The Health Freedom Advocate's Essential Library
These highly recommended books are essential to understand the depth and breadth of the political and legal obstacles to free access to health care alternatives.
Assault on Medical Freedom
By P. Joseph Lisa
This outstanding book, published in 1994, provides an essential foundation of understanding how pharmaceutical based medicine achieved and has maintained supremacy over homeopathy, osteopathy, chiropractic, naturopathy and a host of other alternative medical systems.. Author P.J. Lisa document the history since 1847 how the American Medical Association, in collusion with the pharmaceutical industry, federal agencies, and state medical boards have systematically acted to suppress innovation and natural non-toxic therapies in an effort to block competition to a solely drug based medical system. There are specific chapters on chelation therapy, chiropractic, acupuncture, holistic dentistry, and nutritional supplements that demonstrate how opposition to natural therapies has limited public awareness and access to these important therapies.
Racketeering in Medicine
By James Carter, MD
In Dr. Carter's own words, "This book will tell you the true story about the frightening power-mongers who have orchestrated financially-motivated cover-ups for the purpose of:
- controlling the treatment of cancer,
- promoting the use of drugs in the treatment of psychosomatic disorders which respond better to stress management,
- promoting drugs instead of acupuncture to relieve chronic pain,
- discounting natural remedies and nutritional therapies as being useless, and
- controlling the treatment of advanced cases of AIDS, which have remained incurable, in part, because of the failure to consider alternatives."
Racketeering in Medicine contains so many chilling stories about just how the aims of the participants in this conspiracy have harmed doctors and patients alike. The book's appendix lists many important resources, both medical and advocacy.
Politics in Healing
By Dan Haley
Author Dan Haley explains just how the FDA, AMA, and other big pharma players have suppressed and even completely eliminated natural non-toxic cancer therapies that had the potential of curing cancer and saving thousands if not millions of lives. Stories of the Koch remedies, Hoxsey's herbs, Krebiozen, and Dr. Burzinski illustrate how American people have been kept dependent on the toxic cancer therapies of chemotherapy and radiation.
The Truth About the Drug Companies
By Marcia Angell, MD
This is a must read for anyone who has ever or will ever use a prescription drug. It should be required reading in all medical schools. Dr. Angell, the former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine and an outspoken proponent of medical and pharmaceutical reform clearly shows just how the greed of Big Pharma has corrupted federal agencies, medical institutions and universities and hood-winked the American public. This 200 billion dollar industry, for many years the most profitable industry listed in the Fortune 500, costs consumers and employers billions in excessive drug prices while taxpayers pick up most of the tab for the research that pharmaceutical companies make billions of dollars profit from. These same companies are failing to fund research for truly innovative, life-saving new drugs, sticking to "me-too" drugs that are a sure bet for profits. Dr. Angell concludes with clear-cut recommendations that would fix many of the problems in this industry. Lastly, she outlines simple action steps that each one of us can immediately implement to start creating change:
Other books and references from this book:
The Big Fix by Katharine Greider
IMS Health: www.imshealth.com
FamiliesUSA: "Out of Bounds: Rising Prescription Drug Prices for Seniors" www.familiesusa.org
Public Citizen Congress Watch: "Rx R&D Myths: the Case Against the Drug Industry's R&D 'Scare Card'" www.citizen.org
"Protecting Americas Health: The FDA, Business, and One Hundred Years of Regulation" by Philip J. Hilts
" FDA: Inside and Out" by Suzanne Parisian
Cancer-Gate: How to Win the Losing Cancer War
By Samuel S. Epstein, MD
Cancer-Gate details how the National Cancer Institute and the American Cancer Society are sitting on mountains of information on environmental and other avoidable causes of cancer, while failing to act on this and make it available to Congress and the public. This silence even extends to frank suppression of information.
Cancer-Gate explains how we can win the war against cancer with strategies including "right-to-know" laws, ensuring public dissemination of critical information on environmental carcinogens and other avoidable causes of cancer, and Congressional reform and oversight to ensure that the NCI protects the public rather than special interests.
