Pain, Placebos and Panacea
Examining the Religion of Medicine
by Phillip Day

As a final word on this four-part cancer investigation, it is necessary for us to take a brief look at the credibility of today's medical establishment - the same establishment still willing to lie to oppose B17 and nutritional treatments for cancer. Credibility often becomes an issue when the words 'nutrition' and 'cancer' crop up in the same sentence, and it really shouldn't. After all, when you get down to the basics of it, the issue of B17 is not one of credibility. All a cancer sufferer wants to know is: "Does it work or doesn't it? And if it does, will it work for me NOW?"

Krebs has little time for B17 detractors: "Scientific truth isn't dependent upon credibility or lack of it. The scientific reality either is or it isn't. And this is the scientific reality - that the seeds of all common fruits (except citrus) contain vitamin B17, an anti-cancer vitamin."

Yet since the cancer and general medical establishment are hot to make an issue of credibility, it's only fair in turn to examine their credibility. Let's also talk about the victims of cancer and how they react to their diagnosis. Let's explore too our worship of medicine, for in examining all three together, one can begin putting together a bizarre picture of a public often times desperate to participate in an elaborate religious healing ritual, one in which danger, personal cost to the patient and a potent fear actually appear to be the vital ingredients.

Psychologist and medical researcher Richard Totman studies the effects of faith and suggestion at the heart of our drug-based medical religion today. He has this to say:

"Take anything that is either nasty, expensive or difficult to obtain, wrap it up in mystery and you have a cure."

Have we become the congregation of a medical religion in whose surgery and hospital temples we attempt to seek a kind of redemption? Certainly we take an almost ghoulish delight in telling others what is wrong with us and what our doctors are trying to do to put it right. I remember my daily train journey into London involved enduring the non-stop medical anecdotes of a family friend - what Kevin was suffering from today; what Mary's latest pills were doing for her, and so on. These conversations are an extremely common social ritual, as is apparently the need to endure some kind of ghastly sacrifice at the altar of ill-health and emerge bloodied but victorious, thanks to our faith in doctors and their wonderful, life-saving chemicals.

Do some of us subconsciously make ourselves sick in order to enter this healing/redemption ritual? Judging by the following testimonies from doctors themselves, such a 'blasphemous' notion does not appear too wide of the mark.

"I was brought up, as I suppose every physician is, to use placebo, bread pills, water injections and other devices... I used to give them by the bushels..."
Professor Richard Cabot, Harvard Medical School, 1903

"Whatever the rights and wrongs, placebo prescribing is widely practised and, if we admit it to ourselves, so is the habit of prescribing for largely social reasons."
Dr K Palmer, British general practitioner, 1998

Drug-taking as a ritual
Not much has changed in 95 years, it seems. Many studies have been conducted examining the effects of placebos. The fact that pharmacologically inert substances such as sugar and bread pills have a measurable clinical effect on illness is proof positive that our healing religion is alive and even kicking into a higher gear today.

To illustrate this point, in a television episode of the enthralling series Trust Me (I'm a Doctor), shown on British TV on 11th November 1997, Dr Phil Hammond asks a group to test the strength of a fictional drug he named Ketofenfobraphen. Hammond describes the impressive-sounding drug to the group as 'a powerful new painkiller that works by selectively blocking the effects of prostaglandin 2 alpha'.

"It's been licensed in the USA and Japan for a year," Hammond enthusiastically tells his volunteers, "and sales have gone through the roof. In fact, I'd recommend you to buy shares in the company. Its beauty is that it works quickly - usually within ten minutes - although it can occasionally give you a dry mouth and make you feel dizzy. Mind you, it's expensive - seven tablets for £14.99 and they do not taste very nice - but it's the best drug in its class and I use it all the time for my knee. And when the British Lions were on tour in South Africa, they insisted on having some flown out especially..." etc. etc.

Note that in giving out the details of Ketofenfobraphen, Dr Hammond is careful to mention each aspect which will affect the outcome of the healing ritual: The drug is a 'wonder drug'. It is officially sanctioned (licensed). It produces side-effects (dry mouth and dizziness). It is horribly expensive and has an unpleasant taste. And lastly, a group most of us look up to (the British Lions) think it's the business.

