Mike: First off, I'd like to ask you to tell the listeners and
readers here just a little bit about who you are - they may not be
familiar with Nutrition & Healing or some of your work. Can you give
a brief introduction?
Dr. Wright: Well, let's see, I grew up in Southern Ohio, went off
after the appropriate schooling to Harvard University, picked up a
degree there in cultural anthropology, then over to the University
of Michigan medical school for the regular old M.D. degree.
Then
escaped from Michigan with that degree and came out to Seattle for
what's called a residency program in family medicine. That was back
in the 1960s, which my children tell me are qualified as the "Dark
Ages" - they claim that all the cars had square wheels at that time,
but I didn't notice it - they tell me that was because my eyesight
must have been failing.
So anyway, I was doing this residency out here in family medicine
and, during the course of that, came across a couple of folks with
problems that did not get better with anything that I had ever been
taught and, in fact, their cases had been going on for a number of
years and they had been subjected to just about every patented
medicine intervention that you'd ever like to have, and nothing
worked.
One of these ladies brought in a book and it said in that
book that Vitamin E might work on her problem, and I asked her why
she brought the book in, because she could buy Vitamin E down at the
local natural food store. She said she just wanted to make sure it
wouldn't kill her.
Now remember, this was the 1960s, and
the FDA at that time had been
putting out all kinds of propaganda about vitamins, or I should say
against vitamins - that's more accurate. And they had somehow managed
to convince this lady that fat-soluble vitamins, of which
Vitamin E
is one, just might kill her if she took too much. So she came in,
and she was a cautious lady, wanting to know if she took that much
Vitamin E would she survive it all. Well, one thing I've learned in
medical school is that Vitamin E never killed anybody.
We got one
hour, by the way, for lectures on vitamins and minerals in medical
school. A whole blinking hour.
Mike: One hour in four years?!
Dr. Wright: One hour in four years, yes. And during that hour
they did tell us that Vitamin E never would kill anybody. So
anyway I could tell her with confidence that she wasn't going to
die from Vitamin E.
And that was all she wanted to know. So she
packed up her book and went to the natural foods store and got
herself some Vitamin E. And she was kind enough to phone me back
about six weeks later and tell me that she had flushed every
single patented medicine down the toilet because her symptoms
were all gone after a month's worth of Vitamin E, and she just
thought I'd like to know that.
And I thought, oh well, that's interesting, but didn't think
much more of it until someone else came in with a case of a
different problem, but it also hadn't gotten better with all
kinds of patent medicines and so forth. So I thought, well,
nothing I've been taught is working here, and why don't I go get
me a copy of that book that lady had with the Vitamin E in it.
So I did, and it said why, this other vitamin over here might
work. So I talked to the person and said, "Well, I don't know if
this'll work, but nothing else is working and it can't hurt you
any, so why don't you try it," and, make it short, the person
tried it, and it worked. Okay! I figured there was a hole in my
education.
So, I took that book up to the University of Washington library
(remember, we're in Seattle) and started going through all the
pages - fortunately that particular author had been kind enough to
put lots of footnotes and citations to medical journals.
So I
started looking them all up, and, doggone, there was a giant
hole in my education! So between that time (which was 1971 by
then) and the next few years, I spent a whole lot of my spare
time at the University of Washington library looking through all
these old medical journals, nutrition journals, science journals
and all kinds of other journals and photocopying them and
collecting the information, and I must have put in during the
first 10 years at least a few thousand hours up at the library.
And by now a colleague of mine and myself, with some help of
course, have now put together a collection of about 50,000
articles photocopied out of medical journals. And remember, this
is back before the internet too.
And it's a good thing it was, too, because online sources (so
called "MEDLINE") only list some 10 to 15 percent of all the
medical publications out there, and if we strictly relied on
online sources even today, we would not be finding all the
information we need to find. But, getting back to then, there
wasn't any internet so we had to spend all the time in the
library and started noticing, that what all these books were
saying was that human bodies weren't made out of patent
medicines, imagine that!
They're made out of good old water and protein and fat and carbs
and essential fatty acids and vitamins and minerals and so
forth, and what these articles were showing me was that if we
just learned to manipulate all of that, we could not only treat
a lot of illnesses, we could probably prevent a bunch of them,
too. So I left the organization I was with in 1973, started a
clinic, started working with a lot of this stuff, and it worked
- wasn't that interesting? It didn't work every time, nothing
works every time. But it worked a whole lot, and it wasn't
toxic.
So, I did that for a few years and
observed that it kept on working, and it worked better than what
I'd been doing before, and in 1980 I was joined by a fresh
medical school graduate who had been doing a similar odyssey
through the library.
Mike: I've got to ask you, before you get there, back
in the '70s when you were involved in the pioneering work with
your clinic there - this was in the mid-'70s then?
Dr. Wright: It started in 1973.
