Apr 5, 2010
Ayurveda out of balance: 93 percent of medicinal plants threatened with extinction
By John Platt
Traditional Ayurvedic medicine could face an uncertain future as 93 percent of the wild plants used in the practice are threatened with extinction due to overexploitation, the Times of India reports.
The Botanical Survey of India recently prioritized 359 wild medicinal plant species and conducted an assessment throughout the country to determine their health. The news wasn't good. Of the 359 species, 335 were categorized as critically endangered, endangered, vulnerable or near-threatened.
The survey used criteria and categories established by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) for its Red List of Threatened Species.
According to India's Ministry of Environment and Forests, 95 percent of plants used in Ayurvedic medicine are collected from the wild, and about two-thirds of that harvest uses "destructive means" that can damage or kill the plants.
To help keep these plant species from going extinct, the Indian government in 2008 initiated a program (pdf) to relocate species from the wild, study how to domesticate them, and promote sustainable harvest protocols. This survey is the latest step in that program.
Aside from its historical and cultural significance, Ayurvedic medicines could bring profits to India's coffers. The Department of Ayurveda, Yoga & Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha and Homoeopathy (AYUSH) is currently exploring export opportunities for Ayurvedic medicine through Indian Medicines Pharmaceutical Corporation Limited, a company owned by the Indian government. Already, Ayurvedic treatments, vacations and consultants are popular among some alternative health consumers in the U.S.
Of course, other traditional Asian medicines have been attacked for their use of parts from endangered animals, such as tiger bones and rhino horns, but Ayurveda has so far avoided such criticisms.
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93% of wild medicinal plants in endangered list: Study
NEW DELHI: Ninety three per cent of wild medicinal plants used for making ayurvedic medicines in the country are endangered and the government is trying to relocate them from their usual habitat to protect them.
The threat to the plants came to the fore in an assessment exercise in different states carried out by the Botanical Survey of India.
The assessments were done for a total of 359 prioritized wild medicinal plant species. Out of this, 335 have been assigned Red List status ranging from critically endangered, endangered, vulnerable to near-threatened.
In addition, a total of 15 such species recorded in trade have been found threatened, officials in the health ministry's Ayush department said.
Some of the rare plants reported to be threatened, have been relocated during the last decade, including Utleria Salicifolia and Hydnocarpus Pentandra in Western Ghats, Gymnocladus Assamicus and Begonia Tessaricarpa from Arunachal Pradesh and Agapetes Smithiana in Sikkim.
The assessments have involved conducting Conservation Assessment and Management Prioritisation using International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) Red List Categories.
The officials said the medicinal plant resources in the country are threatened by over exploitation to meet the demand of herbal industries.
As per the information received from the Ministry of Environment and Forests, about 95 per cent of such plants are harvested from the wild, primarily from forests.
The National Medicinal Plants Board constituted in November 2000, has been implementing a Central sector scheme for development and cultivation of medicinal plants since 2000-01.
This scheme was revised and renamed as "Central Sector Scheme for Conservation, Development and Sustainable Management of Medicinal Plants" during 2008-09.
States forest departments have been given assistance for protection and propagation of such endangered species, especially used by the herbal industries.
Projects for setting up of 29 Medicinal Plants Conservation Areas (MPCAs) have also been implemented in the states covering mainly the medicinal plants viz Asoka, Guggal and Dashmool varieties.
The scheme is being implemented with an outlay of Rs 321.30 crore during the 11th Plan.
In addition, a new "Centrally Sponsored Scheme of National Mission on Medicinal Plants" with a total outlay of Rs 630 crore is being implemented since 2008-09 by National Medicinal Plants Board. A total of 24 states have been covered under the scheme.
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http://www.naturalnews.com/027088_cancer_laetrile_health.html
recommended reading: http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/ciencia/ciencia_cancertreatment.htm
Apricot Seeds Kill Cancer Cells without Side Effects
September 24, 2009
Paul Fassa, citizen journalist
Email this author
(NaturalNews) Are apricot seeds a source for a natural substance that kills cancer cells without destroying the cancer victim's health and wealth? The essential ingredient has been called laetrile or vitamin B 17. If there is any merit to it, why is this information being suppressed? Why are people who have been cured or have cured others being censured and imprisoned? Could be there is something to the claims.
Keep in mind that the cancer industry world wide is estimated at a 200 billion dollar a year industry. There are many in various associated positions within that industry who would be without a job if that cash flow dried up suddenly with the news that there are cheaper, less harmful, and more efficacious remedies available. Big Pharmacy would virtually vanish.
What is B17, or Laetrile Anyway?
In 1952, a biochemist named Dr. Ernst Krebb, Jr. in San Francisco decided that cancer was a metabolic reaction to a poor diet, and a missing nutrient from modern man's diet could be the key to overcoming cancer. His research led to a compound found in over 1200 edible plants throughout nature. That compound is amagdylin,
Amagdylin is found with the highest concentration and necessary enzymes in apricot seed kernels. A primitive tribe, the Hunzas, were known to consume large amounts of apricot seed kernels. The hard pit had to be broken to get into the soft kernels. There was no incidence of cancer with them at all, ever. And they had long, healthy life spans. Laetrile was created by simply extracting amagdylin from the soft apricot kernels, purifying it and putting it into a concentrated form.
Amagdylin is a nitrioloside. Nitriolisides are difficult to categorize since they are in foods but not foods themselves. As a nitrioloside, amagdylin resembled the B complex structures, so Dr. Krebb called it B17 since by that time 16 types of B vitamins had been isolated.
Dr. Krebb injected himself with laetrile to ensure there would be no toxic side effects. He conducted further lab animal and culture experiments to conclude that laetrile would be effective in the treatment of cancer. By the way, the FDA standard for drug safety is known as LD 50, LD stands for lethal dose, and the 50 is the percentage threshold of lab animals poisoned to death by the drug tested. As long as the percentage killed is under 50%, FDA will approve it!
