There's been an increasing drumbeat of propaganda in the press about the dangers of herbal remedies. Stories in the NY Times, picked up by major media, have alerted the public to herbal hazards.

No dissenting voices were heard, in contrast to the Food and Drug Administration and their expert chorus, that only more government regulation can protect the safety of Americans using herbs and nutritional supplements.

Many herbalists, supplement manufacturers, and alternative medicine proponents oppose further FDA or government regulation of complementary and alternative medicine, because current regulation has been used to crush competition.

A Caduceus Of Cash

The intertwined career resumes of FDA officials and the industries they are charged to regulate is scandal, regularly reported in alternative media. This cross contamination occurs in most government regulatory agencies and creates enormous bias towards corporate profit over public protections. Pharmaceutical companies employ corps of retired FDA officials or place them on their boards. These companies directly benefit from publicly funded research for development of drugs which the FDA sells to drug companies to market to the public. They rake in billions.

Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic and Policy Research reports that "Americans are doubly exploited" by pharmaceutical companies. "We subsidize the research that creates the drugs. Then we pay the highest prices in the world" for pharmaceuticals.

Their obscene profits allow them to finance political campaigns, buy public relations and spend $8,000 to $13,000 on every doctor in the country, peddling their potions.

The top selling drugs are for heartburn, ulcers, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, depression and allergies. Allopathic or scientific medicine can treat the symptoms of those health problems, here's a prescription for a pill or three.

Alternative medical practitioners say these can be cured by their methods which might include regular exercise, a different diet, stress reduction practices, and their favorite remedy. Most Americans would rather take a pill, than actually have to change their lifestyle.

However a significant minority of higher educated, wealthier Americans are choosing alternatives or complementary treatments instead of pharmaceutical drugs. That number is increasing and fueling a booming market.

Competition hurts the cozy relationships in the entire medical industry. Herbal supplements reached $4 billion in sales in 1998 and may have been substituted for three times that cost in pharmaceuticals. The large conglomerate pharmaceutical companies want to kill or control an emerging market. They've already begun buying up herb and supplement companies while pressuring for expensive federal regulations which will drive out smaller companies.

Poison Oak Toilet Paper Herbs are not universally harmless, some are quite potent. Supplements can be contaminated, cause drug interactions and produce health problems. The rapidly growing market for alternative health and sundry products inevitably attracts hucksters, snake oil salesman and cost cutting contaminators. Ethics For Businessmen is a slim volume, rarely opened.

The popularity of herbs like wild ginseng, kava kava, una de gato, echinacea and others have threatened to destroy their sustainable harvesting. An article in HerbalGram, the journal of the Herb Research Foundation reported that only one division of one company out of 100 herbal trade companies selling ten of the most popular herbs, voiced a concern for the people and the environment where it originated from. Many pharmaceutical medicines are derived from plants, but even those companies which have obtained patents on traditional herbal medicines do not benefit the peoples of the plant.

A recent study by the California Department of Health Services found that 32% of 260 Asian patent medicines sold locally were contaminated with pharmaceutical drugs, steroids, and heavy metals. High levels of lead have been found in some Mexican herbs grown near industrial areas. Improper use of ephedra containing herbs and a few other powerful herbs have killed some Americans and harmed more, although the actual number is debated.

The General Accounting Office investigated the FDA's attempt to regulate ephedra containing supplements and criticized their unscientific process of regulation. Ephedra is in over the counter remedies used in asthma and allergy medicine, also used to manufacture methamphetamine. It's found in ma huang, a Chinese herb which is widely sold for "energy". A little too much energy for some folks.

The FDA moved to regulate ephedra in such a biased way that the GAO called them on it and they had to back off. They'll try again, because their attempts to regulate herbs are increasing as rapidly as the market has. Other herbs and supplements have been completely banned for sale by the FDA based on even less evidence of danger.

Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down

The alternative health industry's political power is increasing because of its popularity among wealthier, more educated women and men.

The Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994, was passed when millions of Americans called and wrote their representative to demand this legislation, because the FDA was threatening to regulate vitamins. The legislation protected consumer choice, and it broadened the definition of dietary supplements to include herbs, botanicals and plant based products.

Herbs and nutritional supplements have been shown to effectively treat most of the common illnesses of Americans, even without radical lifestyle changes. James Duke Phd of U.S. Department of Agriculture, and author of The Green Pharmacy has studied medicinal plants for thirty years. He compares their documented effects and price with commonly prescribed pharmaceuticals and predicts that their widespread use would save millions in medical costs with fewer side effects. The FDA is not moving in that direction.

The international pharmaceutical companies are behind the European Union approach to dietary supplements. Herbs are considered medicines and are subject to expensive "scientific" testing. These "harmonization" regulations play fiddle for pharmaceutical companies patented formulas. Under the guise of regulating the exaggerated dangers of herbs, the FDA would further deny Americans access to medicinal herbs and nutritional supplements. Their idea of herbal regulation is to burn it and ban it, as they've already done with several useful herbs and supplements, forcing patients who want them to pay more with less safety.

