By Dr. Royal Lee
Summary: “We shall here confine our discussion to the loss of liberty in connection with the choice of our doctor—and his loss of liberty in the choice of a method of treatment of our ills.” Dr. Royal Lee defends alternatives to medicine and reveals the sinister methods used by organized medicine to entreat the government to squash any competing approaches to health. Dr. Lee wrote this courageous piece after more than thirty years of fighting the corrupt system of the medical/pharmaceutical monopoly, condoned and enforced by governmental agencies. With medicine still enjoying a near monopoly in the minds of the public as the only “legitimate” healing art, this article shows for the historical record how the medical industry unscrupulously secured its place in our society and then entrenched its own definition and self-serving standards of what is science and what is quackery. 1962.
The Progressing Totalitarian Takeover in the U.S.A. (in the Area of the Healing Arts)[spacer height=”20px”]
We lose our constitutional liberties in various ways. We shall here confine our discussion to the loss of liberty in connection with the choice of our doctor—and his loss of liberty in the choice of a method of treatment of our ills.
There always have been various opinions and philosophies as to how to restore health to the ill. We have seen licenses issued to doctors of medicine, homeopathy, chiropractic, osteopathy, etc., including doctors who heal by faith alone.
Some types of disease fail to respond to any of these methods of treatment. As long as this is true, new methods of approach should be welcome. There should be freedom for such approaches to be made. But there is a tendency in all established philosophies to exclude new ideas. When Professor Ohm framed and announced the celebrated Ohm’s law of electrical circuits, the critics were so virulent that he was discharged from his professorial position and forced to spend ten years as a blacksmith’s helper, until more open minds in the higher echelons of electrical science realized that Ohm was right, and he was again admitted to the privilege of teaching in an “accepted” institution.1
(At the end of this article, a few instances will be listed in which honest investigators of new healing methods are in jail, or, in other cases, their legitimate business has been ruined, right here in this country, today, because of official stupidity or corruption).
One wonders how these subversive influences are able to find defects in our constitutional safeguards of liberty and get their ice pick in the crack to destroy the structure. In fact, being as the Constitution is a structure of words, these rodents create their own defects by surreptitiously altering the official (but not the common usage) meaning of words to accomplish their purpose. I shall illustrate by citing two instances. One is the meaning of the word drug, which has been discussed elsewhere in my article; the other is the meaning of false and misleading as used in the enforcement of FDA [U.S. Food and Drug Administration] edicts.
The FDA has taken the position that a statement is “false and misleading” if it fails to conform to the “consensus of medical opinion.” [Making a statement that does not agree with the consensus of medical opinion] then becomes a criminal act, punishable by fine and imprisonment, even if there is no criminal intent. Here, for the first time in a civilized country, it becomes possible to punish people as criminals when there has been in fact no criminal offense.
This is done under the argument that the consequences of the act are so far-reaching that it must be punishable as a crime. Under this philosophy, if you accidentally caused damage to an important governmental dignitary, you could be subject to capital punishment. And it often becomes a crime under FDA regulations to save life by calling attention to deficiency disease, because the official attitude (consensus of medical opinion) refuses to admit that the situation exists. The sentence of Earl Irons to a year in jail for reporting that “worn out soils and refined foods” are endangering our health is a good example of this trend.
But the big breakthrough is the newly hatched philosophy that remedies used by the doctor must be tested for “efficacy” by a bureaucratic “authority.” The reason for licensing the doctor in the first place was because he habitually used weapons to treat disease that were dangerous if used by those unacquainted with their hazards. Drugs were defined then as “poisons”—if they were not potent enough to be dangerous, they were not supposed to be worth considering as a useful weapon. The homeopath was the first to depart from that conclusion, by his discovery that minute doses were often effective where massive doses failed.
In licensing a doctor, it was always a matter of establishing competence to practice as a legal principle. The methods he used within his profession were his choice. He was free to decide what was best for his patient. Now we are faced with the proposition that the government will decide what is effective among his list of remedies. That means that the choice of remedies becomes a political matter, not a professional responsibility. The state becomes the doctor; the doctor-that-was becomes the executive assistant to the state. In fact, he is the slave of the state, for soon he is paid what the state thinks is adequate for his services, and he has lost all his liberty to deal with whom he chooses and to negotiate for what he can get for his services. Liberty, in any case, must permit all of us to sell our services for the highest rate we can negotiate and buy services and goods from the lowest bidder.
