Coercive Psychological Systems

by SkewsMe.com

The study of Mind Control reveals that Jonathan Edwards discovered a method of affecting change during a religious crusade in 1735. World Newstand reports that by inducing guilt and acute apprehension and by increasing the tension, the "sinners" attending his revival meetings would break down and completely submit. Technically, what Edwards was doing was creating conditions that wipe the brain slate clean so that the mind accepts new programming. The problem was that the new input was negative.

F.A.C.T. uses "coercive psychological systems" as an umbrella term for all Mind Control including brainwashing, thought reform, destructive and coercive persuasion.

The simplest form of Mind Control may be propaganda, which comes in three flavors: white, or true facts, gray, and black, or blatant lies; the purpose of which is to change public opinion. George W. Bush's administration has been criticized for producing illegal propaganda in the form of fake news announcements in order to sell its federal programs.

Moving up in complexity, one finds peer pressure. Some people learn the skills of coercive and destructive persuasion at an early age and hone those skills to control friends, family and coworkers.

"Thought reform" is the Orwellian vision in which people are programmed to think alike for the prosperity of the State. Unbeknownst to Orwell, China was subjecting students to this "reeducation" process to adopt Communism. Thought reform creates people who blindly follow their leaders.

Robert Jay Lifton was an early brainwashing and Mind Control researcher. He used the term "thought reform" to include Assault on identity, Guilt, Self-betrayal, Breaking point, Leniency, The compulsion to confess, The channeling of guilt, Reeducation: logical dishonoring, Progress and harmony, and Final confession and rebirth.

One means of bringing thought reform is by "dumbing down" the population so it has less experience from which to draw. According to Literacy Volunteers of America, the 1992 National Adult Literacy Survey discovered that up to 51 percent of American adults lack a sufficient foundation of basic skills to function successfully in our society. Carl Sagan, whose television series "Cosmos" popularized science, warned that people must know the workings of science in order to be less easily manipulated. A 2002 Seattle Times article reported that the National Science Foundation discovered that only about a third of adults showed a good understanding of the scientific process.

Between dumbing down and "grade inflation", schools are producing young adults primed to follow orders rather than think critically. According to Alvin Toffler in his book "Future Shock", nothing could be better calculated to produce people uncertain of their goals, people incapable of effective decision-making under conditions of overchoice.

The term brainwashing came into vogue in September 1950 when Edward Hunter coined the term as a translation of hsi-nao meaning "to cleanse the mind" in an article on Communist Mind Control. Biderman's Chart of Coercion lists methods of Mind Control as isolation, monopolization of perception, induced debility and exhaustion, occasional indulgences, and devaluing of the individual.

Apart from describing the average workday, companies are also exploiting their power by secretly investing in their employees with so-called "peasant death" insurance. Companies including Disney and Wal-Mart have taken out tax exempt life insurance policies on their employees, most often without their consent, sometimes even illegally. Working someone to death has become highly profitable.

Repetition combined with rewards and punishments is the backbone of the behavioral sciences. Pavlov demonstrated how dogs would salivate at the ring of a bell. J.B. Watson repeated the experiment with human subjects. B.F. Skinner showed the military how pigeons could be trained to steer bombs. The 1970s provided countless experiments into the conditioning of children and adult alike.

Today's television programs like "Nanny 911" show the world what a little Mind Control is capable of in limited time. The children on these shows would most likely be required by schools to take medications like Ritalin, but in a few short days the behavior modification programs transform these tiny terrors into little angels.

Large doses of Ritalin and Sodium Pentathol are used in narcoanalysis. Ritalin is used to counteract the sedative hypnotic effects of the Sodium Pentathol. Sedatives made headlines in 1996 due to an increase in people slipping the so-called "date rape drugs" into victims' drinks. Using rape drugs is "almost like the perfect crime," according to prosecutor Dennis Nicewander, "because they don't have to worry about a witness testifying against them."

The CIA has been trying to control human behavior since WWII. In trying to expediate interrogations, for example, their search for a "truth serum" included combining LSD and Sodium Pentathol.

Ewen Cameron was a world-renowned scientist working for the CIA. Cameron developed "psychic driving," a procudure using electric shocks, powerful drugs and induced comas with a patient's own recorded words played back repeatedly. Patients would inevitably become worse off after treatments. Eventually Cameron would admit his experiments weren't as effective as he had hoped. It has taken decades, but hundreds of Cameron's victims are finally entitled compensation.

The CIA has also been accused of brainwashing children to become killers and sex slaves. These projects evolved to become Project Mk-Ultra. Children are used as sex slaves to cater to and compromise government officials. Edwin Wilson began the CIA's widespread use of sex in the early 1950s when he acquired homosexual and pedophile rings from CIA asset, mafia lawyer, and Joseph McCarthy Committee counsel Roy Cohn. Of course longtime FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover denied the existance of organized crime — ie the Mafia — as the FBI denies organized child sexual abuse today — ie ritual abuse. The idea that drugs, hypnosis and brainwashing would be used on children to cover up abuse is apparently too controversial for the FBI to admit.

Resistance to repressed (and suppressed) memories has manifested in the form of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation. Intelligence community specialists sit on the board and send controversial experts like Elizabeth Loftus to testify that recollections of childhood abuse are ficticious.

More than 25% of U.S. children are sexually abused and fewer than 10% of cases are reported to authorities. Often the abuser will implant crazy ideas into the victim's head; maybe the creep donnes a costume…it's up to the imagination what will scare silence into their victims. The über-creepy NAMBLA even publishes instructions on how to lure children.

Sigmund Freud tried to expose the extent of child sexual abuse, but his initial presentation brought reprisals. He retracted any connection between "hysteria" and child sexual abuse and controversy has raged since. Today we are discovering that neglect can cause attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, abuse can cause borderline personality disorder, and severe abuse can cause multiple personalities, or dissociative identity disorder. Unfortunately, there is still much denial when it comes to understanding that coercive psychological systems are being used on children.

Source:
http://www.skewsme.com/coerce.html
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Big Medicine's Malignant Growth

By Stan Cox, AlterNet
February 22, 2006.

Some medical professionals say the only way to rid ourselves of medicine's vast piles of waste is to shrink the health care industry itself. Are they heretics or visionaries?


Andrew Jameton dug through the clutter of his bookshelf and pulled out a flexible plastic ventilator circuit. "This is used by a patient for two days, and we throw it away," he said. "In the past, they were used for just one day, so we're making progress, I guess."

He handed me a thin, colorful cardboard box, about half the size of a sheet of paper. "Pharmaceutical samples came in this. It holds three pills."

Jameton is a professor and section head in the University of Nebraska Medical Center's Department of Preventive and Societal Medicine. He's not a medical doctor but a philosopher, and he's tackling a subject few dare discuss: how to shrink medicine's big ecological footprint by shrinking the medical industry itself.

He showed me a diagram illustrating the vicious circle that he sees as the heart of the problem: "Big Medicine: Big Economy: Death of Nature: Poor Public Health: Big Medicine."

"But," he told me, "if you try to talk about ecological limits in the medical professions, it's not a welcome conversation."

Growing pains

From 2001 to 2004, the U.S. health care industry grew at an annual rate of 3.6 percent, easily outstripping the rest of the economy's 2.1 percent rate. And as 2006 began, the medical industry had $22 billion worth of buildings under construction or renovation -- the biggest boom in half a century, predicted to last through the coming decade.

A hospital bed in America, on average, generates an estimated 16 to 23 pounds of waste every day, seven days a week. That includes office paper, food, IV bags, gauze, syringes, human body parts, drugs, toxic agents used in chemotherapy, heavy metals, radioactive wastes and much more.

Then there are "upstream" eco-costs; for example, the long, toxic history of one pair of latex or vinyl gloves that may be used for only a few seconds and discarded. U.S. hospitals used 12 billion such gloves back in 1994 alone -- almost one pair for everyone on earth.

And despite some environmentally friendly construction projects in recent years, the current hospital-building frenzy is having an environmental impact like that of any construction boom. A 2006 report in the trade magazine Health Facilities Management summarized a nationwide survey of the "red-hot construction market that's reshaping the face of health care delivery." It extolled trends toward larger, more soundproof patient rooms, nurses' computers in every room, wireless infrastructure plus extra cabling and conduit, and of course, more and bigger electric power plants. But read through the report's 2,700-plus words, and you'll find not a single mention of energy conservation or other environmental issues.

In medicine, as in war, urgent questions of life and death can lead the participants to overlook the resulting ecological impact, or to treat it as a necessary evil. But Jameton insists there is no real conflict between saving lives and preserving the planet. Rather, he says, it's money hunger that's making medicine unsustainable. "Rescue can be a beautiful thing. We all need heroism. But people in the back room are gaming that system."

Economic fairness, Jameton says, aligns with ecological responsibility in demanding that we cut back: "Each year, we spend $5,500 to $6,000 per person in this country on health care. Who in the world can afford that?"

"Everyone has to learn to live on less -- and the rich will have to give up more than the poor. I looked at the global distribution of wealth and income and calculated that I'm something like the 50 millionth richest person in the world!" he said. "But does that entitle me to any treatment I demand, whatever the cost to the earth?"

Curbing medical pollution

A growing number of medical professionals recognize the irony of an industry dedicated to health that threatens the natural environment on which human health depends. Among the impressive array of groups working to address the problem is the network Health Care Without Harm, which is in the forefront of the longtime battle to eliminate use of the neurotoxin mercury.

A 2005 study by the American Hospital Association and Hospitals for a Healthy Environment found that 80 percent of hospitals surveyed had stopped using mercury fever thermometers, and more than 54 percent had established a policy to virtually eliminate mercury facilitywide.

Hospital wastes contain three times as much plastic as household trash, and much of that plastic is polyvinyl chloride (PVC), which can leak toxic chemicals into patients via intravenous drips or emit highly carcinogenic dioxins when incinerated. In response, the list of cities and organizations formally aiming to eliminate PVC, dioxin, and/or incineration in medical facilities is getting longer. In recent years, local battles have shut down medical waste incinerators or won commitments to stop incineration in Maine, Illinois, Michigan, Missouri, California and the Gila River Indian Community Reservation in Arizona.

Groups such as Sustainable Hospitals have developed highly detailed guides to "environmentally preferable purchasing." The Nightingale Institute mobilizes nurses and clinicians to push for more environmentally sound products and procedures in their own workplace.

Research is showing that many drugs, including anticancer agents, psychiatric drugs, anti-inflammatories and even caffeine can pass, still in an active form, through our bodies and into sewers and waterways. The sewer lines under hospitals and clinics are teeming with such compounds. Toilets aren't the only source; unwanted or expired medications are often just dumped or flushed. The company PharmEcology Associates is working with some success to reduce drug pollution from medical facilities.

