How the AMA Hooks You on Drugs, Harms Your Health and Hurts the Earth

Founded in 1847, the American Medial Association (AMA) set out to “promote the art and science of medicine for the betterment of public health.” But the benevolent veil is wafer thin. The AMA has relentlessly hounded alternative medicines and therapies, forcing them out of business or keeping them at the margins. It has ignored good health and prevention in favor of pushing less safe and less effective—though more profitable—treatments, primarily surgery and drugs. And some startling facts show that it has done all of this at the expense of our health and that of the environment.

The Rise of AMA Tyranny

In the beginning, there was natural healing—botanical, Chinese, eclectic, homeopathic, nutritional and Native American medicine, as well as chiropractic, to name just a few. But in the eyes of the AMA, that was too much competition. It had to be minimized, which meant removing the glut of choices so that only AMA-approved treatments could be positioned as the cure-alls they are considered today.

Early on there were skeptics. In 1833, the New York Evening Star wrote: “Medicine [allopathic], like every useful science, should be thrown open to the observation and study of all.… We should at once explode the whole machinery of mystification and concealment—wigs, gold canes and the gibberish of prescriptions—which serves but as a cloak to ignorance and legalized murder.” But over time, the AMA mystification proved too complex, while the public ultimately relinquished control and became guinea pigs, which AMA doctors could use to “practice” allopathic medicine.

From their early vision of a one-size-fits-all medicine, in 1904 the AMA established the Committee on Medical Education (which later became the Council on Medical Education). Without government intervention, they singlehandedly used this branch to standardize medical education in America under their belief system, which was hailed as a “scientific breakthrough” with all others labeled “quackery, charlatanism or, at best, alternative medicine.”

In 1910, with support from John D. Rockefeller and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, the AMA funded Abraham Flexner with a grant to travel with the secretary of the AMA Council on Medical Education to medical schools then in existence. This pushed medical education to the forefront of America’s public health agenda. The project resulted in Flexner’s famous report, “Medical Education in the United States and Canada,” which became a catalyst for a historic shift in thinking, which ultimately positioned their medical ideals as scientifically superior to all others. The birth of the AMA tyranny, known technically as “allopathic medicine,” was officially born—and surgery, vaccines and drugs became the primary health option for Americans.

Medical schools were forced to comply with the new standards—by removing other modes of healing from their curriculum—or lose AMA support. Under these restrictions, their numbers dwindled from more than 400 US medical schools in the 19th century to 148 by 1910 and just 76 by 1930.

This was defended by the AMA in a phone interview with Robert Mills, who showed that, “The medical education system churned out an overproduction of uneducated and ill-trained medical practitioners, who in general practiced with “an absolute disregard for the public welfare and without any serious thought of the interests of the public. Flexner noted that there were five times as many U.S. physicians in proportion to population than in European nations such as Germany. What drove this oversupply was commercial exploitation by a large number of schools whose mission was profit, not education. For these diploma mills, the expense of setting up a laboratory to aid didactic instruction took away from the bottom line, and the quality of education suffered as a result.”

The Allopathic Occult

With all competition weakened or removed starting in 1910, the AMA quickly established a “knowledge monopoly” in medicine, primarily with the intentional use of Latin bio-babble. The AMA Council on Medical Education published the first edition of Essentials of an Acceptable Medical College, revised eight times over the next 41 years from 1910, to be superseded by the Functions and Structure of a Modern Medical School.This successfully gave rise to a gap in scientific literacy, which removed health education from the reach of the layman and placed it into the self-serving hands of the AMA, and their “approved” medical schools. It paved the way for the allopathic, drug model of healing, which was to benefit AMA supporters John D. Rockefeller and the Carnegie Foundation via their interests in chemical manufacturer IG Farben—infamous for its manufacture of Zyklon B, a pesticide used for human extermination in the gas chambers of Nazi death camps during the Holocaust.