Mike: Okay, so this was very unusual work for a traditionally
trained doctor to be engaged in at the time, wasn't it?
Dr. Wright: Oh, good grief, yes! In fact, I had better sense
than to try to do this, you might say, where a lot of the other
physicians could observe and get angry (as they usually do when
you're doing something they don't do). When I went to start the
clinic, I got out a map and looked for a geographic location
where there were no medical doctors or osteopathic physicians
for five miles in any direction. Seriously!
And I put the clinic
in the middle of that five-mile radius, because I figured that
by the time the first complaint was lodged against me by a
competing doctor (it's just turf wars, you know that) with the
state medical board, that I'd be able to afford an attorney by
then.
And sure enough, the first complaint came in two years after I
started the clinic, and, naturally enough, it was from a doctor
maybe 10 miles away. He was complaining about this weird doctor
over here giving people vitamins instead of patent medicines.
And by then, I could afford an attorney, and we just fought the
case off.
Between then, which was 1975 and about the early 1990s
when these complaints finally died down, there would be two or
three complaints a year to the state medical board, and all of
them, without exception, were from other physicians about the
kind of stuff I was doing.
Mike: Wow, so they were complaining that you were using
nutrition instead of prescription drugs?
Dr. Wright: That's right. One of the more amusing ones
- here
comes the investigator from the state medical board. He's
carrying this list which shows that I had, allegedly now,
recommended 23 different vitamins and minerals to some lady.
And
I looked it up and thought, okay, I don't even need a lawyer for
this one, I just went in and got her record and pulled it out,
and it showed that I had crossed out eight vitamins and minerals
from the list of 31 she was taking originally! And so she was
down to 23. I figured that I didn't want to cross them out all
at once, you've got to get along with people, too. I might have
upset her if I crossed them all out at once.
But she had carried
that list with her faithfully any time she saw any doctor, and
the doctor she saw figured that I'd given it all and filed a
complaint.
Mike: Well, gee, doesn't a bowl of salad have 23 vitamins and
minerals in it?
Dr. Wright: Oh, I think it's got a few more than that unless
it's grown, as you know, by chemical means.
Dr. Wright responds to health consumers' demand for alternative
and natural treatments
Mike: So then in the '80s a partner joined you?
Dr. Wright: Well, he came out just to get his feet on the ground
after medical school. He was there for a year and a half. Then
he went back to Baltimore. He was a very quick learner, a very
bright guy, Alan Gaby is the name, you've probably heard of him.
So after he went back to Baltimore and was in his practice for a
year or two, the two of us got together and decided to start
teaching all of this stuff.
So since 1983, he and I have put on
a series of seminars on nutritional therapy in medical practice,
as it's generally called. The first time we did it was in San
Francisco - 65 doctors attended. Last time we did it was in
Seattle, and 450 doctors attended.
Mike: Is this something you do every year now?
Dr. Wright: No. About every two or three years now. To start
with we did it every six months, but that was when we were young
and foolish, you know, all full of enthusiasm. So now it's every
two or three years.
Mike: And is there a stark difference in attitude today in the
audience?
Dr. Wright: Not really. Because the ones who came in 1983, there
were only 65 of them, but they were very, very convinced that
using natural means was preferable to using patent medicine
means, and they were self-selected, in other words.
Mike: Now what has changed in terms of the conventional medicine
philosophy in these several decades?
Dr. Wright: Well, the thing that's changed the most is not the
conventional medicine philosophy, it's that so many folks out
there, just regular folks, are absolutely demanding that they
want natural treatment and they want alternative means.
You're
familiar, I'm sure, with the fairly famous study that came out
in 1993, David Eisenberg from Harvard University, who, much to
his amazement, discovered in a very large survey that one third
of all the people contacted were using so-called "alternative
medicine," and that the amount of money that was estimated to be
spent, from that survey, on alternative medicine was actually
slightly larger than the amount of money that was being spent on
primary care in regular medicine.
Now of course that's just
primary care, that's outpatient, it doesn't count all hospital
costs and surgeons and dermatologists and so on, it's just
primary care.
But what they were quite amazed at is that it was,
I think, 11 billion to 10 billion or something like that, a
slight excess. And with the public driving things like that,
basically mainstream medicine is being dragged kicking and
screaming into the recognition that there might just be
something there. I would say most of them are not going gently
into the night, though.
Mike: No, there still seems to be quite an effort to discredit
vitamins at every opportunity.
Dr. Wright: Oh yeah.
Mike: I mean, I think there was a study just a couple of weeks
ago that showed a combination of Vitamin A and Vitamin E,
especially synthetic Vitamin E, and prostate cancer patients,
and said some negative things. And I saw the headlines that were
interpolating that news, and the headlines said: "New research
says vitamins will kill you."
Dr. Wright: There you go.
Mike: I thought that was sort of amusing.