Ted Schettler is science director of the Science and Environment Health Network. Although, he told me by phone that "there's plenty of work yet to be done," he has been pleased to see a growing list of hospitals strive to reduce or eliminate mercury, PVC, waste incineration and drug-dumping. And he's encouraged by a trend in some areas toward green medical buildings. "When a hospital is under construction," he observed, "that's a real opportunity to get it right."

Another big topic, Schettler said, is the food served in hospitals. "Some are transforming their food purchasing procedures, concentrating not only on nutrition but also on the way the food was produced. This is an issue that really gets the industry to look more at public and environmental health."

I asked Schettler about Andrew Jameton's argument that any environmental gains achieved by using better materials and methods would be eaten up quickly by an industry that at its current growth rate will double in size in less than two decades.

Schettler knows Jameton and agrees with his analysis, but, he said, "That's a tough one. People are not going to give up access to expensive medical care."

Michael Gillespie, senior lecturer at the University of Washington, Bothell, has written about a discussion that occurred in one of his classes several years ago, following a visiting lecture by Jameton. One young woman, a mother, said she agreed with his ecological arguments but that if her own child was stricken with a potentially fatal disease, the environment would have to take a back seat. "I would do anything to save my daughter," she said. As Gillespie notes, few in our society would criticize her for that, however contradictory her stance.

In the belly of the beast

Jameton realizes that he's poking at sacred cows. Nevertheless, he argues, there is an ethical imperative to rein in a system whose rapid growth seems to be producing more profit but less health.

To illustrate, he took me on a short tour of the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha. Like any major hospital, UNMC packs an environmental wallop that Jameton likens to a 24-hour hotel, restaurant chain, office building, university science department, big-box retailer and transportation company rolled into one.

We peered into a dim room lit only by video monitors, where banks of computers were being fed by imaging equipment like CT scanners, PET scanners, MRIs, and good old-fashioned X-ray machines. Increasing numbers and varieties of such diagnostic devices not only suck hard on the power grid but also require huge computational power, heavily braced walls, vibration-resistant floors and/or lead shielding.

A nearby storeroom was filled floor-to-ceiling with surgical gowns, disinfectant soaps and a host of other items. This and another storeroom are restocked from a huge UNMC-owned warehouse a few miles away by the center's own fleet of trucks.

"You can think of a hospital as a big retail merchandiser of pharmaceuticals and other medical supplies," Jameton said. He showed me a "personal" can of shaving cream the size of two thumbs, just one of 85,000 items the hospital keeps in stock. That doesn't include pharmaceuticals, where the issues become even more bewildering and the economic stakes higher.

We descended into the basement, passing from the high-tech 21st century to a scene from the mid-Industrial Revolution, complete with boilers; distillers; water treatment tanks; massive, old gray GE and Honeywell electrical controls; a rank of backup batteries and ductwork that looked big enough to drive a Nebraska corn picker through.

In the maintenance staff's work area, we peeked into a room with so many bookshelves it might have been mistaken for a branch of the medical center library, yet the volumes were all equipment manuals and spec books. "With this level of complexity," Jameton said, gesturing toward shelves groaning under the bulky manuals, "any system becomes more and more fragile."

Another sign of fragile complexity is the amazing proliferation of pipes throughout the building. And plumbing's not just for water anymore; the circulatory system of UNMC's gleaming new Durham Research Center is a tangle of pipes carrying eight different kinds of liquids throughout the building. Spaces between floors and ceilings of most medical buildings are especially large, to make room for the extraordinary amount of plumbing needed.

When I asked about hospitals actually making people ill, Jameton acknowledged that problem as yet another sign of the system's fragility -- in fact, it's a big, flashing neon sign. The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that 2 million people per year contract infections in America's hospitals, and that about 90,000 die from those infections.

And all the usual ways of preventing infection -- using disposable supplies and chemical disinfectants, autoclaving, incinerating -- either gobble resources, churn out wastes or both.

Some of the hospital's eco-impact has been moved out of sight. Pictures of the former laundry depict a grim, medieval-looking chamber that was decommissioned a few years ago. Now the hospital's gargantuan daily washload, along with the energy, detergent, water and sewer use it entails, has been turned over to an outside contractor.

Of course, the public face of UNMC, like that of any well-funded hospital, is designed to convey a sense of calm, security and comfort. But a stroll through the more pleasant parts of the complex reveal the tradeoffs that undermine that image. An area that once was a solarium, where patients could bask in the sun's therapeutic warmth, is now completely shaded by the towering Lied Transplant Center. A greenhouse originally intended for growing medicinal plants sits empty atop the pharmacy school. A largely paved-over courtyard known as the Healing Gardens is blasted with air from the Lied Center's massive air conditioning system.

Greener, Cheaper, Healthier

Solid research, an overview of which was presented at a recent workshop sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences, shows that hospitals built and operated on more environmentally sound principles can actually save money. Costs are recovered quickly, patients get better sooner, patients' families are happier, medical errors are reduced, staff are more satisfied, staff turnover and absenteeism are lower and workers' compensation claims drop.

Those conclusions are reinforced by a 2004 book, "The Ethics of Environmentally Responsible Health Care," which Jameton coauthored with Jessica Pierce, lecturer in philosophy at the University of Colorado, Boulder. In it, Pierce and Jameton described a hypothetical "Green Health Center" that would, they argue, achieve better medical results more cheaply and with lower ecological impact.

The British medical journal The Lancet praised the book for taking on the challenge of defining true sustainability in a medical facility but dismissed the Green Health Center idea as economically impractical. Its practical alternative? "At this juncture, we need simple, tentative, precautionary approaches that cut through the uncertainties revealed by science. We need to buy time to find smarter ways of living while not crippling our economies in the process."

The Lancet reviewer continued: "One wonders what will happen when an elderly, wealthy patient, requiring cytotoxic or radioactive treatment, is effectively offered palliative care?"

Pierce, who was the book's lead author, rejects the argument that medicine in a deep shade of green would have to be economically crippling. "We wrote the book as a utopian vision, and we hope health care will evolve toward that vision," she told me. "But we really are presenting a pretty serious challenge to the economic structure."

In Pierce's view, the ecological damage caused by medicine has grown along with a badly distorted growth in its priorities. "The crux of our argument is that allocation of our spending is misplaced. In the past, the greatest advances in overall health have come from clean water, clean air, public works, public health, preventive care."

Rather than more and more medical care, she says, "We need more 'human care,' before people ever get sick. As it is, the system is undermining the very health it's supposed to be protecting. And a lot of those treatments and technologies have negligible health impacts."

Associating high cost with big benefits is just poor logic, says Pierce. She draws a comparison with another expensive, ecologically destructive technology with little or no useful function: "People have a choice to buy a Hummer, too. But that doesn't mean society should encourage them to do it."

Closing the vicious circle

As we emerged from our tour of UNMC into a light snowfall, Andrew Jameton directed my attention downhill to the hospital's immediate neighborhood, where he located several examples of Big Medicine's vicious circle. There was a plastics company, a dry cleaners, a blood-plasma center across the street from a low-income psychiatric clinic ("so people with possibly impaired judgment who need money badly can sell some blood that just might contain psychoactive drugs"), and three (yes, three) power plants.

Finally, pointing toward Saddle Creek Road, which, like so many urban and suburban artifacts, is named for the natural feature that was destroyed to accommodate it, he indicated a grimy metal-fabrication plant. "Notice where it's located," he said, "between the medical center and a graveyard."

Stan Cox is a plant breeder and writer in Salina, Kan.

Source:
http://www.alternet.org/envirohealth/32413/

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Argentina's Vast Tracts of GE Soybeans Are a National Disaster

New Charles Benbrook technical paper on Argentina

From: http://tinyurl.com/e9phv

"Rust, Resistence, Run down soils and Rising Costs - Problems facing Soybeanproducers in Argentina."

By Charles M Benbrook
January 20, 2005


Invasion of the forest snatchers
Greenpeace, Thu 20 January 2005 ARGENTINA/Buenos Aires

In the science-fiction classic, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, alien plants with destructive clone-manufacturing world-domination plans threatened the future of humanity. Bad news: the pods have arrived, disguised as soybeans.

All of us concerned about genetically engineered (GE) crops have been losing sleep for a while over the relentless takeover of traditional fields in many parts of the world. Now, a new report reveals how thoroughly Argentina has been taken over, and outlines previously unimagined dangers for our future when an entire country's agricultural system is invaded by a clone-replicating force like Monsanto.

Within the last 10 years, Argentina's agricultural production system has become dominated by one crop: the genetically engineered Roundup Ready soybean developed by US agrochemical company Monsanto. The large scale environmental, social, and economic impact is unprecedented.

Agronomist Charles Benbrook warns that the planting of 14 million hectares (34 million acres) of a single, genetically homogenous crop has created ahighly vulnerable agricultural production
Argentinean soy production uses GE seeds that are resistant to the herbicide glyphosate, marketed under the trade name "Roundup." Roundup Ready soy relies on repeated herbicide applications to control weeds. As every highschool student knows, Nature abhors an herbicide, and finds ways to evolve around it. Already, strains of Roundup-resistant weeds have appeared in Argentina, requiring ever-heavier doses of the poison, killing off microbes and degrading soil quality. Heavy herbicide applications and widespread planting of Roundup Ready soybeans has also led to increases in pest and disease severity. And when fungi and other threats to the crop encounter none of the natural diversity barriers to their spread, the possibility of monoculture crop collapse increases significantly.

But unlike the devastating Irish potato famine of the nineteenth century, the soy Argentina grows isn't actually feeding people. The vast majority(above 80%) of soybeans are bound for animal feedlots, providing protein for cattle, hogs and poultry. The European Union (EU) is the largest importer of Argentinean soybean meal.

Worse, farmland which once produced subsistence crops and legume forages now produce only soybean monocultures. From 1996 to 2002 (the period of major soybean production expansion) the number of Argentineans lacking access to basic nutrition grew from 3.7 million to 8.7 million. Production of meat, dairy products, and eggs has dropped significantly, to be replaced by soybeans destined for export markets.

Sound like an alien force is taking over? The invasion doesn't stop there.

Can't see the forest for the beans

After Roundup Ready technology was introduced in 1996, the pace of land conversion has increased dramatically. The soybean frontier has expanded deeper and deeper into the ecosystems of Argentina, with 5.6 million hectares of non-agricultural land converted for soybean production since 1996. That compares to 2.4 million hectares converted before 1996. The rate at which forests in Northern Argentina are being turned into soy plantations is 3-6 times higher than the world average. The massive destruction of the forests, in particular of the Yungas and Chaco forests, has sparked violence and protests by agrarian families desperate to preserve their land. These forests also support diverse animal populations, including jaguars, pumas, monkeys, and more than 50% of all bird species of Argentina.