The American impatience with the stranglehold the FDA has on American health care, has been fueled by the many horror stories of the agency's enforcement practices, especially in the alternative cancer care field. From Wilhelm Reich to Hulda Clark they have arrested and imprisoned alternative medical practitioners for "practicing medicine without a license."

Doctor Deadly

The 180 Americans the FDA says have died from unregulated dietary supplements over the last severa years, pales in comparison to official estimates of hundreds of thousands of Americans being killed every year from FDA regulated pharmaceuticals.

In 1999 the National Institute of Health estimated from 40,000 to 98,000 Americans are killed every year from medical errors, mostly drug related. The University of Arizona calculated 119,000 deaths at a cost of $76 billion a year from the same causes. The Journal of the American Medical Association estimated in 1998 that 106,000 Americans die from adverse reactions to properly administered pharmaceuticals, not including errors. A new study is looking at how many automobile fatalities are caused by pharmaceutical use.

These estimates of 140,000 to 200,000 plus deaths from pharmaceutical drugs make them the third leading killer of Americans at a cost of $140 billion a year. Prescription drugs are the fastest growing segment of health care costs, raising prices at three times the cost of inflation. The official line is they're a bargain because meds decrease hospitalization costs. So does Kevorkian care.

Public health would be better supported if the FDA paid more attention to prescription drug deaths, food contamination, toxic cosmetics or genetically modified organisms, duties which they have neglected, rather than extend their reach further into nutritional supplements and botanical products.

Scientific Snakeoil

The dangers in herbal healing and other alternative practitioners trying to fit in with "scientific medicine", and become complementary therapies is that they will be swallowed and suffocated, squeezed into a limited mentality towards medicine.

This is especially apparent in the herbal studies and plant patenting going on now. Plants are being measured by their chemical constituents, usually selecting only one chemical assumed to be the active ingredient. The whole plant, which traditional healers believe to have a soul and spirit which can choose to assist in healing, is ignored.

This reductionist, silver bullet approach, misses something compared to traditional Hawaiian herbalist, Papa Auwae, interviewed in the January issue of Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine.

He grows his own herbs or collects them carefully, chooses individual doses for each patient, prays with them for their health and counsels them. He said it wasn't easy, but he "learned that 80% of healing is spiritual. Only 20% is medicine."

Doctors Killing Doctors

The crushing of competition in medical care in this century by regulation and enforcement of orthodox treatments has been accomplished under the mantle of "scientific medicine."

Rockefeller Medicine Men, by E. Richard Brown is an extensively researched book into how and why the Rockefeller, Carnegie, and other wealthy foundations funded and influenced this muzzling of medical competition. Most notorious is the 1910 Flexner Report, which discredited any medical schools which were not "scientific" and began the process of public and private funding of those which were.

Medical schools in America were profitable in the 19th century, even affordable. With the Popular Health Movement of the 1840's expanding freedom of medical choice, hundreds of schools had churned out doctors, osteopaths, homeopaths, chiropractors, naturopaths, with plenty of spiritual healers, farmer bonesetters, midwives and herbalists.

Conventional medicine for most of the century involved bloodletting, purging and toxic potions like mercury and arsenic with surgery being a likely death sentence. Alternatives were popular and after the Civil War, the Medical Associations began to fight back with government regulations and enforcement. Towards the end of the century, the popularity of academic and scientific medicine grew, especially among the wealthy. This approach required research laboratories, ever more costly machines and researcher expenses which fewer schools could afford. It essentially reduces medicine to biology.

The gradual strangulation by legislation, accreditation and enforcement, culminated in their complete control of medicine for most of the 20th century.

The improved health of Americans over 150 years, has been primarily accomplished through public health measures including public sanitation, cleaner air and water, better nutrition, lifestyle changes, workplace and domestic safety and uncontaminated food (which was the FDA's original goal).

Scientific medicine has taken much of the credit, especially for the enormous drop in infectious disease deaths which declined decades before antibiotics and vaccines became widespread, because of public health improvement.

The sickest 20% of the population account for most medical care costs and are often the least helped by conventional care. They are also the cash cows of the industry.

Most would benefit from health care which included stress reduction and dietary counseling along with symptom treatment. This approach lowers overall costs and improves patient satisfaction and is being adopted by HMO's and health insurance companies in order to contain medical costs.

The medical system is currently organized to both victimize and "help" the sickest Americans by dazzling them with science and cold, hard fact. The gold standard for true believers in "scientific" medicine is the double blind study for testing therapies, to allow for the placebo effect which helps or hurts 30-60% of control groups of patients given sham treatments. It's an expensive standard, and less than 20% of conventional medicine has even been proven this way, according to reviews of the literature.

Alternative medical practitioners claim to use evidence based health care, observing whether the patient gets better or not. They benefit from the placebo effect if they believe in their treatment. Their enthusiasm and the trust of the patient creates a powerful healing potential, negative messages also reverberate in patients.

Crushing medical choice by granting medical monopolies narrows our liberty in the most fundamental of decisions, how we choose to heal or not. It's our life, no matter how wrongheaded or unscientific we may be.

Medicine is an art, not a science. The beliefs of the patient and the healer in benefits of their treatment are often as powerful as the actual medicine. A quack can cure, patients do not always need science to heal.