Dr. Wright: Yeah, we're still working along those lines, but,
very fortunately, researchers are slowly, and with increasing
pace but still slowly, looking at such things as fish oil. My
gosh, I heard from a client at the clinic the other day that her
cardiologist had just about floored her by recommending that she
take fish oil every day to prevent sudden cardiac death. So it
is coming along, it's just slow, and the majority of the
mainstreams docs out there are still resistant, but it's not
anywhere close to 100 percent like it used to be.
Mike: Is there an age difference, I mean, are the younger
doctors better educated about nutrition?
Dr. Wright: Oh absolutely. It's the old thing, I mean, who was
it, Thomas Kuhn "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions"? He
said that they don't happen because people change their minds,
they happen because the proponents of the outmoded ideas finally
die off!
And the younger generation, which has been a little bit
more open to all of that, takes over.
The origins of the Nutrition & Healing newsletter
Mike: Now what year did you start writing Nutrition and Healing}
Dr. Wright: That was 1994. However, I started writing a monthly
medical column for Prevention magazine. I started writing that
in 1976. And I wrote them a monthly column every month between 1976 and 1986. And then from 1986 to 1996 for one of their
competitors, a magazine called Let's Live magazine, which, let's
see, Prevention had a circulation of 7 or 8 million and Let's
Live at the time I was writing for them had a circulation of 2
or 3 million.
I started up my own newsletter in 1994, and it
just got to be too much writing for mine and for Let's Live
magazine, so they were kind enough to find somebody else, and I
just kept on writing my own newsletter.
Mike: And that became Nutrition and Healing?
Dr. Wright: Yeah. It started in 1994 as Nutrition and Healing.
Mike: And still, to this day, the title has stayed the same. Has
the focus stayed the same?
Dr. Wright: Pretty much. The majority of the information has to
do with natural human biochemistry. Mostly diet, vitamins,
minerals, natural metabolizers, essential fatty acids, amino
acids. I'm very fortunate to have been joined by Kerry Bone, do
you know the name?
Mike: I do know the name.
Dr. Wright: Yeah, he has written, I should say co-authored, the
number one textbook on herbs used in all the naturopathic
schools and he writes a column in the newsletter every month,
usually most of one page out of eight. I'm very fortunate with
that.
And that's a sort of nutritional, dietary kind of thing,
too. But we'll take a look at just about anything that's good
for your health that won't hurt you. And so we talk about
natural energies and had a big discussion lately about magnetic
energy and some of the cases in which it's been used at centers
around the country and what it can do.
And the other focus of the magazine is a bit more fundamental
than nutrition and healing or even health, and that's a big
emphasis on freedom and the philosophy of the founding fathers
and mothers of our country, because if we don't have freedom, as
anybody in the alternative health movement knows, we're just
going to be totally squelched by the patent
medicine companies.
Fighting governmental limitations on access to nutritional
medicine
Dr. Wright: And it's a continual fight, as you know, to maintain
our freedom to actually take care of ourselves - and if I had to
pick one or the other, and if it got down to it, am I going to
fight for freedom (and I do not mean by that, folks, I do not
mean by that going over to Iraq, what I mean is reading the
documents put out by the founding fathers of our country who
talked about freedom and responsibility all at once, and talked
about taking care of ourselves and leaving other people alone,
and not having various agencies of various governments trying to
micro-manage our lives, that kind of freedom).
If we don't have
that, then all the health and all the vitamins in the world
aren't worth a darn.
Mike: Right. And it seems like if the FDA had their way, access
to those vitamins would be illegal anyway.
Dr. Wright: Oh absolutely! They've tried it any number of times.
Back in the '70s, a senator from Wisconsin whose name I can't
remember at the moment, a fairly famous one - William ... I'm
sorry, it'll come back to me - he had to lead a fight to keep
the FDA
from putting vitamins on prescription at that time.
And
then, as you know, in the early 1990s there was enough public
outcry that that law went through that said that, gee, it shall
be legal to sell anything natural. What do you know? And the FDA
can't stop it as long as it's harmless.
Mike: Is that
DHSEA (Dietary Supplement
Health and Education Act)?
Dr. Wright: Yeah. And talk about an amazing thing! - that here in
1993, Congress actually had to restate that it should be legal
to sell anything that's harmless and natural. You'd think that
that right would be covered under the United States
Constitution. But, uh-uh, not according to the FDA.
Mike: Well, how do you think this battle is going? Are natural
health and nutritional approaches gaining ground or losing
ground today?
Dr. Wright: We're gaining ground, and so what's being tried is a
stealth attack, and you'll read about that if you care to in
previous editions of my newsletter.
Unfortunately, the folks
that wrote our Constitution here in the United States put a
little clause in there that has allowed the last two or three
administrations, that is several administrations, to do things
to us through the back door without the approval of Congress. It
says somewhere in the Constitution (and I'm serious, go read it,
I just about fell over when I read it) that if we enter into a
treaty, then that treaty shall override our United States
Constitution.