Monopoly + Monoculture = Mon$anto

You'd expect that such a rapid expansion of soy production in Argentina must mean big, big profits for the Argentine nation, right? Think again. Not only is Roundup Ready soy a monoculture, it's controlled by a monopoly. Monsanto Corporation, the American owners of the patent on both Roundup and Roundup Ready soy, sets the price for both the herbicide and the crop. Glyphosate prices are going up in Argentina, and Monsanto has announced that it intends to collect retroactive royalty payments, and aggressively enforce patent laws on Roundup Ready technology. Adios to the profit margin for the farmer, howdy big bucks for Monsanto.
To a nation suffering from international debt, rising unemployment, andwide spread poverty, Roundup Ready soybean production has offered little compensation, and Argentina's economic vulnerability is worsened by the volatile world soybean market.

A recent report by a team of US scientists found that Argentina soybeans contain 5-10% less protein, with lower levels of important amino-acids, than soybeans from competing countries. Poor quality soybeans also means less revenue. Buyers of Argentina soybeans will likely seek price concessions. And in Europe, widespread consumer rejection of GE soy means little market for human food production.

First, we take Buenos Aires, then we take Beijing

Like any good alien invasion, this one is bent on global domination. China is a major importer of Argentinean soybeans. Because China is the centre of biodiversity for soy, any contamination of the wild soybean species there could alter natural soybean evolution irrevocably. And accidental release during import, transport or processing poses a major risk to related wild soybean species.

We demand: Not one single hectare of forest or other natural ecosystems should be converted to soy plantations in Argentina. We call on the Argentinean government to take immediate action to protect Argentina's forests and on international institutions and banks to stop financing unsustainable agriculture and forest conversion in the region.

The use of genetically engineered soy in Argentina should be phased out with a view to implementing a ban on all genetically modified organism (GMO)releases. The Argentinean government must respect consumer opposition to GMOs by providing its citizens the right to reject GMOs through mandatory food and feed labelling and withdraw from the US-led WTO case against the(now historical) de facto ban on GMO approvals by the European Union.

The European Union - a key market for Argentinean GE soy (used for animalfeed) - should ban Roundup Ready soy. Greenpeace calls on EU Member States not to re-approve Roundup Ready soy when Monsanto's approval for use of Roundup Ready soy expires in 2006. Moreover, the EU must provide its citizens the right to reject GMOs in food production by introducing mandatory GE labelling for eggs, meat and dairy products if GE animal feed has been used.

In China - another major market for Argentinean GE soy - the risk of genetic contamination of the worlds' centre of soy biodiversity through GE soy imports must be acknowledged. Strong measures to avoid such contamination must be taken by the importers of GE soy and the Chinese government, by banning GE soy imports into China.

Don't close your eyes! Become a cyberactivist today and fight against the takeover of planet Earth. http://act.greenpeace.org/register

(This GMO news service is underwritten by a generous grant from the Newman's Own Foundation, edited by Thomas Wittman and is a production of the Ecological Farming Association www.eco-farm.org http://www.eco-farm.org/ )

Source:
http://www.organicconsumers.org/ge/benbrook012505.cfm

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AETNA Loses Major Dental Case in Fed Court - Is This Their Demise?...

by Consumer Advocate Tim Bolen

Sunday, January 29th, 2006

Late Friday, January 27th, 2006, 10th District Federal Court Judge Marcia Krieger handed struggling Aetna Insurance, perhaps the biggest legal loss in Aetna's history. And, it was over a dental issue. The reverberations will be felt worldwide. This case may be one of the two straws to break this company's back. I'll tell you about the second straw further into this article.

About 3:00PM, Central Standard time, in Denver, Colorado, Aetna attorneys and top management no doubt went into cardiac arrest when a decision in the "Cavitat v. Aetna" Federal case was announced by the Judge, especially since the decision came only one week after Aetna had arrogantly crowed its legal position to its customer base in Business Week Magazine. It is not known whether Business Week plans to retract its story and apologize to those it named.

In August of 2004, a small manufacturer of medical devices, Cavitat Medical Technologies of Denver, Colorado filed suit against Aetna, and named as co-conspirators:
Delicensed MD Stephen Barrett, his dubious website "quackwatch.com," Robert S. Baratz MD, DDS, PhD, the National Council Against Health Fraud (NCAHF), and a big chunk of the organized "quackbuster" conspiracy, in Colorado, for "were and are each employed or associated with an enterprise, and participated and participates in the conduct of the enterprise affairs through a pattern of racketeering activity in violation of 18 USAC1962(c) and C.R.S. 18-17-104(3). Said pattern of activity included and includes, but was and is not limited to, the preparation, publication, dissemination and transmittal of information by US Mail and by wire through internet websites by wire and other media which falsely represented the Plaintiff's product and technology, constituting a violation of 18 USC 1341, 1343, 1347 and 1349, and CRS 18-17-103(5)(a)..."
"(1) Publication of an Injurious Falsehood, (2) Tortious interference with a Prospective Business Advantage, (3) Negligent interference with a Prospective Business Advantage, (4) Interference with contract or prospective Contractual Relation, (5) Federal and State RICO (18USCA 1961 et seq. and C.R.S. 18-17-104).

I have a copy of the lawsuit on my desk (12 pages), and I LOVE the way it reads. I've put a copy on one of my websites. It's a model, as far as I'm concerned, of the way a hundred other lawsuits should be filed against the "quackbuster" conspiracy, all over North America.
Basically, the lawsuit complains that Bob Jones invented a device called CAVITAT which easily finds cavitations in the jawbone long before an x-ray can, got that device properly approved by the FDA, started selling it all over North America, only to have the quackbuster operation bad-mouth it. Aetna Insurance picked up the quackbuster's commentaries and used them to deny claims for its use, and for treatment based upon results of its findings. The quackbusters that wrote the report (Dodes and Schissell) claim to have a dental clinic in Forest Hills, New York. They are the mainstay writers for Barrett's dubious "dentalwatch.com" website. Dodes and Schissell have very questionable credentials.

Scientist Bernard Windham probably explains best why the quackbusters are so eager to kill CAVITAT for their paymasters. Windham says "Cavitations are diseased areas in bone under teeth or extracted teeth usually caused by lack of adequate blood supply to the area. Tests by special equipment (Cavitat) found cavitations in over 90% of areas under root canals or extracted wisdom teeth that have been tested, and toxins such as anerobic bacteria and other toxics which significantly inhibit body enzymatic processes in virtually all cavitations. These toxins have been found to have serious systemic health effects in many cases, and significant health problems to be related such as arthritis, MCS, and CFS. These have been found to be factors along with amalgam in serious chronic conditions such as MS, ALS, Alzheimer's, MCS, CFS, etc.. The problem occurs in extractions that are not cleaned out properly after extraction.

Frankly, the American Dental System, with the American Dental Association (ADA) at the helm, is buried in 100 year old technologies, won't accept anything new, and is fighting a losing battle over their promotion of deadly poisonous mercury amalgam (they call them "silver") fillings, and ultra-dangerous, but highly profitable "Root Canals." The ADA, I hear, has lost a second insurance carrier, because of its endorsement of certain dental products. And, it is being sued by its former insurance carrier for lying to that carrier about the safety of mercury amalgams.
Worse, the ADA, isn't telling its membership about its legal problems. A California dentist found out the hard way that the ADA won't back those dentists that still install mercury amalgams, stating "he should have known how dangerous they were..."

The ADA, isn't telling its membership about its Public Relations problems, either. Mainstream media has picked up on the ADA's plight. The Chicago Tribune, a few weeks ago, ran an article titled "Are your teeth toxic? The mercury in 'silver' fillings would be hazardous waste in a river----yet it's sitting in your mouth..."

Aetna has been in BIG trouble for a while...
Aetna, just a few years ago, according to Baseline magazine, "was losing about $1 million dollars a day..." Then John W. Rowe was brought aboard as CEO. Rowe made big changes to stop the hemorrhaging. The biggest thing was implementation of a new system labeled Executive Management Information System (EMIS) designed to replace an old system that Rowe said was "using stale information to make actuarial assumptions about what was happening in health care."

Again, Baseline says "This performance management system helped Aetna understand where it was losing money and what it would have to change to reverse that trend. Initially, Aetna returned to profitability by raising its rates and deliberately driving away unprofitable customers. But over the past couple of years, it has continued to increase profits by whittling away at overhead expenses and medical costs."

The "Cavitat v. Aetna" case, though, points out Aetna's reality - and the emptiness of their so-called "recovery." The key words to the problems brought up in the Cavitat case were in the statement above "it has continued to increase profits by whittling away at overhead expenses and medical costs."

It's how they accomplished that increase in profits, that becomes the rub - and is the situation that will anger the health industry towards Aetna far more than anything else.

So, how DID Aetna do the "whittling?"
The "Cavitat" case uncovered four Aetna secrets, a good many of which are revealed in a transcript of a hearing where Aetna tried, unsuccessfully, to change the trial to as different Court. They were:

(1) Aetna makes a policy of using known medical/dental "quackpots," and "liars for hire" as "medical dental experts" evaluating the unsuspecting health professional's choice of testing, diagnosis, and treatment of patients for the purpose of denying claims.

(2) Aetna has a list of legitimate CPT codes that they will NOT pay for under ANY circumstances. They do not reveal this to health professionals.

(3) If ANY health professional uses the legitimate CPT codes mentioned above in a billing, Aetna puts that health professional on a supposedly "independent" computer "health fraud" list it shares with other insurance companies, State licensing agencies, and law enforcement - permanently "marking" that unsuspecting health professional as a "suspected criminal," nationwide. From that point on there is a target on that health professional's heart. The victims have no way of knowing, or finding out, that they are listed as a "suspected criminal." We suspect that there are over 70,000 health professionals on that list right now.

(4) Worst, is that Aetna uses the State health professional licensing boards, and their disciplinary process, to punish health professionals who dare to challenge Aetna's payment denial - filing a formal complaint against that doctor/dentist forcing them to go through an expensive "investigation," and a State hearing process. Aetna can refer the State agency to the supposed independent computer "health fraud" list, saying "see, they're already a suspected criminal..." The New York State Medical Society ran an article last year claiming that not only are insurance companies using, and abusing, the State licensing boards over claims, but they are "funding" those investigations and prosecutions.

