Reforming the Unreformable
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by Dr. Herbert M. Shelton
I am indebted to Harry Clements, N.D., D.O., of London for the following quotation from Medical News-Tribune (May 1, 1972), which he carried in his column in Health For All (July, 1972): "Every doctor who prescribes drugs must be aware of the possibility that the remedy might be worse than the disease for which it is prescribed, warns a leading Dutch pharmacologist. These drug-induced diseases are so varied that there are indeed few pathological conditions that may not be brought about by some drug, Professor L. Meyler, Professor of Clinical Pharmacology at Groningen University, told the International Meeting of Medical Advisers to the Pharmaceutical Industry in London."
After calling attention to the fact that Professor Meyler "does not use the euphemism 'side-effect' which may mean much or little: he talks of drug-induced disease, which makes the matter perfectly clear," and that Meyler "makes it plain, also, how complicated the subject is and warns doctors (physicians) to be on the lookout for symptoms of such induced diseases every time they are confronted by a patient, since the symptoms may be the result of drugs prescribed by other doctors (physicians) or by remedies (drugs) used in self-medication (self-drugging)," Dr. Clements further quotes Meyler as saying: "some drugs produce immediate effects after administration, such as anaphylactic shock. Others cause reactions only after weeks or months, such as aplastic anaemia after chloramphenicol. Sometimes, the effect can only be discerned after several years, such as retinitis pigmentosa, caused by chloroquine and some phenothiazines, and interstitial nephritis caused by analgesics."
So far as I am aware I am the only writer in the world who has consistently and persistently, for more than twenty-five years, stressed the fact that the so-called side effects of drugs, are part of their regular effects. They are simply effects of poisoning and have been called side-effects only because they are not the effects which the prescribing physician seeks to produce. It is surprising therefore to have Clements say that "Just how complicated the whole matter is becoming must be clear to everyone and it is perfectly obvious that the doctors (physicians) are as much in the dark about the subject of drug-induced disease as anyone." As soon as physicians and "everyone," including even Dr. Clements, become willing to recognize that every drug is a poison and that it poisons every tissue in the body as it circulates in the blood stream all this alleged mystery about drug-induced diseases will become clear. So long as it continues to be believed by physicians and their imitators in the other healing professions that drugs may have physiological and therapeutic effects and that drug-induced disease is something separate and apart from these physiological and therapeutic effects, the whole thing will continue to be shrouded in mystery.
Dr. Clements says that Professor Meyler emphasizes the complexity of the subject of drug-induced diseases when he says: "study of adverse reactions is in its infancy, but progress is being made. The main factor is that the prescribing doctor must be aware of the possible effects of what he prescribes. He must not only look for the known adverse reactions, but he must also be prepared for unknown reactions hitherto not described anywhere."
The confusion exists in the minds of men who can speak of the adverse reactions of drugs in such a manner as to imply that drugs may have favorable reactions. All the alleged actions of drugs, whether they are termed physiological, therapeutic, synergistic, antagonistic, side, or by some other term that hides the essential character of the drug effects are the direct outgrowth of the "toxic quality of the drug or drugs. Instead of the actions which follow the ingestion of a drug being drug actions, they are one and all actions of the living organism designed to resist, reject and expel the drug. There is no such thing as pharmaco-dynamics. There is only bio-dynamics. No amount of study of so-called adverse reactions can lead to anything except greater confusion so long as the basic character of alleged drug actions is unrecognized.
In this same column in July Health For All, Dr. Clements writes: "The British Medical Journal paper read by Dr. D. Stafford-Clark, summarized it in part as follows: 'The public was disillusioned with the medical profession because the doctor had little time to listen, understand, and perhaps give affection. Today's medical student was arrogant and ignorant. For years people had turned to doctors as men of education and broad background, but today frequently this was not true. It was essential that all doctors look on themselves as teachers. He reminded them that, like parents, much was taught by example and that it should be the aim of every doctor firstly to set an example for all those he came into contact with, and only secondly to be a technician."
