Crusador Interviews Dr. Carolyn Dean

December 2, 2006

Death By Modern Medicine

CRUSADOR Editor, Greg Ciola, interviews Dr. Carolyn Dean, MD ND, well known book author and advocate for drug free medicine

Crusador:  Dr. Carolyn Dean, it’s a pleasure to have the opportunity to interview you. You’ve just written a new book and you’ve been a pioneer in the health freedom movement for quite some time. As a medical doctor you saw what was happening with modern medicine first hand, and it led you  to what you’re doing today. What was the impetus for writing your new book, “Death By Modern Medicine?”

Actually, it began when Gary Null asked me to find the statistics on what was really killing Americans.   At the time my mother was dying of acute leukemia, which I thought was caused by a cholesterol drug and an antihypertensive drug.  I was already looking at the research of death due to drug medications so I just dove into it.  In a three-week period I compiled a lot of research for Gary.  The figures that I came up with were astounding. About 784,000 people are dying annually due to modern medical interventions[drugs prescribed in hospitals, in outpatient clinics, errors in hospitals (both medical and surgical), bedsores, and malnutrition in nursing homes].
              
This makes medical interventions the number one killer. Unfortunately, when people die of these medical interventions, it’s called something else, such as heart disease, stroke or cancer and they won’t say what’s really killing them.  That’s where my journey began so I just started jotting all the reasons down in this book and I ended up with 13 chapters. Each of them begins with “Death by . . .”
              
Crusador:  The way you laid the book out is fantastic. You start out Chapter 1 with the title, “Death by Modern Medical Doctors.”  Tell us more about that?
              
A certain mentality exists in medicine where medical doctors believe they should have a monopoly on everything to do with a person’s health.  Anybody who does something other than treatments with drugs or surgery becomes the enemy. This mentality existed long before I became a medical doctor.
              
The history of modern medicine began in America with a survey that was done by Abraham Flexner.  It was called the Flexner Report. Flexner was an educational reformer who was hired by the Carnegie Foundation to survey North American medical schools. Flexner had fallen in love with the German scientific model of education when he visited Berlin in 1906. He began to see this as the way to set up the North American medical education system.  The German model was based on science and lab medicine using drugs, science, and treating very, very ill people.
              
In medical school, doctors are trained in the extremes of medicine (emergency and surgical medicine). But then when they go into practice, 80 percent of the patients have conditions that are lifestyle oriented (aches, pains, fatigue etc…). In medical school, students aren’t trained in the area of diet and lifestyle.
              
Over the past 100 years this mentality has caused medicine to treat normal individuals with abnormal therapies -- drugs and surgeries. To me, that became the basis of the modern medical monopoly and how we have been brainwashed into thinking this is the way it should be and it’s not.
              
I’m a naturopathic doctor as well as a medical doctor.  I always held out hope that naturopathic medicine would fill in this gap. We have some principles in naturopathic medicine where we first look to nature  by looking for the cause and not just treating symptoms.  In naturopathic medicine, patients are encouraged to take personal responsibility for their health by making lifestyle changes.  Science-based hospital medicine and prescription drugs have diverted the attention of medical doctors away from truly educating their patients in this area.
              
Unfortunately, naturopathic medicine is following the allopathic mode.  When  some naturopaths see symptoms, instead of giving a drug, they’ll give a supplement, a vitamin, mineral or herb, but it’s still the same allopathic approach -- treating a symptom with some sort of pill instead of really helping a person change their life.
              
Crusador:  Do you think that a lot of the medical doctors today are starting to see the errors of their ways and will change the way they treat patients?
              
Well, I’ll answer that by making this observation.  Annually, 20 to 30,000 doctors and physicians attend  oncology meetings in the United States.. Alternatively, only a few hundred may attend a meeting for alternative or orthomolecular medicine.  So the numbers indicate that we really aren’t making much of a shift toward what I call traditional medicines (diet, supplements, herbs, hydrotherapy, acupuncture, faith, and other effective therapies that have been used for thousands of years).
              
Crusador:  What do you think about this new approach, called Integrative Medicine, where MDs are starting to incorporate some alternative treatments into what they’re doing? 