Keep in mind that these policies are not just restricted to those patients covered by Aetna. Aetna is the so-called "plan administrator" for hundreds of other insurance plans, including some segments of Medicare....

The "Cavitat v. Aetna" case was the beginning of a war...

War is not for the timid.

Bob Jones the inventor of "Cavitat" is certainly not timid. He spent years proving his Cavitat device had merit - so much merit, he scares the crap out of "big dentistry." His device, literally, tears apart long, and strongly held, beliefs in dentistry. His "Cavitat" device shows that dentistry's highly profitable "root canal" method is, and always has been, an oral cess-pool of bacteria of the worst kind - the kind that can, will, and does, literally, stop the human heart from beating. His device changes dentistry forever.

The "quackusters" are an industry unto themselves. It is their job to stop new things in health care. Originally started, and funded, by 26 drug companies, they've expanded to become the misdirection agency for everything new in health care. They get paid to stop, or damage, anything, and everything, that competes with the status quo. When something new arrives on the health scene, soon you'll see an article about it on delicensed MD Stephen Barrett's dubious website "quackwatch.com." And Barrett, and his sleazy quackpot friends, are more than willing to testify against that new thing, claiming to be experts at something that, a few days before, they'd never even heard of. For a price.

They made the mistake of trying that crap on Bob Jones. They used their usual sleazy "bad-mouthing," bringing in two of their lower-level "testifying whores," Dodes and Schissell, from the ludicrous "dentalwatch.com" infamy. Dodes and Schissell wrote a so-called "scientific paper," which NO peer reviewed JOURNAL would publish, but Barrett put on his website, parading it as though it had merit.

Everything would have been fine, because, in the industry, for the most part, Barrett, and his cronies have the acceptance of dog doo-doo on your shoe. Aetna Insurance, for reasons not yet revealed, however, chose to accept quackbuster crap as credible - and chose to republish their statements, with statements of their own, added.

So Bob Jones said "Oh yeah?" And down he went, into central Denver, and plopped himself down in front of nationally famous civil rights attorney Walter Gerash, and said "Walter, I need your help on something..."

And the war began...

Aetna's counter-attack...
Aetna had to have been literally stunned at Cavitat's legal assault. For, Cavitat had laid out the situation, in legal, documents, flawlessly. To me, there was no "out" for Aetna, They'd done exactly what Cavitat said. So, what would their response be?
Well, they did what every multi-billion dollar corporation does when sued by a "little guy."

They went out of their way to make the case too expensive for Cavitat to litigate. Here's what they did:
(1) First, they assigned the case to five separate BIG law firms, all of which began to file massive amounts of legal paperwork designed to deluge Cavitat's attorneys with work, distracting them from pursuing their own case against Aetna.
(2) They subpoenaed every item they could think of, including Cavitat's trade secrets, their bank accounts, personal and corporate - and even though the court ordered those documents to be "confidential," they turned all of that information over to sleazy Stephen Barrett, who put all of it on his dubious website "quackwatch.com."
(3) Then they went to every State licensing board and filed formal charges against ALL of Cavitat's backers, and expert witnesses, pressuring those witnesses to "not testify." This action, of course, was designed to cost those Cavitat "expert witnesses" a fortune in personal legal fees, and exert stress in their lives. The so-called "expert witness" Aetna used against all of these people was Robert S. Baratz MD, DDS, PhD - the current president of the legally defunct National Council Against Health Fraud (NCAHF). Baratz was named as a co-conspirator in Cavitat's original lawsuit.
(4) Then Aetna filed their counter-claim (a counter-lawsuit) stating that Cavitat, all of its users, all of its expert witnesses, etc, in essence, were engaged in a conspiracy to defraud Aetna insurance, blah, blah, blah... Their claim, although poorly written and hard to understand because of its almost "ranting" quality, seems to be saying that NICO (Neuralgia Induced Cavitational Osteonecrosis) doesn't actually exist - and (insert laughter here) is a "fake diagnosis designed to defraud Aetna insurance, blah, blah, blah.."
In that complaint they listed some of the who's who of American Dentistry, and science, as "conspirators" against them - top people from the University system, including the Universities of Texas, Kentucky, Ohio, Arizona, etc. The complaint went on and on - even naming one of the top authors of Dental textbooks in the US as a "conspirator.."
(5) Using the "fake" counter-suit described above, Aetna used its billions of dollars, its hundreds of attorneys, and its connections with State and Federal authorities to begin to harass, en-masse, with subpoenas, demands for depositions and personal information, anyone, and everyone connected to Cavitat. Of course, Aetna bragged in court that it had listed all of these victims on the so-called "independent computer 'health fraud' list."
(a) They even began to harass me, Tim Bolen, claiming that I was somehow a "conspirator" against them. They gave me fifteen (15) paragraphs (insert belly-laugh here) in the writing of their cross-complaint. Using that, they sent thugs to my daughter's apartment building, physically threatened my neighbors, and I've just found out - "subpoenaed my telephone bills" without me knowing it. So, if I've called you on the phone within the last seven years, and your cat has disappeared recently, your dog has been poisoned, there is a bad smell in your yard, or there is someone who looks suspiciously like a vampire peering in your windows - call Aetna's Customer Service line, and complain.
(6) Bob Jones, Cavitat's founder and CEO, believes that Aetna has been illegally wiretapping his telephone. I tend to agree with him - they are, and here's why I think so. Bob and I, in a telephone conversation we knew, for certain, couldn't be wiretapped by Aetna, set a trap for Aetna - and they walked right into it. We "invented" information, a non-existent bank account, supposedly in the "Bank of Laredo." Bob Jones then briefly discussed, with his own attorney, that account in the "Bank of Laredo" as though it actually existed. Only a few weeks later, Aetna sent a new set of "interrogatories" in which was a demand for "all information about the accounts in the Bank of Laredo..."
(6) Aetna then took their "fake" cross-complaint story to the media. First they put the whole thing on Stephen Barrett's goofy "quackwatch.com" website. It's still there today - with Barrett's arrogant commentary. Then they went to Business Week magazine, where they are a MAJOR advertiser, and got a story written making them out to be some kind of hero combating health fraud - especially combating "that evil Bob Jones, Cavitat, blah, blah, blah."
But then the Federal Judge stepped in...

10th District Federal Court Judge Marcia Krieger just didn't see the amusement in Aetna's tactics, I guess. She took the opportunity to take a close look at Aetna's cross-complaint - and decided, last Friday, January 27th, 2006, to put an end to Aetna's overbearing ploy. You can read the Judge's decision by clicking here.

I read a lot of Court documents. So, let me read between the lines, and tell you my interpretation of what the Judge really said in her decision: She said:
(1) I don't appreciate principals in a case filing "fake" complaints. I expect, in my court, to have documentation that substantiates claims, attached to court cases.
(2) I do not approve of "fake" complaints being filed in my Court, obviously using my Court as a tool to defame someone under the guise of a legal action.

One last thing...
The American public has become wise to the health insurance industry's sleazy tactics. A good many health professionals have signs on their office doors clearly stating "We DO NOT take insurance..."

But the State of California is going ten steps farther. Senate Bill 840, having already passed the State Senate, is heading for a vote in the House - where it is expected to pass. SB 840 will eliminate health insurance, within California, completely, settling on a State run single payer system. The law will make it illegal for Aetna, or any other so-called "health insurance company" to do business with California's thirty four (34) million inhabitants.

The American health care system is rated by the World Health Organization (WHO) as seventy-second (72) in quality, worldwide. Many third-world counties rate higher. That same system, the most expensive in the world, is rated as the "Number one killer of Americans."
Recently, I began seriously investigating the health insurance industry's role in the American health care system. I've found that they, far worse than the pharmaceutical industry (which is bad enough) are responsible for the decline in American health care. Initial reports, not yet backed up by government data, show me that out of every dollar spent on health insurance premiums, only nine (9) percent of that premium goes to paying claims.

You can't run a health care system on nine (9) percent. Nor can we have a situation where an aging "quackpot" Stephen Barrett, a man formally discredited in the American Court System as "biased, and unworthy of credibility," working out of his basement in Allentown, Pennsylvania, and his equally ludicrous cronies, can decide what health care is going to be available to Americans, and what is not going to be available.

Understand, the Judge only dismissed Aetna's counter-claim against Cavitat - Cavitat's case against Aetna is going to trial in a few months - with guns blazing, so to speak.

Stay tuned...
Tim Bolen - Health Freedom Advocate

Source:
http://www.bolenreport.net/feature_articles/feature_article023.htm

The Lowdown on Sweet?

The New York Times
By Melanie Warner
February 12, 2006

WHEN Dr. Morando Soffritti, a cancer researcher in Bologna, Italy, saw the results of his team's seven-year study on aspartame, he knew he was about to be injected into a bitter controversy over this sweetener, one of the most contentiously debated substances ever added to foods and beverages.

Aspartame is sold under the brand names Nutra-Sweet and Equal and is found in such popular products as Diet Coke, Diet Pepsi, Diet Snapple and Sugar Free Kool-Aid. Hundreds of millions of people consume it worldwide. And Dr. Soffritti's study concluded that aspartame may cause the dreaded "c" word: cancer.

The research found that the sweetener was associated with unusually high rates of lymphomas, leukemias and other cancers in rats that had been given doses of it starting at what would be equivalent to four to five 20-ounce bottles of diet soda a day for a 150-pound person. The study, which involved 1,900 laboratory rats and cost $1 million, was conducted at the European Ramazzini Foundation of Oncology and Environmental Sciences, a nonprofit organization that studies cancer-causing substances; Dr. Soffritti is its scientific director.

The findings, first released last July, prompted a flurry of criticism from the Calorie Control Council, a trade group for makers of artificial sweeteners that has spent the last 25 years trying to quell fears about aspartame. It said Dr. Soffritti's study flew in the face of four earlier cancer studies that aspartame's creator, G. D. Searle & Company, had underwritten and used to persuade the Food and Drug Administration to approve it for human consumption. "Aspartame has been safely consumed for more than a quarter of a century and is one of the most thoroughly studied food additives," read one news release from the council.

At the same time, Dr. Soffritti's findings have energized a vociferous group of researchers, health advocates and others who say they are convinced that aspartame is a toxin associated with a variety of health troubles, including headaches, dizziness, blindness and seizures.

DR. SOFFRITTI, who oversees 180 scientists and researchers in 30 countries who collaborate on toxin research, says that since last July, he has been contacted by some of these critics, including a member of Parliament in Britain and a number of conspiracy theorists, some of whom say they have suffered from "aspartame poisoning" and filled Web pages with cloak-and-dagger speculation about why the F.D.A. approved aspartame for sale a quarter-century ago.