Were you aware of that?
Mike: I was not.
Dr. Wright: It is in there. I kid you not.
Mike: So how do they use this to suppress nutritional medicine?
Dr. Wright: Real easy! You know that thing called the World
Trade Organization? Well,
the WTO apparently gets to make
so-called "trade rules," and if the various countries don't pay
attention to them they get to do this thing called "sanctions."
Remember when good-old George Bush put up the steel tariffs, and
all the steel industry loved it? But the WTO ruled against it
and - guess what?
The WTO is over in Europe, but
George Bush had
to withdraw the tariffs? And I'm thinking, excuse me? The
president of the United States has to bow down to the WTO? Not
that I think that the presidency of the United States has been
run all that wonderfully well the last few years, but still.
That was the case. Because they were threatening these sanctions
which would have damaged the country economically.
Alright, well, as you know, there's this outfit over in Europe
called
Codex Alimentarius or whatever it's called, and a lot of
the folks who attend their meetings are from the big European
pharmaceutical cartel, which is just about the same as the
American patent medicine cartel these days.
And they put
together this directive which is now called the "European Food
Supplements Directive," and the silly thing is scheduled to go
into effect unless it's overturned in the European Court - and
what that would do is to severely restrict the number and type
of vitamins and minerals and metabolites (such as coenzyme Q10
and L-carnitine and all that) that would be available.
Oh, by
the way, it would apply over here! This is the European Food
Supplements Directive, and it would be enforced by the WTO.
You
see, it's a proposed rule to be enforced by the WTO, and if the
WTO gets to enforce it, then if we don't pay any attention to
it, if they elect to do so (which they might or might not, you
can never tell) they could put sanctions against us.
Mike: So when this kicks in, the FDA is going to say well, we
have to do this to comply with world trade rules.
Dr. Wright: Well, they might and they might not. Now one real
good lawyer I know says that's not likely to happen, and another
real good lawyer I know says that you'd better believe they'll
do it. So you can't really tell what they'll do. I'm guessing
that they will because they've been wanting to do that all
along.
Mike: So you're informing readers of this and trying to call
people to action on this issue, right?
Dr. Wright: Absolutely. There's a group in England called the
Alliance for Natural Health, that stumped up some money and got
a court case together, in Europe of course, against this
European Food Supplements directive, and wonder of wonders, they
won! They won in the British high court. The trouble is that the
British have given up their sovereignty too, and the British
high court is now subordinate to the European high court.
So of
course it was appealed to the European high court. And so what
we put in the newsletter was, here's the name of the place, the
Alliance for Natural Health, here's the address, send them
money! Let's send our money to Europe and get it overturned over
there before it comes over here.
Mike: Because the pharmaceutical cartel on both continents would
really like to see the whole world dependent on synthetic
chemicals for treating health symptoms, right?
Dr. Wright: Yes, they would. I like to call them patent
medicines, because that's what they are. Now, just incidentally,
a couple of things. You are more than welcome to download the
article about that European Food Supplements Directive, from the newsletter site,
and put that as an attachment on any place you have content on
the web. It's the September issue, the lead article.
Mike: Okay, and for people listening by the way, the website for
that newsletter is
www.WrightNewsletter.com which is for Dr.
Jonathan Wright.
Dr. Wright: Now here's the other little detail that may blow
some of your listeners away. I happen to keep handy a copy of
the Declaration of the Constitution, and here we go,
Constitution of the United States, Article 6:
"This
Constitution, and the laws of the United States which shall be
made in pursuance thereof; and all treaties made, or which shall
be made, under the authority of the United States shall be the
supreme law of the land".
I'm going to repeat that - "all treaties
made or which shall be made, under the authority of the United
States shall be the supreme law of the land" ... "and the judges
in every state shall be bound thereby, anything in the
Constitution notwithstanding!" I think the founders blew it on
that one.
Mike: Yeah, I'm getting images of blue helmets running around
the planet. (Laughs)
Dr. Wright: You are! Just go pick up your Constitution and have
a good look at that. There is, by the way, a bill in the
Congress introduced by Representative Ron Paul. It's called the
American Sovereignty Restoration Act, which would negate
anything which violates the Constitution in any way. We'd just
say, uh-huh, we're not going to do it.
Mike: Well, people who are familiar with
Ron Paul know that he's
so often right, and so often not taken seriously by his
colleagues. You know, I do want to get back to health, but you
make an important point, which is that health freedom is tied
irrevocably to political freedom, freedom of speech, our own
sovereignty in this country. Health is intertwined.
Dr. Wright: Absolutely.