Attacks on Chiropractic

With the dwindling of all other forms of medicine, only chiropractic remained a challenge. In an effort to suffocate the profits of that industry, AMA secretary Morris Fishbein led an anti-chiropractic campaign in medical journals and public media. He portrayed them as members of an unscientific cult—caring about nothing but money—despite chiropractic’s proven health benefits. The war against chiropractic continued into 1987 when, in the case of Wilk v. American Medical Association, the AMA was found guilty under the Sherman Antitrust Act of conspiring to destroy the profession of chiropractic. But the AMA’s propaganda campaign has had staying power. Chiropractic is still reeling from bad press and is seen by many as quackery.

As of 1992, AMA’s official stance on chiropractic is that, “It is ethical for a physician to associate professionally with chiropractors provided that the physician believes that such association is in the best interests of his or her patient. A physician may refer a patient for diagnostic or therapeutic services to a chiropractor permitted by law to furnish such services whenever the physician believes that this may benefit his or her patient. Physicians may also ethically teach in recognized schools of chiropractic.”

To this day, there is no opposition to the allopathic occult. The Journal of the American Medical Association admitted as much when it published a 2004 article by Andrew Beck, which stated that “all accredited US medical schools strive to apply Flexner’s ‘uniformly arduous and expensive’ brand of medical education…” And the monopoly is fully supported by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and even mandated by the US court system, as seen by the myriad charges against parents who opt out of vaccines, psychiatric meds, surgery or traditional chemotherapy for their children. “As long as science shows these to have public health value,” the AMA insisted that they, “endorse mandating certain medical treatments.”

A Drug-Addicted Nation

Prescription drugs have become more popular than McDonald’s hamburgers. In 2008, there were 3.9 billion prescriptions written—about 14 per American—compared to 560 million Big Macs sold—just two per American. Drug spending is projected to top $445.9 billion by the year 2012. This drug addiction is the result of two tactics designed to spread AMA’s beloved allopathic “scientific breakthroughs” to hundreds of millions.

The first tactic is the creation of mini-sagas culminating in a miracle answer: drugs. This is direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising, and one of the most potent ways to get unsuspecting patients to ask their doctors if a drug is “right for” them. Whether you’re reading a magazine, watching television or listening to the radio, it is guaranteed that you’ll be bombarded by these types of slick drug ads. No surprise, the concept of DTC ads was created by the AMA, FDA and the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association. Officially, this was done as a means of “promoting health awareness among consumers to ensure their health and safety.” Unofficially, it was done to sell more drugs under the medical umbrella of allopathic medicine.In a 2010 American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) survey, 90 percent of respondents said they had seen a drug ad, 10 percent asked their doctor for the drug, of which two-thirds received either a prescription or a sample. Former US Senate Majority Leader, Bill Frist (R-Tennessee), is seen in the film, Big Bucks, Big Pharma, clearly identifying the DTC advertising threat: “Let there be no mistake: drug advertisements fuel America’s skyrocketing prescription drug costs. They influence consumer behavior. And they influence physician behavior. They cause more people to take prescription drugs. They create an artificial demand.”

In defense of my claim, the AMA insisted that they are strictly against today’s rampant DTC advertising, but that they do support it when the ads satisfy AMA accepted policies, which ultimately help to, “improve the communication of health information; enhance the patient-physician relationship; and contain accurate and reasonable information on risks, precautions, adverse reactions, and costs.”

Billing Code Extortion

The second tactic, standardized billing codes, is much more clandestine. The AMA isn’t dependent on membership to flex their allopathic muscles among doctors. Members or not, physicians who accept insurance or Medicare are forced to prescribe drugs for payment via billing codes—known as Current Procedural Terminology (CPT)—established by the AMA as a “universal language” to help practitioners communicate to insurers. A matrix of slick computer technology, CPT codes are matched to AMA-approved treatments—generally prescription drugs—and thus don’t allow for payment toward preventive, complementary or alternative medicine. Though, the AMA insists that any organization can begin “providing their own codes.”

