Mediacheck

The Media Doctor Is In

Alan Cassels takes on the 'disease mongerers.'

By Danielle Egan, 17 Mar 2008, TheTyee.ca

Alan Cassels

Cassels: News 'beast' is hungry.

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When Alan Cassels reads the newspaper, he often shakes his head at the way medical issues are misreported. Whether the reason is simple human error or the need to sell papers with sensationalistic headlines, the result, too often, is a news story that raises hopes, or fears, without the substance to back it up.

Take one example. While some major newspapers crowed about the potential of an osteoporosis drug called Evista to significantly reduce the risk of breast cancer, Cassels, a Victoria-based health policy researcher, tracked down the published clinical trial data. Missing in many reports was the fact that Evista has a high rate of potential serious side effects like stroke, blood clots, and so on.

That day, the idea for Media Doctor was born, though it would take a few years before he could launch the site in late 2005 with a $20,000 grant from Industry Canada. "The goal was to create a sort of audit for medical journalists. We all need feedback and fair evaluation if we're going to improve," says Cassels, who has researched medical reporting for the past 15 years and is affiliated with University of Victoria's School of Health Information Science.

The Media Doctor panel of professors and researchers rate mainstream news articles on a number of factors, including "evidence," "harm of treatment" and "disease mongering." They also provide a report card-style media comparison chart. The Globe currently has the highest score at 57 per cent while most mainstream media sources are lagging at medical coverage, with the Victoria Times-Colonist last, earing a 34.

"Top notch medical journalists are in many cases getting the big issues completely wrong and make exaggerations and bombastically misleading comments about treatments when the [medical] studies didn't make such claims at all," says Cassels. "It's been reined in a bit and I think journalists have also been embarrassed by recent drug disasters. When a drug is unceremoniously yanked from the market, like Vioxx, which was responsible for harming or killing 50,000 people in the U.S., journalists should be thinking, 'Are we contributing to this?'"

Viral misinformation

The misinformation has continued through 2007, particularly around viruses. "There's been a lot of disease-mongering around the flu virus," says Cassels who just released his second book The ABCs of Disease Mongering. "You read stuff put out by media and public health agencies that a vaccine will prevent 70 to 90 per cent of the flu. But the real benefits are less than five per cent," For Cassels, the most "troubling" media bolstering has happened around the HPV vaccine, with the recent continued media assertion that it has a 90 per cent efficacy at preventing cervical pre-cancers, while the trial data actually notes only a 17 per cent reduction in these pre-cancerous lesions. "The vaccine is fraught with all kinds of problems," Cassels declares. "This is where mainstream journalism is failing us."

The patient will see you now

Of course, Cassels isn't placing the blame solely on the media. He's heard too many lamentations from doctors about patients requesting the latest magic bullet advertised on TV. Canadians now fill 400 million scripts yearly at a cost of over $20 billion.

Spending on drugs doubled between 1998 and 2004 and while the public seems enamoured by quick-fix cures hawked through aggressive pharmacorp advertising, The Health Council of Canada recently called for an outright ban of direct-to-consumer drug ads in a report titled Safe and Sound: Optimizing Prescribing Behaviours.

The report also raises concerns that doctors aren't always educated about new drugs, so they're often inappropriately prescribed and harmful.

A sick system?

The medical field is plagued with quality control problems according to researchers like Cassels. "Health care is a highly political game these days and 50 per cent of clinical trials are funded by [the pharmaceutical] industry," he points out. "It's problematic that there isn't often a level of independence in clinical trials. Pharmaceutical companies play by the same rules as businesses that make cars or computers: produce a product that sells. They've always been profit-driven.

"What has changed though is the extent to which Health Canada and CIHR are partnering with pharmacorps to do research, taking 'fees.' More and more, they're concerned with a commercial bent. The client is no longer the public, it's the company paying the fees. It's now pretty clear that influences decision-making and ultimately public health. You get drug disasters like Vioxx. That probably wouldn't have happened with an independently funded health agency. And strong public activism."

Yet the media underreports these governmental biases and conflicts of interest, according to Cassels. Meanwhile health researchers are increasingly donning the PR hat before a drug or device has been thoroughly tested and peer-reviewed, "pushing for media coverage because their next grant depends on the importance of their work," says Cassels.