Since laetrile is derived directly from a food substance in nature and not chemically developed in a laboratory, it is impossible to patent. And of course it's not toxic. In other words, just as with all natural healing substances, Big Pharma and the AMA can't make a fortune from the substance and from the remedies for the long term side effects. There have been several testimonies from cancer victims who cured themselves by chewing large quantities of the apricot seeds alone.
The seeds are more available to consumers now than laetrile because in 1971 the FDA banned laetrile. Laetrile is difficult, but not impossible, to purchase. The seeds are actually the soft almond shaped, bitter tasting kernels from inside the pits. A few users prefer extracting those soft kernels from the pits themselves. But the soft kernels are available and inexpensive.
So How Does It Work?
Amagdylin contains four substances. Two are glucose; one is benzaldyhide, and one is cyanide. Yes, cyanide and benzaldyhide are poisons if they are released or freed as pure molecules and not bound within other molecular formations. Many foods containing cyanide are safe because the cyanide remains bound and locked as part of another molecule and therefore cannot cause harm.
There is even an enzyme in normal cells to catch any free cyanide molecules and to render them harmless by combining them with sulfur. That enzyme is rhodanese, which catalyzes the reaction and binds any free cyanide to sulfur. By binding the cyanide to sulfur, it is converted to a cyanate which is a neutral substance. Then it is easily passed through the urine with no harm to the normal cells.
But cancer cells are not normal. They contain an enzyme that other cells do not share, beta-glucosidase. This enzyme, virtually exclusive to cancer cells, is considered the "unlocking enzyme" for amagdylin molecules. It releases both the benzaldyhide and the cyanide, creating a toxic synergy beyond their uncombined sum. This is what the cancer cell's beta-glucosidase enzyme does to self destruct cancer cells.
Amagdylin or laetrile in conjunction with the protective enzymes in healthy cells and the unlocking enzymes in cancer cells is thus able to destroy cancer cells without jeopardizing healthy cells. Chemotherapy, on the other hand, kills a lot of other cells and diminishes one's immune system while killing an undetermined amount of cancer cells.
Those cancer cells tend to return elsewhere because the patient's general health was reduced from the pervasive chemo toxins. The cancer industry has declared the bench mark for curing cancer as being cancer free for 5 years. It's estimated that of those who undergo the AMA big three for curing cancer, surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy, no more than 3% make the 5 year cancer free mark. Besides the treatments' debilitating effects, they are much more expensive!
But for someone with cancer, it takes a considerable amount of daily B17 consumption to enable the amagdylin to reach the cancer cells with beta-glucosidase. That's because some of the amagdylin molecules will be neutralized by the normal cells containing rhodanese.
Many practitioners who use laetrile have an 85% cure rate among cancer victims who did not undergo much of the standard cut, burn, and poison that is main-stream - while the cure rate for those who come to laetrile therapy as a last resort after all that conventional medicine could only have a 15% recovery rate. There is a clinic in Mexico that claims a 100 percent cure rate!
The Medical Mafia's Suppression
Since around 1920, practitioners of alternative cancer therapies and remedies and their messengers have been marginalized, harassed, imprisoned, and even killed. Federal agencies have been used to bring about bogus charges or IRS tax liens that are enforced by US Marshals the way Dr. Gary Glum was hassled for even writing books on Essiac Tea. See Natural News article "Essiac Tea: A Cancer Cure Big Pharma Doesn't Want You To Know About." http://www.naturalnews.com/026928_c....
A young Brooklyn man, Jason Vale, was imprisoned because he refused to stop telling others on TV and in lectures how he cured himself of cancer using those nasty apricot pit kernels! Jason is a more recent public example of the Medical Mafia's grip on the legal system regarding B17. Laetrile, which is non toxic, was banned by the FDA in 1971.
Shortly after the 1971 laetrile ban, a practicing physician in San Francisco, Dr. John Richardson, who had been using laetrile successfully on cancer patients, came to his friend G. Edward Griffin, a published investigative journalist, and asked Griffin if he could write up something to help him and others continue using laetrile on their cancer patients.
G. Edward Griffin's research evolved into his groundbreaking book, World Without Cancer. This book not only explained laetrile and chronicled several cancer cures, but Griffin's investigative nose led him down the rabbit hole and into the underbelly of the cancer industry's efforts at keeping alternative cancer cures from the light of day. That's how he discovered that the Sloane-Kettering Cancer Institute had buried documentation from scientists' research, which proved laetrile was "highly effective" at curing cancer.
Griffin received those documents himself from a Dr. Ralph Moss, who had been told to cover up that evidence and claim that laetrile was worthless. He refused and left his position as PR manager with Sloane-Kettering. Since that time in 1977, Dr. Ralph Moss has gone on to write or edit several books on cancer cure options. It's always encouraging to see an insider come out! Someone else filled Dr. Moss's vacant position and lied the lies about laetrile that filled the medical journals.
And what about those medical journals? Lately, the most prestigious New England Journal of Medicine dropped its standard of not allowing articles contributed to the journal from anyone who was receiving money from Big Pharma, as long as it's less than 10 grand annually. If they didn't drop that standard, there wouldn't be enough articles to fill the journal! Of course, most medical journals are glossy ad forums for Big Pharma anyway.
Both G. Edward Griffin with World Without Cancer and Phillip Day in his book Cancer: Why We're Still Dying to Know the Truth, make it very clear that the cancer industry does not really want a cure. Even non-profit organizations get millions in donations from the brainwashed, huddled masses along with funding for promoting Big Pharma. A non-profit organization can and will have key people working for 6 figure plus annual salaries, by the way.
Doctors mostly do as they are trained and told; medical journals contain false reports and lies. Cancer foundations have breast cancer months or whatever as PR to get people into the disease industry's money mill as early as possible, and at the top, there is Big Pharma. It's all about money and career. Not about public health and "The War on Cancer."
