By Dr. Royal Lee
Summary: In this classic lecture to the National Health Federation Convention in Columbus, Ohio, Dr. Royal Lee reveals how organized medicine succeeded in legally hampering drugless therapies through the 1938 Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, which redefined a drug as “anything used to treat, prevent, diagnose, mitigate, or cure a disease.” Given this new definition, Dr. Lee says, “once the drugless practitioner has discovered how to druglessly treat his patient, lo and behold, that remedy now automatically becomes a drug, and he is stopped from its use.” This trick was particularly effective in thwarting the use of whole-food supplements in nutritional therapy, since it made all such supplements potential “drugs” under the law. 1962. Original source unknown.
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How Federal Laws and Federal Courts Are Illegally Used by Organized Medicine to Maintain Its Medical Monopoly
Lecture by Dr. Royal Lee at the National Health Federation Convention, Columbus, Ohio, July 3, 1962.
When Thurman Arnold prosecuted and convicted the American Medical Association on criminal charges of violating the antitrust acts, the federal prosecutor said, “The ‘ethics’ of organized medicine had been employed with the purpose of carrying the general idea to the public that they represented the ‘Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule.’” Instead, the prosecutor declared, organized medicine used these “ethics” to promote its criminal methods of suppressing competition (Harold Rogers, news release, Washington, April 4, 1941).
Anyone who has studied the activities of organized medicine knows how their schemes are covered with a thin veneer of pious protestations that it is all for the good of the patient. But there is one scheme that has been quite successful that has been overlooked by all, including Thurman Arnold.
An important trick of political criminals is to change the meaning of words so that confusion is created, under cover of which their nefarious plans can be put into effect. In framing the 1938 Federal Food & Drug Law, the neat trick of redefining drugs was inserted somewhere. Under this new law, a drug became anything used to treat, prevent, diagnose, mitigate, or cure a disease, as well as “articles other than food intended to affect the structure or function of man or animal.”
The last definition was the correct one. But the former classification put new weapons into the hands of the monopolist. Right at this moment, in Arkansas, chiropractors are being prosecuted for violating the laws regulating the practice of medicine because they were recommending special foods for deficient patients. They were using “drugs” in the treatment of disease!
Did you enjoy your lunch of drugs today? Do you carefully drug your children daily? Maybe you can see the vicious nature of these highly successful schemes to monopolize the healing arts.
Just what is medical treatment anyway, as historically practiced by medical doctors (as distinguished from the drugless professions)? It consisted in the use of drugs as remedies, with a great list of pharmaceutical products having no end, as you can realize today with new antibiotics every day, and with old ones continually discarded by reason of their long history of unpleasant and often fatal “side reactions.”
Medical “science” tells us that germs cause disease, that we are the healthiest people in the world (but with the most hospitals), that there is very little deficiency disease; yet “science has not discovered the cause of tooth decay,” nor does it know the cause of cancer or arthritis. Then, when we are ill, we are dosed with poisons of varying types and descriptions—pharmacologists having defined a drug as being of necessity a poison.
Now, the drugless professions have come up with some different ideas. They say that germs are not the cause of most diseases they are credited with, that the real cause is lowered resistance due to poor food and other had environmental conditions, that viruses cannot cause disease such as polio unless the victim has been prepared by malnutrition or other causes of environmental nature.
But if the definition of drug can be changed to mean anything used to prevent, diagnose, or mitigate disease, then once the drugless practitioner has discovered how to druglessly treat his patient, lo and behold, that remedy now automatically becomes a drug, and he is stopped from its use.
A very neat trick, if you can get away with it. And it is being very successfully used, the various states are passing “laws copied from the federal statutes,” and the state courts, as well as the federal ones, are being used for the hatchet work of the medical monopoly.
When drugs were defined as poisons, laws regulating their use and dispensing were, of course, essential. These laws were never intended to provide a means of steamrolling competition, never intended to provide a weapon for use by a medical monopoly to destroy its enemies. The fights of osteopathy, chiropractic, naturopathy, and homeopathy to get laws on the books licensing their devotees are matters of history.
Organized medicine never has missed an opportunity to smear and ridicule these upstart competitors. But as a matter of logic, who is operating in the biggest house of glass? Medicine—the healing of disease by using poisons in varying dosages—seems the most barbarous of all now that most of our chronic disease is being found to be due to malnutrition.
We cannot afford to ridicule new ideas in any field of research. We live in an age that professes to abhor discrimination, but we certainly discriminate against new ideas in the healing arts, against all competitors of allopathic medicine.
As a matter of simple justice, all systems of healing should have equal opportunities. Any doctor who has a license to practice should have equal privileges before any court, should have the same responsibilities and the same limitations. But when we investigate, we find that the laws are so worded that there is a stringent discrimination, a continual smear campaign in action by organized medicine against all competitive schools of thought.