The volunteers were randomly split into two groups after being told they would receive either Ketofenfobraphen or a placebo. In reality both groups were given different coloured placebos. Ten minutes after taking the tablets, they were blindfolded and asked to submerge a hand in ice and pull it out only when it got uncomfortably painful. Hammond reports that after five minutes, twice as many volunteers who thought they had been given the painkiller still had their hands in ice:

"When I asked if anyone had suffered side effects as a result of taking the 'powerful painkillers', one woman said she had felt faint and dizzy soon after swallowing the pills."

Officially sanctioned quackery
We hear cries of 'quackery!' levelled by the medical establishment against treatments unsanctioned by them and yet official quackery on a vast scale, in some cases involving highly toxic and deadly drugs, surrounds us in breathtaking abundance. Got a pain? Have a drug. Got a headache? Have a drug. Got a bad attitude? Have a drug. When the only tool you have is a hammer, very soon everything starts looking like a nail. The pharmaceutical industry cynically ignores unprofitable prevention in favour of successfully snowing us that biotechnology is the future for mankind's health. I beg to differ. I think, if we do not get prudence and quick, biotechnology will be the ruin of us. It already contributes to the third leading cause of death in the western world, as we found out earlier.

Also, as we are discovering, and as Ralph Nader and many others have found out, 'orthodox' medical quackery has created sickness and death on a scale that is hard for us to accept at first, but the true picture is beginning to emerge along with the scandals and hard statistics which show us where the real problem lies.

Have we become like the shade-tree mechanic who spends so much time tinkering with his car that it no longer runs the way it used to? Professor Chris Bulstrode, an orthopaedic surgeon turned medical teacher, puts the compelling case for less doctors and medicine, not more:

"More doctors just means more illness. If we want a healthier and happier country, we should get rid of a lot of doctors. I cannot have been the only person who was absolutely incensed to discover that when the Berlin Wall came down, the military strength of the Eastern Block was an order of magnitude less than we had been led to believe. I want to try all the Western generals for lying to the public about how strong the Russians were. These generals have done three things over the last thirty years. They have frightened the hell out of the Russians, they have frightened the hell out of us, and they have stolen a huge amount of money from the budget that could have been used elsewhere. As I was thinking about this, I realized that this is exactly what we as doctors do in health care."

Cancer as a social stigma
So how does this medical and drug tinkering apply to cancer? A person receiving a cancer diagnosis for the first time is a frightened individual. Cancer has been bred into us as the secret fear at the back of the 20th century mind, the Sword of Damocles come to destroy our family, corrupting our vitals a little each day, to rob a little boy of his mother, a daughter of her father. Yet cancer also remains a potent social stigma, despite its abundance, causing relatives and friends politely to distance themselves in some cases from the unfortunate sufferer in question.

Who doesn't hate the idea of a hospital? Who doesn't fear the fateful diagnosis of the oncologist? Cancer victims are pitied as much today as they ever were in decades past because cancer still seems insurmountable and frightening ("Jack's got cancer." "Oh, well. That's it for him then."). More often than not, cancer victims sense an isolation; they realise that something has changed that won't ever be the same again. They know almost nothing about the circumstances surrounding the cause or onset of their illness, and so they turn to the easy familiarity of their local doctor or mainstream medical consultant who they hope will offer some comfort and a way out.

Thus the cancer victim enters the medical ritual. The procedure that follows runs a well-worn and predictable path in orthodox medicine. The instillation of fear. The patient enters a foreign environment of strange words, stranger machines and the strangest smells. A biopsy or similar operation to test for tumour malignancy followed by the commencement of surgery, chemo- or radiotherapy. Sometimes the life of the patient appears to be extended or shortened by some months. Sometimes surgery cuts out the tumour without spreading the cancer. Sometimes it doesn't. More often than not the resultant chemotherapy or radiation treatment poisons or burns the patient's immune system, liver and kidneys into complete submission before the cancer itself closes for the kill.

