hospitalized patients. We estimated that in 1994 overall 2,216,000 (1,721,000–2,711,000) hospitalized patients had serious ADRs and 106,000 (76,000–137,000) had fatal ADRs, making these reactions between the fourth and sixth leading cause of death.
CONCLUSIONS: The incidence of serious and fatal adverse drug reactions in U.S. hospitals was found to be extremely high. While our results must be viewed with circumspection because of heterogeneity among studies and small biases in the samples, these data nevertheless suggest that adverse drug reactions represent an important clinical issue.
As you can see, this study found that almost seven people out of a hundred who enter a hospital will have a serious drug reaction, and three out of a thousand will die from a drug reaction!
Null, Gary, PhD; Dean, Carolyn, MD ND; Feldman, Martin, MD; Rasio, Debora, MD; and Smith, Dorothy, PhD.
Null et al. added the hospital deaths to other drug-induced deaths and came to the conclusion that iatrogenic (caused by doctors) deaths are the leading cause of death in the U.S.
Thus if you add untoward hospital deaths to deaths from the side effects of drugs, the leading cause of death in the United States is health care! The approximately eight million Americans killed by health care is certainly more than the approximately 1.25 million killed in all the wars Americans have fought!
The table below shows the number of U.S. soldiers killed in battle beginning with the Revolutionary War.
The single drug Vioxx is now estimated to have killed approximately 130,000 people in the United States alone.
Myth: There is a Safe Dose of Chemicals that can be put Into the Human Body.
In 1927, J.W. Trevan attempted to find a way to estimate the relative poisoning potency of drugs and medicines used at that time. He developed the LD50 test because the use of death as a “target” allows for comparisons between chemicals that poison the body. “LD” stands for “Lethal Dose.” LD50 is the amount of a material, given all at once, which causes the death of fifty percent (one half) of a group of test animals. The LD50 is one way to measure the short-term poisoning potential (acute toxicity) of a material.
To determine what dose of a drug to give, pharmaceutical companies determine how much of the drug is required to kill half of the mice or other animals it is given to. This is called the Lethal Dose 50% (LD50).
Then they determine how much drug must be given to humans to get an effect in fifty percent. This is called the Effective Dose 50% (ED50). Dividing the LD50/ED50 gives you the Therapeutic Index. If it takes 400/mg/Kg of a drug to kill half of the mice and 100 mg/Kg to get a result in people, the TI is 4. The closer the ED50 is to the LD50, the more toxic the drug.
Drugs are approved as “Safe and Effective” when the FDA determines the number of people who will die from the drug is acceptable “collateral damage.” Patients (and often doctors) tend to believe that “Safe and Effective” means just that in all patients. They ignore the “acceptable collateral damage” implied by LD50/ED50 that tells us that all drugs will kill or injure some of those who take them. Over time, the FDA seems to have allowed more toxic drugs to be called “Safe and Effective.” Witness what has happened with Neurontin, Vioxx, Bextra, Avandia, Baycol, Propulsid, Posicor, Astemizole, Omniflox, Fen-Phen, and many OTC drugs that were declared “safe and effective” and then had to be removed from the market.
The diabetes drug Avandia increases the risk of fatal heart attack by sixty-four percent. The FDA has recently ruled that this is acceptable collateral damage and should remain on the market.
Those you hope will happen.
Those you hope won’t happen.
Those you don’t know are happening.
Most pharmaceuticals and surgery speak to eliminating symptoms, but do not speak to healing. Absence of symptoms is not the same as healed and healthy. For example, taking aspirin or Tylenol may make you not know your joints are hurting, but they are still degenerating.
Myth: Most illness is genetic. We will find drugs to cure most disease by studying genes.
Proteins are the “gears” that make cells capable of doing their work. Every cell contains thousands of proteins. When a cell needs to make some more proteins, it needs to read the gene’s information on how to make the protein (reads the blueprint). DNA contains the genetic blueprints to make new proteins. Genes don’t do anything. They are just blueprints. Genes are kept hidden like keeping blueprints in a drawer. You can’t see them until the drawer is opened.
After accessing the DNA, the genetic information is imprinted onto a protein molecule called “messenger RNA.” Messenger RNA is like a photocopy of the genes. The messenger RNA leaves the nucleus and enters the cytoplasm. It goes to a unit called the ribosome. Ribosomes are protein assembly factories that use the instruction set from the messenger RNA to build the protein from the genetic blueprint carried by the messenger RNA. Once the protein is manufactured by the ribosome factory, it moves out into the cytoplasm of the cell to takes its place and begin to do its work.
“Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids”; “A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid,” Watson, J. D., and Crick, F.H.C., Nature 171, 737–738 (1953), Macmillan Publishers Ltd., Medical Research Council Unit for the Study of Molecular Structure of Biological Systems, Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge There is no doubt that some genes are responsible for certain diseases. Examples are Huntington’s chorea, beta thalassemia, and cystic fibrosis. However, only two percent of disorders are due to single gene defects! The thousands of people who sit and worry that they are destined to get cancer, diabetes, and other diseases because one of their relatives had it do so without good scientific basis.
The theory that genes control everything about us began to unravel with the publication of “The Origin of Mutants” by John Cairns et al. They took bacteria that lacked the gene to utilize lactose and placed them into an environment where the only nutrient was lactose. They were surprised to find that the bacteria lived instead of dying. This could only mean that the bacteria changed their genetic structure so that they could use lactose!
Nucleic acids are replicated with conspicuous fidelity. Infrequently, however, they undergo changes in sequence, and this process of change (mutation) generates the variability that allows evolution. As the result of studies of bacterial variation, it is now widely believed that mutations arise continuously and without any consideration for their utility. In this paper, we briefly review the source of this idea and then describe some experiments suggesting that cells may have mechanisms for choosing which mutations will occur.
Another example of the ability of environment to change genes was described by Waterland et al. Usually yellow and fat, Agouti mice fed folic acid, vitamin B12, choline, and betaine changed their genes to have slender brown offspring. Thus we see that our genes can be changed by changing our diet.
One of the findings that is causing the genetic control myth to evaporate is the Genome Project. This project was the mapping of the genes of the human. It takes over 120,000 different proteins for the human body to work. It is still being taught that there is a specific gene present to make each protein. However, when the genes were all mapped, it was found that the human only has about 25,000 genes! Oops! There is obviously something wrong with the theory, isn’t there?
Primitive cells (totipotential cells, stem cells) have the entire genetic code of the organism. As cells differentiate into specialized cells such as liver, brain, heart, etc., the entire code is still present. However, the unused codes are switched off. Under the right conditions, these codes are switched back on, and the cell dedifferentiates back into a stem cell.
It has been found that the genes that we received from our parents can be altered by our environment. The study of this phenomenon has come to be called epigenetics. Not only can our genes change, these changes can be passed on to the next generation.
“Reprogramming of Genome Function through Epigenetic Inheritance,” Surani, M. Azim, Nature, Vol. 414, Issue 6859 (2001): 122–28.
Most cells contain the same set of genes and yet they are extremely diverse in appearance and functions. It is the selective expression and repression of genes that determines the specific properties of individual cells. Nevertheless, even when fully differentiated, any cell can potentially be reprogrammed back to totipotency, which in turn results in re-differentiation of the full repertoire of adult cells from a single original cell of any kind. Mechanisms that regulate this exceptional genomic plasticity and the state of totipotency are being unraveled and will enhance our ability to manipulate stem cells for therapeutic purposes.
We see that almost any of our cells can revert back to adult stem cells. There is no need, and perhaps no advantage, in using embryonic stem cells.
Most doctors rely on “double-blind studies” published in peer-reviewed journals for information about how to treat patients. Actually many doctors rely on information from drug salespeople on how to treat patients.
BACKGROUND: Evidence-based medicine is valuable to the extent that the evidence base is complete and unbiased. Selective publication of clinical trials—and the outcomes within those trials—can lead to unrealistic estimates of drug effectiveness and alter the apparent risk-benefit ratio.
METHODS: We obtained reviews from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for studies of 12 antidepressant agents involving 12,564 patients. We conducted a systematic literature search to identify matching publications. For trials that were reported in the literature, we compared the published outcomes with the FDA outcomes. We also compared the effect size derived from the published reports with the effect size derived from the entire FDA data set.
RESULTS: Among 74 FDA-registered studies, 31%, accounting for 3,449 study participants, were not published. Whether and how the studies were published was associated with the study outcome. A total of 37 studies viewed by the FDA as having positive results were published; 1 study viewed as positive was not published.