So far in mainstream medicine, it's been a losing battle with more getting cancer than ever. Around 1 out of 3 is destined to get cancer these days, and more are dying from cancer after conventional treatments. Talk about pandemics! All this with lots of cash going their way, enabling some to live a lush lifestyle and others hanging on to their comfy, secure jobs at the expense of our health.
Meanwhile, too many true humanitarian doctors and herbalists and writers concerned with the truth wind up being treated like criminals or nut cases, sometimes with their lives destroyed. That's tragic. And so is the fact that millions suffer and die while being conditioned against using effective and less painless procedures.
Laetrile Treatment
There are many success stories from people using just laetrile or apricot pit kernels. The usual recommendation for prevention is around 5 to 7 over the course of a day. For actual cancer cases use 2 to 3 times that. Some say one kernel for every 10 lbs of body weight. For maintenance after a cure, go back to 5 to 7 per day.
Some laetrile therapists have patients use vitamin B15 tablets and digestive enzymes such as papaya's papain and pineapple's bromalene. Too many apricot pit kernels can create nausea or dizziness. There are no recorded deaths or disabilities from the apricot seeds or laetrile, however. Although some success has been recorded with patients undergoing conventional therapy and using laetrile, it's not recommended. Eventually most of those who combine the two get off the chemo or die anyway.
There are many practitioners and writers who recommend you combine other alternative cancer therapies while taking laetrile or using the apricot pits - especially if you go for it alone at home. It should be obvious to Natural News readers that a foundation of healthy food and less stress is necessary. A fundamental lifestyle change has to be a part of any permanent cancer cure. In addition, a little eclectic mix and match with other alternative therapies seems like a good approach.
For example, Gerson's cancer cure therapy's juicing protocol with the right type of juicer and using coffee enemas to detox the liver could be added with laetrile use. It's hard to go wrong with that healthy combination. See Natural News article on the Gerson Therapy for more details here:
http://www.naturalnews.com/027004_c...
Do your own research by starting with the source links below this article. Those sources are for more than showing the author has done his homework. The author intends for you to use them as a springboard for your own research. Why waste your money and health on toxic remedies when so much is available as alternatives for far less money and negative side effects?
Sources:
Excellent interview of G. Edward Griffin on laetrile and the cancer industry
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFnP...
An excellent overview of different cancer cure options
http://www.1cure4allcancer.com/the_...
A vast, indexed and categorized free source of cancer cure options with details you can use - It's the free online bible of cancer cure options
http://www.cancertutor.com/index.html
Information on apricot seeds with more details
http://www.detailshere.com/cancerap...
Vitamin B17 - contains information on supplements to include with B17 and a list of foods with B17, also a few caveats on using B17
http://www.detailshere.com/cancerb1...
Author Phillip Day's blog
http://www.credence.org/
About the author
He also practices Chi-Lel Chi Gong, and he is trained as a polarity therapy practitioner. He is dedicated to warning others of the corruption of food and medicine in our time, and guiding others toward a better direction for health. You can visit his blog at http://healthmaven.blogspot.com
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http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/ciencia/ciencia_cancertreatment.htm
Death by doctoring
Extracted from his book 'Great News on Cancer in the 21st Century'
August-September 2002
NexusMagazine
Orthodox anticancer therapies have harmful if not fatal side effects, but medical professionals continue to inflict them on their patients as a matter of course.
CANCER: THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY
Twenty-first century medicine boasts a number of treatments that are actually very dangerous to human health, none more so than for cancer. May this short report reach the many thousands of people currently undergoing conventional cancer treatment. May it also reach the many thousands of doctors, physicians, nurses and carers who every day are innocently inflicting serious harm in the name of conventional cancer care.
Let the countdown begin. Let there soon be an end to... Death by Doctoring.
Every year in the United Kingdom, 200,000 people are diagnosed with cancer and 152,500 people die.1 In the United States, the annual death rate for this disease is approximately 547,000.2 These deaths are recorded as cancer deaths, but how many of these deaths are really attributable to the disease itself? How many deaths should in fact be recorded as “death by doctoring”?
When we consider that conventional treatment consists almost entirely of radiation, chemotherapy and the long-term application of toxic pharmaceuticals-treatments which are all well known for their life-threatening side-effects — then the question becomes all the more legitimate.
On chemotherapy, for instance, note the following:
“Most cancer patients in this country die of chemotherapy. Chemotherapy does not eliminate breast, colon, or lung cancers. This fact has been documented for over a decade, yet doctors still use chemotherapy for these tumors.”
(Allen Levin, MD, UCSF, The Healing of Cancer, Marcus Books, 1990)
We examine the much-publicized story of the UK media personality, the late John Diamond, who opted for conventional treatment. What does his story tell us? John was known for his critical attitude towards many of the more popular alternative therapies.
We look at some aspects of the alternative approach and ask if his criticisms were entirely undeserved. We hear from those within the cancer establishment itself who cite the conventional cut, burn and dissolve techniques as ugly and inhumane, and from those who seriously question the amounts of money being invested in conventional cancer today, given the pitifully low recovery rate. In the UK alone, £2.8 billion a year is spent in the conventional cancer emporium. That’s roughly £6,800,000 a day. US spending on cancer is 10 times higher.
We also hear from those who defied conventional wisdom and opted for non-toxic, non-conventional cancer treatments, with remarkable results. And no, we are not talking dolphin or pyramid therapy. From the known range of anticancer treatments available, this story focuses on the naturally occurring vitamin B17, vitamin C and the supporting role of nutrition. Vitamin B17 in particular has been attracting a great deal of attention recently, despite the concerted efforts of the worldwide cancer establishment to suppress or distort all the positive reporting on this vitamin.
But should we find this so surprising?
After all, it’s no secret that with global spending on conventional cancer running into the hundreds of billions of pounds and dollars annually, any news of a successful anticancer treatment extracted from the simple apricot kernel could do some serious damage to the wealth of the mighty Cancer, Inc.