Cancer patients who do stride out on their own to investigate the alternatives to orthodox treatments become bewildered and disheartened by the rainbow of cure-alls and snake-oil remedies confronting them. Yes, even in the realm of alternative health there are the true quacks. All promise long life and happiness and some cost a small fortune. Often times, the intrepid patient will discuss alternative therapies with their doctor who understands their emotional need to search, but who tactfully reminds them of all the work being done by the pharmaceutical companies to cure their condition.

Doctors not to blame
No one would seriously blame doctors for the woes of the world, or even for their failure to cure cancer in our loved ones. These busy and overworked ones have barely enough hours in the day to do what they have to do. They simply respond to disease by applying the training they themselves submitted to with a willing and honest heart. Naturally, most do not want to confront the awful possibility that what they were taught in the hallowed halls of medical academia would not be in the best interests of their future patients. Yet, years later in the heat of the cancer war, they do not see their medicine working, and this presents a problem for many of them.

Could this, in itself, be the tragedy of where we have arrived as a society today? In a commercial environment, where the life and health stakes are high and doctors have to rely on medical briefing packages prepared for them by their peers and the commercially compromised drug industry, what indeed becomes of the rest of us when part of the industry-accepted science in which these doctors were trained has proved to be so tragically flawed?

Some reading this will have their hopes raised by the information contained within it, only to have them dashed when they excitedly broach the B17 metabolic therapy subject with their doctors, the majority of whom, we must remember, were trained, rightly or wrongly, in allopathic medical institutions funded by the pharmaceutical industry. The 'establishment' responses from GPs and oncologists usually go something like this:

"Ah, B17! That old wife's tale! Doesn't work. Never has done. We disproved that one back in the '70s, Mr Smith. It's cyanide, for goodness sake!"

Or: "If B17 really worked, Mrs Winterbottom, don't you think we'd be prescribing it and the good news would be all over the newspapers?"

But nutritional therapy for cancer can never be part of the orthodox healing ritual for four reasons.

Ø It cannot be patented.
Ø The mystery of cancer and its treatment would evaporate.
Ø The drug establishment and cancer charities would be cut out of the profit loop and our grocers would become our new doctors!
Ø An end would come to the fear which binds the followers to the medical religion.

Not all doctors, as we have seen, are negative to nutritional therapy. Some, as we shall see in a minute, have become curious and excited in cases where their patient's 'miracle' regression can be provably put down to nutritional therapy - in other words, after the patient has ceased all conventional treatment to return home to die or, as the cancer establishment puts it, 'to enjoy a remaining quality of life'.

Nearly all GPs have an honest heart and are desperately involved with their patient's struggle for survival (the heroes of the B17 story are almost all doctors). As we have seen from the oncologists and biochemists quoted earlier, more than a few have noticed with despair the inability of orthodox treatments to arrest cancer and so are willing to take a fresh look at the alternatives. Those who have taken the trouble to do their homework recognise that Krebs' and Sugiura's research on B17 is based on solid science and there is nothing sensible to gainsay it. As a result, official medical attitudes towards cancer are changing, but tragically not fast enough to save a lot of us at the present time.

Human like the rest of us
The point that needs to be made and fully understood here is this. Hard though it may be for most of us to accept, doctors and professors get up each morning and put their pants on, one leg at a time, just like the rest of us. As all are part of flawed humanity, PhDs don't stop greed, nor do the letters 'MD' guarantee a perfect and impartial diagnosis. This hasn't stopped an institutionalised medical arrogance automatically rearing its offended head when non-sanctioned treatments that work with cancer challenge accepted dogma. Can doctors and the medical establishment always be trusted to know what's right for us? Not in all cases. Richard Smith put it this way in March 1997:

"Doctors are set apart. We are a priesthood with our own rites, beliefs, systems of initiation and tribal practices. And we have special powers. The public turns to us in moments of extremity and expects an answer, even a solution. Often we cannot provide it..."

And that from the editor of the British Medical Journal!

