Why Is Mainstream Medicine Not On Board?

Why have they not taken the proven nutrition approach to chronic disease seriously?

In order to answer that question, I would like to tell you about two prominent mainstream physicians who have learned about how to promote health during their respective careers after medical school; you see, that topic doesn't get much attention during their formal training. The two doctors below went to the very best schools and both have enjoyed distinguished careers. Both of their stories offer compelling information regarding the question that I posed above.

Case #1 - Caldwell Esselstyn, M.D.

As one of the famed Cleveland Clinic's most prominent surgeons for over 20 years, Dr. Esselstyn became disillusioned with the medical treatment paradigm in the late seventies, noting that the treatments were doing little if any to prmote the health of his heart and cancer patients. In order to address that problem, he began his own independent program of research to learn how the clinic could actually help their patients promote health and rid themselves of disease...instead of just treating symptoms with surgery, drugs, radiation and chemo therapy.

I first learned about Dr. Esselstyn in The China Study (by T. Colin Campbell) and have since gotten to know him and his wife Ann personally. I learned a great deal about his work upon reading his excellent book on preventing and reversing heart disease. As Dr. Esselstyn and Dr. Campbell know, a health promoting diet could easily eliminate well over 80% of the health care mess that is causing so many problems for most of us. But guess what, the mainstream medical community does not wish to listen to the nutritional wisdon of one of their most successful and most prominent physicians. It sadly begs the question, "Where would all those doctors and hospital workers go if everyone learned how to get healthy?" As horrible as it sounds, the current medical system has no incentive whatsoever for their patients to get healthy; for if they did, what would happen to the millions of people working in the health care field?

The good news is that you don't need the approval of the mainstream medical community to take charge of your own health. You just need to make the decision, make the commitment and then get started. I can think of no better person to help inspire you to take this very important step than Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn...credentials just don't get any better than his. After reading those credentials here, you may want to take a look at his recent book, described the BOOKS section above.

Caldwell Esselstyn, M.D.

Prominent Surgeon of the famed Cleveland Clinic

Background and Career Summary

Yale Grad, Olympic Gold Medal in rowing in 1956, Bronze star as Army surgeon in Vietnam

Published over 100 scientific papers, twice listed in “Best Doctors in America” in three categories of surgery, for 15 years was the #1 earner in the Cleveland Clinic Department of General Surgery.

When the then-president of the American Medical Association needed thyroid surgery, he chose Dr. Esselstyn.

After 11 years as a surgeon, he became disillusioned with the treatment paradigm of U.S. medicine in cancer and heart disease and began to look for ways to truly “cure” the patients. His study (in late 70's) focused on nutrition.

After much research, he decided to test the effects of a whole foods, plant-based diet on people with established coronary heart disease.

Began his study in 1985 with 23 patients; 5 dropped out, leaving 18. Within the 8 years leading up to the study, these 18 had suffered 49 coronary events. In the following 11 years, there was one event (from a patient who strayed for 2 years), so for patients that adhered, the score was 49-0.

Other doctors at the Clinic began seeking his program for themselves and for their families, but didn't refer their patients or even tell their patients that there was an alternative. (Could be grounds for a potential lawsuit)

After retiring from active surgery in 2002, formally proposed to the Cleveland Clinic that he set up an arrest and reversal dietary program to offer heart patients at the clinic. His proposal was ignored.

Dr. Esselstyn sums up the situation:

“There is absolutely no reason that anyone should ever die of heart disease;

it is reversible at almost any age with the proper nutrition.

Consumers just haven't been provided the right information.”

So my conclusion is simply: if the system won't listen to someone with the incomparable credentials of Caldwell Esselstyn, we know that "the system" doesn't really want people to have a choice in taking charge of their own health.

Case #2 - John Abramson, M.D.

The following is the Foreword in a new book by Joel Fuhrman, M.D., entitled Eat for Health. Dr. Abramson, who wrote this foreword, is a Clinical Instructor at the Harvard Medical School and is a noted author. He presents compelling information here regarding the reason why Mainstream Medicine hasn't taken seriously the proven nutrition approach to curing and/or preventing chronic disease.

John Abramson MD

Author, Overdosed America:

The Broken Promise of American Medicine

Clinical Instructor, Harvard Medical School

Almost daily we hear news of exciting medical breakthroughs. We're barraged by drug ads trying to convince us we need medications to cure diseases we didn't even know we had. And our doctors' enthusiasm about prescribing the latest medicines, tests, and procedures is highly contagious. It's almost impossible not to get swept up in the expectation that we can count on the latest in medicine to protect and restore our health.

There is no doubt that modern medicine can be a God-send, and many of us have benefited from good medical care. But all this good news sounds too good to be true. And it is. The real story is that most of these “miracles” are being foisted upon the public, not because of the health benefits they bring to us, but because of the financial benefits they bring to the medical industries that manufacture these beliefs.

