Eyes Wide SHUT! Understanding The Modern Health Pandemic

Contributing Writer for Wake Up World

Pharmaceuticals and the lack of nutritional knowledge and understanding had been a growing concern of mine, ever since I developed my own health issues. A simple breakout of spots led to a 6 year health battle that was finally won when I made the decision to emrbrace a complete lifestyle change which included cutting out chemicals and toxins and switching to an organic, whole food, plant based diet. As is (unfortunately) the standard these days, instead of investigating what was causing the breakout of spots, my doctor simply handed me a prescription for antibiotics which they continued to prescribe for over a year.

Throughout this period, I went to my doctor with many health issues, most of which I later found out were side effects of the antibiotics but unfortunately I was uneducated on the subject at the time and did not make the link. More worrying, neither did the doctor who continued to prescribe the antibiotics without any further investigation into my symptoms.

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As I later discovered, the antibiotics had annihilated my gut, leaving me deficient in the very vitamins and minerals essential for a healthy and effectively functioning immune system which, in turn, left me vulnerable and open to attack. When I had vaccinations to allow me to travel, my body was not able to fight off the live disease that had been injected into my system which then, undiagnosed, attacked and destroyed my already weakened immune system for many years to come.

Only when I moved to Hong Kong and found an incredible holistic doctor who was also a fully trained GP in conventional western medicine, did I start to get to the root cause of the problem. I was diagnosed with colitis, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia and exhausted adrenals, which led to me suffering from acute stress due to the fact that my body was not physically able to deal with the stress of normal life.

Instead of prescribing further pharmaceuticals, she worked to get me off of the ones that I had been previously prescribed, recognising the side effects that they were causing within my body and helped me to get a plan into place to get my body back into balance more naturally and gently by stripping out unnecessary toxins and implementing a more balanced diet in order to provide my body with the fuel that it needed to heal.

Whilst I do understand that it is an immense amount of training, this level of knowledge, understanding and expertise is what we should expect from all of our doctors but instead, we are just given a quick fix of drugs which often only treat the symptoms instead of getting to the root cause of the problem.

Eyes Wide SHUT!

Our current medical system does not understand or respect how our complex bodies work, nor does it even attempt to try to prevent illness. Dr Leigh Connealy MD and medical director of the Cancer Centre For Healing in California has said “doctor’s simply maintain a persons disease or illness with drugs instead of striving to create optimum health”.[1]

The majority of training given at medical schools is on prescribing drugs. It quite literally seems to be all that our GP’s now know how to do. Nutrition needs to be a much larger part of their training. In fact, nutrition should be part of the school syllabus so that we can become an informed nation when it comes to what we choose to put into our bodies.

Less than 1/3 of medical schools in the US have a requirement for even a single nutrition course [2] and those that do often use material that is supplied by industries, including the sugar and dairy association, with products to sell that actually undermine our health in the first place.[3][36]

The Federal Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDCI) state that 75% of healthcare spending in the U.S is on preventable chronic diseases, most of which are linked to diet.[4][5][6]

Despite the U.S spending more than twice the average of other developed countries on healthcare, their average life expectancy is significantly lower than that of other nations.[4]

According to the American Institute for Cancer Research, at least half of cancer and cancer related deaths are preventable. AICR’s vice president of research has said that “our reports show that simply eating well, being physically active and maintaining a healthy weight could prevent tens of thousands of cancer cases each year”[7] but, as of yet, none of these findings have been incorporated into the way that we treat or prevent disease.

The growth of science and technology has seen us filling our bodies with more and more chemicals and less and less nutrition. At the first sign of a cold or headache, we reach straight for the chemicals without giving any consideration as to what may be causing the problem in the first place and with very little idea of the negative affect and strain that we are putting onto our bodies by doing so.

Healing is inherently built into our bodies. With the right nutrients and by stripping back poisonous toxins, it can heal itself. Often the body’s symptoms of disease are simply its response to bringing about healing. When we get a cold, that is actually the body’s way of responding to something that is invading the system but instead of allowing our bodies to do what they were designed to do, instead, we fill ourselves full of chemicals to stop this natural healing process.

As well as the huge intake of chemicals that our bodies now have to work hard to break down and process, our food has become so overly processed that it no longer contains enough of the vitamins and minerals that our bodies need to survive.

The dictionary definition of food is ‘a nutritious substance that is taken into the body to sustain life, provide energy and promote growth’. Food is our fuel for life but we continuously fill our bodies with overly processed, sugary foods, lacking in any kind of nutritional content.