Studies viewed by the FDA as having negative or questionable results were, with 3 exceptions, either not published (22 studies) or published in a way that, in our opinion, conveyed a positive outcome (11 studies). According to the published literature, it appeared that 94% of the trials conducted were positive. By contrast, the FDA analysis showed that 51% were positive. Separate meta-analyses of the FDA and journal data sets showed that the increase in effect size ranged from 11% to 69% for individual drugs and was 32% overall.
CONCLUSIONS: We cannot determine whether the bias observed resulted from a failure to submit manuscripts on the part of authors and sponsors, from decisions by journal editors and reviewers not to publish, or both. Selective reporting of clinical trial results may have adverse consequences for researchers, study participants, health care professionals, and patients.
Most doctors will say that they will not consider a treatment for their patients unless it has been approved by the FDA and results of double-blind, crossover studies have been published in peer reviewed journals. What is clearly demonstrated by the article above is that what is published in our journals is cherry-picked so that it appears that therapies work when indeed the totality of studies show just the opposite. This modification of the truth by drug companies and medical journals is criminal! The paradigm that doctors so fervently believe regarding published studies is like believing in the tooth fairy! This becomes even worse when you understand that many of the published studies were never even done!
CONTEXT: Authorship in biomedical publication provides recognition and establishes accountability and responsibility. Recent litigation related to rofecoxib (Vioxx) provided a unique opportunity to examine guest authorship and ghostwriting, practices that have been suspected in biomedical publication but for which there is little documentation.
OBJECTIVE: To characterize different types and the extent of guest authorship and ghostwriting in 1 case study.
DATA SOURCES: Court documents originally obtained during litigation related to rofecoxib (Vioxx) against Merck & Co. Inc. Documents were created predominantly between 1996 and 2004. In addition, publicly available articles related to rofecoxib identified via MEDLINE.
DATA EXTRACTION: All documents were reviewed by one author, with selected review by coauthors, using an iterative process of review, discussion, and re-review of documents to identify information related to guest authorship or ghostwriting.
DATA SYNTHESIS: Approximately 250 documents were relevant to our review. For the publication of clinical trials, documents were found describing Merck employees working either independently or in collaboration with medical publishing companies to prepare manuscripts and subsequently recruiting external, academically affiliated investigators to be authors. Recruited authors were frequently placed in the first and second positions of the authorship list.
For the publication of scientific review papers, documents were found describing Merck marketing employees developing plans for manuscripts, contracting with medical publishing companies to ghostwrite manuscripts, and recruiting external, academically affiliated investigators to be authors. Recruited authors were commonly the sole author on the manuscript and offered honoraria for their participation.
Among 96 relevant published articles, we found that 92% (22 of 24) of clinical trial articles published a disclosure of Merck’s financial support, but only 50% (36 of 72) of review articles published either a disclosure of Merck sponsorship or a disclosure of whether the author had received any financial compensation from the company.
CONCLUSIONS: This case-study review of industry documents demonstrates that clinical trial manuscripts related to rofecoxib (Vioxx) were authored by sponsor employees but often attributed first authorship to academically affiliated investigators who did not always disclose industry financial support. Review manuscripts were often prepared by unacknowledged authors and subsequently attributed authorship to academically affiliated investigators who often did not disclose industry financial support.
This report shows that Merck, the manufacturer of Vioxx, had its marketing department write up studies to show the safety of Vioxx. They then paid professors of medicine to say that they did the study when, in reality, no study was ever done. The professors names were placed on the study and it was submitted to journals and the FDA as if the study actually happened. It was all fraudulent and criminal. It resulted in the death of at least one hundred thousand Americans and many more in other countries. Merck paid a small fine in relation to the amount of money they made on the drug. I have not read that anyone went to jail.
The database of the National Library of Medicine is the MEDLINE computer database. This database is widely used by physicians to understand medical issues. Few physicians know that less than twenty percent of the world’s medical studies are indexed here. They tend to refuse to index studies that do not support drug sales. They tend to refuse to publish studies that show that natural remedies work.
How can we doctors know what therapies to recommend to our patients when only the positive studies get published and many of them never even happened? The paradigm must change. This ongoing criminal behavior makes medical care the leading cause of death in the United States!
In addition to publishing only positive studies and hiding negative ones, publishing fake studies, and only indexing twenty percent of the studies, another deceit has come into prominence. It is the difference between absolute risk and relative risk.