Traditional medicine is increasingly coming under fire as cracks appear in the flawless picture we have painted of our medicinal saviours. When Trust Me (I'm a Doctor) - the book and the TV series written by Dr Phil Hammond and Michael Mosley - came before the British public, the British National Health Service (NHS) and private medical practice were portrayed in a strange new, disturbingly dark and foreboding light. Dr Hammond remarks:

"In BBC2's 'Cardiac Arrest', an NHS hospital was depicted as a war zone, with staff bullying one another, humiliating patients and taking the path of least resistance in order to survive. The only way to cope was not to care. For the first time in a British TV program, nurses were portrayed as a bunch of clock-watching, bolshy witches, and the rougher side of doctors was shown... one making easily overheard remarks about a man with lung cancer ("He's got so much asbestos in him, it'll take a year to cremate him.") A bullied female doctor with an alcohol problem committed suicide. All very bleak and unsettling."

The picture painted by most who have worked in the National Health Service is one in which overworked and inexperienced junior doctors are engaged in a daily struggle to keep their heads above crushing workloads. Some of these believe their problems started during medical school, where they were first introduced to the deeply ingrained cronyism and party culture of the medical establishment.

A harsh reality
Two surveys, reported in The Lancet, discovered that heavy drinking and illicit drug use were common among second-year medical students, and that these invariably increased after graduation. Of the 90 house officers studied, 60% of both sexes exceeded their safe limits. 35% of men and 10% of women reported using other drugs such as hallucinogenic mushrooms, LSD, ecstasy, amyl nitrite, cocaine and amphetamines. As for their mental state, 21 percent of men and 45 percent of women had anxiety scores indicating possible pathological anxiety.

Stress too was to be a major factor in influencing the later mental conditions and competence of doctors when interacting with their patients. In 1991, a study of doctors who qualified in 1986 found that 58% of men and 76% of women regretted entering medicine.

Dr Hammond states: "Drinking and drug abuse are clearly coping mechanisms picked up in medical school, but it is impossible to predict which of the many heavy student drinkers will go on to develop a problem. The BMA estimated that up to 13,000 practising UK doctors are addicted to drugs or alcohol. If each makes 2,000 clinical decisions a year, at a conservative estimate, that is 26 million decisions affecting patient care [including prescribing potentially lethal drugs] made by doctors who can't function without alcohol or other drugs."

Doctors often neglect to advise their patients of their true condition. Patients are usually frightened and in awe and tend not to ask for an interpreter when their consultants revert to medical jargon, with predictable and unfortunate consequences. A study of 100 patients interviewed within five days of major abdominal surgery found that 27 didn't know which organ had been removed and 44 were unaware of the exact nature of the surgical procedure, despite having been counselled before the operation.

Neither do doctors appear to be as in control of emergency events as Casualty and ER would have the public believe. A Cardiff Royal Infirmary study polled 113 doctors in cardiac arrest teams from 62 teaching and district general hospitals in England and Wales. Only 32 could cite the full sequence of managing ventricular fibrillation (the commonest cause of cardiac arrest) and 32 didn't even know the initial actions to take.

The medical establishment bravely dons the mask of unflappable capability, and yet the statistics imply a worldwide allopathic disaster is occurring. Trust Me reports that between 4-13% of admissions to hospital in the United States are due to medical accidents. 7% of these patients suffer permanent damage and 14% die. In England, where there are about 8 million admissions a year, even the lower figure extrapolates to 320,000 medical accidents a year, resulting in 40,000 deaths and 20,000 cases of permanent disability.

And orthodox medicine is the one crying 'quackery'?

High-profile flaws
Dispelling the myth we have been sold that doctors are society's guardian angels and above medical reproach, scandals abound within Britain's National Health Service of chronic bed shortages, patients being treated on trolleys in corridors and bungled medical procedures occurring far more frequently than the public realises. Surgeons occasionally pick up names like 'Chopper', 'Slasher' or 'Hacker'. Rodney Ledward, a Kent gynaecologist, was struck off by the General Medical Council in September 1998. Known as 'The Butcher' by his colleagues, he nevertheless was able to practise his incompetence for sixteen years before he was eventually stopped. Most of his colleagues knew of his ineptitude but were unwilling to be the ones to blow the whistle. As a result of their silence, hundreds of women today bear the scars from the hacking of a doctor who once boasted he was 'the fastest gynaecologist in the South East', having on one occasion completed seven hysterectomies between 8am and noon.