Passing of King Charles II, 1685
But first, by way of introduction to the subject of “death by doctoring”, we travel back a few hundred years to the bedside of King Charles II, where 14 of the highest-qualified physicians in the land are earnestly “reviving” the king from a stroke.
“The king was bled to the extent of a pint from a vein in his right arm. Next, his shoulder was cut into and the incised area was sucked of an additional 8 oz of blood. An emetic and a purgative were administered, followed by a second purgative, followed by an enema containing antimony, sacred bitters, rock salt, mallow leaves, violets, beetroot, chamomile flowers, fennel seeds, linseed, cinnamon, cardamom seed, saffron, cochineal and aloes.
The king’s scalp was shaved and a blister raised. A sneezing powder of hellebore was administered. A plaster of burgundy pitch and pigeon dung was applied to the feet. Medicaments included melon seeds, manna, slippery elm, black cherry water, lime flowers, lily of the valley, peony, lavender and dissolved pearls. As he grew worse, forty drops of extract of human skull were administered, followed by a rallying dose of Raleigh’s antidote. Finally, bezoar stone was given.
“Curiously, his Majesty’s strength seemed to wane after all these interventions and, as the end of his life seemed imminent, his doctors tried a last-ditch attempt by forcing more Raleigh’s mixture, pearl julep and ammonia down the dying king’s throat.
Further treatment was rendered more difficult by the king’s death.” 3
We can be sure that the physicians gathered around the king’s bed were all leaders in their particular field—royalty and presidents do not settle for anything less.
But, as Proust observed, with hindsight we can now see the hideous error of their therapeutics. Today, the skull drops, the ammonia and the pigeon dung have long gone, but what will we say in a few years’ time when we look back on the “highly respected” cancer therapeutics of 2002? Will we dare to venture that there is nothing new under the Sun?
Have we really progressed much further?
Side Effects of Chemotherapy
Consider the following statement from cancer specialist Professor Charles Mathe, who declared:
“If I contracted cancer, I would never go to a standard cancer treatment centre. Cancer victims who live far from such centers have a chance.” 5
Walter Last, writing in The Ecologist, reported recently:
“After analyzing cancer survival statistics for several decades, Dr Hardin Jones, a professor at the University of California, concluded: ‘...patients are as well, or better off, untreated. Jones’s disturbing assessment has never been refuted.’” 6
Or what about this?
“Many medical oncologists recommend chemotherapy for virtually any tumor, with a hopefulness undiscouraged by almost invariable failure.”
(Albert Braverman, MD, “Medical Oncology in the 90s”, Lancet 1991, vol. 337, p. 901)
Or this?
“Most cancer patients in this country die of chemotherapy. Chemotherapy does not eliminate breast, colon, or lung cancers. This fact has been documented for over a decade, yet doctors still use chemotherapy for these tumors.”
(Allen Levin, MD, UCSF, The Healing of Cancer)
Or even this?
“Despite widespread use of chemotherapies, breast cancer mortality has not changed in the last 70 years.”
(Thomas Dao, MD, New England Journal of Medicine, March 1975, vol. 292, p. 707)
Chemotherapy is an invasive and toxic treatment able supposedly to eliminate cancer cells.
Unfortunately, though, its ferocious chemistry is not able to differentiate between the cancerous cell or the healthy cell and surrounding healthy tissue.
Put simply, chemotherapy is an intravenously administered poison that kills all living matter. Repeated chemotherapy and repeated radiation treatments kill the whole body by degrees. The immune system is hit particularly hard by chemotherapy and often does not recuperate enough to protect adequately against common illnesses, which can then lead to death.
Some 67 per cent of people who die during cancer treatment do so through opportunistic infections arising as a direct result of the immune system failing because of the aggressive and toxic nature of the drugs.7
What is this, if not death by doctoring?
And the side effects from both chemotherapy and radiation itself are extensive. They can include dizziness, skin discoloration, sensory loss, audio/visual impairment, nausea, diarrhea, loss of hair, loss of appetite leading to malnutrition, loss of sex drive, loss of white blood cells, permanent organ damage, organ failure, internal bleeding, tissue loss and cardiovascular leakage (artery deterioration), to name but a few.
Two years ago, Hazel was diagnosed with breast cancer. She described her chemotherapy as the worst experience of her life:
“This highly toxic fluid was being injected into my veins. The nurse administering it was wearing protective gloves because it would burn her skin if just a tiny drip came into contact with it. I couldn’t help asking myself, ‘If such precautions were needed to be taken on the outside, what is it doing to me on the inside?’ From 7 pm that evening, I vomited solidly for two and a half days. During my treatment, I lost my hair by the handful, I lost my appetite, my skin color, my zest for life. I was death on legs.”
We shall be hearing more from Hazel later, although under very different circumstances.
It seems, though, that with chemotherapy we are once again looking at the acceptable face of King Charles’s ammonia treatment and, once again, being administered by the highest physicians in the land. Similarly, on the toxicity of radiation “therapy”, John Diamond noted that it was only when he began his treatment that he began to feel really ill.
Senior cancer physician Dr Charles Moertal, of the Mayo Clinic in the USA, stated:
“Our most effective regimens are fraught with risks and side-effects and practical problems; and after this price is paid by all the patients we have treated, only a small fraction are rewarded with a transient period of usually incomplete tumor regressions…” 8
Dr Ralph Moss is the author of The Cancer Industry, a shocking exposé of the world of conventional cancer politics and practice. Interviewed on the Laura Lee radio show in 1994, Moss stated:
“In the end, there is no proof that chemotherapy actually extends life in the vast majority of cases, and this is the great lie about chemotherapy: that somehow there is a correlation between shrinking a tumor and extending the life of a patient.” 9
Scientists based at McGill Cancer Center sent a questionnaire to 118 lung cancer doctors to determine what degree of faith these practicing cancer physicians placed in the therapies they administered.