If we were to fill our petrol run car with diesel it would clog the engine and no longer work. This is what we are doing to our bodies on a daily basis whilst our current medical system blindly ignores the magnitude of positive affects that a simple change in diet can have on our health.

Our bodies are literally coming under a barrage of attack. “We need to move towards better living by moving towards working with nature and natural laws” says David Wolfe MA, nutrition and super foods expert.[8] All of the nutrition that we could ever need has been provided to us through nature and yet we ignore it in favour of overly processed foods which are full of chemicals and lacking any of the real nutritional value which our bodies so desperately need.

As this lack of nutrition starts to take a hold, we turn to the pharmaceuticals in order to try to fix the problems that could so easily be avoided by a change in diet.

We use pharmaceuticals as a quick fix to do what we are not prepared to do for ourselves. If we listened to our bodies and changed our lifestyles and our eating habits instead of turning to pharmaceuticals at the first sign of a problem then our bodies would not become so out of balance that more aggressive and invasive forms of treatment are later needed.

Of course, there is a time and a place for pharmaceuticals, particularly in emergency situations when fast acting treatment is imperative but we have become a society that are reliant on taking a pill for every ill. Whilst pharmaceuticals may save lives, it is my strong belief that the dramatic rise in many of the serious illnesses that we are now suffering from are a direct result of both poor nutrition and the over use of pharmaceuticals in our everyday lives as well as the chemicals that have found their way into our food chain and our water supply.[9]

Pharmaceuticals do not work in harmony with the body, instead they cause changes to our DNA and genes10 which, in turn, puts us at higher risk for all kinds of diseases.[11][12] They also cause a chemical imbalance within our bodies, therefore creating side effects. Disturbingly, often these side effects can be much worse than the original disorder. We are then prescribed more drugs to mitigate those side effects and so the process continues with many people ending up on a veritable concoction of unnecessary prescription drugs.

One study has shown that if you are on 5 or more medications, it is impossible to predict the clinical response of the 5 drugs1 and yet many people are prescribed a plethora of drugs on a daily basis by a doctor that we put all of our trust in but who literally has no idea of the colossal affects of the concoction of drugs that he is prescribing.

Worryingly, it is difficult for doctors to spot if a drug is causing a side effect when the side effect is a medical problem that many people suffer from anyway. Side effects of headaches, aching joints and even heart attacks and cancer will therefore not raise the suspicions of the doctor who is prescribing the drug as they will simply assume that the patient is suffering from these as a separate, stand alone issue. This means that a lot of negative side effects of medications will go largely unreported whilst the drugs continue to be prescribed to the patient suffering from them.[13]

Gary Noel, PHD and various other MD’s have recently released a report called ‘death by medicine’. In this report they state that 783,936 deaths a year are caused by conventional medicine. That is an astounding figure but still we continue to trust that conventional medicine is the way forward! They state that “it is now evident that the American medical system is the leading cause of death and injury in the U.S”.[1][14][15]

106,000 deaths per year are attributed to prescription drugs that have been properly prescribed and administered, making prescription drugs the 4th biggest killer in the U.S, with over 2,000,000 people suffering adverse side effects.

Death from illegal drugs is roughly 10,000 per year in the U.S.[14] If you choose to take illegal drugs you do so knowing the risks and make a conscious decision to accept the consequences. When we take drugs that are prescribed to us by our doctor, most of us are usually completely unaware of the risks involved with this. It has, disturbingly, become the norm for us to leave our doctors’ surgery with a prescription in our hands and yet, according to this evidence, prescription drugs cause 10 times more deaths than illegal drugs.

Despite the fact that psychotropic medication, used to treat mental disorders, has been estimated to have caused over 700,000 serious adverse reactions and over 42,000 deaths, they have become the standard treatment for every problem in life.[16]

Pharmaceutical companies have labelled everyday life problems as medical disorders in order to yield millions of dollars worth of profit. Shyness has become social anxiety disorder, the ups and downs that we all endure have become bipolar whilst distractibility has become ADHD.[16]

It has become very common to put children who aren’t quite conforming to the norm or who are having trouble concentrating in class on Ritalin. Figures released by the NHS business services authority show that prescriptions for Ritalin have quadrupled in the UK in the decade up to 2010, with statistics showing that in 2004, 90% of prescriptions for this drug were used to combat behavioural problems in school-age children.[17] Instead of working with those children to find out what makes them tick, we just slap on the ADHD label and reach straight for the drugs.