Nothing emphasizes the mind beclouding effects of medical tradition and a medical education as much as does the fact that man can observe and study all the disease-inducing effects of drugs and continue to believe that the same drugs, in the same dosages and in the bodies of the same patients, can also produce beneficial or curative effects. It is a strange delusion long hugged by the men of medicine that poisons can be both our bane and our boon. Instead of seeking to restore the sick to health by the employment of beneficial substances and conditions, medical men seek for all of their curative agents in the most toxic substances which they can discover. There is a mountain of evidence, accumulated during the past thirty years, that aspirin has produced more damage and killed more people during this time than has penicillin, yet a cure-deluded profession continues to prescribe this poison on a large scale and to encourage self-drugging with aspirin. The drug induced diseases resulting from the use of aspirin should be enough to cause any intelligent man to condemn its use for any beneficial purpose. Aspirin is but one of many thousands of rank poisons that the medical profession is sending down the throats or injecting directly into the blood and tissues of their victims in the name of healing and then expressing wonder and mystification over what they term their side-effects.
Commenting upon this item from the British Medical Journal, Dr. Clements says that "the most significant part of this summary is not the criticism of the attitude of the doctors, but the proposition that they should regard themselves as teachers, since this raises a very important question: To what extent, and how effectively are they taught to be teachers and what are they taught to teach? Surely, no one would expect that a doctor practicing drug-therapy would want to teach his patients about it. The millions of patients who go to the consulting rooms go for their prescriptions, and little else.
"However, if the doctor is to become a teacher, presumably of matters appertaining to health and disease, his whole curriculum will have to undergo radical changes with more emphasis being placed on food and nutrition and the other environmental factors which play so important a part in the maintenance and recovery of health. In short, it will have to embrace a good deal of the nature cure philosophy, and if the doctor is to become an example of healthful living for his patients we can foresee the need for some big changes. It looks as if Dr. Stafford-Clark is setting the stage for what could be some sort of medical revolution."
Is Dr. Clements kidding when he suggests that Stafford-Clark is setting the stage for a revolution? Dr. Clements is too well aware of the fact that revolutions arise spontaneously out of revolutionary situations and do not occur because somebody sets the stage for them. He must know that Stafford-Clark has in mind nothing more significant than a few petty reforms. Like Meyler, who suggests more study of adverse-reactions rather than a discontinuance of practices that inevitably and necessarily give rise to so-called adverse-reactions, Stafford-Clark would not think of suggesting anything that would deprive him and his profession of their pills and potions. Revolution is the farthest thing from his mind that is conceivable. A revolution in medicine, long overdue, will destroy it, root and branch, and this no leader in the medical profession would dare to suggest.
Dr. Clements heads this part of his column "Doctor or Teacher," as though there is a difference. He continually used the word doctor, which means teacher, as a synonym for the term physician. A physician is one learned in or skilled in the art of physics. Physic is a drug, particularly a purgative drug. It is what Shakespeare had in mind when he put the words "Throw physic to the dogs," into the mouth of one of his characters. "Where can you find a dog that will take it," asked one of his contemporaries. I am sure that it is known to Dr. Clements that at first the schools of physic conferred the degree Dr. of Physic only upon men who were to be teachers of physic. Men who administered drugs at the bedside were not doctors, but practitioners, and were not called doctors but were known as practitioners.
I am constrained to wonder just what Dr. Clements himself means by revolution in this instance. In this same column in this same issue of Health For All, under the subtitle "Worth Quoting" he quotes the following words from a recent work entitled Cure or Heal by E. Graham Howe, M.D., in which Dr. Clements says Howe has given to the vis medicatrix its proper significance and that Howe reaffirms his confidence in the healing power of nature: "given the right attitude on the part of both patients and therapist and a sufficiency of time, our old friend the vis medicatrix naturae, which mends our broken bones and heals the common ailments of our bodies (with some help maybe, but also sometimes in spite of more than a little hindrance from the doctor), works on every level, and all the time, to heal us of our ills."
If a statement of this kind which gives the healing power of nature a subordinate position gives to the healing power of nature its proper significance, there still remains a lot of healing or curing to be done by the therapist with his "bag of tricks." There is no room in a statement of this kind for a revolution. There remains only the work of trying to reform the unreformable.
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