Well, there are many levels of that.  I see that doctors, hospitals, and clinics want to use that title so that they’ll attract people who are fed up with drug medicine and want to have an alternative.  Most of the clinics  are very expensive.  Since these alternative clinics need to make money, patient turnover is quite high. In other words, a doctor may only spend 10-15 minutes with their patient. What works with traditional medicine is spending a good amount of time with a person -- an hour or an hour and a half on the first visit. You set up a protocol for the person and then you might just see them every two or three months to monitor their progress.  That’s not the way money is made in our HMO system or in clinics.  They want people to come in for five or ten minutes every week or every few weeks. That’s how money is made in a medical clinic.  So, integrative medicine is something that is for the most part, too expensive for the ordinary citizen. 
              
Most medical doctors don’t have the naturopathic philosophy that is needed to help a person change their lifestyle and change the way they look at their health. Doctors, for the most part, have been trained to think that they know everything there is to know about health and disease and that people come to them for answers. What we need for more appropriate health care is to have a partnership between the doctor and the client.  As I mentioned earlier, 80 percent of conditions are lifestyle oriented. Patients have to take personal responsibility  for their health.  That’s why I started writing books.
              
My first book, which is now called “Natural Prescriptions For Common Ailments,” started out as  a one-page handout to patients designed to help people deal with simple conditions like a cold or a flu.  Most of the time,  doctors end up writing a prescription for a cold, flu or cough. I was simply suggesting that patients turn to natural remedies such as, vitamin C,  Echinacea, garlic, gargling etc…  Most of my patients were quite happy to do “other than drug” therapies and I hardly prescribed any medication at all when I was in practice.
              
Crusador:  Can you tell us about Chapter 2, “Death By Drug Companies?”

That chapter expands on the study that I did for Gary Null.  I also was able to go over Dr. Marcia Angel’s work. She did an editorial when she was still editor of the New England Journal of Medicine called “Is Academic Medicine For Sale?”  Then she wrote quite an incredible blockbuster book, “The Truth About the Drug Companies:  How They Deceive Us And What To Do About It.”  That came out after I wrote the paper “Death By Medicine” for Gary. The timing couldn’t have been better!  Here was an insider, you might say, who was just fed up with drug companies fudging data, hiring people to sign studies that showed how beneficial a drug was and covering up the fact that there were many side effects.
              
It also all came to a head with the whole Vioxx scandal  when Dr. David Graham from the FDA exposed that up to 139,000 people had heart attacks and up to 60,000 died while using Vioxx.  It became very obvious that  drug  companies are only interested in making money and are not interested in making people healthy.  If they were interested in making people healthy, they wouldn’t be selling dangerous drugs.
              
Crusador:  They have a vested interest in seeing their stocks go up.  It’s all about the money and keeping people sick instead of getting people well.  It’s really a shame that it’s come to that today.
              
The bottom line is definitely money. And yes, they want to keep the stockholders happy.  Citizens would be wise to invest their money into ethical companies rather than drug companies that have blood on their hands.
              
Crusador:  That’s a good point. People that don’t agree with what’s going on in modern medicine shouldn’t buy these stocks. Chapter 3 of your book is titled “Death By Health Care Bureaucracy.”  Tell us a little bit about what you get into here?.
              
When I’ve been lobbying in Ottawa and Washington with my health freedom groups -- Friends of Freedom in Canada and Friends of Freedom International in America, we have seen our elected officials and many of them want to do what’s best.  However, we’re facing a tough challenge given that we have to compete against very aggressive drug lobbyists. There are 10 lobbyists for every elected official.Unless the American people stand up for what’s right and express themselves to their elected officials in their home states and in Washington, we’re not going to get anything that we want. Without appropriate action,  the hired lobbyists and drug companies will get what they want.
              
Crusador:  Do you talk about insurance companies when you talk about health care bureaucracy?
              
I really don’t write much about the insurance industry.  Insurance companies stay in business by not paying out claims.  We need an innovative, alternative insurance agency that will compensate for wellness rather than sickness.
              
Crusador: People are forced into this modern medical system because the insurance companies don’t cover alternative medicine.  The whole system is corrupt and needs to change.  I don’t know when that’s going to ever happen, but it needs to happen.
              
That’s right.  Another thing about health care bureaucracy deals with a situation in Canada that occurred in January 2004 where Health Canada legislated our dietary supplements into a drug category.  It wasn’t a law; it was just a regulation by the bureaucracy.  That has created a lot of economic hardship with companies trying to comply.  It’s run a number of companies into bankruptcy and out of business.
              
So you can have health care bureaucracy that claims to be doing their job, but in fact, they’re probably doing the bidding of international trade organizations and pharmaceutical lobbyists who are determined worldwide to put dietary supplements into a drug category.
              
