By Gene Ayres,
Your Consumer Curmudgeon

This being Martin Luther King Day, might be a good day to take a look back at history. From a consumer perspective, we have never been worse off than we are now, due to inequality and inequity in the marketplace, starting of course on Wall Street, following the course set by Madison Avenue, and ending uptown with the Big Banks. I'm not sure if Dr. King ever went to New York, but maybe he should have.

What he would have seen then, as now, was a mantra of greed overwhelming all other issues and attributes, human and otherwise. It was greed, of course, that led to slavery, and maintained it for four centuries. Who needs to work for a living if they can live the high life on somebody else's back? And religion should have put a stop to it, but that too fell to greed long before there were any colonies, including poor Haiti.

It is greed that dominates Congress today, and has handcuffed virtually every effort to bring justice, equity, and equality to the marketplace. It is greed that has prevented healthcare from becoming a service instead of an industry, ever since Teddy Roosevelt tried to clean it up. And of course, nobody has demonstrated more greed (arguably apart from the Big Banks) than Big Pharma.

So today I want to take a quick look back through history to see how it was that Big Pharma got so powerful, who their allies were to facilitate this takeover of health care from the humble visiting family doctor, who might stay the night in return for a meal to see you through your fever, to a huge corporation that demands exorbitant pay up front, or you can just die outside, thank you very much, and please, don't puke in the parking lot, or bleed on the carpet, or we'll send you a bill for that too.

Back in the early 1800s in Germany, a young physician named Samuel Hahnemann made a remarkable discovery that minute doses of a potential poison or pathogen could actually provide a cure. This, of course, became the basis for the work of Jonas Salk a century later, and the whole idea of immunization. But Hahnemann's discovery was much more basic and unlike vaccines, could actually cure a disease. The principal Hahnemann discovered became known as the Law of Similars, and led to a form of medicine that has stirred up nothing but rancor and rage ever since, because it basically puts apothecaries and their manufacturer mentors, i.e. today's Big Pharmaceuticals, out of business.

The principle of curing disease through the Law of Similars, i.e. introducing tiny, minute doses of what ails you (the “dog that bit you”) became known as “homeopathy,” and it was to stop homeopathy in it's tracks in the USA that led to the formation of the American Medical Association. Because even back in the early 1800s doctors recognized that medicines that were virtually cost-free, that a competent physician could make him or herself, and provide for almost no cost, was a huge threat to a burgeoning and hugely profitable industry, and had to be stopped in its tracks. Which, essentially it was.

Hahnemann was practically run out of Germany. And his successors were minimalized as cracks, and their products dismissed as snake oil, when sadly, exactly the opposite was true.

Ironically, even Big Pharma has been forced to apply this principle of the Law of Similars in their bestselling drug making and marketing, because they have been forced to acknowledge that it works (not publicly, of course, but in the back corporate boardrooms and laboratories). Why else would a drug that actually causes hyperactivity (Ritalin) serve to reduce it (not cure it, of course, which would be bad for business, and would require micro doses, i.e. homeopathic doses, that cost practically nothing)?

Thus, what the pharmaceutical and AMA backed medical industry has created, and promoted, instead of allowing what are called ultra diluted doses that can actually cure a disease (see the work of recent Nobel Prize winner Luc Montagnier for one example), the drug companies are simply marketing drugs that suppress symptoms. Always temporarily, thus forcing the patient to take more (hence more profits) with the ultimate and unfortunate side effect of creating new, even worse conditions. Which is why repeated application of cortisone cream to eczema can lead to asthma, and the suppression of arthritis pain can lead to heart disease, and why teenagers who take acne drugs sometimes develop suicidal depression. But hey, so what? Profits are up, and while some folks celebrate a man who gave his life for freedom, others, in Washington D.C., are celebrating their latest balance sheets, and writing checks to keep the Senate in their control.

Sources
Amy L. Lansky PhD
Impossiblecure.com
National Center for Homeopathy
Mercola.com

Gene Ayres is a career writer, author and freelance journalist. His latest book is A Billion to One: An American Insider in the New China. He can be found at: www.geneayres.org.