It requires all the skill that any doctor can mobilize to detect the effects of his treatment and change it as the patient’s welfare may demand. It is a responsibility that cannot be taken over by the crude blunderings of a bureaucracy. Dr. Shadman’s book, Who Is Your Doctor and Why, affords a very illuminating insight into how a doctor, after becoming a full fledged medical practitioner, duly licensed, discovers that the patients he cannot help are recovering under the guidance of a so-called “quack” across the street, and upon investigating finds that the homeopathic “quackery” so thoroughly condemned by his medical college was in fact curing patients he had failed to help by orthodox methods.
Herbert Spencer spoke immortal words when he said that the reformer, in proposing a new innovation, is so often so absorbed in looking at the action of his scheme that he fails to see the reaction that will inevitably accompany it.
Shadman immediately investigated homeopathy and adopted such parts of the system as he found useful in his own practice. Of course a bureaucratic control of medical practice would prevent this search for effective methods and their adoption by the doctor. This is the exact spot where totalitarian oppression begins and constitutional liberty departs, the place where the doctor is told what to do for his patient, what treatment is authentic, and what foods or drugs are good or bad. Congress has always recognized this boundary of human rights; any usurpation of such power is totally unauthorized by any congressional action.
It must be kept in mind that bureaucrats are not in the main really interested in public welfare. They usually represent a political influence, the end product of corruption in politics. They hide their motivation under pious protestations of how they protect the people, while, as Dr. Wiley so thoroughly showed in his book,2 they are really protecting the violators of the laws they are paid to enforce.
There is no better example of such influence than the story of synthetic foods and drugs. A synthetic substance is one made by man in a laboratory or factory instead of by plant or animal metabolism, the two sources for all natural foods. No man-made substance has ever been found to be a complete substitute for a natural one. Often it has been found to be a frightful menace, as in the case of the synthetic drug thalidomide. Yet the spectacular results of thalidomide are microscopic in comparison with the effects of vast tonnages of synthetics—sold under false labeling—such as dextrose, known popularly as corn sugar or corn syrup. Proven to cause diabetes,3 to cause cancer at the site of injection if introduced directly into the tissues,4 and to block the assimilation of calcium,5 it has no place even in pharmacology, it would appear.
Or, take bleached flour. All bleaches, by reason of their oxidizing nature, can convert the food factor xanthine into synthetic alloxan, a diabetogenic poison so potent that a single dose can cause permanent diabetes in a test animal.6 Or, consider the synthetic fats, the so-called hydrogenated oils, falsely labeled “vegetable shortening” (here in open violation of false labeling laws), which are now suspected to be a major factor in creating the susceptibility to cardiovascular disease that is our leading cause of death. The U.S. Army reports that 76 percent of our soldiers were found to have advanced coronary disease when autopsies of those killed in battle in the Korean war were reviewed.
Or take Butter Yellow, sold for forty years to the American butter industry as a “vegetable color” to make anemic butter look rich—before it was discovered to be a potent carcinogen. And what happened then? Did the FDA make an example of the promoters? Not a chance. They were permitted to liquidate and steal away out of sight silently and unnoticed. The Diamond Dye Company and its Butter Yellow peddling subsidiary are not even remembered on the stock exchange—the guilty ones unpunished for their misrepresentation. The sale of any synthetic substance to be used in food should be prohibited until its harmlessness has been so established that the makers can post a bond to guarantee some compensation to anyone who later finds it to be more dangerous than first supposed.
In the state of Texas, it is mandatory for a common carrier or trucking carrier to post a $20,000 bond when they propose to transport a certain weed poison. Why? Simply because the poison is so potent that it can kill cotton for a hundred years on the leeward side if a wind blows across the load of packaged poison on the truck as it passes along the highway. The Pandora’s box of mythology certainly has its real counterpart in modern synthetic poisons and drugs.
