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A report from Reuters Tue Sep 18, 2007 stated that the FDA has warned Hain Celestial Group Inc. by calling the natural herbal sweetener that they add to some of their teas “an unsafe food additive.”

Stevia, derived from a South American herb is 300 times sweeter than sugar but with no calories, is approved as a dietary supplement, but not as a food additive in the U.S.

This should not be surprise as the FDA and Health Canada both regard stevia as an herb but not as a food additive. As Wikipedia points out:

“In 1991, at the request of an anonymous complaint, the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) labeled stevia as an “unsafe food additive” and restricted its import. The FDA’s stated reason was “toxicological information on stevia is inadequate to demonstrate its safety.”[31] This ruling was controversial, as stevia proponents pointed out that this designation violated the FDA’s own guidelines under which any natural substance used prior to 1958 with no reported adverse effects should be generally recognized as safe (GRAS).”

Gee, I wonder who this anonymous complaint came from. An interesting comment on a blog at Dr. Mercola’s web site is insiteful:
“I’m far too stupid to wonder why it’s fine (stevia) when called one thing, yet potentially a destructive, nation-flattening weapon when used as a cheap, abundant sweetener that would coincidentally compete with the safe-as-mother’s-milk health chemicals like Splenda and Aspartame. ”

Agriculture Canada Wants to Grow Stevia

If stevia is so unsafe then why did the Canadian Brodacasting Corporation (CBC) state on it’s Market Place television program in February of 2000 that:

“Agriculture Canada is growing stevia. “We want to turn it into a crop, a viable crop for farmers in southwestern Ontario,” says Jim Brandle, a plant breeding specialist with Agriculture Canada.

…It has been embraced in Japan, where it’s used in soy sauce, sweet pickles and soft drinks. In Japan, Diet Coke has been sweetened with stevia. ”

The article points out that Linda Bonvie a New Jersey-based investigative journalist who’s written a book on stevia that on its cover asks ‘Is the FDA suppressing an ideal herbal sweetener?’

“I think there’s a lot at stake here … and when there’s big money at stake, strange things happen.” She stated, and “There’s been no consumer complaints or reports of ill effects due to stevia,” she says. “Not in health journals, not in government statistics, and not by consumers.

Stevia- Health Benefits

Wikipedia Balanced Report also states:

“…while newer studies find no safety issues…Other studies have shown stevia improves insulin sensitivity in ratsand may even promote additional insulin production, helping to reverse diabetes and metabolic syndrome. ”

To sum up this herbal product that’s been used for decades with no reported toxicity is not allowed to compete on a level playing field with the big boys that make chemical sweeteners with known toxicity. Can you imagine what would happen if the general public was aware of safety and benefits of stevia compared to Nutrasweet/Equal (Aspartame) and Splenda.

There is faint hope but not complete because Coca Cola and Cargill are working on scientifically establishing the safety of the herb. You can bet though that it will not be the pure total herb from the plant but will be a patentable derivative. At least with heavyweight corporations like these they will be able to pay off the FDA because Coke is desperate for an alternative to expensive Nurtasweet.

Just think in the near future your local health food store will no longer be raided for their dangerous stevia because their will be a ‘patent FDA approved for your protection brand’ with higher prices. Then the sour view of the FDA on stevia will miraculously turn sweet.
http://www.steviainfo.com/

For more information on Stevia go to these sites-

Stevia: Nature’s Perfect Sweetener
The Sweet Secret of Stevia

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Dennis Cutforth is a researcher and writer with over 35 years experience in health-care sales, marketing and research in pharmaceuticals and natural health. Dennis will cut through all the propaganda and give you the real facts about what really works to make you healthier and happier. Visit his Blog at Better Life Blog.

In the spring my 11 year old grandson wanted to watch his and my favorite television show with me, House on the Fox television network. I asked him why he liked the show so much. He said that Dr. House reminded him of me.

When I asked why, he said because I know so much about health; except, when I wasn’t able to diagnose his burning foot. I said that I asked him if his foot was burning and he had said yes, and I said therefore you have burning foot syndrome. He didn’t think that that was a very good diagnosis, but I said it was true because he had a burning foot.