The case of red yeast rice: How the FDA approval process and
drug patents limit access to natural products
Mike: Let's talk about the FDA a bit more. You mention in your
newsletter some of the promotional materials, especially red
yeast rice. And I think the story about what happened with red
yeast rice demonstrates the overreaching power grab of the FDA.
Dr. Wright: Absolutely does.
Mike: Can you give listeners a little overview of what happened
there?
Dr. Wright: Sure. Everybody's heard of patent medications called
statins. Several of the companies have them. They do make your
cholesterol go down. They also give you a risk of a sometimes
fatal disease called rhabdomyolysis, which means all your
muscles basically dissolve. I'm not kidding, myolysis just means
dissolution of muscles. And folks have died of that.
There was
one statin that had to be withdrawn from the market because
there were too many people dying from their muscles literally
wasting away when they took this statin. Anyway, yeah, they do
lower cholesterol, these patented medicines, even though they do
sometimes have lethal side effects, so they're still out there
on the market except for one.
Some folks discovered that red yeast rice, which is a yeast that
is red in color and grows on rice, and it's called 'monascus' if
you want to be scientific, taken in certain quantities also
lowered cholesterol. Isn't that interesting? And an American
company started selling this stuff, I believe it was under the
title
Cholestin, they started selling red yeast rice. And they
made the mistake of reading the First Amendment of the
Constitution of the United States, which says that we should
have freedom of speech, and they made the mistake of saying that
their stuff lowered cholesterol.
As you know, even though we have the First Amendment in the
Constitution, the FDA has negated the First Amendment when it
comes to free speech in health care ever since about the '40s
and '50s. That's why if you pick up your bottle of vitamins in
your local natural food store, let's say you pick up a bottle of
Vitamin E or something, all it says is "supports cardiovascular
health." Because if they were to put on there that Vitamin E has
been found in this scientific study over here to cut the rate of
heart attacks by this percent, even though the research is true,
they could be hauled up by the FDA on the grounds of making an
unapproved claim. The FDA doesn't care whether it's true or not,
they just care whether they've approved it.
And so, fish oil, for example.
Everybody knows, and all the
major medical journals have published it in the last two years,
that taking enough fish oil every day cuts your risk of sudden
cardiac death by 50 percent or more, and yet if anybody put that
on a label of a fish oil bottle, they would be out of business
tomorrow, I guarantee it.
Mike: Yeah, and they'd have their inventory confiscated.
Dr. Wright: And they'd have their inventory
confiscated. Somehow the courts allow the FDA to get away with
suppression of the First Amendment. I'd like to know, by the
way, where all the First Amendment advocates in the ACLU are on
this one. Okay, well back to -
Mike: They're on statin drugs!
Dr. Wright: Yeah, that must be it. Or maybe it's psychotropic
medication. Ah, back to the monascus. They put on the label of
the bottle that their stuff would actually lower cholesterol. Oh
my gosh, that's the first deadly sin to the FDA! But then
someone discovered the second deadly sin - it turns out that this
monascus stuff actually makes teensy weensy quantities of
statin!
No kidding!
So what was found was that the statin drugs actually
occur in nature in very tiny quantities.
But probably because
it's in a very tiny quantity in this monascus, it doesn't hurt
anybody. It's surrounded by a whole complex of other things that
help it to work, and so it's an effective cholesterol lowerer,
even though the quantity of statin in there is very, very small.
Well, okay, now somebody found out there's statin in there, and
that's the second deadly sin, and they went and hauled the
company up for patent infringement! Get that!
Mike: (Laughs) Something from nature is infringing on a patent!
Dr. Wright: Yeah, Merck and Co. and the other statin
manufacturers had patents on these different statins, because
they had convinced the FDA that it didn't occur in nature, and,
by the way, I can't prove it, but I'm kind of suspicious that
some research scientist somewhere found this statin in the red
yeast rice and knew it was only in tiny quantities, so they made
believe they didn't know about it and went out and patented it
in big quantities.
I wouldn't put it past somebody to be doing
that, but I can't prove it, of course.
Mike: Basically ripping it off from nature and slapping a drug
company label on it.
Dr. Wright: Yes. So they sued this little company for patent
infringement, and, thank goodness, a judge with a little bit of
sanity, located somewhere in Utah, they seem to have a few more
sane judges in Utah than they do on the 9th Circuit, you know
that.
The judge threw the case out of court and said, "Excuse
me, nature can't infringe on patents."
Mike: Imagine that!
Dr. Wright: Imagine that. And if this is found in the red yeast
rice, well, sorry guys, it's in there naturally and even if you
have a patent (oh, and perhaps you shouldn't have been granted
that patent). Even if you do, these guys can keep selling their
stuff.
Well, guess what, that was appealed to the 9th "circus." And a
three judge group of the 9th "circus" decided to side with the
FDA and the drug manufacturer, and ordered the red yeast rice
company to quit selling the stuff. Now the big deal, as you can
tell from subsequent events, was not the selling of it, it was
telling people what it did.
