Dear Sir/Madam

I write in response to the recent article published in your newspaper covering my recent meeting in Wagga. A Dr Mackay apparently 'took me to task' over the figures I quoted, namely that 1 in 5 Australians were being killed by their own healthcare system.

As someone with a journalistic background myself, I found your article rather interestingly written. I made a special point of giving your journalist a free copy of my book "Health Wars", so they could quote me accurately (which he didn't), and also so they could verify the official source documentation concerning the research I was reporting. Yet, in spite of this, the resultant article merely spoke of a "Respected Doctor" from Lockhart commenting on my "Radical Statements"!

Dr Mackay, who, according to your article, states that "many of Mr Day's figures are skewed, out of context and 'mumbo jumbo'", then apparently goes on to state: "I can't say I am familiar with his work."

Well maybe he should be. The 1 in 5 figure was published in Environment and Health News, Vol 3 in January of 1998 and compiled by Ron Law, Executive Director of the NNFA in New Zealand and member of the New Zealand Ministry of Health Working Group advising on medical error. Law draws from Australian Bureau of Statistics reports which state that preventable medical error in hospitals is responsible for 11% of all deaths in Australia (around 1 in every 9 deaths). However, if deaths from properly researched, properly registered, properly prescribed and properly used drugs are added along with preventable deaths due to private practice, it comes to a staggering 19%, which is almost 1 in every 5 deaths.

If Ken Mackay wants to call these 'skewed' or 'mumbo jumbo', may I invite him to take the matter up with his government's statistics compilers. Don't you find it interesting that, not three days after your article was published, the Australian Daily Telegraph on 3rd November reported on page 3: "80,000 Victims a Year of Wrong Medication". The article states: "An estimated 80,000 people are admitted to hospital each year as a result of being given the wrong medications or incorrect doses. Hospitals around the country will now be asked to reduce by up to half the number of potentially fatal mistakes they make with patient medications."

The fact that hospitals 'are being asked to reduce the figures by up to half' is a clear indication that this is achievable, thus implying gross negligence and indeed quackery on a scale that is Herculean.

Mackay further contends with me the environmental causes of cancer, the point I made to your journalist in the interview, which presumably was reported accurately when Mackay was asked for his views. Maybe Ken Mackay should consult with Professor Samuel Epstein, Professor of Occupational and Environmental Medicine at the University of Illinois Medical Center in Chicago. Let me quote from Epstein, widely regarded as one of the world's leading experts in cancer and recipient of a number of coveted medical awards, on the subject of another cancer scourge, which presumably Mackay endorses - that of mammograms:

"X-rays are carcinogenic. The more x-rays you submit to and the greater the dose, the greater is your risk of cancer.... Whatever you may be told, refuse routine mammograms to detect early breast cancer, especially if you are pre-menopausal. The x-rays may actually increase your risk of getting cancer.... Very few circumstances, if any, should persuade you to have x-rays taken if you are pregnant. The future risks of leukaemia to your unborn child, not to mention birth defects, are just not worth it." (Politics of Cancer, the Cancer Prevention Coalition, p. 304. www.preventcancer.com).

While Mackay's peers continue to reject promoting safe, infra-red thermography procedures for early breast cancer detection nationwide, they also fail to train doctors in nutrition, that most basic of body sciences. As long as this continues, Australians will remain powerless to turn the tide against metabolic diseases, such as cancer, stroke and heart disease, whose only recourses are in metabolic preventatives, which are always food factors.

By favouring toxic chemotherapy and radiation treatments for cancer (themselves carcinogenic), all the while trivialising the environmental causes of cancer in Australia, such as the use of superphosphates on the land, oestrogen-rich HRT for the ladies and fluoride wastes for all dumped in the water supply, the medical establishment in Australia has presided over a disaster of biblical proportions, with cancer rates leaping from 0.13% of the population in the state of Victoria in 1971 to 0.19% in 1998 (a whopping 46% increase - Australian Bureau of Statistics, 3303.0 and 3302.0, issues for 1971 and 1998, Victorian Year Book). Of course this is clear indication that Mackay's cancer medicine has been doggedly following the wrong course with the maximum of precision for over five decades, in spite of clear, empirical evidence of the efficacy of nutritional treatments for cancer, as practised by other scientifically enlightened countries, which do not persecute their healthcare practitioners for using food as medicine.

I could go on, (and have frequently been known to!), but let me finish by saying that Dr Mackay and others of his comfortable, establishment ilk, who are so quick to engineer the usual knee-jerk, Pavlovian response to any attack on their dignity and credibility by the public, will always bluster as he supposedly did: "These people come up with their pretend facts [sic] and manage to skew and manipulate the facts..." Science used to be about verifying the facts.

Used to be.

Dr Mackay, you have a chance to do something great for the public you serve. I will tell you for nothing, Sir, that citizens are no longer staying silent on the issue of iatrogenic, healthcare-induced death among their loved ones, and they are mobilising. My conferences have been packed across your country, and also well attended by a number of your doctor colleagues who have been offering the global Campaign for Truth in Medicine their wholehearted support to usher in much-needed reform and a revision of the archaic practices that have so damaged Australians.

There is no shame in admitting there is a serious problem in your profession. Indeed, you may well earn the epithet "Respected" in word as well as deed by coming clean and being part of the solution rather than stoically bolstering the problem. To stay silent or, worse, contradict what ordinary citizens can see happening plainly enough for themselves with the deaths of their loved ones will put you in mighty trouble with an increasingly angry public.

 

Come clean. Because De-nial ain't just a river.

With grace,

Phillip Day

Chief Executive

Campaign for Truth in Medicine (UK)