He said his mother (my daughter) doesn’t like Dr. House because he reminds her of me, because I think I know so much, plus House is impossible as am I. Different generation, different perspective I’d say.

On thinking of this little exchange with number one grandson I also thought of the reasons he felt that I knew a lot about health. It may have been that since he was a baby I have had a big say about his health.

When he was 2 he had projectile vomiting so his mother (my daughter) asked a Pediatric specialist if it could be a food allergy. The doctor assured her it couldn’t possibly be the cause. I had her take him off milk and voila! no more projectile vomiting.

Subsequently he began to have fits of anger and once again she was assured by the specialist that it couldn’t be food allergy. I asked his mother (my daughter) what his favorite food was. She said that he loves eggs and wants them every day. I said take him off eggs and voila! once again the temper tantrums subsided. These food allergy/intolerances are in the Scientific Literature from over 50 years ago but are ignored by Conventional/Orthodox Medicine (to be written about in a future post).

As my grandson got older and he would twist his knee I would press a trigger point above his knee on the thigh for seven seconds and voila! the knee pain would be gone. He would say that he knew that it was going to hurt, for those few seconds, but it was worth it because his knee pain would be gone and wouldn’t hurt when walked.

Conventional/Orthodox Medicine Missteps

This is a long preamble to point out some shortcomings of Conventional/ Orthodox Medicine. Medical doctors are the absolute best at diagnosing patients of many illnesses and as the House show points out that a brilliant physician can discover the underlying cause of the most obscure illnesses.

Fortunately most of us don’t need the services of such a medical detective. Unfortunately many of us need the services of a physician that can diagnose and offer a treatment for the most simple of things. Simple, (unexciting for a TV show) things, like fatigue, pain, sleep problems, depression etc. In other words we need simple non-invasive treatments for non-life threatening chronic illnesses, everyday things that affect millions of patients’ quality of life.

So this brings me to the point of an illness that was pooh-poohed by Dr. House and dismissed as one patient’s problem. The show toed the company line of the Conventional/Orthodox Medical bureaucracy which states that Gulf War Syndrome does not exist. Well the Flat Earth Society still believes the earth is flat despite the overwhelming evidence that the earth is as round as a ball, check out their web-site.
The overwhelming evidence is that the Gulf War caused an alarming amount of debilitation among veterans and the Medical bureaucracy worked from their long held position that it was all in their heads. This gave the Psychiatrists a field day and prevented compensation from the Veterans Administration who listened to these so-called ‘Medical Experts’.

The so-called experts ignored the evidence for over twenty years that h-pylori infections caused duodenal ulcers for which two physicians from Australia received a Nobel Prize for Medicine.

Over ten years ago when I almost died from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (while in pharmaceutical sales) all the experts that I sought out said my lab tests were just fine therefore there was nothing wrong with me.

At least I knew the fallibility of medical tests but how did the Gulf Veterans cope without the knowledge that I posses. A lot like ulcer patients who had previously been told that stress or a myriad other things but not a bacterial infection caused their ulcer.

The Wrong ‘House’ (doctor) Due to the Wrong Paradigm*

Interestingly as reported in Time magazine shortly after the Gulf War a Professor of Medicine, Dr. Garth Nichols didn’t accept that his step-daughter was depressed or suffering from a psychological illness and he discovered a bacterial infection, mycoplasma hiding as a stealth bug in her red blood cells that was a major cause of her symptoms, and undetectable by conventional blood tests.

The mycoplasma bug didn’t affect every soldier just as any infection only hits immune depleted individuals. What contributed to the depression of the immune system in some soldiers was the high number of vaccinations they received and exposure to toxic chemicals.

If an open minded individual looked at the data they would find some interesting facts, such as a higher incidence of Gulf War Veterans with this Syndrome whose spouses and children came down with Fibromyalgia and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, thus suggesting an infectious component. (Wikipedia has an excellent article on Gulf War Syndrome.)

For physicians to get on their high horse and use the copout standard line of psychological illnesses for legitimate disorders like Gulf War Syndrome, Fibromyalgia and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome based on 19th century thinking just shows how out of touch they are with reality and unbiased scientific research.