They were asked to imagine that they had cancer, and were asked which of six current trials they would choose. Seventy-nine doctors responded, of which 64 would not consent to be in any trial containing Cisplatin—one of the common chemotherapy drugs they were trialing (currently achieving worldwide sales of about US$110,000,000 a year)—and 58 of the 79 found that all the trials in question were unacceptable due to the ineffectiveness of chemotherapy and its unacceptably high degree of toxicity.10
The following extract is taken from Tim O’Shea at The Doctor Within:
“A German epidemiologist from the Heidelberg/Mannheim Tumor Clinic, Dr Ulrich Abel, has done a comprehensive review and analysis of every major study and clinical trial of chemotherapy ever done. His conclusions should be read by anyone who is about to embark on the Chemo Express.
To make sure he had reviewed everything ever published on chemotherapy, Abel sent letters to over 350 medical centers around the world, asking them to send him anything they had published on the subject. Abel researched thousands of articles: it is unlikely that anyone in the world knows more about chemotherapy than he.
“The analysis took him several years, but the results are astounding: Abel found that the overall worldwide success rate of chemotherapy was ‘appalling’ because there was simply no scientific evidence available anywhere that chemotherapy can ‘extend in any appreciable way the lives of patients suffering from the most common organic cancers’.
Abel emphasizes that chemotherapy rarely can improve the quality of life. He describes chemotherapy as ‘a scientific wasteland’ and states that at least 80 per cent of chemotherapy administered throughout the world is worthless and is akin to the ‘emperor’s new clothes’—neither doctor nor patient is willing to give up on chemotherapy, even though there is no scientific evidence that it works! (Lancet, 10 August 1991) No mainstream media even mentioned this comprehensive study: it was totally buried.” 10a
Most definitely, the power imbalance that exists in all doctor-patient relationships (whence comes the term “shrink” in psychiatry) is a key agent in determining the direction of treatment.
(...)
Confusing and Conflicting Information
Aside from this very powerful influence, a mass exodus away from conventional cancer treatment towards proven, non-conventional treatments has also been severely hampered by the negative effects of the vast sea of confusing, conflicting and often bizarre information out there, posing as “helpful” alternative cancer advice. A first-timer seeking alternative advice on the Internet, for instance, can soon become thoroughly disheartened. Some 4,000 links come up under “alternative cancer treatment” alone!
An anxious patient, with no time to separate the wheat from the chaff, is then faced with having to make a series of calculations, based solely on his negative experiences on the Internet and a sort of blind, desperate faith that, somehow, the well-qualified oncologist has got to be right.
“And didn’t he warn us that there were a lot of Internet kooks out there?” The patient is then right back to square one and, by default, the chemotherapy suggested earlier seems overall to be the “safest” bet.
In the view of health reporter Phillip Day, author of Cancer: Why We’re Still Dying to Know The Truth:
“Many people just gulp, enter the cancer tunnel and hope they come out the other end.”
But despite the fact that an Internet search can very easily generate confusion, there is actually a wealth of expertly documented, credible information available on natural and genuinely efficacious treatments for a variety of serious illnesses, including cancer—information that, in some instances, has been in existence for many years.
But information on such treatments is not widely available in the public domain—perhaps because genuine medicine has had to fight tremendously hard to be heard clearly. And there are particular reasons why this has been so. Often, it is not so much where to look for genuine natural treatment and medical advice as how to look for it.
Before discussing specific cancer treatments in more depth, it is important that we briefly examine the reasons for the current levels of confusion surrounding genuine natural medicine as a whole: willful distortion, unwitting stupidity, you name it. Conventional and alternative, it’s taking place on both sides of the fence.
We must learn to read between the lines.
Forked Tongues, Fraud & Failure
Proponents of genuine natural treatments for serious illnesses have always had to fight on several fronts in their long, hard battle for proper recognition of these treatments. They have had to do battle with those calculating opportunists—the forked-tongued drug merchants—who use every trick in the book to undermine any genuine treatments not under their own jurisdiction and employ all means possible to disseminate their damaging disinformation as far and wide as possible in order to protect their own lucrative markets.
No department, private or public, is beyond the reach of the drug merchants’ all-consuming influence.
Thriller writer John Le Carré spent many years working in the British Foreign Office and knows the politics of big business very well. His most recent book, The Constant Gardener, focuses on the corrupt nature of the pharmaceutical industry.
In an interview on the subject, Le Carré stated recently:
“Big Pharma is engaged in the deliberate seduction of the medical profession, country by country, worldwide. It is spending a fortune on influencing, hiring and purchasing academic judgment to a point where, in a few years’ time, if Big Pharma continues unchecked on its present happy path, unbought medical opinion will be hard to find.” 12
In opposition to the incessant drive by Big Business to dominate our health choices, Dr Matthias Rath provides a concise summary of the primary ethics of the merchant’s house:
“Throughout the 20th century, the pharmaceutical industry has been constructed by investors, the goal being to replace effective but non-patentable natural remedies with mostly ineffective but patentable and highly profitable pharmaceutical drugs. The very nature of the pharmaceutical industry is to make money from ongoing diseases. Like other industries, the pharmaceutical industry tries to expand their market—that is, to maintain ongoing diseases and to find new diseases for their drugs. Prevention and cure of diseases damages the pharmaceutical business and the eradication of common diseases threatens its very existence.
“Therefore, the pharmaceutical industry fights the eradication of any disease at all costs. The pharmaceutical industry itself is the main obstacle, why today’s most widespread diseases are further expanding, including heart attacks, strokes, cancer, high blood pressure, diabetes, osteoporosis and many others. Pharmaceutical drugs are not intended to cure diseases. According to health insurers, over 24,000 pharmaceutical drugs are currently marketed and prescribed without any proven therapeutic value. (AOK Magazine, 4/98)
“According to medical doctors’ associations, the known dangerous side-effects of pharmaceutical drugs have become the fourth leading cause of death after heart attacks, cancer and strokes. (Journal of the American Medical Association, April 15, 1998)
“Millions of people and patients around the world are defrauded twice. A major portion of their income is used up to finance the exploding profits of the pharmaceutical industry. In return, they are offered a medicine that does not even cure.”
