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Archives | (February 2002)
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The Other Assault On Our Freedom (cont.)
------------------------------------------------------------------ Page 4 of 4 Perhaps the most extreme example was the raid on Dr. Jonathan Wright’s Seattle clinic. Breaking down the door just as the clinic was about to open, the SWAT team accompanying the FDA held an automatic rifle on Dr. Wright’s middle-aged secretary. Local police enlisted to participate in the raid were outraged when they found that the warrant was for vitamins! Dr. Wright sued the Agency and eventually won a cash settlement. But it’s not just the federal government that is actively attempting to suppress alternative medicine. The testimony of Dr. Tammy Guerkink Born before a congressional committee exposed what is really going on. I should note that Dr. Born is Vice Chairman of the Michigan Osteopathic Board of Licensing and Regulation and a voting delegate to the Federation of State Medical Boards, and therefore is highly credible. What she told the committee about a presentation at a meeting of the National Association of State Medical Boards conference in Chicago is a warning to us all: "The focus of the very first presentation was how to stop the practice of alternative and complementary medicine. As one Assistant Attorney General of California said at that meeting: 'It is difficult for us to get patients to complain about these doctors, so we will have to find ways to get them ourselves." She continued: "He [The California official] asked for a show of hands for how many states had prosecuted alternative medicine doctors, and many of the state representatives raised their hands. Then he asked for a special conference to compare how other states had been successful in prosecuting alternative physicians simply because they were alternative not because they practiced bad medicine." Clearly, the deck is being stacked! Even more disturbing, however, is that at the state level, there are various non-judicial forums available to the government that allow state and local officials to make a mockery of the Constitution and deny alternative practitioners and supplement manufacturers the rights of due process under the law. It is one of the most ominous trends in the assault on alternative medicine and one with which I am personally familiar. The way that states are circumventing the Constitution is to use so-called administrative bodies to harass and persecute anyone who strays from the path of medical orthodoxy. For physicians, dentists and other practitioners, these take the form of state licensing boards. In virtually every state, board members are drawn from the profession that they regulate. The selection of board members, however, who are political appointees, is normally done in consultation with that state’s professional societies. Medical board’s members are selected from prominent members of that state’s medical association, dentists from prominent members of the state dental association and so forth. Since the most prominent members are inevitably orthodox practitioners, they are hardly likely to be sympathetic to alternative and complementary therapies. Moreover, most will have associations with large medical institutions or even pharmaceutical companies, making them even less likely to view unorthodox therapies with favor. What is particularly important about this characteristic is that they also set the "standard of care" rules for their state. Any medical practitioner who fails to comply with this standard is liable to have his or her license to practice revoked. On a practical level, this means that doctors must practice conventional medicine – or else! For the patient it often means being subjected to questionable and expensive treatments by doctors afraid to challenge the status quo. In a his submission to the Breaux hearing, Representative Dan Burton (R-IN) provided an example of what can result: "At a meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncologists in the spring of this year, Dr. Ezekiel Emmanuel presented a study showing that doctors are prescribing chemotherapy to patients for cancers known not be unresponsive. Using billing records of nearly 8,000 patients in the state of Massachusetts they found that 41 % of patients received chemotherapy in the final year of life, 33 % in the final six months, and 25% in the final three months. The researchers found that at six months, three months, and one month before death that chemotherapy was given with the same amount of frequency between the two groups. The research showed that for patients with cancers generally recognized as being unresponsive to chemotherapy (gallbladder, kidney, liver, pancreatic, and melanoma) in the last year of life, doctors prescribe treatments that cost $38,000 when they know it is not going to help. Prescribing expensive drugs with serious side effects when there are lower cost, less dangerous options available and prescribing chemotherapy, which has significant risks associated with it and can cause terrible loss of quality of life, when there is no evidence that it will benefit are serious scams within the medical community that need to be addressed." If only 10% of all cancer patients (and the number is likely to be much, much higher) are administered these useless drugs each year, and they are only administered for 3 months, the cost to the U.S. economy of such unnecessary treatment would be $5.7 billion annually! Even worse, though is the fact that the patients may be denied other alternative or complementary therapies that might have saved their lives! The use of extra-judicial means to suppress alternative and complementary medicine is not limited to medical practitioners. Manufacturers and distributors of dietary supplements too, can have their rights to due process trampled upon. In their case, however, the tool used against them is what is called an "administrative review board." While the name given to administrative review boards can vary from state to state, they all have one thing in common: administrative law judges do not have to abide by the rules of evidence and procedure that apply in a court of law. As a result, they have wide discretion in admitting evidence, approving expert witnesses and determining the relevance of testimony. They are essentially a Kangaroo Court with the deck stacked against the defendant from the outset. Maryland Attorney General J. Joseph Curran testified about one such proceeding at the hearing, engaging in the same sort of obfuscation and dissembling as the witnesses who proceeded him. While trumpeting his victory over "consumer fraud" what Curran failed to note was that no fraud charges were ever brought. Indeed, the specific action he discussed was one in which no consumer complaints had been registered in his state! More important, the defendants were denied any semblance of due process. Many their expert witnesses were not allowed to testify. Over eighty defense witnesses were barred from testifying, with the administrative law judge saying she would accept their affidavits instead, but then she changed her mind and did not allow them to be considered! At the same time, the State was allowed to present so-called "expert" witnesses who admitted on the stand that they had no knowledge of the products being considered. Amazingly, the administrative law judge allowed their testimony to be considered despite their self-proclaimed ignorance! When the administrative law judge found for the defendants on one count, the Attorney General simply went over her head and had her supervisor reverse her decision! As unbelievable as this sounds, it is not only true, it is commonplace. All over the United States, dietary supplement manufacturers and distributors are being subjected to the same sort of high-handed, possibly unconstitutional proceeding. If average Americans do not rise up and object, the situation will only get worse. Each of us who want to have the ability to make choices about our medical care must speak out. We must write our elected officials. We must contact the media. If we do not, we will lose our most precious right – the right to determine what sort of health care we are able to use. |
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