This is a very short diatribe for which I could go to great lengths to provide references and reams of information. It should be said that physicians who don’t believe could call on their colleagues to pontificate and back up their position with reams of data as well. They could impress the lay person with all this information however, having been an insider in medicine and knowing their paradigm* is wrong (see their previous paradigm on the cause of ulcers) I’m not buying their pitch.

It’s best to seek out a physician who understands the new paradigm of Integrative Medicine if you suffer from one of these illnesses because they can help you. That would be a better thing than talking to a non-believing Conventional/Orthodox physician because in this case it would be a good thing that the doctor is not in the ‘House’.

*Paradigm- “the generally accepted perspective of a particular discipline at a given time; “he framed the problem within the psychoanalytic paradigm”. Dictionary.com

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Dennis Cutforth is a researcher and writer with over 35 years experience in health-care sales, marketing and research in pharmaceuticals and natural health. Dennis will cut through all the propaganda and give you the real facts about what really works to make you healthier and happier. Visit his Blog at Better Life Blog.

In a Globe and Mail article, August 15, 2007 titled: ‘What Canadians should learn from the U.S. health care disaster’, Arnold S. Rahlmans M.D. a professor emeritus of medicine and of social medicine at Harvard Medical School, and a former editor of The New England Journal of Medicine, concludes that “Canadians should not follow Americans down the path to greater privatization.”

Why should Canada follow a failed health-care system that cannot be sustained in the U.S.? Canada has had research done that could even save more money and be more effective than ‘Orthodox Medicine’ but bows to short term thinking and the vested interests of Medicine- Big Pharma and Medical Associations/Journals which are connected at the hips.

What the health-care authorities need is an overall ‘quality of care’, ‘cost effectiveness’ committee with lay representation to offset the vested interests and ask the right questions about why inferior ‘medical, surgical, prescription drug treatments’ are paid for? And very effective and in many cases more effective, less expensive higher quality but non-medical approaches are ignored.

For instance the Manga Report on the treatment of low back pain proved that Chiropractic adjustments were better and less expensive than prescriptions drugs. Guess who sponsored this study? The Ontario Government, that’s who, and guess who deleted Chiropractic fees from the Ontario Health Insurance Plan (OHIP)? The current Ontario provincial government deleted this useful non-invasive treatment to save $100 million dollars a year; unfortunately it was estimated that increased emergency room visits would eat up these savings and actually increase costs.

Stop the insanity and try a totally different approach.

There is research that shows that taking ‘medically treatment resistant patients’ (in other words- failures of ‘Medicine’), that have been treated ineffectively with multiple prescriptions and treating them with diet and nutrition improved patients quality of life dramatically, returned most to work and reduced the need of drugs by 50-100%. Treating patients in this manner could save billions of dollars. Unfortunately the governments (see above paragraph) are not interested and the vested interests, even in Canada, and the private insurance companies for industry are not interested.

Insanity is described as doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results. Medicine is incredibly valuable for acute treatments; however the majority of family physicians patient population has chronic illnesses. These patients, as research has shown, will respond better and less expensively to a non-medical approach for which these physicians lack expertise and training. When your physician’s prescription drugs fail they’ll try different drugs or send you to a specialist who’ll try different drugs.- This is insanity and a totally different approach should be tried.

Governments in Canada, (in other words tax payers) continue to pay for a failed ’sick-care’ system rather than a ‘wellness-care’ based system. Medicine’s approach is to block symptoms rather than treat the underlying cause (usually nutritionally/immune system based deficiencies/impairment).

Take the finger out of the Dam and fix the Damn thing properly!

Think of Medicine as the little Dutch boy with his finger in the dyke using more and more fingers (drugs) and toes (more drugs) to plug the holes (treat the symptoms, many caused by the drugs themselves). It doesn’t make any sense, fix the dyke. Fix the patient with better nutrition, diet and herbs. There are doctors that specialize in taking the elderly off the multiple prescriptions they have been given, now if they would only use better nutrition on them.

I am not anti-drugs, if they are needed so be it, but there are some better strategies and they will hopefully come when the present paradigm (or model) of medicine collapses from the weight of its own arrogance. If governments reimbursed and insurance companies (payers) covered Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) and nutritional and herbal supplements their costs would go down and the quality of patient care would go up.