No regulatory agency has yet acted on Dr. Soffritti's findings, although Roger Williams, a member of Parliament, called for a ban on aspartame in Britain last December. Last month, the European Food Safety Authority, an advisory body for the European Commission, began to review 900 pages of data from Dr. Soffritti; the goal is to finish by May. A commission spokesman, Philip Tod, said it was too early to know what the next steps would be if the scientists reviewing the data concurred with Dr. Soffritti's findings.

In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration says it has also taken note of the study, which is available online (http://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/docs/2005/8711/abstract.html) and is scheduled to be published next month in a medical journal financed by the National Institutes of Health. F.D.A. officials say that they, too, intend to conduct a thorough review.

But both the F.D.A. and the European Commission have cautioned that there is no need for people to avoid aspartame. "We don't see any concerns at this stage," said George H. Pauli, associate director for science policy in the F.D.A.'s Office of Food Additive Safety. "We've gone through a humongous amount of data on aspartame over the years."

Putting restrictions on aspartame would come at a significant cost. Food companies and consumers around the world bought about $570 million worth of it last year. New regulatory action on aspartame would also jeopardize the billions of dollars worth of products sold with it. Already, in the United States, many companies are opting to use sucralose, or Splenda, in their new low-calorie products, in part because it is less controversial.

Lance Collins, chief executive of Fuze Beverage in Englewood Cliffs, N.J., said that safety concerns about aspartame were a "major contributing factor" in his decision to use sucralose in his tea and juice drinks. Sucralose, however, is made by under a patent by just one company, Tate & Lyle of London, and is in desperately short supply.

Dr. Soffritti, who has spent 28 years doing research on potential carcinogens, said he was trying to steer clear of the growing political maelstrom. But he added that he was concerned about the large numbers of people who use aspartame, particularly children and pregnant women. "If something is a carcinogen in animals," he said, "then it should not be added to food, especially if there are so many people that are going to be consuming it."

Lyn Nabors, executive vice president of the Calorie Control Council, said Dr. Soffritti's study was not valid because the rats used in it had been allowed to live longer than the two-year standard established by the United States government's National Toxicology Program. "It's difficult to determine if the cancers you find are due to something else," Ms. Nabors said. "Just as in humans, the rat's body slows down later in life, and the aging process causes all kinds of things."

But John R. Bucher, deputy director of environmental toxicology at the National Toxicology Program, the government's agency for research on toxic chemicals, called the design of the Ramazzini study "impressive" and "thorough," and said that he did not think the fact that rats were allowed to live until their natural deaths had skewed the results.

Dr. Jose Russo, director of the breast cancer and environmental research center at the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia, says that lifetime studies are "ideal" but that they are not done often, partly because they are more expensive than limited-time tests. Dr. Russo, however, criticized the Ramazzini study for not allowing outside pathologists to analyze all of the tissue samples where cancerous tumors were found. "People need to see every tumor," he said.

Dr. Bucher of the National Toxicology Program said pathologists at the program, with which Ramazzini collaborates, looked at 70 tumor slides. But with the study producing over 9,000 tumor-containing slides, James Swenberg, professor of environmental science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, says that this falls short of standard practice.

While Dr. Soffritti's methods have drawn some criticism, the Ramazzini cancer lab, which is financed by private bank foundations, governments and 17,000 individual members, has earned considerable credibility since it was founded in 1971 for its pioneering research on chemicals. It was the first research body to do studies showing that vinyl chloride and the gasoline additive methyl tertiary-butyl ether, or M.T.B.E., are carcinogenic, research that eventually encouraged the United States to strictly regulate vinyl chloride and that led 21 states to ban M.T.B.E.

Dr. Soffritti said he was inspired to look at aspartame because of what he calls "inadequacies" in the cancer studies done by Searle in the 1970's. He said that those studies did not involve large-enough numbers of rats and did not allow them to live long enough to develop cancer.

The Ramazzini study was conducted with 1,900 rats, as opposed to the 280 to 688 rodents used in Searle's studies, and the rats lived for up to three years instead of being sacrificed after two, which is the human equivalent of age 53. "Cancer is a disease of the third part of life," Dr. Soffritti said. "You have 75 percent of cancer diagnoses for people who are 55 years old or older. So if you truncate the experiments at 110 weeks and the rats are supposed to survive until 150 to 160 weeks, it means you avoid the development of cancer at the time when cancer would be starting to arise."

Others have also challenged Searle's studies.

Documents from the F.D.A. and records from the Federal Register indicate that, in the years before the F.D.A. approved aspartame, the agency had serious concerns about the accuracy and credibility of Searle's aspartame studies. From 1977 to 1985 — during much of the approval process — Searle was headed by Donald H. Rumsfeld, who is now the secretary of defense; Searle was acquired by Monsanto in 1985. Monsanto later spun Searle's assets out into two companies: Merisant, which owns the brands Equal and Canderel, and NutraSweet, which is owned by J. W. Childs Equity Partners, an investment firm in Boston.

A 1976 report from an F.D.A. task force, for example, found that Searle's studies on aspartame and several of the company's pharmaceutical drugs were "poorly conceived, carelessly executed, or inaccurately analyzed or reported." It cited what it called a lack of training by the scientists analyzing tissue samples, a "substantial" loss of information because of tissue decomposition and inadequate monitoring of feeding doses.

In response to the report, the F.D.A. asked the Justice Department to open a grand jury investigation into whether two of Searle's aspartame studies had been falsified or were incomplete. In a 33-page letter in 1977, Richard A. Merrill, the F.D.A.'s chief counsel at the time, recommended to Samuel K. Skinner, then the United States attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, that a grand jury investigate the company, which was based in the Chicago suburb of Skokie, for "concealing material facts and making false statements in reports of animal studies conducted to establish the safety of the drug Aldactone and the food additive aspartame."

A grand jury was never convened, however. Shortly after the letter was sent, Mr. Skinner left the Justice Department to join Sidley & Austin, a law firm that represented Searle. After 12 years at that firm, now Sidley, Austin, Brown & Wood, Mr. Skinner was appointed to be President George H. W. Bush's transportation secretary; later he became his chief of staff. In 1978, a year and half after Mr. Skinner left the United States attorney's office in Chicago, his deputy, William F. Conlon, also left to work at Sidley & Austin.

Mr. Skinner, now a lawyer at Greenberg Traurig LLP, said that as soon as he began looking for a new job and interviewing with Sidley & Austin, he recused himself from the Searle investigation. Mr. Conlon, who is still at Sidley & Austin, did not return phone calls.

Over the next few years, Searle's petition for aspartame approval led to much disagreement within the F.D.A. The commissioner at the time, Alexander M. Schmidt, convened a three-member public board of inquiry, which concluded that one of Searle's studies on rats showed an increase in brain tumors from aspartame. The board members — all of them scientists at universities — voted to withhold approval of aspartame until more studies were done.

But yet another F.D.A. review, this one of Searle's tumor tissue slides — paid for by Searle and conducted by an academic group that is now defunct — concluded that Searle's studies had demonstrated that aspartame was safe. In 1981, a new F.D.A. commissioner, Arthur Hull Hayes, concurred with this assessment and granted approval to aspartame shortly after President Ronald Reagan appointed him to run the agency.

And in a move that fueled the conspiracy theories, Mr. Hayes left the F.D.A. a little more than a year after approving aspartame and took a job as a consultant to Burson-Marsteller, which at the time was Searle's public relations agency. Mr. Hayes did not return calls seeking comment.

Ms. Nabors of the Calorie Control Council said that suggestions or innuendoes that Searle was trying to influence government officials with lucrative job offers were baseless. Artificial sweeteners are unfairly targeted for suspicion, she said, citing the government's decision to ban the sweetener cyclamate in 1969 after studies showed that it caused cancer in animals. "Cyclamate was banned, saccharin was required to have a warning label for a while, and there's all these conspiracy theories on aspartame," she said.

She added that there were more than 100 published scientific studies showing no adverse effects from aspartame, and said that in 2002, the European Commission reviewed many of these studies and reaffirmed the sweetener's safety. The bulk of the studies investigated neurological effects; none were animal cancer studies, which are lengthy and expensive.

In any case, critics say that most of these studies were financed either directly or indirectly by manufacturers of aspartame, and that the results of aspartame studies tend to depend on who paid for them.

In an analysis of 166 articles published in medical journals from 1980 to 1985, Dr. Ralph G. Walton, a professor of psychiatry at Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine found that all 74 studies that were financed by the industry attested to sweetener's safety.

Of the 92 independently funded articles, 84 identified adverse health effects.

"Whenever you have studies that were not funded by the industry, some sort of problem is identified," said Dr. Walton, adding that he has not looked at studies performed since 1985. "It's far too much for it to be a coincidence."

Dr. Walton, who, like some other psychiatrists, has studied aspartame from a neurological perspective, said he had also seen problems from the sweetener firsthand.

At Safe Harbor Behavioral Health, a mental health facility in Erie, Pa., where he is clinical director, Dr. Walton said he had observed that for many people with mood disorders, such as depression or bipolar disorder, aspartame exacerbates the condition. "For people with panic disorders, for instance, we've seen that when we eliminate aspartame, it's much easier to control their illness," he said. "The number of panic attacks goes down."

Dr. Walton and others say that this is probably attributable to aspartame's phenyalanine component. (Aspartame is made up of two amino acids, phenyalanine and aspartic acid.) He said that an excess of phenyalanine could upset the body's balance of neurotransmitters, causing a range of neurological symptoms.

Defenders of aspartame often point out that phenyalanine is naturally present in many protein-intensive foods. But Dr. William M. Pardridge, a professor of endocrinology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, says that when it comes from food, phenyalanine is absorbed into the brain more slowly.

"If your blood phenyalanine level was increased five times, in my view there would be a safety concern," Dr. Pardridge said. "The question is whether aspartame use could ever increase levels that much, and the answer is yes. We've known that for 20 years."

Dr. Soffritti said he had not studied the effects of phenyalanine. He theorized that the tumors in his study were related to the methanol, or wood alcohol, that is produced as the body metabolizes aspartame. When the body breaks down methanol, the result is formaldehyde, a known carcinogen. "I know that when I treat animals with methanol, you end up with lymphomas and leukemias," he said.

BUT Dr. Kenneth E. McMartin, a methanol expert and professor of pharmacology, toxicology and neuroscience at the Louisiana State University Medical Center, said he believed that it was unlikely that someone could consume enough aspartame to let harmful levels of formaldehyde build up in the body.

Dr. Soffritti said he thought that more research and open debate were needed on whether aspartame was a carcinogen. "It is very important to have scientists who are independent and not funded by industry looking at this," he said.