For reporters and their editors, he issues this warning. "I wouldn't trust a doctor with a PR agent sending out press releases. Newspapers probably get stacks of these faxes. Good journalists shouldn't take that stuff at face value. But there's the sense you have to feed the beast every day."

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[Tyee]

Danielle Egan is a contributing editor to The Tyee.

17 Comments:

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  • skeptikool

    3 years ago

    Let the truth be told

    This article is much appreciated.

    I've always held great distrust of the sickness industry and in particular, the pharmaceutical side of it. That memorable line from John Le Carre's The Constant Gardener comes to mind. I paraphrase: "Pharmaceuticals are right up there with the arms industry."

    The harm done by prescription drugs and over-the-counter drugs should be as exposed as that of illegal drugs.

    Let's expand the war on drugs.

  • Fiat lux

    3 years ago

    Even 50 years ago the

    Even 50 years ago the overall cancer rate was about 2%, and cancers in children were unheard of. Now look at the chemicals in the agribiz foods n the stores and start thinking.

    It was in the papers even then that the people of Europe have never been healthier than in the early postwar years, surviving on starvation rations and no medications.

    As an 18 year old veteran of the Hungarian army, I ended up in a German MASH hospital in Austria, with a badly infected legwound in May 1945.

    The hospital was located in former artillery training huts, under the most primitive conditions, with wooden floors, patients in bunkbeds. No sheets on the beds. The laundry was done by hand by the refugee parents of my future and present wife for some food and a room in one of the huts.

    After I recovered I volunteered as an orderly, to avoid being sent to a POW camp, also having already been madly in love .

    Part of my job was to help in the operating room, located in the former dining room of the barracks. Some floodlights, but no other equipment, anesthesia by a nurse dripping ether onto a mask, while the
    patient was counting till he fell asleep.

    By then the hospital was specializing in leg amputations which were done twice. No antibiotics, and virtually no medications.

    The first time the wound was left open to drain and heal and then the scar tissue cut out and a cushion formed over the bone for the artificial leg.

    That was what we were doing 3-4 a day, for months. I was in my old uniform, covered down with a sheet with a hole in it, where the leg was stuck through, while I was holding, twisting and turning it on the doctors orders. My hands and pants were often covered with blood.

    The doctors and the operating nurses had white coats and rubber gloves, but nobody had any masks and we were all, the patients and staff, were starving, eating junk, garbage, and the hospital's old horses.

    After that I had to go around the huts with a large bottle of distilled water with sulpha dissolved in it squeezing it under the bandages with a long sringe. The bandages were either paper, or washed and rewashed a hundred times. All had big, yellow patches on them from the sulpha.

    We started with 600 patients and never lost single one, had no illnesses, no colds, no flu, no infections, everybody left healthy as possible.

    I have a friend who was doing the same job in a hospital in Minnesota during the Korean war, under the best sanitary conditions, the best foods, all the antibiotics and medications available then.
    They had serious health problems and the infection rate was 30%.

    Now, at 81 and close to 80, we haven't taken any medications for many years, are working full time on our ranch and on various projects and are healthy as can be

    In the meantime some of our old friends have dozens of medications all over their houses, in and out of hospitals, sick as dogs and waiting to die.

    Ed Deak, Big Lake.

  • Booker

    3 years ago

    Peddlers

    On the one hand you have big pharmaceutical companies peddling unnecessary new meds, and on the other you have peddlers of woo trying to sell snake oil and pseudoscience (e.g. how many times do we have to be shown that homeopathy is loony). I would like to see more impartial research into medical treatments, but that means the Conservatives will have to actually fund science, and they don't like science. Also, I think pharmaceutical companies should have to do research, as should the alt med practitioners. It's their responsibility to prove, in double-blinded randomized trials, that their products are effective.

  • Fiat lux

    3 years ago

    Homeopathy is far from

    Homeopathy is far from loony. It is based on solid facts and results, proven by millions. We've been practicing it for years and are the better for it.

    We have friends who have been suffering with chronic illnesses, like asthma, for 30-40 years, without any results, but when switched to homeopathy, they never had any problems again. Now their whole families are practicing it.

    I came down and been paralyzed by heavy metal poisoning 5 years ago, collected in my fruit tree spraying days over 50 years ago. All the medical profession could do for me were painkillers.

    It took agonizing months, I would sooner be dead than going through them again, haven't slept for 4 weeks, but a homeopathic practitioner got me on my feet and I never looked back.