Crusador: I get very angry every time I hear the media report that dietary supplements are unregulated, unsafe, and that they’re hurting people. In our last issue of CRUSADOR Dr. David Graham reported that the FDA rarely pulls a drug off the market, even when they know people are dying from it, yet supplements get the brunt of the bad press. You actually have a chapter in your new book, “Death by Media.”  We’re being totally manipulated and misled by the media which is really just a mouthpiece for the pharmaceutical industry and for the medical establishment. 
               
Yes! I learned a lot about the media through Marshall McLuhan (a Canadian media scientist). Chapter 5, “Death by Propaganda”, explains how we’ve been totally propagandized by the media.   It is incredible how the medical research industry began.

Initially,  they intentionally made people afraid of disease in order to raise funding for the research.  I talk about Sigmund Freud’s nephew, Edward L.  Bernays. He wrote a book called “Crystallizing Public Opinion.”  He said, “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.  Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”
              
So I think people really took that to heart.  Then Bernays went on to launch one of his first ad campaigns for the American Tobacco Company.  He even had medical doctors and journals advertising tobacco for many years (even during the time when we knew tobacco was dangerous).  It became a huge advertising campaign.
              
Then, I write about Albert Lasker who was a Madison Avenue ad man. He founded the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation and became associated with the American Cancer Society. Lasker would get people like the president of the American branch of Hoffman-LaRoche, Elmer Bobst, to start every fund raising speech for medical research by saying one in five of us here will die of cancer. And then he’d enter the element of hope by saying, “We want to cure cancer in our lifetime….donate to the American Cancer Society.”
              
With this fear and hope message, millions of volunteers went door to door. My mother was one of these poor volunteers that collected money to continually research cancer drugs.  And they never did anything about the chemicals that cause cancer or cancer prevention; it was all about referencing cancer drugs. That’s where it began, with an ad man.
           
Crusador: The whole vaccine issue is another area of propaganda.  We’re propagandized to believe that our bodies basically don’t have natural immunity to ward off disease; that we have to rely on man to create all these vaccines with known toxins and carcinogens in them that somehow give us natural immunity. What do you think about this issue?
              
The vaccine industry is huge and some people predict that it may grow. For instance, we’ve noticed a heavy promotion campaign surrounding the flu shot.   Just when we thought we were getting thimerosal, the mercury preservative, out of vaccines for children, they’re promoting flu shots for children from six months on. The flu shots still have thimerosal in them. Vaccines are, as you say, promoted as the only way to ward off diseases.  Most people accept that.  When they had the West Nile virus scare in New York and all down the Eastern seaboard, all of a sudden people were making West Nile vaccines.
              
They’re probably creating vaccines for avian bird flu as well.   But, what we know from traditional medicine and naturopathic medicine is that if your body is healthy, then you can usually withstand most diseases.  And then again, if you do succumb to some disease, there are so many alternative therapies that you can use that we shouldn’t have to go to drugs.
                                     
Crusador: I understand that vaccines deliver  yeast, viruses, bacteria and toxins into the body, which create some of the autoimmune diseases we’re seeing as well. What do you know about this?
            
When I was in medical school there were maybe half a dozen or a dozen autoimmune diseases, and recently I noticed that there were 80 autoimmune diseases.  A friend of mine, Dr. Russell Blaylock, said that we don’t attack a normal body.  We attack a diseased body or a toxic body.  That’s what autoimmune disease is; foreign bodies, toxins or yeast organisms, are being attacked.
             
I’m medical adviser to www.yeastconnection.com, so I do a lot of research on yeast and Candida albicans.  Yeast can produce up to 180 different toxins.  A yeast overgrowth in your gut will release many different types of toxins which will irritate the intestinal lining  causing  micropunctures (holes).  When holes are formed, toxins can then be released and circulated through the body.  Some of them cross-react with human tissue, and then the body attacks those tissues because it thinks there’s an invasion.  Autoimmune diseases are caused by  both our environmental and internal toxicity.
              
Crusador: Let me pick up on another chapter in your book.  Chapter 6 is “Death By Modern Drugs and Procedures.”  Tell us a little bit about what you get into in this chapter.
              