We all come to this life with our own gifts and yet when children go to school, instead of encouraging and nurturing their gifts and working with them to find out what path is best suited to these gifts, we instead focus on the subjects that they are not so good at, possibly getting them tutours and encouraging them to spend more time on those subjects. In turn, this means that they have less time to nurture their true talents into something special, thus creating a child that is simply average at everything instead of incredible at something. Is it any wonder that our children start to feel disconnected and play up in class..?

If they were alive today, it is likely that the great minds of Einstein, Mozart, Alan Turing and Leonardo Davinci would be diagnosed with ADHD and prescribed Ritalin, numbing their genius and robbing our society of the great achievements that they made in their lifetimes.

The average child under 12 years old consumes 49 pounds of sugar per year, according to the USDA Economic Research Service.[18][19] According to the book “Functional Biochemistry in Health and Disease,” consumption of high-fructose corn syrup is linked to hyperactive behaviour. Reducing a child’s sugar intake should, without question, be the first port of call, for all children, not only those being diagnosed with ADHD but due to the lack of nutritional training and understanding that our doctors have, it is unlikely that this avenue would even be explored before giving a diagnosis that would undoubtedly lead to a child being on prescription drugs for the rest of their life.[20]

Psychopharmologist, David Healey has said that “these days, the people who define what gets treated aren’t the patients who are sick or even the doctors, it is the marketing departments of pharmaceutical companies”.[21]

Science is often manipulated by big business to show intended results.In his book ‘Bad Pharma’, Dr Ben Goldcare discusses the fact that, often, information from pharmaceutical trials are cherry picked to show a positive result whilst many negative trials go unpublished.

In 2008, a group of researchers decided to check for publication of every trial that had ever been reported to the U.S Food and Drug Administration for all of the anti-depressants that came onto the market between 1987 and 2004. They found 74 studies in total. 38 of these trials had positive results that found that the new drug worked whilst 36 were negative. When the researches tried to find these trials in the academic literature, the ONLY material that is available to doctors and patients, they found that 37 of the positive trials were published in full whilst only 3 of the negative trials were published. 22 never saw the light of day and whilst the remaining 11 did appear in academic literature, they were written up as if the drug was a success.[13]

Regulators and doctors do not have access to the full research carried out on the pharmaceuticals that are being prescribed every day and even if they did, around 90% of the studies are funded by industry and have unreasonable secrecy clauses attached to them, meaning that only research that they wish to be released into the public domain would be.[13][36]

Pharmaceutical companies have access to the trials whilst they are being carried out and can and do stop the trial at any time if it is not going in their favour.[13]

Further to the many malpractices being carried out in the pharmaceutical industry, the FDA, a regulatory body that is meant to be acting in the best interests of the public, has a relationship with the industry that is way too close for comfort. According to Dr Marcia Angell of the department of social medicine and former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine ‘Industries have allowed themselves to become corrupted by the drug companies. The pharmaceutical industry uses its vast wealth to buy influence and also co-opts any industry that might be expected to stand in the way of its drive for profits. Firstly it co-opts the U.S congress. It gives generously to political campaigns and has the highest lobby in Washington. Through the U.S congress and the administration, it controls, to a remarkable extent, the FDA.’[15]

Science, when at its best, can achieve many wonderful things but it seems that more and more often, science is performing at sub par standards due to the malpractice, misinformation and secrecy clauses that all stem from the outright greed of not only the pharmaceutical industry but other conglomerates that hold much of the wealth and therefore power and control over our society.

Science lays claim to the fact that vaccinations eliminated measles but there is a lot of opposition against these claims, backed up with evidence that shows that vaccinations were not actually released until the epidemic was almost under control, with the belief that clean water, better sanitation, living conditions and nutrition were key in fighting the disease.[22][23][24]

There is evidence to suggest that both the small pox and polio outbreak were actually created by the vaccines themselves.[25] In 1992 the CDC admitted that the live polio vaccine had become the dominant cause of polio in the U.S, with figures showing that every case of polio in the U.S since 1979 was caused by the oral polio vaccine.[26][25]

In a censored interview, Dr Maurice Hilleman, chief of Merck’s vaccine division at the time, admits to finding a cancer causing virus named SV40 in the polio vaccination that was given to roughly 98 million American adults and children[27] between 1955 and 1963.[28][29] It is estimated that between 10,000,000 and 30,000,000 people could have received an SV40 contaminated dose of the vaccine.[30][29]