    It was absolutely amazing to see how the poisons were locking and swelling up different joints in different areas, from one minute and hour to another, and how the remedies worked, literally in minutes, until I was totally cured.

    Now we don't use anything else and are healthy, without loading up with more poisons.

    Ed Deak.

  • Booker

    3 years ago

    Homeopathic theory

    http://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/homeo.html

    Quote:
    "Homeopathic products are made from minerals, botanical substances, and several other sources. If the original substance is soluble, one part is diluted with either nine or ninety-nine parts of distilled water and/or alcohol and shaken vigorously (succussed); if insoluble, it is finely ground and pulverized in similar proportions with powdered lactose (milk sugar). One part of the diluted medicine is then further diluted, and the process is repeated until the desired concentration is reached. Dilutions of 1 to 10 are designated by the Roman numeral X (1X = 1/10, 3X = 1/1,000, 6X = 1/1,000,000). Similarly, dilutions of 1 to 100 are designated by the Roman numeral C (1C = 1/100, 3C = 1/1,000,000, and so on). Most remedies today range from 6X to 30X, but products of 30C or more are marketed.

    A 30X dilution means that the original substance has been diluted 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times. Assuming that a cubic centimeter of water contains 15 drops, this number is greater than the number of drops of water that would fill a container more than 50 times the size of the Earth. Imagine placing a drop of red dye into such a container so that it disperses evenly. Homeopathy's "law of infinitesimals" is the equivalent of saying that any drop of water subsequently removed from that container will possess an essence of redness. Robert L. Park, Ph.D., a prominent physicist who is executive director of The American Physical Society, has noted that since the least amount of a substance in a solution is one molecule, a 30C solution would have to have at least one molecule of the original substance dissolved in a minimum of 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 ,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000 molecules of water. This would require a container more than 30,000,000,000 times the size of the Earth."

    That's the Law of Infinitesimals. The Law of Similars is even more interesting.

  • mopled

    3 years ago

    Flu vaccine statistic impressive NOT!

    I knew the flu vaccine was worse than useless, but the "less than 5%" benefit is truly impressive.

    Here's a link I've wanted to post for a long time.
    http://www.cbc.ca/airfarce/vidplayer/AF_single_player.html?/season13/051202m&playerType=wmp

  • skeptikool

    3 years ago

    This fresh from my inbox:

    From a longtime, health activist:

    "Another reason health - whoops! - sickness care is the fastest growing failing business in the country and - btw - it is not for nothing that the top 10 of the Fortune 500 are drug manufacturers......" CW

    Big Pharma caught price fixing

    excerpt:

    Hagens Berman: Eleven Defendants Settle in Average Wholesale Price Litigation

    Two major defendants - AstraZeneca and Bristol-Myers Squib - not part of
    settlement

    BOSTON, March 7 /PRNewswire/ -- Today eleven major pharmaceutical companies, including Abbott Laboratories (NYSE: ABT) and Watson Pharmaceuticals (NYSE: WPI), agreed to a $125 million nationwide settlement
    in the average wholesale price (AWP) litigation filed in 2002 by consumers
    and insurance companies, which claimed the defendants intentionally inflated reports of the average wholesale prices on certain prescription
    drugs.

    The published AWP is used to set the price that consumers making
    Medicare Part B co-payments and Medicare pay for the drug, as well as
    insurance companies and other third-party payors. The lawsuit contends that
    consumers and third-party payors paid more than they should because of the
    drug companies' false AWP reporting.

    Seattle-based Hagens Berman, co-lead counsel in the case, announced
    today's settlement which includes branded and generic drugs used primarily
    in the treatment of cancer, HIV and other serious illnesses. Under the
    terms of the settlement 82.5 percent of the settlement fund is designated
    for third-party payors' claims and the remaining 17.5 percent is designated
    for consumer claims.

    "This is a very good settlement for third-party payors and consumers,"said Steve Berman, Hagens Berman managing partner. "The battle isn't over yet, but every settlement signifies that our claims are just and these drug
    companies have many years of damage to repay to drug purchasers."