Actually this chapter has the details about the “Death By Medicine” article I wrote for Gary Null.  Most of that information is in the appendix because the “Death By Medicine” paper was abbreviated and published in the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine in the spring of 2005.  People can read the paper in the back of the book.  Only 5 to 20 percent of adverse reactions and medical mistakes are ever reported.  The current number of people who are dying annually due to medical interventions (784,000) could be 2, 3, or 4 times higher.  Our foundation, Live Longer Educational Foundation, is organizing a death registry where the ordinary citizen can enter the reasons for death of their loved ones so that we can start getting a more accurate count  and compare that with the coroner’s reports.  That should be interesting.
                             
Crusador: What do you talk about in Chapter 7, “Death By Modern Science?”              

Well, science is failing us in the areas of lifestyle, nutrition and dietary supplements.  Science needs to study the synergistic effects of combinations of nutrients rather than one single nutrient (such as vitamin C). There are about 80 nutrients that we need on a daily basis.              
We need to see more resources available where people can learn about the value of eating organic, whole foods.  People also need more resources in the area of exercise and emotional support. Instead of funding these types of solution oriented resources, money goes towards research trials in hospitals and in universities.
              
Crusador: In a recent interview we did with Dr. David Graham from the FDA, he stated that  a lot of  scientists are on the payroll of pharmaceutical companies.
              
Oh, yes. The main goal of medical research is to research drugs. They don’t look at anything else because drugs can be patented and then they can get their money back from their research. When I spoke to somebody at the office of dietary supplements under the NIH , she said, “Well, our goal is to study nutrients and the deficiency diseases that are created.”  So I said to her, “Well, what about treating diseases with dietary supplements?” She said, “Oh, we can’t go there.  We can only study deficiency diseases.”   We’re never going to get anywhere if scientists ignore the significance of nutritional deficiencies and how they relate to disease. 
              
Crusador:  What is Chapter 8, “Death by Cancer, Inc.” about?
              
It’s about the business of cancer.  There are some good resources in this chapter.  Dr. Ralph Moss has a tremendous weekly newsletter on the  latest cancer research. In March 2004, Fortune Magazine featured an article called, “Losing the War on Cancer”, written by the executive editor, Clifton Leaf.   He points out that the basic flaw in  cancer research is that  they use animal models with artificially created cancer that are supposed to mimic human disease.  When scientists create cancer in lab animals, and then treat  them with chemotherapy drugs,  they try to apply the results  to humans. 
              
According to Leaf, “Cell lines in tumors growing in mice are drastically different from spontaneous human tumors.”    Scientists have been using this flawed model for decades.  They desperately hold on to this model even though chemotherapy doesn’t work in humans.  I’m reading Daniel Haley’s book right now, “Politics in Healing.”  He has 10 cancer cures that have been suppressed in America.  Dr. Max Gershon started a popular cancer clinic many years ago. His daughter still has a clinic in Tijuana where  they successfully reverse even the worst case scenarios.
              
Crusador: You also have a chapter in your book, “Death by Modern Chemicals.”  This is a big issue.  What do you get into in this chapter?
              
People  who are ill don’t have enough nutrients in their body. Unfortunately, due to poor agricultural practices using large amounts of chemicals, the nutrients in our soil have been depleted.
              
Because we are missing so many nutrients that would normally come from healthy soil, our immune systems become compromised and can’t fight or prevent diseases like cancer. And then to put chemotherapy in a body that’s already toxic and deficient is really almost criminal because it kills off good and bad cells.  Somebody who is very toxic will have a difficult time recovering from the effects of chemotherapy.
              
Crusador: Can you imagine a doctor telling somebody with cancer who has been administered chemotherapy that they shouldn’t take any vitamins or any nutrients because they want to make sure that the chemotherapy can do its job properly to kill the cancer cells? 
          
I know; it is criminal.  But you see, they have drugs that work by stopping certain vitamin processes in the cells.  So, like the antifolate drugs -- if you take folic acid, I guess they think that you’re feeding the cancer cells, but that’s just a minor aspect.  They’re really not looking at the whole picture and the need for the body -- the immune system -- to be able to both fight the cancer and help to detoxify the chemicals.
              
Crusador: You designate a whole chapter in your book to, “Death by Sugar.”  Tell us about this.

Well, sugar is another industry that has a huge lobby in Washington. The most recent story on sugar was in spring 2003 where the UN Food and Agricultural Organization and the World Health Organization condemned a high sugar diet.  They wanted people to only have maximum of 10 percent of the calories in their diet from sugar. I thought that was incredible.  I was all for it.
              