But note that the bureaucratic management of the FDA has been very careful to avoid any admission of responsibility on the part of the promoters of these frightful menaces. Instead, they have proposed and actually put into effect the very unusual and unreasonable new idea that criminal punishments are proper for anyone who makes statements in their literature regardless of their truth if they do not conform to the “consensus of medical opinion,” such opinion being unavailable beforehand to anyone who might want to inquire of the FDA to insure himself against unfair prosecution (bureaucratic guillotining, rather) if he is in a business that is subject to FDA regulations.
This is of course the totalitarian takeover by commercial interests, true fascism, a system quite parallel to communism, both being slave states, wherein the individual has no rights except to conform under penalty of imprisonment.
We may cite the cause of the Ellis Microdynameter as an example of bureaucratic guillotining. The Ellis machine measured the resistance of body tissues. In disease or inflammation, the resistance drops very definitely. A tooth abscess will show up far more accurately with this method than by the use of the X-ray because it shows whether or not there is inflammation present today. The X-ray shows only bone changes, which may be only evidence of past inflammation that today is under control. Dr. Osterhout long ago wrote this principle up in his book on the subject, Injury, Recovery, and Death (Lippincott, 1922).
But the bureaucrats brought in their phony authorities, who testified that the whole idea was quackery, and now Ellis is out of business, his machines seized in the doctors’ offices, and those doctors publicized as dupes or worse—a very efficient way to use the powers of the federal government to destroy the enemies of the well entrenched medical monopoly. That group (the American Medical Association) was convicted and fined in 1942 of conspiracy to violate the Sherman Antitrust Act. But after this slap on the wrist, they dug in deeper than ever in their foul plans to destroy their enemy: the groups outside their well organized racket who refuse to patronize the synthetic food and drug business, who instead warn their patients against the dangers of the use of such adulterated and counterfeit products.
And I might cite John Crane, who is in a federal jail in California with a sentence of five years for the crime of selling Rife equipment that destroys viruses and germs. Rife invented a microscope with a power of 60,000 diameters magnification back in 1930, and it was reported in the Journal of the Franklin Institute (Philadelphia), February 1944, as showing how cancer virus can be isolated and [how the virus] acts with a variable potency in causing cancer depending on the state of health of the victim, showing that malnutrition has an important part in the cause of most disease.7 The authenticity of Rife’s products are in no way challengeable, being certified herewith by the Franklin Institute, which cites various other institutions using Rife’s apparatus—including the British School of Tropical Medicine, the Mayo Clinic, and others—in the bibliography of its report.
Here is a man in jail for trying to introduce a device of proven merit. In jail because of manipulations to defeat justice that will be evident to anyone who investigates. In jail because the medical monopoly is afraid of his new methods! What else?
If Rife’s ideas are not sound, why not let them die a natural death? Medical science once advocated bloodletting for almost every disease. Bloodletting still has a lot of merit where it is really indicated, but no doctor would dare use the discredited treatment for fear of ridicule. I have been told by top men in medicine that bloodletting is the only way to save a victim of congestive heart failure. But the doctor, rather than expose himself to ridicule, must let the patient die. That is the penalty of regimentation, of trying to freeze the methods of treatment into an orthodox pattern. It is the result of intimidation, the result of failing to protect the doctor in his right to choose the remedy his profession has discovered, the remedy he himself has observed in action until he knows exactly what it can do.
That is why different doctors will treat the same patient differently, with different results. And the patient has the privilege of trying a new doctor anytime he becomes dissatisfied with the old one. It is his life he is trying to save, and no bureaucrat has or should have the right to prevent him from a free choice of what type of licensed doctor he might wish to select. Certainly punish the frauds, the counterfeit foods, the synthetic poisons sold as drugs (who goes to jail for the false claims made for thalidomide???), but also stop the food and drug laws from being used, as Dr. Wiley so well proved, to protect the law violators instead of protecting the people.
An alert Congress should have used Wiley’s book in 1930 to guide a congressional investigation into every activity of the FDA. The present situation [see following article] is far more corrupt—as is evident from the news items relating to the present grand jury investigation, which we hope will not turn out to be a complete whitewash.
By Royal Lee, DDS, September 1962.