    The defendants included in today's settlement are Abbott Laboratories,
    Amgen Inc., Aventis Pharmaceuticals Inc., Hoechst Marion Roussel, Baxter
    Healthcare Corp., Baxter International Inc., Bayer Corporation, Dey, Inc.,
    Fujisawa Healthcare, Inc., Fujisawa USA, Inc., Immunex Corporation,
    Pharmacia Corporation, Pharmacia & Upjohn LLC, Sicor, Inc., Gensia, Inc.,
    Gensia Sicor Pharmaceuticals, Inc., Watson Pharmaceuticals, Inc., and ZLB
    Behring, L.L.C.

    Drugs covered in this settlement include Aranesp, Epogen, Neupogen,
    Neulasta, Anzemet, Ferrlecit and Infed.

  • Fiat lux

    3 years ago

    Booker, I too have read

    Booker,

    I too have read all those statistics years ago, and being a non believer, they make no difference to me. All I'm interested in is what works and what doesn't.

    If I'd stayed with the orthodox medical people, today I would be a cripple, or dead, as they had no idea what to do to drive the arsenic, lead, liquid nicotine, DDT, etc. etc. accumulation from my body, that has killed my old workmates and millions of other victims of the Green Revolution, with the worst accumulation of cancers many years ago.

    After the good, "expert" Cambridge professors assured us that they were harmless and we didn't need protection.

    Since then, every time I saw new doctors I told them what is in my body and they all just ignored it.

    When they broke loose for some reason 5 1/2 years ago, I was helpless and paralyzed. My friends had to feed our stock, my wife had to put my clothes on and sometimes fed me, as I couldn't even lift a spoon.

    The homeopathic practitioner took me on as a challenge, as I was already 75 and had no medication in my body. We talked on the phone 2-3 times a day and she told me which one of those "ridiculous and impossible" remedies to take to drive out the poisons.

    My left ankle may have been swollen like a football and my right thumb and lower arm also swollen and locked up. After I took the treatments, the previous swellings may have disappeared and my right shoulder and ankle locked up, showing clearly that something was moving around. So it went on for weeks, all told for 3 months with gradual improvements.

    Sometimes the remedies didn't work and made things worse. She would then tell me to take an "LM". Now this is the biggest laughing stock fraud in the eyes of the faithful.

    An LM consists of the dosage that didn't work, dissolved in a half glass of water. Then had to take 1 teaspoon of the solution
    and drop it into another half glass of clean water and drink it. Within minutes the pain disappeared etc. In short ther remedy was dissolved to an even higher, impossible degree.

    Sounds crazy? Perhaps, but it worked and stil works far better than any medications we ever took. I've known my wife for 63 years, married for 57, In all these years I can't remember a single prescription drug that hadn't given her sometimes dangerous, life threatening reactions.

    She never had any from homeopathics and we are thriving on them as are all the people we know, while others are going down the drain. When we hear of an old friend on bloodthinners, we say goodbye.

    Regardless the statistics by the "experts" on google.

    Ed Deak, Big Lake.

  • siamdave

    3 years ago

    a start!

    Watching the media in terms of what they do with medical stories is a good start, but they need to be watched on pretty much everything these days. Most notably for now, the financial meltdown occurring everywhere, and not a single mainstream media is daring to go to the source of it all - the fact that private banks are creating 98% or more of our money supply, and getting interest on it every year. In Canada, for instance, that is over two trillion dollars each year of bank debt, which they expect interest for. This is insane, with inflation and too much money created for speculation leading to all the problems we see today. Explained in more detail at Banketeering - how the banks have been stealing trillions from you, and the tap is still running http://www.rudemacedon.ca/dlp/box/box01-money.html

  • frank2

    3 years ago

    HOMEOPATHY

    If it works for you, great.

    Just as faith in God has brought tremendous comfort to innumerable people, so, apparently, does homeopathy. (Even if the probability of God is no larger than ingesting the stated ingredient in a 30X homeopathic remedy.)

    Of course, the particular God may vary. I doubt Jupiter works today. Just as homeopaths may tout different active ingredients for the same illness.

    The important points are that we don't require everyone to accept our beliefs and that we don't require others to pay for our faith-based cures, UNLESS the efficaciousness and absense of excessive adverse side effects of those cures have been RELIABLY demonstrated.

  • Fiat lux

    3 years ago

    Frank........I'm a cold

    Frank........I'm a cold blooded realist, a non believer and have lost any faith in anything many years ago. The only thing I believe is when I see practical results I can see and touch.