Dr Rath is currently spearheading the fight against the pharmaceutical industries as they seek to legislate against our free use of vitamins and minerals. If this legislation is passed, it will directly affect you in many ways.
Writing in the UK Guardian on February 7, 2002, senior health editor Sarah Bosely reported:
“Scientists are accepting large sums of money from drug companies to put their names to articles, endorsing new medicines, that they have not written— a growing practice that some fear is putting scientific integrity in jeopardy.” 12a
These supposed guardians of our health are being paid what to say. Said one physician in the article:
“What day is it today? I’m just working out what drug I’m supporting today.”
The Non-Conventional Medical Marketplace
Whilst the remit of this article does not extend to a full exploration of the influence that money has had over the corruption of true medicine and medical practice, let the reader be assured that conventional medicine has more than its fair share of attendant commercial pressures, and especially so in the world of cancer, as we shall soon discover.
Aside from the wiles of the merchant, genuine medicine also has always had to do battle with the well-intentioned parahealer,14 who unwittingly has the capacity to prove equally as threatening to the cause, but for very different reasons.
The non-conventional medical marketplace seems to be dominated by those who are able to deliver an admirably coherent deconstruction of the conventional paradigm, but who choose not to apply the same level of intelligent critique to their own, often wacky, nostrums.
As such, we are subjected to an equally misguided barrage of pronouncements, for example:
“Submit not to the ravages of chemo—let White Eagle purge you of those negative energies”; “Visit a pyramid, a shaman (‘My sickness is a shamanic gift and calling’14a), a cancer ‘guide’ (‘Okay, group. Eyes closed. Your cancer is receding. The lump is disintegrating. Envisage the all-consuming fire!’)”
A coat of mud, of seaweed or both, some psycho-surgery, some radionics, this therapy, that therapy and, of course, a thousand-and-one folk remedies: grandma’s trusted “brain tumor elixir” perhaps, a walnut kernel perfectly preserved in rainwater (seven drops, three times a day)…
Celebrities with the more serious illnesses receive these well-intentioned “tips and tricks” by the sackload.
John Diamond was no exception:
“I’ve had anecdotal evidence from those who believe in voodoo, the power of the fairy people—yes, really—drinking my own p**s and any number of other remedies… I should put my faith in the Bessarabian radish, the desiccated root of which has been used for centuries by Tartar nomads to cure athlete’s foot, tennis elbow and cancer, as detailed in their book, Why Your Doctor Hates You And Wants You To Die, review copy enclosed…” 15
Notwithstanding the genuine treatments available in the natural cabinet (we shall discuss this in part two), a huge number of remedies being sold as “medicine” today contain no sensible methodology—yet, amazingly, they are selling very well.
No better is this phenomenon illustrated than in the lucrative minor ailments market, where, on a daily basis across the world, untold millions are being spent on pharmacologically inert mixtures and “essences”, producing truly marvelous results with illnesses from which we were going to get better anyway.16
The Dangers of Uncritical Thinking
In truth, were the general public to be given clear information on the nature of self-limiting illness and on the wondrous ability of a properly nourished immune system to overcome almost all ills unaided, the bottom would fall out of the minor ailments market tomorrow, both conventional and alternative.
Unfortunately, though, any of the more awkward questions arising from this discussion, such as “How can you continue to sell these ointments as ‘medicines’ in the light of this knowledge?”, are usually defended not by answering the actual question itself, but by the therapist appealing to the worthiness of his wider philanthropic goals and to “the much greater threat to the global populace” posed by the merchant’s house with all its toxic wares, etcetera, etcetera.
Donald Gould, author of The Black and White Medicine Show, has warned of the dangers we invite by adopting such laissez-faire reasoning:
“Why not make the most of what the non-conformists have to offer and to hell with uncharitable logic? There is, I suggest, a powerful reason for rejecting this superficially attractive option.
Truth is a fundamental value. If we accept uncritical thinking in one area of our lives for the sake of convenience or because of the popular appeal of a seductive myth and the short-term comfort to be gained by believing in the unbelievable, or because the false answer lets us pretend we are competently coping with a painful problem we haven’t truly tackled, then we are all the more likely to adopt the same strategy in other situations, from dealing with the family to managing the national economy, and from chairing the parish council to handling arsenals of nuclear weapons.
The result is likely to be unhappy and stands a decent chance of proving a disaster. Irrational beliefs are always dangerously corrupting, even when they only relate to the cause and cure of piles.” 17
REPUTATION IS EVERYTHING
(..)
Vitamin B17
In his UK Observer article entitled “Quacks on the Rack”, John Diamond summarily dismissed what is arguably the most famous of the natural and proven anti-cancer treatments known to man: the natural extract of the apricot kernel, otherwise known as vitamin B17.
“Supporters of laetrile (vitamin B17) and Essiac, in particular, made so much noise about their miracle cures that both have been through the research mill on numerous occasions and found to be useless.” 19
Now we can ask ourselves whether it was perhaps the fault of some kindly but misguided soul who posted John Diamond an essay on the benefits of vitamin B17 mixed with walnut water which caused him to dismiss B17 so emphatically. Or was it that John actually trusted the conventional research reports he had accrued on this vitamin?
Interestingly, Dr Dean Burk, the former head of the Cytochemistry Department of the National Cancer Institute and one of the co-founders of this famous American medical institution, had personally worked on vitamin B17.
He described this substance in very different terms:
“When we add laetrile to a cancer culture under the microscope,” said Dr Burk, “providing the enzyme glucosidase also is present, we can see the cancer cells dying off like flies.” 20
(Glucosidase is the enzyme heavily present in cancerous cells, which triggers the unique cancer-destroying mechanism found in vitamin B17. An excellent clinical analysis of this mechanism is found in B17 Metabolic Therapy – In the Prevention and Control of Cancer, a concise history of the research into this vitamin, including many clinical assessments.21)
Dr Burk also stated that evidence for laetrile’s efficacy had been noted in at least five independent institutions in three widely separated countries of the world.22
(...)