Cancer-Gate's searing indictment of the NCI and ACS for losing the war against cancer, launched by President Nixon in 1971, has been endorsed by over 100 leading independent scientific experts in cancer prevention and public health, including past directors of federal research and regulatory agencies, besides citizen activist groups.
Stop Worrying About Cholesterol:
Better Ways to Avoid a Heart Attack and Get Healthy
By Richard E. Tapert, DO
Stop Worrying About Cholesterol challenges the current official opinion that consumption of animal fat and cholesterol are the cause of our epidemic of heart disease and heart attack death. The author exposes the bad science, bias, and conflict of interest that has characterized the demonizing of cholesterol. He exposes the irrationality and the profiteering behind the ongoing focus on the lowering of blood cholesterol levels by diet and dangerous drugs to treat and prevent heart disease. The real causes of heart disease and its rational prevention and treatment by natural means are elucidated.
Malignant Medical Myths:
Why Medical Treatment Causes 200,000 Deaths in the USA Each Year,
and How to Protect Yourself
By Joel M. Kauffman, PhD
A fearless expose' of mainstream medicine's most revered dogma, Malignant Medical Myths is solidly based on trusted medical and nutritional books and journals. Americans spend $2 trillion per year on health care, about $7,000 each, yet it buys almost the poorest healthcare among developed countries, with 200,000 deaths per year from medical treatment. Find out why advice from authorities on screening tests, drugs, diet, exercise, alcohol, radiation, radon, and water fluoridation is often wrong and commercially motivated. See how clinical trials are slanted. Understand how "sickness" is created to sell treatments, and which government agencies support these shenanigans.
Includes a list of Recommended Books and Websites.
Overdo$ed America: the Broken Promise of American Medicine -
How the Pharmaceutical Companies are Corrupting Science,
Misleading Doctors, and Threatening Your Health
By John Abramson, MD
Using the examples of Vioxx, Celebrex, cholesterol-lowering statin drugs, and anti-depressants, Overdo$ed America shows that at the heart of the current crisis in American medicine lies the commercialization of medical knowledge itself.
Drawing on his background in statistics, epidemiology, and health policy, John Abramson, MD, and award-winning family doctor on the clinical faculty at Harvard Medical School, reveals the ways in which the drug companies have misrepresented statistical evidence, mislead doctors, and compromised our health. The good news is that the best scientific evidence shows that reclaiming responsibility for your own health is often far more effective than taking the latest blockbuster drug. You?and your doctor?will be stunned by this unflinching expose' of American medicine.
The Serpent on the Staff:
The Unhealthy Politics of the American Medical Association
by Howard Wolinsky, Tom Brune
Publisher: Tarcher (May 9, 1995)
From Library Journal
Chicago Sun Times reporters Wolinsky and Brune argue that what is good for the American Medical Association (AMA) is not necessarily good for the public or its health. Since the AMA is a doctors' organization, few readers will be surprised by the authors' revelations of conflicts of professional vs. public interests. The authors provide an overview of the AMA, discussing its organization and membership and how it works; its political "wheeling and dealing"; and some of its less altruistic actions regarding alternative (i.e., nonallopathic) medicines, Medicare, and the tobacco and drug industries and its ethical waverings on health issues such as abortion and AIDS. They write that "the AMA is a cheerleader for just enough reform to avoid a major overhaul" of the U.S. healthcare system. Recommended for healthcare and public policy collections.
James Swanton, Albert Einstein Coll. of Medicine, New York
Divided Legacy, Volume III: Science and Ethics in American Medicine
by Harris Coulter
North Atlantic Books; 2Rev Ed edition (January 27, 1993)
Divided Legacy is a fundamental book in understanding the History of Medicine in United States. The book chronicles the establishment of the first medical society in the country by the Homeopaths and the response by allopathic physicians forming the AMA.