A good explanation of this problem is the book entitled The Illusion of Certainty: Health Benefits and Risks by Ed Bouwer and Eric Rivkin from Johns Hopkins University.
Absolute risk is your risk of developing a disease over a specified period of time. Absolute risk reflects the number of people who will be harmed compared to the total number of people being considered.
If six out of one hundred get a disease and die, the AR is 6/100 or 0.06 or 6 percent.
“Absolute Risk Reduction” is the difference between two absolute risks in two groups. In the above example, if people take a drug and only four out of one hundred get the disease and die, the ARR is 6% - 4% = 2%. Two lives are saved out of one hundred.
ARR compares the number of people who will benefit from intervention to the total number of people being considered.
Relative risks are based on the ratio of two absolute risk numbers. When using relative risks, the absolute risk levels for the experimental and control groups are not known. If taking a new drug reduces the number of disease deaths from six out of one hundred (6%) to four out of one hundred (4%), then the relative risk difference is thirty-three percent, because four percent is thirty-three percent less than six percent. The absolute risk difference is two percent (6% - 4%). However, thirty-three percent sounds much better than two percent.
Let’s say we looked at ten thousand people, five thousand of whom chewed bubble gum and five thousand that did not. If one of five thousand that chewed bubble gum had a heart attack and two out of the five thousand that did not chew bubble gum had a heart attack, we could report that only half as many people developed a heart attack when they chewed bubble gum. The FDA would then allow us to market bubble gum as preventing fifty percent of heart attacks because the relative risk is 0.5. This ignores the fact that 0.02 percent of those that chewed bubble gum had a heart attack while 0.04 percent of those that did chew gum did not have the same event. Certainly one case different between the two groups is not significant. However, it can be reported as a relative risk of fifty percent.
This is a significant problem in that almost all medical studies are now reported with relative risk instead of absolute risk. This sleight-of-hand reporting is the primary way that physicians are tricked into believing that drugs work.
This graph is from the MRFIT Study and shows deaths vs. cholesterol levels. It assumes a current benchmark of 200 mg/100 ml.
Out of two thousand people with cholesterol over 200 mg/100 ml, there will be one additional death each year from CHD as compared to two thousand people with normal cholesterol. This means that 99.95 percent of the population would not benefit from efforts (diet and/or drugs) to reduce blood serum cholesterol levels.
The graph above is the same data as above except the data line has been trended and the y-axis extended to make it more obvious visually how little difference cholesterol makes in deaths per thousand.
To put it another way, for 1,999 out of 2,000 individuals each year, it makes no difference whether they have elevated cholesterol or normal cholesterol in terms of whether or not they develop coronary heart disease!
I will discuss this in greater detail in the chapter on heart disease. It is clear that it doesn’t make much sense to focus so much time and energy and money on the subject of cholesterol. Despite the science, the politics of medicine says that doctors should lose their license if they don’t put patients with “elevated” cholesterol on statin drugs. The American Heart Association states that you are at high risk of coronary heart disease if your cholesterol level is above 240. However, the study showed that the cholesterol of 240 is only 0.5 percent more likely to have a heart attack than those with the cholesterol of 200. Economics vs. Science at work again!
Current guidelines suggest that anyone with a cholesterol level over 180 should be put on statin drugs. If you have a heart attack, you are put on statins no matter how low your cholesterol already is.
Statin drugs cost between $900 and $1,400 per year per person. This means that we waste about 12.5 billion dollars per year in therapies that are not supported by science for cholesterol treatment alone. Now expand this into all areas of medicine. It then becomes easy to see why Americans spend more money on health care than anyone in the world and yet have outcomes equivalent to Third World countries.
Myth: The human body is controlled primarily by chemistry.
Fact: the human body is controlled primarily by electronics (physics), not chemistry. Thus to really understand how the body works, we must understand something about physics and electronics.
Most physicians operate as if the body works like a clock. If a clock stops working, you take it apart to find the broken gear. You then replace that gear with a new one and the clock will work again. This concept is called reductionism and is a part of what is called Newtonian physics (after the theories of Isaac Newton).
The mathematics of reductionism is, at its most basic, the use of fractions, which holds that dividing and multiplying are opposites. The statement “four divided by two equals two” is the idea that dividing the system into two parts and then putting them back together restores the original system.
Simply put, reductionism is the idea that if you take a ten-pound bag of flour and put five pounds in one bucket, three pounds in another, and two pounds in another, you have ten pounds. Then if you put it all back into a sack, you will have the same ten pounds.