There is, however, a genuine scientific breakthrough that is readily available to you and it isn't expensive. It is the health-giving, disease-preventing power of a truly healthful eating-style. The one thing it does require, however, is that you reclaim responsibility for keeping yourself healthy.

According to both the prestigious Institute of Medicine and researchers from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, two-thirds of our health is determined not by the medical care we receive, but by our health habits and the environment in which we live. The problem is that there's a mismatch between what is being done to help us preserve our health and what the scientific evidence shows us would be a lot more effective. Nineteen out of 20 of our healthcare dollars are spent on biomedical interventions like medications, procedures, blood tests, x-rays and MRIs. These biomedical interventions use up all the time and resources that could also help us address the kinds of things that would dramatically improve our chances of staying healthy.

One example: Women can't avoid being confronted with the message that heart disease is their #1 killer and in order to protect themselves, they should “know their numbers.” Of course we all know that this means knowing your cholesterol numbers, and we also know that this will lead many otherwise healthy women to be put on a cholesterol-lowering drug by their doctors. There are several things wrong with this common medical narrative:

1. Despite the National Cholesterol Education Program's guidelines for treating healthy women with cholesterol-lowering drugs when their risk hits certain thresholds, there has never been a single, randomized controlled, clinical trial (gold standard) that shows that women who don't already have heart disease or diabetes, benefit from taking a statin. (I know this sounds crazy, but I am the author of an article published in the British medical journal, The Lancet, in January of 2007 titled “Are Lipid-Lowering Guidelines Evidence Based?” that made exactly these points.)

2. Eating a healthy diet is three times more effective than taking a cholesterol-lowering statin drug for preventing a recurrent heart attack. Contrary to what is generally thought, the healthy diet doesn't help by lowering cholesterol that much. A healthful diet-style reduces the risk of heart disease by an assortment of other known and unknown mechanisms. Like a good magician, cholesterol-lowering marketing campaigns have focused our attention on cholesterol levels when we should be focused on the real goal: reducing the risk of heart disease and improving overall health.

3. One study followed 7300 healthy women for 31 years to see what risk factors contribute most to premature death. The contribution of elevated cholesterol to increased mortality rate was exactly zero. On the other hand, the Nurses' Health Study shows that women who follow five healthy habits develop 83% less heart disease and 91% less diabetes than women who don't follow the healthy habits-eat a healthy diet, exercise regularly, don't smoke, don't drink heavily, and maintain a good body weight.

Surprisingly, only 3 out of 100 American women adhere to these healthy habits. We are investing most of our health care resources in lowering cholesterol with drugs instead of helping women adopt healthy lifestyles, which would be far more effective and less costly. Americans now spend about twice as much per person on healthcare as the other 21 wealthiest industrialized countries. Of course, there's little that's more important than health, so if this is what it takes to get the best healthcare in the world, then most people think the high cost of healthcare is a necessary evil. But it's not just the cost of American healthcare that's out of line. The really bad news is that for all the extra money we are spending, Americans not only don't have the best health, we have the worst among the citizens of the wealthiest 22 countries.

According to the World Health Organization, Americans live an average of two and a half years fewer years in good health than the citizens of these other countries. Adding insult to injury, according to the World Health Organization, the efficiency of the American healthcare system (meaning how much health we get for the money we spend) ranks 72nd in the world! Can you imagine how long your employer would continue to buy services from a supplier that ranked 72nd in efficiency, was charging your company twice as much as your international competitors, and achieving inferior results?

Researchers from Dartmouth Medical School calculate that about one third of American healthcare expenditures are now devoted to services that don't improve health and may actually make things worse. This means that Americans are wasting more than $700 billion per year on unnecessary or harmful healthcare. To put this in perspective, the amount we are wasting each year on unnecessary or harmful medical care is more than the entire budget of the United States Department of Defense.

Corporations are struggling to purchase healthcare coverage for their employees and, by necessity, shifting costs to their workers in the form of higher monthly payroll deductions, higher deductibles and co-pays, and less coverage. As a result, the number of uninsured Americans is increasing by about one million every year and the majority of the recently uninsured are middle class, full-time workers. They and their employers can't afford health insurance. We need to get to the bottom of the dysfunction in our national approach to health. The politicians don't want to address the real issues because most of them are dependent on contributions and other support from the healthcare industry. Most of the “experts” don't want to get to the real issues either, because they too have financial ties to the medical industry; same with universities, with medical journals, and even the media.