[References:]
1. Howell & Schrader. The History of the Incandescent Lamp, page 14. The Macqua Co., Schenectady, New York, 1927.
2. Dr. Harvey W. Wiley. The History of a Crime Against the Pure Food Law. Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research, Milwaukee 1, Wisconsin, 1930.
3. Science 105:175, 1942.
4. Von Euler & Skarzynski. Biochemie Tumoren. Ferdinand Enke, Biochemie Der, Stuttgart, 1942.
5. Bicknell & Prescott. The Vitamins in Medicine. Lee Foundation, Milwaukee 1, Wisconsin-American Publishers, page 528.
6. Cantor et al. Science 105: 476–77, 1947.
7. Journal of the Franklin Institute, February 1944. (Reprint available from Lee Foundation, Milwaukee 1, Wisconsin.)
How FDA Employees Are Intimidated
From The Milwaukee Journal, August 16, 1962. Originally titled “Dr. Kelsey’s Predecessor Gave Warning.”
Washington, D.C. — Two years ago, when thalidomide was a word known to few Americans, a woman doctor warned that some drugs were reaching the market without adequate proof of their safety.
The warning came from Dr. Barbara Moulton, at the time a medical officer with the new drug division of the Food and Drug Administration. She had the same job as the one now held by Dr. Frances Oldham Kelsey, who is credited with keeping thalidomide, the drug blamed for infant deformities, off the American market.
Testified at Hearing
Dr. Moulton argued that some drugs reached the market because of inadequate federal regulation and because of the tremendous pressures exerted by the drug companies.
Dr. Moulton’s testimony on June 2, 1960, before the Senate Antitrust and Monopoly Subcommittee, was based on her experiences in the same job now held by Dr. Kelsey.
Dr. Moulton, a physician, is now with the Federal Trade Commission.
In her appearance before the Senate subcommittee, Dr. Moulton contended that the Food and Drug Administration had become “in many of its activities, merely a service bureau” for the drug industry.
She testified that there had been cases in which orders came “from above” to medical officers to certify a new drug on the grounds that the drug company itself was the best judge of its safety.
She did not specify who issued such orders “from above” but said that one time she had conferred with Dr. Albert H. Holland Jr., then the Medical Director of the Food and Drug Administration, and warned of possible habit-forming properties of a new sedative she was studying.
Moved at Firm’s Request
She testified that he had told her to do nothing about it. She quoted him as saying, “I will not have my policy of friendliness with (the drug) industry interfered with.”
Dr. Moulton said she was transferred from the new drug division at the request of a drug company. She said Dr. Holland told her she had not been sufficiently polite to members of the drug industry and that a large company had requested that she no longer be permitted to handle new drug applications.
Dr. Holland, who is no longer employed by the government, could not be reached for comment.
Dr. Moulton testified that some drug firms often sent four or five representatives at a time to argue for approval of a drug application. She said such visits usually continued every day our so until an application was cleared.
From The Milwaukee Journal, Thursday, August 19, 1962. © New York Times New Service. Author unknown.
[Additional, supporting article:]How Expert Witnesses Are Intimidated
From Drug Trade News, July 16, 1945. Originally titled “We Need More Guts!”
One of the most unfortunate and most dangerous conditions besetting the American scene is the fear of business and professional men to say in public what they scream behind closed doors when the subject of administrative injustice comes up or when the matter of professional standing is involved.
There are manufacturers in the drug—and all other—industries who see the menace to themselves in the usurpations and excesses of the multigovernmental agencies sprawled all over Washington but who quail down to their knees when asked to appear before congressional committees for an expression of their views. They beg off on the ground that once they criticize these agencies openly, they become targets for retaliation.
There are research scientist and clinical investigators engaged by drug manufacturers for specific studies who will not come into court or before an administrative agency to defend their findings, insisting that to do so will “get them in bad” with their scientific society or with the organized medical profession. They flare up if one questions the accuracy of their findings, but even so they lack the guts to openly assert their views.
Well what do you think of it? Can we expect Congress or anyone else to fight our battles when we don’t dare to do so ourselves?
From Drug Trade News, July 16, 1945. Author unknown.