Isaac Newton lived from 1642 to 1727. Newton’s book Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica demonstrated for the first time that celestial bodies follow the laws of dynamics and, formulating the law of universal gravitation, give mathematical solutions to most of the problems concerning motion. Newton created the mathematics called calculus. Newton’s laws of motion became the basis for what we today call physics or Newtonian physics.
Modern medicine assumes that the body is Newtonian. We keep looking for the smallest particles of the body assuming that there we will find the answers to disease, for example, gene mapping. This is valid for systems where only the total mass of a system matters, such as for weights or collections of small, weakly interacting particles, like a pound of flour.
Later when people began to consider atoms instead, Newton’s laws didn’t work. Newton’s laws work for large objects but don’t work for atoms or the human body while it lives.
The following history of the theories of atoms is reprinted here with the permission of Jim Walker, http://www.nobeliefs.com/atom.htm. I have taken the liberty of recreating some of the graphics since the copies from the website do not reproduce well. For Dr. Walker’s original graphics, please see his website.
Atom n.: A unit of matter, the smallest unit of an element, consisting of a dense, central, positively charged nucleus surrounded by a system of electrons, equal in number to the number of nuclear protons, the entire structure having an approximate diameter of 10−8 centimeter and characteristically remaining undivided in chemical reactions except for limited removal, transfer, or exchange of certain electrons.
The history of the study of the atomic nature of matter illustrates the thinking process that goes on in the philosophers’ and scientists’ heads. The models they use do not provide an absolute understanding of the atom but only a way of abstracting so that they can make useful predictions about them. The epistemological methods that scientists use provide us with the best known way of arriving at useful science and factual knowledge. No other method has yet proven as successful.
Actually, the thought about electricity came before atoms. In about 600 B.C. Thales of Miletus discovered that a piece of amber, after rubbing it with fur, attracted bits of hair and feathers and other light objects. He suggested that this mysterious force came from the amber. Thales, however, did not connect this force with any atomic particle.
For more than 2,000 years nobody did anything to continue the explorations that the Greeks had started into the nature of matter. Not until the early 1800s did people begin again to question the structure of matter.
In the 1800s, English chemist John Dalton performed experiments with various chemicals that showed that matter, indeed, seem to consist of elementary lumpy particles (atoms). Although he did not know about their structure, he knew that the evidence pointed to something fundamental.
In 1897, the English physicist J.J. Thomson discovered the electron and proposed a model for the structure of the atom. Thomson knew that electrons had a negative charge and thought that matter must have a positive charge. His model looked like raisins stuck on the surface of a lump of pudding.
* Note: I anachronistically use the word “photon” here. Actually physicists did not refer to light quanta as photons until after Gilbert N. Lewis proposed the name in an article in Nature, Vol. 118, Pt. 2, December 18, 1926.
Atoms not only emit photons, but they can also absorb them. In 1905, Albert Einstein wrote a ground-breaking paper that explained that light absorption can release electrons from atoms, a phenomenon called the “photoelectric effect.” Einstein received his only Nobel Prize for physics in 1921 for his work on the photoelectric effect.
A heated controversy occurred for many years on deciding whether light consisted of waves or particles. The evidence appeared strong for both cases. Later, physicists showed that light appears as either wave-like or particle-like (but never both at the same time) depending on the experimental setup.
Other particles discovered around this time were called alpha rays. These particles had a positive charge and physicists thought that they consisted of the positive parts of the Thompson atom (now known as the nucleus of atoms).
In 1911, Ernest Rutherford thought it would prove interesting to bombard atoms with these alpha rays, figuring that this experiment could investigate the inside of the atom (sort of like a probe). He used radium as the source of the alpha particles and shined them onto the atoms in gold foil. Behind the foil sat a fluorescent screen for which he could observe the alpha particles impact.
The results of the experiments were unexpected. Most of the alpha particles went smoothly through the foil. Only an occasional alpha veered sharply from its original path, sometimes bouncing straight back from the foil!
Rutherford reasoned that they must get scattered by tiny bits of positively charged matter. Most of the space around these positive centers had nothing in them. He thought that the electrons must exist somewhere within this empty space. Rutherford thought that the negative electrons orbited a positive center in a manner like the solar system where the planets orbit the sun.