Because of the Money
Cancer is big business, and knowledge claims on any treatments that earn money and, conversely, on any treatments that do not earn money for the drug companies are never neutral.
Dr Ralph Moss served as the Assistant Director of Public Affairs at America’s most famous cancer research institution, Memorial Sloan-Kettering in Manhattan. He knows the cancer industry inside out.
Read what he had to say in an April 1994 interview with Laura Lee, and judge for yourself the quality of the evidence against the effectiveness of vitamin B17:
Dr Moss: “Shortly after I went to work [at the Sloan-Kettering Cancer Institute], I visited the elderly Japanese scientist Kanematsu Sugiura, who astonished me when he told me he was working on laetrile (B17). At the time it was the most controversial thing in cancer, reputed to be a cure for cancer. We in Public Affairs were giving out statements that laetrile was worthless, it was quackery, and that people should not abandon proven therapies. I was astonished that our most distinguished scientist would be bothering with something like this, and I said, ‘Why are you doing this if it doesn’t work?’ He took down his lab books and showed me that, in fact, laetrile was dramatically effective in stopping the spread of cancer.”
Laura Lee: “So this is verified, that laetrile can have this positive effect?”
Moss: “We were finding this and yet we in Public Affairs were told to issue statements to the exact opposite of what we were finding scientifically.” 23
Unable to sit on this information, Dr Moss later called a press conference of his own and, before a battery of reporters and cameramen, charged that Sloan-Kettering officials had engineered a massive cover-up. He provided all the supporting documents and named all the names necessary to validate his case. The following day he was fired for “failing to carry out his most basic job responsibilities”.24
Similarly, in his book, World Without Cancer, cancer industry researcher G. Edward Griffin notes:
“Every laetrile study had been tarnished with the same kind of scientific ineptitude, bias and outright deception… Some of these studies openly admitted evidence of anti-cancer effect, but hastened to attribute this effect to other causes. Some were toxicity studies only, which means that they weren’t trying to see if laetrile was effective, but merely to determine how much of it was required to kill the patient.” 25
The “evidence” supporting John Diamond’s claim that vitamin B17 is useless and even dangerous is available in abundance in all of the major cancer institutions today.
Well, of course it is! We’re in the merchant’s house, don’t forget!
As Pat Rattigan, author of The Cancer Business, reports:
“The threat to the cancer business from effective therapies was taken very seriously from the beginning. By the 1940s, the Syndicate had 300,000 names on its ‘quack’ files. Vitamin B17, being a unique threat due to its simplicity, attracted more concentrated attacks than all the other treatments put together: fraudulent test reports; hired, banner-carrying pickets outside clinics; rigged juries; newspaper character assassinations; dismissal of heretic employees; etc.
The FDA, orchestrating the onslaught, sent out 10,000 posters and hundreds of thousands of leaflets warning about the dangers of the toxicity of the non-toxic substance. Earlier, a Congressional Accounting Office had found that 350 FDA employees had shares in, or had refused to declare an interest in, the pharmaceutical industry.” 26
The American Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued one such story about the death of an 11-month-old girl, supposedly from cyanide poisoning due to her apparently swallowing her father’s vitamin B17 tablets.
Cancer specialist and B17 advocate Dr Harold Manner takes up the story:
“I was lecturing in Buffalo, New York and…after I had made some strong statements, a man stood up and said, ‘Dr Manner, how in the world can you make statements like that when the FDA is making these other statements?’ I reiterated that the FDA statements were lies. He said, ‘Look at this little girl in upstate New York; she took her father’s laetrile tablets and died of cyanide poisoning.’
Just then, a little lady stood up: ‘Dr Manner, let me answer that question. I think I am entitled to because I am that little baby’s mother. That baby never touched her father’s laetrile tablets. The doctor, knowing the father was on laetrile, marked down “possible cyanide poisoning”. At the hospital they used a cyanide antidote and it was the antidote that killed the child. And yet that statement will continue to appear, even though they know it is a lie.’” 27
The scare stories always focus on the minute amounts of naturally occurring cyanide found in vitamin B17.
But no mention is made in any of these stories of the wondrous mechanism governing the release of this cyanide. No harm is done to the person eating this vitamin (if that were the case, we’ve consumed enough apricots, apples, peaches, cherries, etc. containing B17 to have finished us off long ago). The cyanide is released only when cancerous cells are recognized by their high glucosidase content.
B17 cyanide attacks cancer cells specifically. No large amounts of glucosidase detected means no cyanide release. Rest assured, there is no evidence that vitamin B17 can kill—unless, of course, one is accidentally crushed under a pallet of the stuff!
A further embarrassment for the cancer orthodoxy must surely be the research being carried out at the Imperial College in London, where researchers are looking at ways of using naturally occurring plant cyanide specifically to attack human bowel tumors. The idea came about after studying the pattern of specific cyanide release in the almond and cassava fruit which protects them from insect attack. Another one of those natural wonders, just crying out to be heard, is at last being listened to by the orthodoxy, perhaps? 28
Very sadly, in assessing the deservedness of the “shady” reputation bestowed upon vitamin B17 metabolic therapy, we realize it is entirely unwarranted and that, instead, there has been a sustained attack by the conventional cancer industry on this treatment—an attack that has been carried on in one form or another for the last 40 years.
As mentioned earlier, with global spending on conventional cancer running into the hundreds of billions annually, a naturally occurring cancer cure of any description is an unwanted intruder.