Tampering with the meaning of words to destroy competition is a new type of criminality. Words do change in their significance over periods of time, but usage is the only legitimate standard to be used. Changes of meanings forced into existence by fiat of law are like fixing prices and wages by law. They are political dodges, historically the work of conniving political schemers trying to reward one class at the expense of another—the old art of using governmental powers to promote “special interests.”
In this case the medical monopoly is enforced free of cost to the monopolists; the courts are put to work to do the hatchet work of punishing the upstart competitor who, regardless of his license to practice a healing art, is robbed of his weapons as soon as he tries to use them.
Another interesting situation arises in considering the use of placebo prescriptions. Placebo is Latin for “pacifier.” It is a prescription for a phony remedy, a fake pill or powder that looks like medicine but without any effect. Often it actually helps the patient, according to our best authorities. But how often is it used as an escape by the doctor from admitting that he is baffled, when an honest admission would permit the patient to try another doctor who might have had more experience in his particular problem?
It is here that we encounter the curious attitude of most medical doctors that they are entitled to be as free as God to make decisions themselves that mean life or death to the patient, when the honest course would be to give the patient the facts and permit him to do his own steering of his life—or choose his counselor, which he cannot do if kept in ignorance of the truth by this artifice. Nobody condemns this carelessness with other peoples’ rights more than that same medical doctor when he is talking about his drugless competitor.
We find a good example of this medical attitude that “we are God” in the April 1961 issue of the National Health Federation Bulletin, in which J.W. Wilson, MD, describes his efforts to interest the National Cancer Institute in making tests of the cancer remedy Mucorhicin, which had been showing very promising results. [See the article American Cancer Society Repudiates Pittsburgh Cancer Clinic, about the developers of Mucorhicin, whom Dr. Wilson supervised.] Wilson reports the attitude of the National Cancer Institute high brass as follows:
“We went to the National Cancer Institute in Washington to try to get them to evaluate Mucorhicin, to find out whether or not it was, according to their standards, a cure for cancer. They were ready for us when we got there. They had about fifteen doctors sitting around in a circle. I had all the mice tissue slides—slides that we had made up in our own crude way. We put them down, and each doctor grabbed a slide, walked over to the microscope, took one quick glance, one twist of the focus knob, and said, ‘nothing there.’
“I have been using a microscope for many, many years, and I don’t think I can focus a microscope that fast, let alone look at the cells and identify them. These men were not pathologists—they were clinicians at the institute. After it was all over, they decided that it didn’t warrant even looking into, and Dr. Shearer, who was working with polysaccharides at the institute, stated that we should go home and forget about it. At one time Dr. Spencer even said, ‘Say you did save these 250,000 people every year who died; what would you do with them? How could we absorb them into our economy?’ In other words, these people have to die to establish an economic balance here in the United States. I do not believe this statement covers the feeling of either you or myself.” (National Health Federation Bulletin, p. 31, April 1961)
Doctor Ivy in Chicago found the same attitude when he made preliminary tests of Krebiozen and found enough encouraging results to request similar help from the National Cancer Institute. [To learn the incredible story of Krebiozen, see Cancer and the Medical Research Business.]
Apparently, the National Cancer Institute has for one of its functions the destruction of cancer remedies—the blocking of cancer research instead of what they pretend, exactly as Thurman Arnold’s prosecutor said: a pretention of high ethics used as a cover and screen for the most vicious type of racketeering.
(See the new book The Long Search for the Truth About Cancer by Mark Boesch, Putnam, 1960, for the exact way that organized medicine has obstructed cancer cures and ruined any doctor who, like Dr. Ivy, has tried to follow a scientific attitude. See also The Cancer Blackout, 1959, by Maurice Natenberg, for a list of cancer cures that have been systematically destroyed by the medical monopoly—evidently to save their two billion dollar per year harvest from cancer victims.)
Drugless doctors, using their best judgment in selecting methods of treatment or diagnosis, are ruthlessly prosecuted for larceny and theft if they try to treat with reasonable methods a patient having a so-called “incurable” disease, often really a deficiency state. California is celebrated for this trick.
In all honesty, how can the use of a placebo ever be justified? If the medical doctor is to have the privilege to so deceive his patient, how can any attempt to regulate the healing arts ever be successful? The medical man wants rigid control of his competitor but assumes the liberty of God himself in his own case.
We must look to the old reliable Golden Rule here for guidance. Laws must be applied without discrimination here in this country, where we try to boast about our social justice but allow some of the most vicious rackets ever invented to carry on over the long, wearisome years.
Read about Dr. Harvey Wiley and his lost battle over honest enforcement of the Pure Food Law. Then look up the most recent developments in skullduggery within the FDA (the story of Dr. Welch, for instance)—the control or lack of control of carcinogenic and poison food additives, of chemicals in food, of propaganda by FDA officials to sell foodless foods—and you will find a lot to write your congressman about.
There is no question that in time the use of poisons as curative weapons will be seen as barbaric as the anesthesia of the ancients—a whack on the skull with a club—or the blood letting of more recent respectability.
By Dr. Royal Lee, May 1961.