Michael F. Jacobson, executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a nutrition advocacy group, said he did not think that Dr. Soffritti's study could be considered definitive, but that it should prompt an "urgent re-examination.

"For a chemical that is used by hundreds of millions of people around the world, it should be absolutely safe," Mr. Jacobson said. "There shouldn't be a cloud of doubt."

Dr. Soffritti's journal article on his findings is at nytimes.com/business.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/12/business/yourmoney/12sweet.html
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Links to more Aspartame & Phenylalanine Information

http://www.womentowomen.com/nutritionandweightloss/splenda.asp?id=1&campaignno=artificialsweeteners&adgroup=splenda&keywords=splenda
http://www.mercola.com/article/aspartame/fda_safety_study.htm
http://www.mercola.com/article/aspartame/not_natural.htm
http://www.sweetpoison.com/
http://www.aspartame.ca/indexa.htmlhttp://www.greenfacts.org/aspartame/aspartame.htm

Googling Aspartame Safety
http://www.google.com/search?q=Aspartame%20Safety&sourceid=groowe&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8
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McDonald's Says Its French Fries
Contain 'Wheat, Milk Ingredients'

By DAVID P. HAMILTON
February 10, 2006

McDonald's Corp. said for the first time that its french fries contain "wheat and milk ingredients" that might cause problems for diners sensitive to these substances. McDonald's had previously described its fries as free of substances that can cause allergic or other medical reactions in sensitive people.

The Oak Brook, Ill., fast-food giant said the change in its ingredient disclosures followed its decision to conform to new federal food-labeling rules, and does not reflect any change in the ingredients of its fries or the way they are prepared.

Some people with food-sensitivity conditions found the change alarming, largely because they had previously considered McDonald's fries safe based on information supplied by the company. For instance, some individuals with celiac disease -- an autoimmune condition triggered by gluten, a protein found in wheat, rye and barley -- worried in an online forum whether the McDonald's fries had always contained gluten, despite the company's assertions to the contrary.

Cathy Kapica, McDonald's director of global nutrition, said the company's fries include a "natural flavoring" made, in part, from extracts of wheat and dairy products.

Ms. Kapica said those extracts are processed in ways designed to remove wheat and dairy proteins, which are the substances generally responsible for triggering allergies or food-sensitivity problems.

Until earlier this week, McDonald's described the natural flavoring as safe for people with food allergies and other dietary sensitivities. On its Web site, McDonald's listed the fries on a page of menu items "for people with gluten sensitivity."

On an "allergies and sensitivities" page, the fries were described as free of gluten and milk or wheat "allergens." More recently, however, McDonald's voluntarily decided to bring its nutritional information into voluntary compliance with new Food and Drug Administration food-labeling rules that took effect on Jan. 1. Those regulations, which apply to packaged foods but not to restaurant meals, require labels to note the presence of common allergens such as milk, eggs, wheat, fish or peanuts.

Under McDonald's interpretation of the FDA rules, Ms. Kapica said, the company decided to note the presence of the wheat and dairy ingredients used to flavor its fries.

"If someone is really sensitive, they need to be aware that this product was at one point derived from wheat and dairy," Ms. Kapica said. On the other hand, anyone who has eaten the fries without incident "can continue to do so," Ms. Kapica said.

"The whole reason the FDA changed the regulations was to err on the side of caution."

Write to David P. Hamilton at david.hamilton@wsj.com

Source:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB113961770739171339.html?mod=health_home_stories

Assisted Living: 10 Great Ideas

Homemade wine, calligraphy, your own RV—you can have it your way.

AARP
By Barbara Basler

February 2006


Ray Croft zips around the gardens on the grounds of Oatfield Estates in his motorized wheelchair carrying a large watering can.

Before he came to Oatfield, an assisted living community of frame houses in the suburbs of Portland, Ore., he had never tried his hand at gardening. But now Croft, 77, raises prizewinning black-eyed Susans and takes a proprietary interest in the colorful organic flower and vegetable gardens surrounding his new home.

"My daughter found this place for me," he says, speaking in short bursts like the puffs of smoke coming from his pipe. "I had been in three other places—one horrible, the other bad and the third crummy. This is like heaven."

It's not just the beguiling gardens and breathtaking mountain views that delight residents like Croft. It's the ethos of Oatfield—a place where residents have a say in their own lives, from what's for dinner to where to go on an outing.

While assisted living residences are one of the most popular options for older people who can no longer live on their own, few think of these facilities as places that foster independence or rejuvenation or hope. But homes like Oatfield Estates are redefining assisted living care. "They listen to you here," says Croft. "They respect you."

There is no standard definition of assisted living care from state to state. But unlike nursing homes, these residences tend to be "more like home and less like an institution, and that's what people want, even people who need extensive medical care," says Karen Love of the Consumer Consortium on Assisted Living, a national consumer group.

Bill Thomas, M.D., a Harvard-educated gerontologist, has spearheaded the movement known as the Eden Alternative, which seeks to enrich and enliven cold, hospital-like long-term care residences. Today, he says, "the large-scale, institutional care facility is crumbling, and we now have the possibility of real transformation."

That transformation is already apparent in some exceptional facilities that offer residents more autonomy and more choices.

Whether in Kansas or California, these are residences brimming with life—young children, dogs, cats, birds, plants—and with opportunities. From a Pennsylvania home where residents with Alzheimer's and their caregivers can walk to a day care center and play horseshoes with the children, to one in Virginia where residents make award-winning wine—these places are catering to the men and women who live there.

The facilities can run the gamut from a room in a family-run home with three residents to a high-rise building with 100 residents. Services can be simple and basic, or they can be upscale and sophisticated, with skilled nursing and even hospice care.

About 1 million Americans live in assisted living residences now, and at least half of them have some form of dementia. In Florida and California more people live in these facilities than in nursing homes. Indeed, assisted living residences are becoming the new nursing homes, and the demand for these facilities is expected to increase.

Burgeoning assisted living care—regulated only by a patchwork of laws that vary from state to state—is uneven: Some places accept people they cannot adequately care for, others are neglectful, even dangerously negligent. Residents have suffered, even died, in some facilities.

But growth has also spurred refreshing innovations that have given rise to some special, creative homes. It's important for the public to know about these kinds of places, Thomas says. "People hear so much about the worst, their expectations are low. They don't tend to demand high standards and excellent care—and they should."

Here then are 10 of the most innovative assisted living homes where residents are well cared for and respected—treated as adults with the right to make choices, take risks and grow—even in the winter of their lives:


Making Vintage Wines

In September, when the sun is warm and the sky clear, residents of Marian Manor spend a day in a nearby vineyard, picking big muscadine grapes for the wine they make. Leaning on canes and walkers, they move slowly down the smooth dirt paths between the rows of leafy vines, carefully plucking only the best grapes.

"Before, I was just one to knit and crochet," says Mary Piedmont, 89, one of the winemakers. "Life is full of surprises."

Marian Manor, a nondescript three-story brick building on the grounds of St. Gregory the Great Catholic Church in Virginia Beach, Va., looks like hundreds of other elder care facilities. But this 15-year-old residence has a staff and volunteers who work with the 132 residents to create activities that make Marian Manor a standout—from its seasonal winemaking to its chef program that encourages residents to plan and oversee dinner for the entire facility using their favorite recipes.

The people who live here go crabbing on the Chesapeake Bay and take the Marian Manor van to Delaware for a day of gambling. They enjoy an annual formal dance and monthly wine and cheese socials.

Six years ago some residents decided winemaking might be interesting, so administrator Desiree Mitchell scoured the library for information and tracked down an amateur vintner who volunteered to help. Residents have been making small batches of wine ever since—picking the grapes, pressing them by hand, bottling, corking and designing labels for each vintage. While about 45 residents sign up for winemaking each year, others join in to taste the wine as it ages in two five-gallon jugs, sipping from tiny plastic pill cups.

Their Golden Glow and Sunset Sizzle have won medals in international amateur wine competitions.

Now, each New Year's Eve when they uncork their latest vintage, residents toast the future and dream of a new triumph.

Owner: Catholic Diocese of Richmond, Va., nonprofit
Cost: From $2,435 a month for a private room to $4,230 for intensive care.


Haiku, Sumo and Sushi

When they step through the doors of the sleek glass-and-stone building, the 56 residents of Seattle's Nikkei Manor enter a special world evocative of Japan: the poignant music of the koto, the pale light of rice paper lanterns. Here residents are cared for by people who speak their language, who know their culture.

Today, more assisted living facilities are specialized residences for people who want to spend their old age with others who share their customs, whether they are Japanese, Chinese or Native Americans.

The first- and second-generation Japanese at Nikkei Manor dine on a mix of Japanese and Western dishes, take classes in haiku (poetry) and ikebana (flower arranging) and watch sumo wrestling beamed from Japan on satellite TV.

Most, though not all, of the residents are of Japanese descent, and most of the staff is bilingual, as are the activities and the Buddhist and Christian religious services.

A number of residents have some form of dementia, and "people with dementia often revert to their primary language," says Bill Colter, Nikkei Manor's manager. "That's a problem for their children who don't speak Japanese. And we can help with that."

Colter says the families and the Japanese community strongly support Nikkei Manor, which has a constant stream of volunteers and visitors.

Owner: Nikkei Concerns, nonprofit
Cost: From $3,240 to $3,760 a month inclusive. Residents who need extensive nursing care must transfer or hire private aides.


Never Too Old to Take Risks

At Meadowlark Hills men and women are allowed to make their own choices, even when the choices are risky. Here, if a diabetic wants to eat a big bowl of ice cream, he can.

"We would advise the resident of the risks," says Willie Novotny, administrator of the Manhattan, Kan., residence, "but if he still wanted the ice cream, he could have it."

If the diabetic continued to eat sweets, "we would discuss his behavior with him and his family and then ask them to sign a risk management agreement," Novotny says. "If the resident understands the risk and doesn't jeopardize others, we won't stand in his way."

Joyce M. Aikin, 73, came temporarily to Meadowlark Hills when she suffered compression fractures in her back. She liked it so much she decided to stay permanently. "There are all kinds of choices here," she says, "and everyone does everything they can to make you comfortable."

The community, which began with a nursing home founded by six local churches, added assisted living apartments for 40 people five years ago. The apartments are clustered into households, and the staff handles the arrangements, but the residents plan the menus and activities.

Residents can also add their favorite snacks to the weekly grocery list. And if someone suddenly craves a food that's not in the "house" or on the menu, staff members can go to the grocery and buy it. "We provide services for our residents on their terms, because this is their home," Novotny says.