Then various sugar lobby groups including the U.S. National Soft Drink Association stated that this was interference and they lobbied Washington and said that the U.S. should stop paying dues to the UN because it was interfering with business and on and on and on. The World Health Organization was trying to do something, but they were attacked immediately by business because it’s not good for business. We have 60 percent of the population that is obese or overweight and we have an epidemic of diabetes. Nobody is admitting that diabetes is due to sugar because everybody is afraid of being sued by the sugar companies or the sugar lobby groups.
              
Crusador: Do you think that all these alternative choices for sugar are more dangerous than sugar itself, like aspartame, neotame, sucralose, Splenda, etc.?
              
Yes. They are probably worse because they’re chemicals.  Refined sugar  hits the bloodstream like a ton of bricks, overworking the pancreas , causing  insulin resistance and, eventually  diabetes. Chemical sweeteners, like aspartame, can affect the brain, hormones, and all parts of the body. There are three components of aspartame --  phenylalanine, aspartic acid  (two very powerful neurotransmitters) and methanol (wood alcohol).  Wood alcohol can cause blurred vision and even blindness.  People who drink liters of diet pop  are getting very toxic amounts of methanol. Even one can of artificially sweetened pop has a toxic level of methanol.
              
Crusador: What’s really amazing to me is that all these diet drinks are being marketed to fit teenagers now.  Pepsi and Coca-Cola are running commercials on TV showing attractive, young teenagers drinking diet soda.  It’s unbelievable! Why would they want to push diet soda on a thin teenager?
              
So they can sell it.  And what’s even more amazing is that aspartame actually causes people to crave sugar. It also adversely affects your hormones and your metabolism, so people on these diet products actually gain more weight. Since the introduction of diet pop, obesity has increased. If diet products were working, obesity should be on the decline.
              
Crusador: Another chapter in your book is, “Death by Denial.”  People seem to be in total denial as far as what’s making them sick and overweight. Is that what you touch on in this chapter?
              
Yes. I even refer to Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s work on the five stages of death and dying that people go through.  When it comes to the death of our society, the death of our culture, we are in complete denial of what’s going on.  You see, we don’t think governments or business could be that sinister -- that they would rather make money than be concerned about human health.   Instead of accepting this fact, people have  put their head in the sand.  They’ve got to wake up to the reality that the government and corporations are corrupt and simply don’t care about our health. What Marshall McLuhan said is that only puny secrets need protection.  Big secrets are protected by public incredulity, and that’s where we are now. 
              
One way to defend ourselves is to take better care of our health. Another defense is to better educate ourselves by joining groups like ours  -- Friends of Freedom and Friends of Freedom International (www.friendsoffreedom.org and www.friendsoffreedominternational.org).   We have joined groups and we continue to lobby Washington and Ottawa. We regularly attend Codex meetings so that we can monitor their proceedings and, hopefully, have a positive influence on their outcome.
              
Crusador: The last chapter of your book is, “Death by Lifestyle.” What’s that about?
              
One of the studies I quote in the chapter is by Dr. Gerberding. She’s the head of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).  A March 2004 paper is titled “The Actual Causes of Death in the United States in the Year 2000.”  We know about tobacco deaths but we don’t realize that tobacco deaths are the highest cause of actual death, which is 435,000.  A close second is poor diet and physical activity at 400,000.  Alcohol consumption is 85,000.  What happens is these deaths get translated into lung disease and heart disease and diabetes and all the effects of tobacco, poor diet and physical inactivity.  I put this in here because I thought people really need to see these figures and understand that they do have control over their life.  Ultimately, people can choose to exercise and eat right.      

If you make healthy choices, you’ll feel better and won’t need to see a medical doctor who will only end up writing a prescription.
              
The promotion of blood pressure medication and cholesterol medication is at an all-time high.  We’re being told that a blood pressure that’s even a few points above normal should be treated immediately; cholesterol, even a few points above normal should be treated immediately -- with drugs -- instead of encouraging people to make healthy lifestyle changes.
              
Crusador: Well, Carolyn, you’ve given us a lot of good information here, and I know we just scratched the surface.  You go into a lot more detail on all these issues in your book.  Is there anything else you’d like to say  to our readers?
              
I would just say that even though we’ve talked about a lot of very serious issues which may make people think that we’re in a very bad state, I do believe   that we number far more than the people in power.  I would encourage your readers to lobby  their elected representative and send letters to the  President and to all elected officials to tell them what you want.  Otherwise, the paid lobbyists are going to get their way.
              
Crusador: Thank you for everything, Carolyn.