CPT codes are the result of a covert agreement between the AMA and the US government’s Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA). The long-secret agreement was exposed in 1997. The US Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit, ruled that the AMA’s exclusivity agreement with HCFA for using CPT code “gave the AMA a substantial and unfair advantage over its competitors” and “constituted a misuse of the copyright by the AMA.” But the codes are still in full force. In 2009, the AMA made $70 million in revenue courtesy of physicians using their payment codes.

Payment codes coupled with DTC advertising ensures that the masses are hypnotized into a prescription drug addiction, in the name of health. But it’s health in name only. Americans are sick, sick, sick. The United States ranks 12th among the top 13 countries in the ill health of its citizens—at least 80 percent of seniors have at least one chronic disease and 50 percent have at least two. Relative to children in other industrialized countries, the health of US children is worse in virtually every category. But more worrisome than declining health is the overt toxicity of using drugs as prescribed by doctors. And until the AMA puts a stop to it, they are just as much an accomplice as the industry making the drugs.

Doctors of Death

You don’t have to dig deep to know that allopathic medicine has become risky as hell. A Levitra ad recently showed me that a drug-induced erection may be accompanied by blindness. That’s serious. My college roommate used party drugs that were more fun—with half the side effects—and he had to buy them illegally. Yet, following doctor’s orders has become synonymous with danger.

Legal drugs prescribed through the wisdom of allopathic medicine kill an estimated 105,000 people per year. That equates to one individual dying about every five minutes from an “approved” drug—almost 300 deaths daily—that is, twice as many fatalities in a single year from approved drugs as the total number of US deaths (58,000) from the nine-year Vietnam War. And this does not include the 98,000 killed every year by physician medical error.

Illicit drugs, on the other hand, directly and indirectly kill an estimated 17,000 people annually. Paradoxically, the US government spends nearly $50 billion every year to “fight a war” against illicit drugs in an effort to ameliorate this death toll. Yet America’s more deadly allopathic drug problem continues to be ignored.

If not killed, an estimated two million people are victims of prescription-drug-induced illnesses, according to the New England Journal of Medicine. These include drug-induced obesity, diabetes, cancer, kidney disease, autism, depression and heart failure, as well as the super-bug phenomena that is sweeping the nation due to overuse of antibiotics. This troubling trend is ignored by lazy thinking and myopic physicians who dismiss the symptoms as “worsening health.”

Then there are the staggering hospital-death numbers. Even the AMA’s own, probably conservative, statistics paint a bleak picture. They show that more than 12,000 people are killed every year by unnecessary surgeries. About 7,000 die from hospital medication errors. And 20,000 more lose their lives thanks to non-medication-related hospital-staff mistakes.

Environmental Evils

Besides making us sicker in many cases, allopathic medicine—with its reliance on chemical drugs—also harms the ecology. Realizing that prevention in most cases can eliminate the need for prescription drugs, and that many are counterproductive to our overall health, the negative environmental impact of their widespread use is even more troubling.

Pharmaceutical manufacturing plants expend energy and release toxic wastewater. Their global shipments create a large carbon footprint. And vast quantities of their products pass through our bodies—or are flushed down toilets—and end up in our rivers, lakes and groundwater. Health facilities alone flush an estimated 250 million pounds of drugs annually. A 2008 Associated Press investigation discovered “a vast array of pharmaceuticals including antibiotics, anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers and sex hormones… in the drinking-water supplies of at least 41 million Americans.”

While allopathic medicine has become a disaster for both the environment and many individuals, the AMA, US government and the drug-giant descendants that have grown from IG Farben continue to amass huge sums of wealth at their expense. As long as the AMA holds the medical monopoly and refuses to act against the atrocity, this holocaustic trend will continue. Every man, woman and child will become enslaved by surgery, vaccines, drugs and more drugs, or whatever else the AMA chooses to label a “scientific breakthrough.” And ecosytems, waterways and aquifers worldwide will continue to be fouled by the chemical pollutants flowing from both the manufacture and use of pharmaceuticals.

About This Article

I was hired to write this article for www.ecohearth.com. It was a labor of love between myself and the editor, Rick Theis, a leader in environmental protection. Visit his site to learn how you can contribute to the global fight to save the planet.