    I didn't know a damn thing about homeopathy and still know very little, but I can see the results, which are good enough for me.

    It had absolutely nothing to do with any faith. My body and skin has been covered and saturated with the worst poisons for 7 years. Our skin and hair below our caps was yellow from the constant exposure to the spray blowbacks. My friends have died one after the other, as farmworkers have been all over the world since the chemical farming crime of the Green Revolution was forced on us.

    You can't get rid of major poisons in your body with faith and the doctors had no idea what to do, except painkillers, which would have killed me. Homeopathy worked and it is good enough for me. Just as it has been to other people with decades of chronic illnesses.

    It was that simple. Nothing to do with any bloody faiths, or beliefs.

    Ed Deak.

  • frank2

    3 years ago

    Homeopathy worked and it is good enough for me

    Dear Ed

    Glad you have experienced the cure you have, and I don't doubt your word for a moment.

    It would be a big leap to use such personal experiences as a basis for approving homeopathy in general.

    Such experiences would provide a basis for engaging in appropriate tests of efficacy, perhaps, if we had a health system which sought cures irrespective of whether they promised enormous profits to their proponents. (Something not possible with testing remedies in the public domain.)

    May I add, I have enjoyed all your posts.

  • Fiat lux

    3 years ago

    Dear Frank, I knew nothing

    Dear Frank,

    I knew nothing much about homeopathy until a friend suggested at the time that I should try it, seeing the state I was in.

    My wife has always been very interested in health, which shows in our present state, and after that she went into it seriously, buying a number of textbooks, publications, talking to many people, etc..

    It is a long established science, based on the inbuilt capacity of the body to heal itself. Something modern medical science has long forgotten and replaced with the artificial, external blocking of illnesses.

    The practitioners have to go through years of rigorous training and examinations, absorbing thick textbooks. "Faith" is nowhere mentioned and the practitioners just laugh when somebody uses the word.

    My wife had a bad accident yesterday, when she was walking our dog and when she took off she fell, twisting her left arm. We spent 5 hours in the hospital's emergency yesterday, then 4 more today, for the results of a CT scan.

    The top of the bone is broken at the shoulder and she was told to carry it in a sling for 4 weeks, etc.

    2 years ago a cow backed out of the barn very violently and the door hit my wife, flying 6' according to witnesses. Again, her left arm was hurt, plus her pelvic bone cracked, 4 days in hospital, paralyzed with pain.

    When she left the hospital loaned her a walker for 3 months and told she can reborrow it for longer if she needed it. She stopped using it after 2 weeks. I made her a couple of walking sticks. She was using them for a week, then one for another week and in 4 weeks she was working out in the garden.

    She was 78 at the time and now a firm believer in homeopathics with millions all over the world. Not a fanatic, but a firm believer, based on solid success.

    I could tell you all kinds of such stories we've learned of since then, but I would like to know, why this frantic denial of facts, based on some google stories by special interests.

    When we came to Canada in 1955 I had very serious back problem with 2 herniated discs. Again all the doctors could give me were pain killers, until somebody suggested chiropractic. Never heard of it. Unknown at the time in Europe and in England. I tried it and it worked. I had relapses, but no problems. Still go for monthly visits

    At that time the medical profession looked at chiropractors like worms creeping out of a manure pile.Now doctors, even neuro and ortho surgeons advice people to seek chiropractic help.

    So, what has changed, except prejudice ?

    How long do you think my wife will have her arm in a sling now that Spring is here? She was already talking to our homeopathic friend and help is on the way.

    Glad you like at least some of my blurb, which should show that I ain't no "faith" believer. This is why I torture economists and politicians selling ideologies.

    By the way, we donated $250. toward that CT scanner a few years back. Glad we did.

    Cheers, Ed.

  • mvuk250

    3 years ago

    LAWYER WANTED TO TAKE ON UK VIOXX

    IS THERE ANY ONE WHO CAN REPRESENT 250 VIOXX CASES IN THE UK, CONTACT PLEASE,flightsim3@hotmail.com
    LOCKSLAW NEWJERSY, HAS SEEN MY CASE 619. THANKYOU CW. uk.

  • zalm

    3 years ago

    Big Ed

    Congratulations on your success with homeopathy. My mother-in-law had some success with it too. however, it is incorrect to say it is scientific. It is a practice, one grounded in long years of experience, but it is not a science. A science produces demonstrably-repeatable results, formed by theory and capable of a high degree of repeatability by any competent practioner in randomized double-blind studies, the gold-standard of the scientific method.