Owner: Meadowlark Hills Foundation, nonprofit
Cost: Average charge for an apartment with basic care is $3,500 a month. Residents who need extensive care must pay for private nursing.


Freedom to Roam

Dementia experts from around the world have visited tiny Woodside Place, a gray-shingled building in Oakmont, Pa., that looks like a series of pitched-roofed cottages nestled at the edge of a wood.

Designed to accommodate 36 Alzheimer's residents, Woodside has been a model for dementia care since it opened in 1991. From its cozy bedrooms and short hallways to the looped garden paths that lead back to the building and never dead-end, never frustrate, Woodside is a comfortable community with plenty of space to wander. Its grounds are secure but the fencing is unobtrusive, blending in with the greenery.

Residents dress as they please, rearrange the furniture on a whim and even curl up for naps in the community room. That is all fine with the staff, which provides care, activities and even food 24 hours a day.

Residents garden, fold laundry, help with meals. They go on outings, often to the staff day care center for activities with the children.

"The focus is always on the individual," says Susan Collins, vice president of assisted living at Woodside Place of Presbyterian SeniorCare. A university study found that Woodside residents, whose average age is 85, are much more social and continue to feed, bathe and dress themselves much longer than Alzheimer's residents in a nursing home.

"We provide an environment that promotes independence," Collins continued, "and we adapt to our residents. We don't make them adapt to us."

Owner: Presbyterian SeniorCare, nonprofit
Cost: $4,860 inclusive. "Benevolent beds" are available for residents who have exhausted their savings. Residents must transfer to a nursing home when they are no longer ambulatory.


Pets, Putting and Art

The Silverado Senior Living Center is home to 90 Alzheimer's residents who can grow flowers in the garden, play with one of the 11 dogs or four cats that sun themselves on the grounds or practice their putting on a golf green with a hole twice the normal size.

Because the facility in Escondido, Calif., accepts even those deemed "problems" by other homes, half the residents are men. The home works with doctors from the University of San Diego, and 69 percent of residents who come here on psychotropic drugs are soon able to function without them.

Staff members know how to "redirect" the aggression of Alzheimer's patients, steering them to gizmos on the wall with lights, bells and other whirligigs that distract and calm.

Residents, who are given a great deal of freedom, take part in daily routines like feeding the pets. They can attend exercise, music and art classes. Men have their own activities—gathering to watch baseball games on TV and enjoy a few beers or hanging out in a room decorated like an old garage where they can sand or paint woodworking projects. The enclosed grounds have extensive paths that meander past rabbit hutches and a playground for staff children.

Bath time—often a problem with dementia patients—is a soothing spa experience with Jacuzzi tubs and music.

"There is a lot of life here; it doesn't stop because of the disease," says Stephen Winner, a co-founder of Silverado. The center has around-the-clock licensed nursing and even hospice care, so 98 percent of its residents never go to a nursing home.

Owner: Silverado Senior Living
Cost: $4,500 a month inclusive.

The Price Is Right


Fay Wright, a lively 82-year-old who still takes bus trips around town just to see what's going on, says she'd be in a nursing home now if it weren't for the Gardens at Osage Terrace in Bentonville, Ark.

After years of working in a water meter factory, Wright could not afford assisted living, and even though her income and health qualified her for Medicaid to pay for a nursing home, she didn't want or need that kind of care.

Instead, she moved into the Gardens, where she and the 54 other residents can have pets, decorate their own rooms and receive nursing care—all for less than the cost of a nursing home bed. "I have my own little apartment and all kinds of help," Wright says. "It's great."

The three-year-old facility—an attractive Craftsman-style home with a welcoming front porch—is one of the affordable assisted living residences developed under the Coming Home Program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and NCB Development Corp., a national nonprofit that assists low-income communities.

Coming Home, working with nine states, has helped establish 30 affordable assisted living homes, with 59 more in development. The idea is that other nonprofits will learn from these homes and build more like them.

All the residents—teachers, secretaries, factory workers—have low incomes. "They pay in their Social Security, pension or savings," says Arletta Wallace, the Gardens administrator.

Owner: Community Development Corp. of Bentonville, nonprofit
Cost: The state Medicaid program pays for health and care services. Residents pay room and board.


Students Young and Old

The weekly current events class at University Living in Ann Arbor, Mich., crackles with passion and conviction. Bush? Social Security? Iraq? "We bring our newspaper clippings and go at it," says Richard C. Adelman, the former head of the Institute of Gerontology at the University of Michigan, whose job now is to organize classes and discussion groups for this assisted living residence.

Current events is one of two classes offered each year at University Living, a four-year-old facility where aging men and women can continue to learn along with college students. The yearlong classes have included the ethnic history of the United States and the novels of John Updike.

While a growing number of retirement communities are affiliated with universities, this is one of the few independent assisted living centers that have established ties with one. Each year university students are paired with residents for research projects, and they take classes with them at the facility.

While the 75 apartments in the two-story building are bright and comfortable, it's the programs residents love.

"The main attraction for me was the fitness program and the classes and discussion groups," says 92-year-old Irene Skurski, a former legal secretary and Realtor. She helped organize Students and Seniors, the group that arranges faculty lectures on everything from Medicare to the music of Louis Armstrong.

Skurski has worked with several students in her three years here, including one who took an oral history of her life. "We get to know them, go to lunch with them, enjoy knowing them," she says. "It's good for both of us."

Owner: University Living LLC
Cost: $3,050 to $5,400 a month. Hospice care is offered.


Care in an RV Park

Deep in east Texas, on a campground near a piney woods 65 miles north of Houston, stands perhaps the most unusual long-term care facility in the country.

At Rainbow's End in Livingston, residents live in their own RVs—recreational vehicles—and receive virtually all the care offered by assisted living for $800 a month in a program called CARE (Continuing Assistance for Retired Escapees). The national Escapees RV Club set up the service several years ago for members (dues are $60 a year) who need good care at a good price.

Because residents remain in their own homes, CARE is legally not assisted living and doesn't claim to be. But once a member parks his RV on one of the lots around the steel-framed CARE building and pays his monthly fee, he can get all his meals, housecleaning, laundry, transportation, activities and nursing through CARE.

"Every morning they have to leave their RV or be helped out of it," explains Kay Peterson, the 79-year-old former nurse who founded the club, which now has 34,000 member families, and CARE. "They come a few steps to the center where we have our staff give them medications and bathe, groom, dress, even feed them. We also have nurses for health care."

During the day, CARE residents—some in wheelchairs, others active and ambulatory—can visit with RV travelers camped on the grounds, attend a tai chi exercise or a crafts class at the center or just sit back in one of its big recliners and watch TV. At night when they return to their RVs, there is always someone on call.

"I don't know what I would do without this place," says Kitty Haire, 81, who came here when she needed help caring for her husband. "I think everyone here feels that way."

Owner: Escapees CARE Inc., nonprofit
Cost: $800 a month inclusive.


Absolutely Cutting-Edge

There are thousands of long-term care facilities, but Menorah Park Center for Senior Living is one of only 11 in the nation with its own research institute. Care here is not just compassionate, it's absolutely cutting-edge.

Doctors and psychologists at its Myers Research Institute have pioneered new Alzheimer's therapies and other geriatric care breakthroughs. They work with residents with dementia who live in Stone Gardens, a building with 116 assisted living apartments that are part of a larger complex that includes independent and nursing home care.

Here, special books with large, bold type encourage dementia patients to read and take part in discussions, while activities—from a comedy club event to a welcome committee that greets all newcomers—give them rewarding social roles.

"If you give people a reason to get out of bed, activities that engage them and allow them to feel successful, they will be at the top of their game, whatever it is," says Cameron Camp, the psychologist who directs research at the facility.

Not all the residents have dementia, so activities are varied, including adult education classes, lectures and a state-of-the-art indoor swimming pool with a floor that rises to accommodate all kinds of water exercises and therapies.

Residents can volunteer to read or help feed the children at Menorah Park's day care center for the children of employees. Children's toys are tucked in the corners of every corridor for visiting grandchildren.

Owner: Menorah Park Center for Senior Living, nonprofit
Cost: From $3,600. If extensive care is needed, residents must hire aides or transfer to nursing care.


Wired and Welcoming

Oatfield Estates—10 attractive two-story houses with large living rooms, country kitchens and colorful gardens—is such a homey place it's easy to forget that it's known worldwide for its state-of-the-art computer network that tracks each resident's movements.

Oatfield, near Portland, Ore., was conceived as a place that would foster freedom. Its technology not only gives staff more information, it gives residents more independence while assuring their well-being.

The only real reminders of the complex system constantly at work here are the small, teardrop-shaped monitors residents wear on a chain or pin. Each monitor communicates with sensors throughout the residence that report to a central computer. The computer records where each resident goes, with whom and for how long, showing how active and social—or not—a resident has been.

If a resident approves, relatives can access all that data through a website, learning where Mom spends her days, whether she is losing weight or tossing and turning at night. Technology also strengthens staff care. It allows managers to track a personal assistant's response time to a resident's call for help.

Ray Croft, the gardener who raises black-eyed Susans, put a stop to one daughter's having access to his data because "she would just call me up and ask about this and that. It wore me out."

Chris Langford, 44, whose mother recently moved to Oatfield, says the technology "is wonderful. It gives the caregivers the chance to give care, to be interactive instead of taking vital signs all the time."

Owners: Elite Care
Cost: Average cost is $4,400 inclusive. Hospice care available.

Source:
http://www.aarp.org/bulletin/longterm/assisted_living_ten_ideas.html

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When Trust in Doctors Erodes, Other Treatments Fill the Void

New York Times

By BENEDICT CAREY
February 3, 2006


Deirdre J. O'Connor mixes tinctures at her naturopathic pharmacy in Mystic, Conn. Connecticut is one of 14 states that license naturopaths.

Ms. Solomon, 56, said she had no way to know whether the tablet, an herb-based remedy for jet lag, worked as advertised. Researchers have found no evidence that such preparations are effective, and Ms. Solomon knows that most doctors would scoff that she was wasting her money.

Yet she swears by the tablets, as well as other alternative remedies, for reasons she acknowledges are partly psychological.

"I guess I do believe in the power of simply paying attention to your health, which in a way is what I'm doing," said Ms. Solomon, who runs a Web consulting business in Los Angeles. "But I also believe there are simply a lot of unknowns when it comes to staying healthy, and if there's a possibility something will help I'm willing to try it."

Besides, she added, "whatever I'm doing is working, so I'm going to keep doing it."

The most telling evidence of Americans' dissatisfaction with traditional health care is the more than $27 billion they spend annually on alternative and complementary medicine, according to government estimates. In ways large and small, millions of people are taking active steps to venture outside the mainstream, whether by taking the herbal remedy echinacea for a cold or by placing their last hopes for cancer cure in alternative treatment, as did Coretta Scott King, who died this week at an alternative hospice clinic in Mexico.