Governments and Medicine and Insurance Companies will say- ‘There aren’t any studies.’ Then do them! That’s no excuse and is lazy and biased. There are over 4000 studies in the Cochrane Library on CAM treatments.

Improved Patient results-What a concept?

Governments and insurance companies blindly feel free to pay for Cancer Chemotherapy prescriptions even though the U.S. Federal Government General Accounting Office states that “For the majority of the cancers we examined, the actual improvements (in survival) have been small or have been overestimated by the published rates…” Checking further into the data Dr. G. Morgan found that for 85% of Cancers the success rate is a whopping 2% better than ‘NO TREATMENT’. (See my post- Cytotoxic Chemotherapy Cancer Clinker, April 20, 2007)

Any other business except the pharmaceutical industry would be embarrassed by these results. There have been numerous cases of drugs achieving 5-10% improvement, over placebo or an inexpensive older drug, and trumpeted as the greatest thing since sliced bread while the governments and insurance company’s trip over themselves to pay for these so-called ‘proven treatments’ and decline CAM therapies as supposedly unproven.

If they only funded the firearms that worked 5-10% of the time Police would go on strike. Why not fund firefighter equipment that is useless as well. Health care politicians and bureaucrats treat Medicine like a ‘holy cow’; otherwise they wouldn’t put up with these failures by funding them. They disdainfully look down their noses at CAM, which is growing substantially even though patients pay out of pocket, because of word of mouth about its success. Interestingly the higher the education, the more patients use CAM.

An appropriate comment from Winston Churchill should have payers look at their strategy and Medicine’s ‘Pharmaceuticals only’ approach: “However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.”

So, Professor Arnold S. Rahlman is right when he says that Canada should not adopt the unsustainable, expensive, inefficient and inequitable U.S. health care model. He should also go one step farther and state that the failures (’Disasters’) of Medicine, and there are many (think of literal ‘poison pills’ pulled from the market), should be turned over to wellness practitioners instead of ‘Sicko’ practitioners.

The Soviet Union collapsed when the top leaders realized ‘It isn’t working’. Well Medicine- ‘It isn’t working’.

To sum up, I’ll slightly alter another famous quote from Winston Churchill. ‘Never have so many (patients, government/taxpayers, insurance companies) paid so much (prescription drugs) for so little results (results of only 2-5 or 10% success in many cases)!’

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About the author

Dennis Cutforth is a researcher and writer with over 35 years experience in health-care sales, marketing and research in pharmaceuticals and natural health. Dennis will cut through all the propaganda and give you the real facts about what really works to make you healthier and happier. Visit his Blog at Better Life Blog.

According to news wire services and articles such as appeared at CTV.ca ‘Quebec refuses to force chemo on 3-year-old boy’; this is a welcome occurrence.

Too frequently parents are forced to turn their children over to so-called medical experts to pump chemotherapy poisons into their children that are of questionable value. The studies have not been properly done. So, for experts to say parents are threatening their children’s lives by withholding life-saving pharmaceuticals is without basis in fact.

As I wrote in a previous post (dated April 20, 2007) titled: ‘Cytotoxic Chemotherapy Cancer Clinker – Part 7′- “What we can see from Conventional Medicines own words is that Conventional Cytotoxic Chemotherapy Cancer treatment is a Clinker of ‘inferior quality’ that has FAILED.”

This was based on quotes from medical journals such as the British Journal of Cancer- ” “showed no advantage of conventional chemotherapy over no treatment.”

The Journal of the American Medical Association, for most types of cancer, the chances of surviving more than five years in 1995 was not much better than in 1950:
“…our analysis shows that changes in 5-year survival over time bear little relationship to changes in cancer mortality [death].”

“The overall contribution of curative and adjuvant [supplemental] cytotoxic chemotherapy to 5-year survival in adults was estimated to be 2.3% in Australia and 2.1% in the USA.” Clinical Oncology (Royal College of Radiologists (Great Britain)

Interestingly in e-mail comments to the above website many people emotionally attacked the parents of this child holding up medicine as a sacred cow, some going so far as to say that chemo should be forced on the child who’s parents were irresponsible by resorting to a raw juice diet. Unfortunately when individuals who are uninformed they resort to ‘perception is reality’, however in the case of cancer treatments people have been sold a bill of goods.