Rutherford knew that atoms consist of a compact, positively charged nucleus, around which circulate negative electrons at a relatively large distance. The nucleus occupies less than one thousand million millionth of the atomic volume, but contains almost all of the atom’s mass. If an atom had the size of the earth, the nucleus would have the size of a football stadium.
Not until 1919 did Rutherford finally identify the particles of the nucleus as discrete positive charges of matter. Using alpha particles as bullets, Rutherford knocked hydrogen nuclei out of atoms of six elements: boron, fluorine, sodium, aluminum, phosphorus, and nitrogen. He named them “protons,” from the Greek for “first,” for they consisted of the first identified building blocks of the nuclei of all elements. He found the protons mass was 1,836 times as great as the mass of the electron.
But there appeared something terribly wrong with Rutherford’s model of the atom. The theory of electricity and magnetism predicted that opposite charges attract each other and the electrons should gradually lose energy and spiral inward. Moreover, physicists reasoned that the atoms should give off a rainbow of colors as they did so. But no experiment could verify this rainbow.
RULE 1: Electrons can orbit only at certain allowed distances from the nucleus.
RULE 2: Atoms radiate energy when an electron jumps from a higher-energy orbit to a lower-energy orbit. Also, an atom absorbs energy when an electron gets boosted from a low-energy orbit to as high-energy orbit.
By the 1920s, further experiments showed that Bohr’s model of the atom had some troubles. Bohr’s atom seemed too simple to describe the heavier elements. In fact it only worked roughly in these cases. The spectral lines did not appear correct when a strong magnetic field influenced the atoms.
Bohr and a German physicist, Arnold Sommerfeld, expanded the original Bohr model to explain these variations. According to the Bohr-Sommerfeld model, not only do electrons travel in certain orbits but the orbits have different shapes and the orbits could tilt in the presence of a magnetic field. Orbits can appear circular or elliptical, and they can even swing back and forth through the nucleus in a straight line.
The orbit shapes and various angles to the magnetic field could only have certain shapes, similar to an electron in a certain orbit. As an example, the fourth orbit in a hydrogen atom can have only three possible shapes and seven possible traits. These added states allowed more possibilities for different spectral lines to appear. This brought the model of the atom into closer agreement with experimental data.
The conditions of the state of the orbit got assigned quantum numbers. The three states discussed so far consist of: orbit number (n), orbit shape (l) and orbit tilt (m).
In 1924, an Austrian physicist, Wolfgang Pauli, predicted that an electron should spin (kind of like a top) while it orbits around the nucleus. The electron can spin in either of two directions. This spin consisted of a fourth quantum number: electron spin (s).
Pauli gave a rule governing the behavior of electrons within the atom that agreed with experiments. If an electron has a certain set of quantum numbers, then no other electron in that atom can have the same set of quantum numbers. Physicists call this “Pauli’s Exclusion Principle.” It provides an important principle to this day and has even outlived the Bohr-Sommerfeld model that Pauli designed it for.
In 1926, the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger had an interesting idea: Why not go all the way with particle waves and try to form a model of the atom on that basis? His theory worked kind of like harmonic theory for a violin string except that the vibrations traveled in circles.
The world of the atom, indeed, began to appear very strange. It proved difficult to form an accurate picture of an atom because nothing in our world really compares with it.
Schrödinger’s wave mechanics did not question the makeup of the waves, but he had to call it something so he gave it a symbol seen here. The “psi” symbol of Schrödinger’s wave came from the Greek lettering system.
In 1926, German physicist Max Born had an idea about “psi.” Born thought they resembled waves of chance. These ripples moved along waves of chance, made up of places where particles may occur and places where no particles occurred. The waves of chance ripple around in circles when the particle appears like an electron in an atomic orbit, and they ripple back and forth when the electron orbit goes straight through the nucleus, and they ripple along in straight lines when a free particle moves through interatomic space. You can think of them as waves when traveling through space and as particles whenever they travel in circles.
However, they cannot exist as both waves and particles at the same time.
Just before Schrödinger proposed his theory, German physicist Werner Heisenberg, in 1925, had a theory of his own called matrix mechanics that also explained the behavior of atoms. The two theories seemed to have an entirely different set of assumptions yet they both worked. Heisenberg based his theory on mathematical quantities called matrices that fit with the conception of electrons as particles whereas Schrödinger based his theory on waves. Actually, the results of both theories appeared mathematically the same.

References: v. 
 §2000
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 § 41