by Raymond Francis
Throughout the history of humankind, people have done some strange things. Perhaps one of the strangest of all is that half of all American adults voluntarily take poison on a daily basis. We call these poisons prescription drugs. They are making us sick and slowly killing us, but people are taking them anyway in the mistaken belief that they are being helped. More than half of Americans over age 65 take multiple drugs per day, causing an appalling calamity of disease, suffering and death. Properly prescribed prescription drugs are the acknowledged third-leading cause of death in America. Hundreds of thousands of lives and millions of injuries could be prevented every year if we were to just say “no” to drugs.
Almost every prescription drug is harmful in some way, and when you take more than three drugs, no one in the world understands what is going on in your body. It throws your body into biochemical chaos, and chaos is the essence of disease. No one has any idea how all these drugs interact with you and each other.
There is only one disease – malfunctioning cells – and only two causes of disease – deficiency and toxicity. Drugs are one of our leading causes of disease and death because they deplete the body of essential nutrients and poison cells, causing both deficiency and toxicity. Drugs do nothing to address the true causes of disease – all they do is suppress the symptoms of disease at a very high cost to the patient. Without addressing and reversing the causes, diseases remain chronic.
Drugs are toxins. They work by interfering with normal cell chemistry. Most drugs work by disrupting the action of enzymes that regulate specific cell functions or by interfering with receptors on the surfaces of cells. The intention is to move the body’s chemistry in what is thought to be a favorable direction, such as lowering blood pressure or cholesterol. But here is the problem: Given the complexity of human biochemistry, it is not possible to do only one thing. Whenever you do one thing, you do many other things. While a desired good thing may happen, numerous other biochemical reactions are pushed in unfavorable directions.
Virtually all prescription drugs have unintended consequences, leading to entirely new disease conditions. To confuse the public, these new diseases are called “side effects,” so as not to alarm people that they are now sicker than before they started taking the drugs. Then as people complain to their doctors about their fatigue, dizziness, edema, poor memories, heart attack, intestinal bleeding, palpitations, colitis and other new problems, they are told these are merely part of their illness or the result of the aging process. Doctors prescribe additional drugs to suppress the new symptoms, making the patient even sicker. Few would take drugs if they knew the truth: Drugs treat symptoms while actually causing cellular deficiency and toxicity, suppressing the body’s normal healing process and making you sicker.
In recent years, the toxic effects of drugs have forced a number of them off the market. New warnings are constantly being issued, and new studies are constantly showing drugs to be ineffective. Drugs such as Vioxx, an anti-inflammatory, was removed in 2004 after having caused over 140,000 deaths in the U.S. alone plus millions of injuries. Even worse, such numbers are always far too low due to rampant underreporting. A new study by the University of California shows that glucocorticoids (drugs used to suppress allergic, inflammatory and autoimmune disorders) cause accelerated decline in Alzheimer’s patients. Heartburn, hypertension, steroidal and antidepressant drugs cause osteoporosis. People taking proton pump inhibitors for heartburn for more than a year have a 50 percent higher risk of hip fracture. Other examples include Prempro, a drug for post-menopausal women that causes heart disease and breast cancer, and Baycol, a cholesterol drug, that causes severe liver damage. There are many other examples. A particularly grievous travesty is chemotherapy. Chemotherapy drugs do very little if any good, and they are probably the leading cause of death among cancer patients. One only has to look at the relentless increase in cancer deaths in the face of the growing use of chemotherapy to know there is something very wrong going on. John Cairns, professor of microbiology at Harvard University, had this to say in Scientific American: “Aside from certain rare cancers, it is not possible to detect any sudden changes in the death rates for any of the major cancers that could be credited to chemotherapy. Whether any of the common cancers can be cured by chemotherapy has yet to be established.” Dr. Martin F. Shapiro explained that while “some oncologists inform their patients of the lack of evidence that treatments work… others may well be misled by scientific papers that express unwarranted optimism about chemotherapy. Still others respond to an economic incentive. Physicians can earn much more money running active chemotherapy practices than they can by providing solace and relief… to dying patients and their families.” Alan C. Nixon, PhD, past president of the American Chemical Society, wrote that “As a chemist trained to interpret data, it is incomprehensible to me that physicians can ignore the clear evidence that chemotherapy does much more harm than good.” As a chemist myself, I wholeheartedly agree with Dr. Nixon. Too bad the public is kept in the dark!
Many people are aware that drugs have a toxic effect on the body, but drugs do something else – they cause nutritional deficiencies. A major reason why people taking multiple drugs for a long period of time experience deterioration in their health is that the drugs cause substantial nutritional deficiencies. Some drugs reduce appetite, causing you to eat less. Some reduce the absorption of nutrients from food and supplements. Some drugs speed metabolism, using nutrients faster. Some inhibit enzymes, depleting the body of critical metabolites. Other drugs increase the loss of essential nutrients in the urine, as happens with diuretics. The use of multiple drugs greatly increases nutrient depletion by a variety of mechanisms.
If prescription drugs were a real solution to health problems, then surely people should take them. However, when all they do is address symptoms while making you sicker, it doesn’t make any sense. Fortunately there is an alternative to drugs. Since all disease is caused by deficiency and toxicity, the real solution to health problems is to reverse cellular deficiency and toxicity, restore cells to normal function, and get well. In fact, getting well is the only true solution to any health problem. A word of caution on getting off of drugs: most drugs can be stopped immediately with good results. However, you must be aware that there are drugs that require careful withdrawal with the help of a physician.
On the bottom line, modern medicine is not equipped to cure disease because it does not address its causes. Part of the problem is that disease is a more than two trillion dollar-a-year industry and is growing rapidly. There is a lot of money at stake, and helping people get well, rather than treating their symptoms, threatens this huge and very profitable industry. Cancer alone is a billion dollar-a-day industry. There is no incentive to stop treating cancer and start curing it.
If you want to get well, stay well and end disease in your life, read my book Never Be Sick Again. Then get off the Big Four foods that cause most of our disease – sugar, white flour, supermarket oils and dairy/excess animal protein. Eat a diet rich in fresh vegetables, fruits, legumes and whole non-gluten grains, with minimal animal protein. Learn where toxins are in our environment and avoid them. Get regular exercise – as simple as walking or rebounding. Avoid modern medicine and its toxic treatments, and get on a superior supplement program.
To get well and stay well, the best supplement program I know of is Beyond Health’s Comprehensive Kit along with any appropriate Support Kit that addresses your specific health issues. These kits address deficiency and toxicity – the two causes of disease – by supplying essential nutrients and helping the body to detoxify.
© 2008, Raymond Francis
Raymond Francis is an M.I.T.-trained scientist, a registered nutrition consultant, author of Never Be Sick Again and Never Be Fat Again, host of the Beyond Health Show, Chairman of The Project to End Disease and an internationally recognized leader in the field of optimal health maintenance.
Source: www.beyondhealth.com