    As you will note, the pharmaceutical industry frequently does not meet this standard either.

    Nor do you know what millions of your compatriots died of. You have made assumptions that are probably reasonably accurate, but you rely for your conclusions on the same faulty scientific reporting that Cassells takes to task in his article.

    By all means, be a cheerleader for homeopathy - you won't do our health budget any harm. But if you use the same tactics as your opponents, don't expect any big gains, except from the gullible who sway with any prevailing wind, but do not actively seek success because the work is too hard.

  • zalm

    3 years ago

    Bang on, Media Doctor

    Health research is a big business. It's very sexy - it looks like the 6-49 to anyone observing casually from the outside, especially government and insiders. But big research is essentially a money pit with no real returns compared to the massive investment thrown at it, especially when you consider that the only thing paying for those returns are....tax dollars.

    Children's Hospital will shortly open a new research facility to much hoopla and fanfare. Lesser known will be that there will only be one lab in the basement - the rest of this over-budget $100-million building will be devoted to the Foundation's offices and donor spaces, and a few miscellaneous spaces and lecture halls where the self-satisfied can pat themselves on the back.

    Meanwhile, a small denominational extended-care facility in Richmond of my personal acquaintance has sought for seven years to expand its beds to serve the large number of "bed-blockers" that the government promised in 2005 to eliminate with 5000 new beds. To date, only 400 have been built, and we have built none of them. Our $22 million in funding was in place, our design was done, an agreement to purchase property was in place and City Council actively sought our project to go ahead to ease the strain on other facilities it funded.

    Through massive bureaucratic bungling (the creation and enlargment of the health authorities where now 9000 people push the paper that 3000 used to in the old Ministry of Health), there is now no more money for any extended care beds in BC, and our project has been put on indefinite hold. We are not allowed to put in place our own funding (now risen to over $56 million) and build it.

    But there's lots of money to GIVE more than $340 million to research at Children's and at UBC without the benefit of the PPPartnership.

    I guess old folks can go to hell.

  • Fiat lux

    3 years ago

    Zalm..... The concept and

    Zalm.....

    The concept and definition of science is so corrupted that it has become what people, and so called scientists believe in.

    We now have scientists calling each other dirty names across the whole spectrum, pushing their own pet ideas, theories and what they're being paid for.

    We have scientists who talk about the dangers of climate change,then those who deny it. Chemical monocropping and GM foods, developed and promoted by scientists, killing and making people sick, while those who question the "science of the Green Revolution and GM foods" and try to warn people of its dangers are being vilified, fired from tenures etc.

    How about the development and use of DU ammo, now destroying the lives of millions,
    the psychological warfare promoting theories and products, not to mention the dozens of medications people take to cancel out the harmful side effects of the previous ones?

    I mentioned the accident my wife had on Monday morning. After the CT scan, showing the broken shoulder bone on Tuesday, she was told to keep her arm in a sling for 4 weeks. She was in great pain on Wednesday. The Tylenol didn't help, only upset her stomach and made things worse.

    Now she's taking homeophatic remedies, not painkillers, the pain is almost gone, she can move her arm and out of the sling for long periods. She can't lift her arm at the shoulder, but is quite functional at lower levels and well on the way of recovery. I expect that within 2 weeks she'll be almost
    back to normal.

    She'll be 80 in June. If these are not proven and measurable results, what are they? Are you certain the questioning of such results is not based on simple prejudice and definitely not on experience?

    I mentioned how chiropractors used to be vilified and called dirty names by other medical practitioners, now our chiropractor can go to the hospital and look at the Xrays and CT scans without any questions.

    I think it would be a better world if some of these competing "sciences" would get together in objective and logical meetings and figure out what's the best way and not what's being promoted by special interests for profits.

    We're not into any religions ,faiths, or ideologies, and look at things and life strictly from the factual, practical angle, whether something works, or not? This is why we're working with organic agriculture, because we've seen and can see the terrible damage that has been and being done by chemicals in foods.

    I have to laugh when textbooks and practitioners describe economics and politics as a science, while the world is going downhill at an accelerating rate.

    The bloody fools can't even figure out the simplest physical realities, like that all forms of competition must increase costs.

    Ed Deak.

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