Because as you know, you can now
walk into any natural food store and you can find a bottle of
red yeast rice somewhere on the shelf, it might not be
prominently displayed but there it is.
But there is not a word
on the label about how this will lower your cholesterol, and
even the store clerks are very hesitant about telling you what
this bottle of red yeast rice will do, because the FDA have been
known to send agents into natural food stores to see if they can
get them to make claims.
Mike: Oh yeah, sure. So basically then, the truth about this
nutritional substance and others really only gets propagated
through newsletters like yours and websites like ours and word
of mouth, right?
Dr. Wright: That's right.
Mike: It's an underground information railway.
Dr. Wright: And it's a real shame. Now, the nice thing, if we
can call it that, is the fact there is this information has now
reached enough people that it has reached what's called
"critical mass." And folks know that there's hidden information
out there, so a lot of them actively go looking for it.
Mike: Right. And they can find some of that in "Nutrition and
Healing," right?
Dr. Wright: They can find it on "Nutrition and Healing," they
can find it on your website, they can find it all over the
place.
Mike: All they've got to know is what to look for.
Dr. Wright:
What to click on.
The effort to discredit natural medicine
Mike: A big question, though, that comes up when people come
across information, is that there's also a huge effort by
conventional medicine and the FDA to discredit anything online
for one thing, but especially anything that goes against
conventional patent medicine approaches.
Dr. Wright: There certainly is, so folks have to do a lot of
digging on their own and determine what sources they feel are
reliable on their own.
Mike: Any tips? How can people judge if a doctor is reliable?
What's credibility these days?
Dr. Wright: Well, do you mean online and print sources, that
sort of thing, or do you mean when you walk into the doctor's
office?
Mike: No, I mean, looking at authors, looking at newsletters,
articles.
Dr. Wright: Okay. Well one of the better ways of judging
- it's
just a traditional scientific thing to do - is that you start
looking for footnotes and references and citations to medical
journals.
Now, remember, what we went over in the first part of
our conversation here, when a lady brought in a book that said
that Vitamin E might take care of her problems, and I didn't
have anything better to do, and it wouldn't hurt her any, so I
said why not try, but then the next time I ran into a really
tough case, boy, was I happy that that book had footnotes and
citations because I could go look it up! And I did!
Now just because footnotes and citations are there does not
always mean that the author has interpreted them correctly.
That's always the case.
But if there are no footnotes or
citations, then, unless you've read that particular writer for
quite a while and found them to be reliable, if there are no
footnotes or citations, you do want take it with a grain of natural sodium chloride and proceed cautiously.
Mike: (Laughs) Sure. What about the issue that so many people in
conventional medicine are not themselves very healthy, as well?
Is that a factor? They're taking their own patent medicines.
Dr. Wright: Many of them are, but, here's another little inside
truth, not secret, but truth. It gets printed every once in a
while and I've seen it online. In the mid 1990s, at someone's
cardiology convention, the Annual Convention of the American
College of Cardiologists or something, one of the speakers asked
that particular audience,
"How many of you recommend Vitamin E
to your patients?"
And approximately 25 to 30 percent of the
doctors there raised their hands - remember this is conventional,
that's pretty good. And,
"How many of you take Vitamin E
yourself?"
Better than half of the room raised their hands!
(Laughs)
Mike: They know what works in their own group, but they're not
about to recommend it to everyone.
Dr. Wright: No, they're not. There are several reasons for that.
One of them is peer pressure! Peer pressure is not just for
teenagers. Peer pressure is everywhere. And, unfortunately, with
physicians, attorneys or any other group, not too many people
are willing to "step out of line" with all the rest of them,
because something bad is going to happen. And in the case of
medicine, why here might come the medical disciplinary board to
get you if you step out of line. So peer pressure's one.
Secondly, there is, and there should be by the way, innate
conservatism in health care. We always want to proceed slowly
and cautiously and make sure that things are safe and that we
don't hurt anybody with them. That's quite commendable. And it
should be in conventional and alternative medicine, too.
But the
big problem is that most physicians -and I'm sorry, it's just
the way it is in life, it's not just most physicians, it's most
physicians, it's most attorneys, it's most of anybody in any
profession - they don't spend a lot of time outside of office
hours digging in the library, spending time online researching,
reading not just the latest journals but some of the old books.
I worked at a prepaid healthcare cooperative when I was at
so-called residency training. Most docs there would show up just
about nine o'clock, they'd work with patients all day, they'd
quit at five o'clock, and what did they talk about all day? Golf
games, sailing, and that's what they'd do on weekends.
And you
know, if you're occupied seeing patients nine to five and the
rest of the time you're off doing your favorite hobby or playing
golf or whatever it is, you don't process a lot of research
information or a whole lot of new information. So, of course
you're going to be cautious, because you don't know what you're
doing with this new stuff out there.