As the U.S. Federal Government General Accounting Office report- “For the majority of the cancers we examined, the actual improvements (in survival) have been small or have been overestimated by the published rates…It is difficult to find that there has been much progress…(For breast cancer), there is a slight improvement…(which) is considerably less than reported.”

Some accused the people who suggest trying alternative approaches as selling ’snake oil’. If they honestly examine the actual data they will see that chemo is ’snake oil’ for 85% of cancers. However, it is effective in 15% of cancers, and that is where it should be used.
In countries such as Germany where they combine herbs and low dose chemo they get excellent results. Pioneering physicians who use herbs, nutrition and diet get good results for some types of cancer, however, the big motive in chemo isn’t as altruistic as you might think but really profit driven.

In my post (dated March 19, 2007) titled: Big Pharma’s ‘Big Bucks Control Medicine - Part 6,’ I discuss what one retired detective found out about the Cancer Industry- “I learned that making money, not finding cures, is what conventional medicine is interested in.”

To really learn what alternatives there are to harsh chemicals you should check the informative and well researched book about complementary cancer care- Choices in Healing by Michael Lerner. Also definitely visit the website of Dr. Ralph Moss.

As the CTV.ca article stated- “Arthur Schafer, an ethics professor at the University of Manitoba, said the court ruled against the medical staff at the hospital because the boy’s condition, which is currently not life threatening, is not an emergency situation.

“The chemo is toxic, it’s highly aggressive treatment,” Schafer told CTV’s Canada AM on Friday. “It may be that the child is likely not to survive anyway, it may be that there’s time to survive and that the chemo doesn’t have to be given now.”

Schafer said that if the doctors had testified that it was a medical emergency, the province probably would have intervened.

“There’s a heavy burden of proof on the state if you’re going to interfere on the judgments of a loving family about their own young child,” he said. “You better have good medical evidence and my supposition is that we haven’t seen that evidence yet.”

All parents in the same situation should not be intimidated by the medical authorities but should ask to see the ’scientific studies’ to support their treatments. You’d be surprised by the lack of effectiveness for their caustic treatments that would support their case in a court of law.

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Dennis Cutforth is a researcher and writer with over 35 years experience in health-care sales, marketing and research in pharmaceuticals and natural health. Dennis will cut through all the propaganda and give you the real facts about what really works to make you healthier and happier. Visit his Blog at Better Life Blog.

The tag line in a news article 19 Jul 2007 at Medical News Today is “Scientists Discover Genes Behind Restless Legs”, based on one study published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) and the other study published in the journal Nature Genetic.

So Hallelujah all you have to do if you suffer from this sleep disorder is to wait for a Drug Company to use this information, take out a patent with a drug that blocks the symptoms while causing intolerable side effects and 15-20 years from now you’ll be able to take advantage of this miracle treatment that is 5-10% effective at a premium price.

To be sure there are prescription drugs that are on the market for this syndrome that can keep you awake and make you feel like you have the creepy crawlies in your legs. However, if you are proactive and don’t just accept the ‘Big Pharma’ line and find a physician or health care provider that looks at diet and nutritional deficiencies you can get the help you need at an affordable price with better results now.

As Melvyn R. Werbach, MD wrote in The Townsend Letter in an article entitled- Nutritional Influences on Illness- Restless Legs Syndrome, hypoglycemia, caffeine, various vitamins, minerals and nutrients in Scientific Studies can play a role.

There can be any of one or more of these along with food intolerances/allergies that contribute to Restless Legs Syndrome so don’t be swayed by the vested interests of ‘Big Pharma’ or a biased physician who is uninformed about simple yet effective natural treatments.

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Dennis Cutforth is a researcher and writer with over 35 years experience in health-care sales, marketing and research in pharmaceuticals and natural health. Dennis will cut through all the propaganda and give you the real facts about what really works to make you healthier and happier. Visit his Blog at Better Life Blog.