The “core lesion” (as we doctors say) is that medical knowledge itself is now produced and disseminated primarily for its profit-generating potential. I am not talking about the ads on TV or about the so-called non-profit groups that take large amounts of money from the medical industry. I'm not even talking about the free lunches that the drug companies' sales reps bring to doctors' offices to get them to listen to their sales pitches. Or about the continuing education lectures and seminars that doctors attend to maintain their licenses, which are overwhelming sponsored by the drug and other medical industries. This is where it gets really scary: I am talking about the clinical trials that are published in our most trusted medical journals. The majority of these studies are industry sponsored, and research shows that the odds are five times greater that these commercially sponsored clinical studies will conclude that the sponsors' drugs are the treatment of choice compared to non-commercially sponsored studies of exactly the same drugs!

To make matters worse, almost all of the articles in medical journals that influence the way that doctors practice medicine have commercial sponsorship. Between 1999 and 2004, for example, all but one of the 32 most influential articles that were published had commercial sponsorship. The commercial corruption of the sources of medical knowledge has become so overwhelming that the current editor of the Lancet and the recent editor of the British Medical Journal told the New York Times that “[Medical] journals have devolved into information-laundering operations for the pharmaceutical industry.”

When the drug and other medical industries invest in research, their primary responsibility is not to optimize your health, but to maximize their shareholders' return on investment. In a medical system with proper oversight, these two goals would be the same-the profits made by private industry would be a direct reflection of their contribution to our health. But the oversight of the FDA, medical journals, universities, and academic physicians has all been seriously eroded by growing dependence on drug and other medical industry funding.

The end result is that the “knowledge” that your doctor receives from the sources that he or she has been trained to trust is distorted in two ways. First, the evidence is overwhelming that the conclusions presented in even the most trusted medical journals are biased in favor of their commercial sponsors. And second, in the same way that plants grow toward sunlight, the “knowledge” produced by commercially sponsored medical research grows towards the medical interventions that have the greatest potential to generate profits instead of the greatest potential to improve our health.

This may sound like dismal news, but understanding the truth points the way to enormous opportunities for you to take back control of your health (and for your employer to become a more intelligent purchaser of healthcare services). Your health is mostly in your control, but a guide is needed to show the way and protect you from getting distracted by all the commercial hype that surrounds health and healthcare.

For a healthier workforce and a healthier nation, both medically and economically, the information in this book is the solution. The solution to our health-care problem is not going to come from making better drugs or from better distribution of economic resources. It has to come from each of us taking better care of our health, so we avoid the need for medical interventions. For those of you taking medications, without addressing the dietary cause of your problem-this book is for you. For those of you who just want to live healthier and longer without medical disability and needless medical tragedies-this book is for you too. And for those of you who are concerned about the economic health of our nation-this book is for you as well.

This is why Dr. Fuhrman's work is so important. It is what we need to hear, well-researched, up-to-date, scientific information about healthy nutrition taught with wisdom and compassion. Not a fad diet, and not requiring great feats of self-denial, Eat for Health shows you how to take control of your dietary habits without going hungry and without denying yourself all of your favorite foods. The most fascinating aspect of this plan is that eating healthier can lead to greater, not less eating pleasure. You will quickly realize that you don't have to be a slave to unhealthy habits and you don't have to be controlled by the intense marketing for highly processed, calorie-dense, nutrient-poor foods.

Please accept my congratulations for reading this and deciding to take control of your health future. Study it well. Soon you will be enjoying a diet that will improve your health tremendously. You will have more energy and will be taking pride in the way that your body is responding to being fed well.

John Abramson, M.D.

Summary

Fortunately, we live in a free country where we can educate ourselves and spread the truth among everyone we know. Maybe someday, we'll have an honest and enlightened politician in the White House who will make sure that the entire country gets a chance to learn the truth about nutrition.

In Colin Campbell's magnificent book, The China Study, he devotes over 100 pages to answering the question, "Why haven't I heard any of this before?" He sums it us thusly,

"There is a wealth of published research that suggests that the diseases of affluence are a result of poor nutrition; not poor genes or bad luck. So why doesn't the medical system take nutrition seriously? Four words: money, power, ego and control. While it is unfair to generalize about individual doctors, it is safe to say that the system they work in, the system that currently takes responsibility for promoting the health of Americans, is failing us. Most, but not all, of the confusion about nutrition is created in legal, fully disclosed ways and is disseminated by unsuspecting, well-intentioned people, whether they are researchers, politicians, or journalists. The entire system--government, science, medicine, industry and media--promotes profits over health, technology over food and confusion over clarity. The most damaging aspect of the system is not sensational, nor is it likely to create much of a stir upon its discovery. It is a silent enemy that few people see and understand."

Thanks to a few courageous people like Dr. Campbell and Dr. Esselstyn, I am now one of those few who not only sees and understands, but has decided to spend the rest of my working career on helping the world learn the truth about nutrition. Regards, Jim Hicks