Mike: Sure. Right, and there's no requirement
- I mean, there's
continuing medical education, but that doesn't have to include
nutrition.
Dr. Wright: No, it does not. And in fact, remember that
continuing medical education, which was forced on physicians and
attorneys (let's not just criticize doctors here) by the state
associations and the state legislators and all that, it has to
be "approved" by the medical "authorities." And guess who's
doing the approving?
Mike: I wonder.
Dr. Wright: (Laughs) Basically it's AMA members who approve
patent medicines. So they're not going to approve, of course.
This does not subscribe to the party line.
Mike: So, pretty much, they've got the whole system wrapped up.
It's a closed system of control. It's working for them.
Dr. Wright: Yes, and we could take off if you want to, but we
probably ought to talk about nutrition more, into the whole
thing about medical licensure. You know every time I hear about
medical licensure I want to go "Woof woof! Meow!" and "Where's
my dinner, master?" There have been studies that show (very good
studies) that medical licensure does not protect the public.
What protects the public is a good malpractice attorney. But not
medical licensure.
Mike: Interesting.
Dr. Wright: The idea of having to have a license is a preeminent
way of controlling what doctors do. Breakthroughs on the horizon: Using nutritional medicine to
prevent and treat SARS, bird flu and other viral diseases
Mike: You want to share any big breakthroughs that are coming
through in the newsletters soon?
Dr. Wright: I happen to be writing right now
- I'm just taking a
break from it to talk to you, thank you for giving me a
break - about treatment of dreaded viral diseases - SARS, bird flu,
West Nile and all that. Now, we've all been told that, "Oh my
God, there isn't any treatment for all these things, you catch
it you might die!" You know?
And if you get a bad case, what
happens? You're stuck in a hospital, and they put you on
intravenous fluids and maybe they give you a whole bunch of
prednisone, because prednisone is supposed to cure everything,
even though they know it suppresses the immune system. And we're
just told there's no treatment for these things. So I'm sort of
reviewing the fact that there are treatments, and they're
effective. And no, they don't cure it every time, nothing does.
But, back in the 1940s, Dr. Fred Klenner was curing cases of
polio, the people being brought in were children unfortunately,
they were halfway paralyzed, and he put a whole bunch of Vitamin
C in an IV bottle and ran it on in there, and repeated it and
repeated it, and they pulled right out of polio and they were
cured.
Mike: Wow.
Dr. Wright: And that's high dose intravenous Vitamin C, which is
the first thing to use if you've got yourself a serious virus,
or if you're an older person and you get a bad flu. We've
cleared up any number of cases of people with terrific flu whose
families knew better than to take them to the hospital, they
bring them over to the clinic.
We run in the high-dose Vitamin
C, and they have remarkable turnaround. But that's not the only
thing. There are dozens and dozens of articles in the so-called
medical literature from the 1930s and mostly 1940s about
outright cures of the dread viral diseases of the day with
something called ultraviolet blood irradiation, and many of
those articles were published by doctors working in hospitals at
the time.
And now you cannot find one hospital in the whole United States
that has an ultraviolet blood irradiation machine, and you
cannot find one hospital in the whole United States that gives
high-dose intravenous Vitamin C.
And there's a third thing I'm
going to be talking about, and that is the use of ozone
intravenously, which was introduced in Germany in the 1920s and
in German practice and in American practice, is known to reduce
the odds, and none of these things eliminate the odds, but
reduce the odds, dramatically, of dying from any of the serious
viral diseases.
Mike: Fascinating. Ozone, intravenous ozone?
Dr. Wright: Well, what's done is to take the blood out into a
bottle, ozonate the blood in the bottle and flow the blood back
into the person. But anyway, all of these things dramatically
reduce the risk (although they do not work 100 percent) of death
from SARS, from any of the dread viral diseases. And yet can you
get that treatment in any American hospital today? Rhetorical
question. No, you can't.
You've got to go see a so-called
alternative medicine doctor, who uses those techniques.
Mike: Yeah, just try to go to a regular M.D. and say "Give me
intravenous Vitamin C." He'll toss you out of the office so
quick.
Dr. Wright: And this has become even more relevant with the news
that the so-called British health authorities put the clamps on
that vaccine-producing company over there in England, and now
we're all being told: "Oh my God! Half of the flu vaccine is
gone! There's going to be this tremendous epidemic of death!"
Mike: I was laughing, too, because they pull this every year.
They tell people there's going to be this huge shortage, and
then everybody runs out to get it, and then the shortage is even
worse. It's like Cabbage-Patch-Doll-marketing for vaccines.
Dr. Wright: (Laughs) It is, in fact. This year's a little worse
than usual, but there it is, you're right. And so, what I'm
writing about is:
"Hey folks! First thing you want to do about
viral diseases is prevent them - eat right, get the sugar out of
your diet. Don't eat stuff you're allergic to. Use the Vitamin
A, use the Vitamin C, take your Echinacea and boost your immune
system."