Michele Carbone, Assistant Professor of Pathology at Loyola University in Chicago, has found that the virus is present in many cases of bone and lung cancers. It has also been linked with childhood leukemia, brain cancer and Non Hodgkin Lymphoma.[29][28][30]

In 2002, The Lancet published a paper saying that it was suspected that more than half of the 55,000 cases of Non Hodgkin Lymphoma had a very high probability of being associated with the SV40 virus.[25]

It is thought that this may have impacted the global cancer pandemic more than anything else.[27]

Furthermore, not only are vaccines not tested for carcinogenicity,[25] most vaccines contain mercury and formaldehyde[25] both of which are on the Proposition 65 list of known carcinogenic chemicals.[31]

Vaccines are not the only pharmaceuticals to have come under scrutiny. A study by Thomas Newman, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1996 found that statins, a class of drug used to reduce cholesterol and prevent heart disease, cause cancer in rodents. Almost all substances known to cause cancer in humans also cause cancer in mice and rats.[32]

Despite this information, statins, with their many side effects,[13] continue to be prescribed to millions of people around the world when a simple change in diet could be all that is needed to combat high cholesterol and heart disease.[36]

The diabetes drug, Avandia is suspected to have caused large numbers of heart attacks and strokes whilst Actos has repeatedly been linked to an increased risk of bladder cancer and heart failure.3334

Both Germany and France have taken these drugs off of the market but so far, the FDA continues to allow them to be sold, maintaining that a drug is not considered unsafe as long as the benefits outweigh the risks![35]

The arthritis drug, Vioxx, has been estimated to have caused roughly 160,000 heart attacks in the US alone. It was eventually withdrawn when the issues were spotted by independent academics rather than the regulators themselves.[13]

We put our trust into our current medical system because it is all that we have ever known. It is human nature to be afraid of change but often, when we have the courage to change something that is not working, magical things can happen. Imagine a world without cancer or heart disease. It is in our reach, if only all of us together could find the courage to break free of the trappings of a system that fails us over and over again and allows our loved ones to be sacrificed in the name of profit.

We have a responsibility to ourselves and to our planet to raise the level of awareness and consciousness. It can be hard to let go of the illusion of truth that we have always believed but we must start to think outside of the doctrine of what we have been taught to enable us to shatter the illusion and change our current misconceptions. Know the truth and the truth will set us all free.

We have given away power and control over our thoughts and beliefs for far too long. Without realising it, we have been living in a George Orwell’s 1984 totalitarian state whereby we have been programmed, conditioned and indoctrinated to think a certain way since the day that we were born. With an education system that teaches us not to think outside of the box or to question what we are taught but instead, programmes us to conform, making us more susceptible to the propaganda.

I appreciate that some of what I have written may be challenging to the belief systems of some, particularly those who have been educated to high levels as the indoctrination of false beliefs has been taken to such a deep level through an education system that gives no rise to the challenge of information taught. It is not my intention to offend, the purpose of my articles are simply to challenge people to think for themselves in a world that works hard to stop that from happening.

I am not asking you to believe, trust or agree with everything or even anything that I have said. It is simply my aim to bring information into your awareness that might trigger thought or further investigation and research. I would like to ask you to really think about the ‘truths’ that we have been taught and to challenge our teachings and perceptions. When we strip back the supposed science that we have been blinded by, does all that we have been taught and believe, really make sense? Could there be another way to that which is currently offered? Or do you truly believe that our current system is in no way flawed?

With so many people now waking up, now is the time to take control of our own health by changing our relationship with food and chemicals. We can not rely on our current medical system to look at us as individuals or to look at our body as a whole instead of measuring factors in isolation as is what our current definition of science allows for.36 Nor can we rely on our doctors to see us as mind, body and soul and to look at what is causing the imbalance within us that leads us to so much ill health, for they are not trained to so.

We owe it to ourselves and to our health to take control. It is time for us to take the power back into our own hands and give our bodies the fuel that they need to do the job that they were designed to do – that is, to keep us healthy.

I highly recommend reading Bad Pharma and The China Study for further research and evidence into both the practices of the pharmaceutical companies as well as the importance of nutrition on our health.

Previous articles by Niaby Codd:

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Eyes Wide SHUT!

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