They do not appear to care that there is little, if any, evidence that many of the therapies work. Nor do they seem to mind that alternative therapy practitioners have a fraction of the training mainstream doctors do or that vitamin and herb makers are as profit-driven as drug makers.

This straying from conventional medicine is often rooted in a sense of disappointment, even betrayal, many patients and experts say. When patients see conventional medicine's inadequacies up close — a misdiagnosis, an intolerable drug, failed surgery, even a dismissive doctor — many find the experience profoundly disillusioning, or at least eye-opening.

Haggles with insurance providers, conflicting findings from medical studies and news reports of drug makers' covering up product side effects all feed their disaffection, to the point where many people begin to question not only the health care system but also the science behind it. Soon, intuition and the personal experience of friends and family may seem as trustworthy as advice from a doctor in diagnosing an illness or judging a treatment.

Experts say that people with serious medical problems like diabetes or cancer are least likely to take their chances with natural medicine, unless their illness is terminal. Consumers generally know that quackery is widespread in alternative practices, that there is virtually no government oversight of so-called natural remedies and that some treatments, like enemas, can be dangerous.

Still, 48 percent of American adults used at least one alternative or complementary therapy in 2004, up from 42 percent a decade ago, a figure that includes students and retirees, soccer moms and truckers, New Age seekers and religious conservatives. The numbers continue to grow, experts say, for reasons that have as much to do with increasing distrust of mainstream medicine and the psychological appeal of nontraditional approaches as with the therapeutic properties of herbs or other supplements.

"I think there is a powerful element of nostalgia at work for many people, for home remedies — for what healing is supposed to be — combined with an idealized vision of what is natural and whole and good, " said Dr. Linda Barnes, a medical anthropologist at Boston University School of Medicine.

Dr. Barnes added, "People look around and feel that the conventional system does not measure up, and that something deeper about their well-being is not being addressed at all."

Healthy and Dabbling

Ms. Solomon's first small steps outside the mainstream came in 1991, after she watched her mother die of complications from a hysterectomy.

"I saw doctors struggling to save her," she said. "They were trying really hard, and I have great respect for what they do, but at that point I realized the doctors could only do so much."

She decided then that she needed to take more responsibility for her own health, by eating better, exercising more and seeking out health aids that she thought of as natural, meaning not prescribed by a doctor or developed by a pharmaceutical company.

"I usually stay away from drugs if I can, because the side effects even of cough and cold medicines can be pretty strong," she said.

The herbal preparations she uses, she said, "have no side effects, and the difference in my view is that they help support my own body's natural capability, to fight off disease" rather than treat symptoms.

If these sentiments are present in someone like Ms. Solomon, who regularly consults her internist and describes herself as "pretty mainstream," they run far deeper in millions of other people who use nontraditional therapies more often.

In interviews and surveys, these patients often described prescription drugs as poisons that mostly mask symptoms without improving their underlying cause.

Many extend their suspicions further. In a 2004 study, researchers at the University of Arizona conducted interviews with a group of men and women in Tucson who suffered from chronic arthritis, most of whom regularly used alternative therapies. Those who used alternative methods exclusively valued the treatments on the "rightness of fit" above other factors, and they were inherently skeptical of the health care system.

Distrust in the medical industrial complex, as some patients call it, stems in part from suspicions that insurers warp medical decision making, and in part from the belief that drug companies are out to sell as many drugs as possible, regardless of patients' needs, interviews show.

"I do partly blame the drug companies and the money they make" for the breakdown in trust in the medical system, said Joyce Newman, 74, of Lynnwood Wash., who sees a natural medicine specialist as her primary doctor. "The time when you would listen to your doctor and do whatever he said — that time is long gone, in my opinion. You have to learn to use your own head."

From here it is a small step to begin doubting medical science. If Western medicine is imperfect and sometimes corrupt, then mainstream doctors may not be the best judge of treatments after all, many patients conclude. People's actual experience — the personal testimony of friends and family, in particular — feels more truthful.

To best way to validate this, said Ms. Newman and many others who regularly use nontraditional therapies, is simply to try a remedy "and listen to your own body."

Opting Out

Cynthia Riley effectively opted out of mainstream medicine when it seemed that doctors were not listening to her.

During a nine-year period that ended in 2004, Ms. Riley, 47, visited almost 20 doctors, for a variety of intermittent and strange health complaints: blurred vision, urinary difficulties, balance problems so severe that at times she wobbled like a drunk.

She felt unwell most of the time, but doctors could not figure out what she had.

Each specialist ordered different tests, depending on the symptom, Ms. Riley said, but they were usually rushed and seemed to solicit her views only as a formality.

Undeterred, Ms. Riley, an event planner who lives near New London, Conn., typed out a four-page description of her ordeal, including her suspicion that she suffered from lead poisoning. One neurologist waved the report away as if insulted; another barely skimmed it, she said.

"I remember sitting in one doctor's office and realizing, 'He thinks I'm crazy,' " Ms. Riley said. "I was getting absolutely nowhere in conventional medicine, and I was determined to get to the root of my problems."

Through word of mouth, Ms. Riley heard about Deirdre O'Connor, a naturopath with a thriving practice in nearby Mystic, Conn., and made an appointment.

In recent years, people searching for something outside of conventional medicine have increasingly turned to naturopaths, herbal specialists who must complete a degree that includes some standard medical training in order to be licensed, experts say. Fourteen states, including California and Connecticut, now license naturopaths to practice medicine. Natural medicine groups are pushing for similar legislation in other states, including New York.

Licensed naturopaths can prescribe drugs from an approved list in some states, but have no prescribing rights in others.

Right away, Ms. Riley said, she noticed a difference in the level of service. Before even visiting the office, she received a fat envelope in the mail containing a four-page questionnaire, she said. In addition to asking detailed questions about medical history — standard information — it asked about energy level, foods she craved, sensitivity to weather and self-image: "Please list adjectives that describe you," read one item.

"It felt right, from the beginning," Ms. Riley said.

Her first visit lasted an hour and a half, and Ms. O'Connor, the naturopath, agreed that metal exposure was a possible cause of her symptoms. It emerged in their interview that Ms. Riley had worked in the steel industry, and tests of her hair and urine showed elevated levels of both lead and mercury, Ms. O'Connor said.

After taking a combination of herbs, vitamins and regular doses of a drug called dimercaptosuccinic acid, or DMSA, to treat lead poisoning, Ms. Riley said, she began to feel better, and the symptoms subsided.

Along the way, Ms. O'Connor explained the treatments to Ms. Riley, sometimes using drawings, and called her patient regularly to check in, especially during the first few months, Ms. Riley said.

Other doctors said they could not comment on Ms. Riley's case because they had not examined her. Researchers who specialize in lead poisoning say that it is rare in adults but that it can cause neurological symptoms and bladder problems and is often missed by primary care doctors.

Dr. Herbert Needleman, a psychiatrist who directs the lead research group at the University of Pittsburgh, said DMSA was the pharmaceutical treatment of choice for high blood lead levels.

Researchers say there is little or no evidence that vitamins or herbs can relieve symptoms like Ms. Riley's. Still, she said, "I look and feel better than I have in years."

Life and Death

Diane Paradise bet her life on the uncertain benefits of natural medicine, after being burned physically and emotionally by conventional doctors.

In 1995, doctors told Ms. Paradise, now 35, that she had Hodgkin's disease. After a six-month course of chemotherapy and radiation, she said, she was declared cancer free, and she remained healthy for five years.

But in 2001 the cancer reappeared, more advanced, and her doctors recommended a 10-month course of drugs and radiation, plus a marrow transplant, she said.

Ms. Paradise, a marketing consultant in Rochester, N.Y., balked.

"I was burned badly the first time around, third-degree burns, and now they were talking about 10 months," she said in an interview, "and they were giving me no guarantees; they said it was experimental. That's when I started looking around. I really had nothing to lose, and I was focused on quality of life at that point, not quantity."

When she told one of her doctors that she was considering an alternative treatment in Arizona, the man exploded, she said.

"His exact words were, 'That's not treatment, that's a vacation — you're wasting your time!' " she said.

And so ended the relationship. With help from friends, Ms. Paradise raised about $40,000 to pay for the Arizona clinic's treatment, plus living expenses while there.

"I had absolutely no scientific reason for choosing this route, none," she said. "I just think there are times in our life when we are asked to make decisions based on our intuition, on our gut instinct, not based on evidence put in front of us, and for me this was one of those moments."

Cancer researchers say that there is no evidence that vitamins, herbs or other alternative therapies can cure cancer, and they caution that some regimens may worsen the disease.

But Ms. Paradise said that her relationship with the natural medicine specialist in Arizona had been collaborative and that she had felt "more empowered, more involved" in the treatment plan, which included large doses of vitamins, as well as changes in diet and sleep routines. After four months on the regimen, she said, she felt much better.

But the cancer was not cured. It has resurfaced recently and spread, and this time Ms. Paradise has started an experimental treatment with an oncologist in New York.

She is complementing this treatment, she said, with another course of alternative therapy in Arizona. She moved in with friends near Phoenix and started the alternative regime in January.

"It's 79 degrees and beautiful here," she said by phone in mid-January. "Let's hope that's a good sign."

For all their suspicions and questions about conventional medicine, those who venture outside the mainstream tend to have one thing in abundance, experts say: hope. In a 1998 survey of more than 1,000 adults from around the country, researchers found that having an interest in "personal growth or spirituality" predicted alternative medicine use.

Nontraditional healers know this, and they often offer some spiritual element in their practice, if they think it is appropriate. David Wood, a naturopath who with his wife, Cheryl, runs a large, Christian-oriented practice in Lynnwood, Wash., said he treated patients of all faiths.

"We pray with patients, with their permission," said Mr. Wood, who also works with local medical doctors when necessary. "If patients would not like us to pray for them, we don't, but it's there if needed."

He added, "Our goal here is to help people get really well, not merely free of symptoms."

That is exactly the sentiment that many Americans say they feel is missing from conventional medicine. Whatever the benefits and risks of its many concoctions and methods, alternative medicine offers them at least the promise of affectionate care, unhurried service, freedom from prescription drug side effects and the potential for feeling not just better but also spiritually recharged.

"I don't hate doctors or anything," Ms. Newman said. "I just know they can make mistakes, and so often they refer you on to see another doctor, and another."

Seeing a naturopath, she said, "I feel I'm known, they see me as a whole person, they listen to what I say."

Source:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/03/health/03patient.html?th&emc=th

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