Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 28/2/2013 (2974 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
Do you know every day, 290 North American citizens are killed by prescription drugs? To kill the same number of people, a jumbo jet would have to crash every day. So why are natural remedies being removed from health-food stores while drugs that kill remain available?
"Health Canada has been raiding health-food stores, terrorizing proprietors and confiscating natural food supplements," Dr. Zoltan Rona, an expert on natural remedies, recently told me.
"Could you help to stop it?" he asked.
Rona related a New York Times report that the government's primary suspect in 542 deaths was Pradax, a blood-thinning agent. Moreover, when this drug causes bleeding, there is no antidote to stop it, yet Health Canada has done nothing to remove Pradax from the market. However, it has removed a competitor, the soy-derived enzyme Nattokinase, a safe, effective, natural blood thinner that has not harmed anyone and has been used for centuries in Japan.
While researching this column, I interviewed several other authorities who were concerned other natural remedies are no longer available. I also discovered a most disturbing fact: In Germany, a doctor's prescription is now required to obtain vitamin C! A red light flashed as I've recently reported that Medi-C Plus, a powder that contains a high concentration of vitamin C and lysine, can prevent and reverse coronary heart disease.
Germans now pay $45 for 90 tablets of 500 milligrams of vitamin C. Since I take several thousand milligrams of Medi-C Plus daily, this asinine ruling would cost me $3,600 annually for vitamin C.
This shows how far governments go to control natural remedies. It's sheer, unadulterated madness since there is no known toxic amount of vitamin C. For instance, it's been proven safe to give intravenous injections of several hundred thousand milligrams of vitamin C intravenously day after day to fight infection.
Today, many people are also taking Sytrinol, a natural remedy consisting of citrus and palm-fruit extract that decreases the body's total cholesterol level, bad cholesterol and triglycerides and increases good cholesterol. For the moment, it's still available and there's no scientific reason it should be removed, but if it happens, patients will be forced to switch to cholesterol-lowering drugs whose safety record leaves much to be desired.
Alan Cassels, a drug policy researcher at the University of Victoria, says, "Cholesterol-lowering drugs are not worth the risk and history will regard CLDs as an unmitigated scandal in medicine."
Readers know I share this view, but hell will freeze over before Health Canada raises an alarm and closes the door on these risky multibillion-dollar products.
Money and high-paid lobbyists have won the day in Ottawa and Washington.
Other North Americans are taking products such as BioSil to prevent osteoporosis (fragile bones). This natural silicon product safely deposits calcium and phosphate into bone. It's even more effective if used along with vitamin D3, which helps absorb calcium from the bowel, and vitamin K2 that deposits calcium and phosphate into bone where they belong, rather than into arteries where they cause trouble.
Will these people be forced to take drugs such as Fosamax and Actonel that have been associated with unusual fractures and degeneration of the jaw bone?
If government bureaucrats are honestly interested in the welfare of medical consumers, the best way for them to make an assessment is to examine records of the dead bodies. Data collected from 57 poison control centres in the U.S. found in 2010 there were no deaths from the use of vitamin and herbal supplements -- this in spite of the fact during this year there were 60-billion doses of nutritional supplements taken.
So where will these amateur forensic bureaucrats find the dead bodies? It doesn't require a long tedious search. The Journal of the American Medical Association says there are 60,000 deaths from drug use in the U.S. and 10,000 in Canada every year and is now the fourth leading cause of death after cancer, heart disease, and stroke.
The point is prescription drugs can kill, natural remedies never. It's time Health Canada learned this message.
To read more about natural remedies, see the website www.docgiff.com. Comments to info@docgiff.com