Health freedom is becoming more of an illusion every day. If you do not yet know what the FDA, NAFTA, CAFTA, and the WTO are doing to erode your rights, then you are in for a shock. Human life would benefit tremendously if all of those entities would disappear as quickly as possible. Your freedom of choice is under attack by them every day. Read more to see today’s propaganda.

And, most of all, keep these thoughts in mind:

“If people let the government decide what foods they eat and what medicines they take, their bodies will soon be in as sorry a state as are the souls who live under tyranny.” Thomas Jefferson

(We have NOT followed Jefferson’s advice.)

“Unless we put medical freedom into the Constitution, the time will come when medicine will organize into an underground dictatorship….To restrict the art of healing to one class of men and deny equal privileges to others will constitute the Bastille of medical science. All such laws are un-American and despotic and have no place in a republic….The Constitution of this republic should make special privilege for medical freedom as well as religious freedom.” Dr. Benjamin Rush, signer of the Declaration of Independence

(The founders did NOT put medical freedom into the constitution. Now we, indeed, have an extensive system of despotic health laws in place, just as Dr. Rush predicted.)

Today’s Propaganda

The medical-pharmaceutical cartel puts out a continuous stream of so-called medical studies of supplements. They are consistently funded by a small department at the National Institutes of Health, called the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. Nearly all of the studies funded by this agency somehow fail to show positive results from natural medicine. What a surprise!

News headline – “Study” Joint-pain pills are ineffective”
(Arizona Republic, September 18, 2010)

Stated purpose of the study: To evaluate the efficacy of glucosamine and chondroitin supplements against joint pain.

Unstated purpose of the study: To show that these supplements are ineffective.

Results: These supplements are ineffective. Surprise!

Here is the published abstract in the actual journal:

BMJ. 2010 Sep 16;341:c4675. doi: 10.1136/bmj.c4675.

Effects of glucosamine, chondroitin, or placebo in patients with osteoarthritis of hip or knee: network meta-analysis.

Wandel S, Jüni P, Tendal B, Nüesch E, Villiger PM, Welton NJ, Reichenbach S, Trelle S.

Institute of Social and Preventive Medicine, University of Bern, Switzerland.

OBJECTIVE: To determine the effect of glucosamine, chondroitin, or the two in combination on joint pain and on radiological progression of disease in osteoarthritis of the hip or knee. Design Network: meta-analysis. Direct comparisons within trials were combined with indirect evidence from other trials by using a Bayesian model that allowed the synthesis of multiple time points. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE: Pain intensity. Secondary outcome was change in minimal width of joint space. The minimal clinically important difference between preparations and placebo was prespecified at -0.9 cm on a 10 cm visual analogue scale. DATA SOURCES: Electronic databases and conference proceedings from inception to June 2009, expert contact, relevant websites. Eligibility criteria for selecting studies: Large scale randomised controlled trials in more than 200 patients with osteoarthritis of the knee or hip that compared glucosamine, chondroitin, or their combination with placebo or head to head. Results: 10 trials in 3803 patients were included. On a 10 cm visual analogue scale the overall difference in pain intensity compared with placebo was -0.4 cm (95% credible interval -0.7 to -0.1 cm) for glucosamine, -0.3 cm (-0.7 to 0.0 cm) for chondroitin, and -0.5 cm (-0.9 to 0.0 cm) for the combination. For none of the estimates did the 95% credible intervals cross the boundary of the minimal clinically important difference. Industry independent trials showed smaller effects than commercially funded trials (P=0.02 for interaction). The differences in changes in minimal width of joint space were all minute, with 95% credible intervals overlapping zero. Conclusions: Compared with placebo, glucosamine, chondroitin, and their combination do not reduce joint pain or have an impact on narrowing of joint space. Health authorities and health insurers should not cover the costs of these preparations, and new prescriptions to patients who have not received treatment should be discouraged.

Comment

The public (you) has no defense against studies that seem reputable, are published in major scientific journals (in this case, the British Medical Journal), and were conducted by medical researchers at high-powered research institutions (in this case, University of Bern, Switzerland).

If the abstract seems like a bunch of statistical smoke and mirrors to you, then join the club. This study is what is called a meta-analysis, which is a comparison of several previously published studies. It really does not take a lot of effort to do a 10-trial meta analysis, so I do not know why it took 8 researchers to do it (actually, I do know, although the reason has nothing to do with the science itself).

Meta analyses are invalid statistically, just by the nature of the assumptions that have to be met by statistical formulas. And choosing the criteria for trials to be included automatically limits any comparison with those that have shown positive results. There are plenty.

Actually, I am pretty annoyed by the newspaper article that set me off on exposing this little piece of propaganda. In fact, I realize that I may not seem coherent at the moment. I am pretty steamed up at today’s headline. You can see my point, I hope. Now I’m going to have to go out and run a few miles to let off the adrenaline that came out of this whole thing as I sat with my first cup of coffee, calmly (at the beginning) reading the morning paper.

Stay on your toes and don’t believe much of anything that you see in the media, especially about supplements.

I’ve got LOTS more to say about overbearing health regulations. I just have to get it out of my mind right now or it will ruin my day. Stay tuned.

For health freedom,

Dr. D

Need a good source for your supplements?