Do all that, and you won't catch it in the first place,
or at least you'll greatly reduce your odds of catching it in
the first place. But if you do happen to catch it, there is
treatment, even if it gets serious.
Mike: Yeah. Well, that sounds like something that people should
get their hands on, and for those who are listening, again, it's
www.WrightNewsletter.com. Today we're talking to Dr. Jonathan
Wright and the phone number for newsletter subscriptions is
1-800-851-7100. And of course we'll be running feature articles
featuring Dr. Wright's comments and advice here on the
NewsTarget network.
Dr. Wright: Well thank you very much. I'll mention again that if folks are subscribers to
the newsletter, they can go to the website that you just cited,
put in the username and password and read all ten years of back
issues, anything they want to read.
Mike: That's got to be a wealth of information in there.
Strontium and vitamin D for reversing osteoporosis
Dr. Wright: There's a lot in there! For example, we can quote
from this one if you wish: There is just the best controlled,
double-blind, placebo-controlled research out there that the
element strontium, when combined with calcium and
Vitamin D, can
dramatically help to reverse osteoporosis.
The latest study
reported a gain of 15 percent over three years in bone in the
spine and 9 percent in the hip, and there is no patent medicine
on the market that comes close. And the strontium's in all the
health food stores. Have we heard this in the major media
anywhere?
Mike: (Laughs) Of course not.
Dr. Wright: And if you read the back issues, you'll not only
find the information, but as I mentioned, you'll find the
footnotes and the citations, and you can go look it up yourself.
Mike: And that's with it combined with Vitamin D, then?
Dr. Wright: The research was with calcium, Vitamin D and
strontium versus
calcium, Vitamin D and placebo. The strontium
group came out dramatically well, and the placebo group just
lost a little more bone. There is only one precaution with the
use of strontium and that is, since bones have more calcium than
strontium we always, always have to use more calcium than
strontium - we don't want to reverse the natural body ratio.
But
as long as we do that, it works, and the thing is that we can
use the calcium all day with the Vitamin D, and we don't make a
great deal of progress, but if we throw the strontium into the
mix - wow! - it really starts working!
Mike: Interesting. That's a trace mineral, right?
Dr. Wright: It's not really trace, no, but on the other hand
it's not a macro-mineral either, it's somewhere in between.
Mike: Oh. I'm wondering if people take trace mineral
supplements, are they getting some strontium?
Dr. Wright: No. The research was using hundreds of milligrams,
and if you take trace mineral supplements you get a few
milligrams.
Mike: Interesting.
Dr. Wright: And strontium is in the same family, interestingly
enough, if you look at your periodic table, it goes magnesium,
calcium, strontium - in the same column.
Mike: Wow, what a great observation.
Dr. Wright: So that's the sort of thing that's in those back
issues. We did what I thought was a real good one on all the new
research on Vitamin D and how it helps protect against
auto-immune disease dramatically.
Here's a research article from
Finland, or from Scandinavia anyway, it might have been Finland.
A whole bunch of kids, starting at age one, were started on 2000
units (and we're told by the FDA that's going to kill them if
they're one year old) of Vitamin D, and that was maintained for
a few years, and there's a control group that didn't get any
Vitamin D.
And when they finally looked at all the statistics,
the number of new cases of type-1 diabetes - juvenile diabetes - had
been reduced by 80 percent!
Mike: That's astonishing!
Dr. Wright: And that is fantastically significant! And here
we've got the American Diabetes Association going around
collecting money to cure diabetes. Excuse me - somebody just
showed us how to prevent it!
Mike: Oh, I've got to second you on that. I have to comment on
that, too. Every time one of these organizations is begging for
money, I keep thinking the cure is already out there. This is
not a funding problem, this is an awareness problem.
Dr. Wright: It really is.
Mike: People say, "We're going to run for diabetes!"
- and guess
who's sponsoring the run for diabetes. It's Coke!
Dr. Wright: You're kidding me!
Mike: I kid you not! I picked up the brochure myself because I
was so amused by it. We have a soft drink company sponsoring - it
was a walk, a walk for diabetes, sponsored by a soft drink
company. And I said, what's wrong with this picture?
Dr. Wright: That blows me away!
Mike: I'll have to send it to you.
Dr. Wright: That's like the devil promoting virtue.
Mike: It is! But apparently no one else thought it was strange.
After all, these companies sponsor sporting events, so why not a
walk for diabetes?! Well, thank you so much for your time, Dr.
Wright, it's been enlightening and entertaining at the same
time.
Dr. Wright: Alright. Well, I hope this does help your listeners
and readers, stirs up a little interest, and does some good
things for their health, and thanks for spreading the
information out.