On 23rd March 1999, the front-page news in England told the tale of Anita Froggart who had a breast removed after being wrongly diagnosed as a cancer victim. Doctors later admitted that a sample of her healthy tissue had been mixed up with one from a cancer patient.

At the time of writing, the Bristol Royal Infirmary is the target of a £15 million General Medical Council enquiry that will rock the foundations of British medical practice for years to come. Several hundred babies are believed to have perished or were maimed after botched cardiac procedures by incompetent surgeons, producing such an inordinately high mortality rate that the institution was referred to among consultants for years as 'The Killing Fields' or 'The Departure Lounge'. Even though GPs would go out of their way to refer their patients away from Bristol to other areas, once again nothing official was done. Whistle-blowing Bristol nurse Helen Stratton later reported:

"Parents used to say, "See you later!" to their children and I used to stand there thinking, "No, you won't."

So is our medical establishment above reproach? Hardly. But the irony is, most doctors know it even if the public doesn't. Yes, doctors are necessary and a valuable part of our society. But what are we to make of the scandals which rob us of our loved ones when so much can be done to stop these senseless tragedies from happening? As Ernst Krebs remarks, you're a pretty rotten expert if you die from the very diseases you are trying to prevent in others. Sad though it may be to accept, we do have cardiologists dying of heart attacks, neurosurgeons succumbing to strokes, osteologists dying of osteoporosis and, yes, oncologists perishing from cancer.

Our own neglect
I believe though that the real tragedy of cancer lies not just with our overworked doctors and their deeply flawed establishment, but with us. Most ordinary citizens gave up looking after themselves years ago and moved the responsibility to BUPA, Blue Shield and the government to do it for them. Now society's general perception is that our doctors constitute our first and last line of defence against any crippling illness and we cannot survive without them. This is baloney. Once upon a time, no one had medical insurance. Hard to believe, but there you go.

Of course, true and responsible medicine has a part to play in our society today - no question of it. Every time I fell off my motorcycle as a teenager, I was grateful to the Accident & Emergency Unit for stitching me back together again with great skill, a kind word and some marvellous coffee. Certain ailments are best treated in our hospitals - who would argue? But when is enough enough? Is it when medicine ceases to be for the good of the patient and begins operating for the good of the shareholder? If it is, we are way past that point today, and our health industries have become ever more cynical and manipulative in their dealings with their patients' misery and weakness as time progresses.

As for our worship of drugs and all things medical, I beg to remind you that the great George Washington was bled to death in 1797 by some of the most well-educated medical practitioners of his day. No doubt, had you been at the august president's deathbed raising a fuss as they slashed his wrists, these learned professionals would have angrily turned on you: "We know what we're doing. We're DOCTORS!" The men who killed George Washington were extremely intelligent. They were experienced practitioners who were no doubt highly educated. And they were wrong.

If cancer seems mysterious and frightening, that is because society has packaged it that way. But the reality is, humankind has been ravaged in the past by those supposedly insurmountable environmental diseases we looked at earlier, and these have been beaten by nothing more controversial than a change in diet, a change in environment and a simple vitamin. To our ancestors living back then, these diseases seemed every bit as complicated and terrifying as cancer appears to us today. But the names of these diseases are all but out of the modern dictionary. So why not cancer?

METABOLIC DISEASES

Turning off the tap
When man rids himself of the delusion that a complicated-looking and horrendous disease requires an equally complicated, horrendous (and expensive) treatment in order to cure it, we can then return to sanity. And what is sanity? Is sanity not gauged by the reaction of the man facing an overflowing sink? Will he reach for the mop or the tap?

Today, because of the religion of medicine, billions are spent on cure and a minuscule amount by comparison on prevention, and so we don't turn off the tap of harm, we just mop up the damage. Our diets are processed, overcooked, irradiated, sugar-laden and vitamin- and mineral-deficient, and even as we scoff all that haûte cuisine in the world's finest restaurants, convincing ourselves we are so civilised, we are living the real insanity in a world we are increasingly polluting with every new step of our technology. Our bodies cannot appreciate the decor of a five-star restaurant, they only react to what comes down the gullet in the form of nutrition. Most of us are still running the gasoline car on diesel. We are, quite literally, what we eat.