Here is Dr Moss, again from the April 1994 Laura Lee interview, this time on the money involved in conventional cancer:
Moss: “About 630,000 people die every year of cancer in the US, and it really is an epidemic disease. We have got a tremendous industry. Every one of those people who is getting cancer and dying of it is going to be treated, and these treatments are extremely expensive. Chemo is [costed at] tens of thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars. A bone marrow transplant, which is basically another way of giving chemotherapy, or radiation, can run to about $150,000 per person, and is almost never effective. It kills about 25 per cent of the patients.”
Lee: “Why carry on doing it?”
Moss: “Because of the money, which is tremendous.” 29
When we understand the amounts of money involved, we can begin to understand the in-house desire to sustain a “fact-creating” process in support of conventional treatment. Conventional cancer treatment and cancer research are a license to print money. Most definitely, conventional interested parties and institutions have colluded in a shameful anti–vitamin B17 “fact-creating” process, which in turn has surely led to the early and unnecessary deaths of thousands upon thousands of people.
(...)
What Are We Eating?
It is interesting to note that there are cultures today who remain almost entirely cancer free. The Abkhasians, the Azerbaijanis, the Hunzas, the Eskimos and the Karakorum all live on foodstuffs rich in nitriloside or vitamin B17. Their food consists variously of buckwheat, peas, broad beans, lucerne, turnips, lettuce, sprouting pulse or grain, apricots with their seeds, and berries of various kinds. Their diet can provide them with as much as 250–3,000 mg of nitriloside a day.
The founding father of vitamin B17 research, Ernst T. Krebs, Jr, studied the dietary habits of these tribes.
Krebs stated:
“Upon investigating the diet of these people, we found that the seed of the apricot was prized as a delicacy and that every part of the apricot was utilized.” 33
The average Western diet, with its refined, fibreless foods, offers less than 2 mg of nitriloside a day. It has also been noted that natives from these tribes who move into “civilized” areas and change their diets accordingly are prone to cancers at the regular Western incidence.34
The Right Materials
In his book, Preface to Cancer: Nature, Cause and Cure, Dr Alexander Berglas has this to say about cancer incidence:
“Civilization is, in terms of cancer, a juggernaut that cannot be stopped… It is the nature and essence of industrial civilization to be toxic in every sense… We are faced with the grim prospect that the advance of cancer and of civilization parallel each other.” 35
The human body has an amazing capacity to recover, if we look after it properly and if we supply it with the proper materials for repair. Working with non-toxic, physio-friendly treatments can only work in our favor.
Just look at the side-effects of vitamin B17 as described by G. Edward Griffin in World Without Cancer:
“B17 side effects include increased appetite, weight gain, lowered blood pressure, increased hemoglobin and red blood cell count, elimination or sharp reduction of pain without narcotics; builds up the body’s resistance to other diseases, is a natural substance found in foods and is compatible with human biological experience, destroys cancer cells while nourishing non-cancer cells…” 36
Compare the above with the side effects from chemotherapy and radiation: the dizziness, skin discoloration, nausea, diarrhea, loss of hair, loss of appetite, organ failure, internal bleeding, etcetera, etcetera.
How long will it be before we find ourselves looking back on these treatments in the same way as we now look back on the blood-letting and ammonia infusions exacted upon King Charles II? Notwithstanding the often life-saving surgical removal of cancerous tissue, could there possibly be a more inhumane treatment in the 21st century than conventional cancer therapy?
(...)
Need for Data and Education
Finally, we hear from Dr Nicola Hembry of the Dove Clinic, which specializes in the non-conventional approach to cancer care and treatment:
“Nutritional treatments such as high-dose vitamin C and B17 [laetrile] have been known about for years, and there are many success stories from patients lucky enough to have received and benefited from them. Research shows that levels of 400 mg/dL vitamin C in the blood can kill cancer cells by a pro-oxidative mechanism, and there is a great deal of data showing that B17 is preferentially toxic to cancer cells.
“The trouble is that there is little in the way of well-designed random control trial data for the use of these substances, and therefore mainstream medicine rejects them out of hand without even considering the evidence available or even asking why these trials haven’t been carried out. It has to be said that one of the reasons is a lack of financial incentive because these substances cannot be patented.
“Sadly, it is the cancer sufferers who lose out. To not even have the choice of these safer, more natural treatments, even when a cancer is deemed incurable and only palliative chemotherapy or radiotherapy is offered, is in my view totally unacceptable. I have seen many patients experience an improved duration and quality of life with an integrated approach, and some go on to achieve complete remission of their disease, even when dismissed as incurable by their oncologists.” 43
Treating cancer is not just about getting hold of vitamin B17 as quickly as possible. We need to be educated in a whole range of issues. Phillip Day’s book, Cancer: Why We’re Still Dying To Know The Truth, has been written in an easily readable and understandable manner, specifically to inform the general public on all of the key issues pertaining to natural treatment for cancer.
It makes for necessary and fascinating reading.
For those readers interested in finding out more on the issues raised in this article, just click on the following titles available from Credence Publications at the website http://www.credence.org:
Cancer: Why We’re Still Dying To Know The Truth – A concise account of the cancer industry and of the good news on vitamin B17 metabolic therapy.
Vitamin B17 Metabolic Therapy: A Clinical Guide – A clinical account of vitamin B17, detailing the landmark research on this most vital of vitamins in the fight against cancer.
Food For Thought – Delicious recipes designed to promote health. A vital contribution to cancer prevention and recovery.
Steven Ransom is Research Director of UK-based Credence Publications, which investigates business and governmental health fraud and provides unbiased, life-saving health information (see http://www.credence.org). He is the author of Plague, Pestilence and the Pursuit of Power: The Politics of Global Disease (Credence, 2001) and co-author (with Phillip Day) of World Without AIDS (Credence, 2000).
His new book, Great News on Cancer in the 21st Century (from which his “Death by Doctoring” article is extracted) is available at http://www.credence.org/great-news/greatnews.htm. His article, “Population & Food Control: The Corporate Agenda” was published in NEXUS 9/03. Steven can be emailed at steve1@onetel.net.uk.
Visit his own website at http://www.whatareweswallowing.com
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