Imagine if the government told us that, in order to improve road safety statistics, it was going to remove seatbelts from cars, ban airbags, outlaw anti-lock brakes, repeal the baby-seat laws and instead pour millions into teaching doctors how to fix the resultant broken heads in the hospitals. If this were to happen, Members of Parliament or Congressmen would be dragged outside by an outraged public and given the good news in the parking lot in no uncertain terms, and yet this attitude is the unbelievable state of affairs in healthcare today.

Of course we see the token gestures made by our leaders towards educating us in disease prevention. I worked in advertising, I used to see their pathetic campaigns ("Eat those fruits and vegetables, kids!"). The sorry truth is, the prevention ethic doesn't bring in tax revenues from drug licensing, nor does it find a way of replacing the incredible incomes governments receive taxing tobacco and alcohol. Ironically We the People know cigarettes and whisky are bad for us, and so in our guilt and naughtiness we don't mind forking out the government tax on them. Look me in the eye and tell me we're not certifiable already with this kind of attitude.

The most deadly items to our health are those we put into our supermarket carts. Stop and think next time you go shopping. Many products masquerading as personal and household care items contain chemical toxins that are known carcinogens. Much of the food now available is nothing more than highly processed commercial material passed off to the public as edible matter. And here am I, from the bottom of my heart, telling you, "Don't trust others to look out for your health! Do it yourself!" The dangerous farce of genetically modified foods and food irradiation should convince you of ulterior corporate agendas even if the foregoing chapters haven't. We must become good at prevention ourselves and look after our families. It takes only a little common sense and a small degree of consistency. If we simply turn off the tap, we will avoid the flood.

Author Paul B Rogerson comments: "In my experience, the great majority of those who learn about B17 say, "Wow, that's neat!" and then proceed to do nothing to change their dietary regimen. And so inevitably these folks will form part of the cancer statistics of the future. What a sad indictment on our civilisation that we have become too fond of our gluttonous habits, too lazy in our self-discipline, too apathetic with our leaders and their agendas, that even when faced with such monumentally good news as this, in the final analysis most of us are not going to do anything to save ourselves."

In World Without Cancer, Edward Griffin summarises his findings on four available treatments for cancer:

SURGERY: Least harmful. Sometimes a life-saving, stop-gap measure. No evidence that patients who receive radical or extensive surgical options live any longer than those who receive the most conservative options, or, for that matter, those who receive none at all. Believed to increase the likelihood of disseminating cancer to other locations.

When dealing with internal tumours affecting reproductive or vital organs, the statistical rate of long-term survival is, on the average, 10-15%. After metastasis, the statistical chances for long-term survival are close to zero.

RADIOLOGY: The burning out of tumours using x-rays. Very harmful in many ways. Spreads the cancer and weakens the patient's resistance to other diseases. Serious and painful side-effects, including heart failure. No evidence that treated patients live any longer, on the average, than those not treated. Statistical rate of long-term survival after metastasis is close to zero.

CHEMOTHERAPY: Toxic drug therapy. Also spreads the cancer through weakening of immunological defence mechanism plus general toxicity. Leaves patient susceptible to other diseases and infections, often leading to death from these causes. Extremely serious side-effects. No evidence that treated patients live any longer, on the average, than untreated patients. Statistical rate of long-term survival after metastasis is close to zero.

VITAMIN [METABOLIC] THERAPY: B17 seeds, amygdalin tablets or B17 administered intravenously. Non-toxic. Side effects include increased appetite, weight gain, and lowered blood pressure. Eliminates or sharply reduces pain without narcotics. Is a natural substance found in foods and is compatible with human biological experience. Destroys cancer cells while nourishing non-cancer cells.

© Copyright 2003 Phillip Day
Extracted from Cancer, Why We're Still Dying to Know the Truth

Further Resources
Cancer: Why We're Still Dying to Know the Truth by Phillip Day
Great News on Cancer in the 21st Century by Steven Ransom
The ABC's of Disease by Phillip Day
B17 Metabolic Therapy compiled by Phillip Day
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