Ray Moynihan and Alan Cassels
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 Like most everything else that happens in health care today, our ideas about sickness are being shaped in the long shadows cast by the global drug giants. Yet the narrowing of the focus is making it harder for us to see the bigger picture about health and disease, sometimes at great cost to the individual, and the community. |
| In the frankest of terms the report describes the selling of sickness: the analyst outlines how companies are "expanding the patient pool" by using marketing campaigns to change public perceptions about what used to be considered normal life. "The medicalization of many natural processes," says the report, "is creating markets for lifestyle drugs for those who want to 'optimize quality of life.'"7
. .. pharmaceutical companies are searching for new disorders, based on extensive analysis of unexploited market opportunities (whether recognized today or promoted as such tomorrow). |
| If a serious challenge to the selling of sickness is going to come from anywhere, it is not going to come any time soon from behind the gray concrete and glass exterior of the FDA or other drug regulators dependent on drug company money. But then again, those challenges are already springing up elsewhere. Perhaps one of the most creative has been born from the freshest, clearest example of the corporate-sponsored creation of disease: female sexual dysfunction.
Note: As this book goes to print, the U.S. Congressional inquiries into the FDA are soon to report, and there are calls for a new U.S. |
| There are many different promotional strategies used in the selling of sickness, but the common factor among them all is the marketing of fear. The fear of heart attacks was used to sell women the idea that the menopause is a condition requiring hormone replacement. The fear of youth suicide is used to sell parents the idea that even mild depression must be treated with powerful drugs. The fear of an early death is used to sell high cholesterol as something automatically requiring a prescription. |
by Michael Murray, N.D. and Joseph Pizzorno, N.D.
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| An indication of ginger's action in eliminating gastrointestinal distress is offered by recent clinical studies with ginger in preventing the symptoms of motion sickness, especially seasickness. In one early study ginger was shown to be far superior to Dramamine, a commonly used over-the-counter and prescription drug for motion sickness. In the study, eighteen male and eighteen female volunteers who had previously indicated an extreme susceptibility to motion sickness were randomly divided into three groups. |
Ray Moynihan and Alan Cassels
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| Like the best of scientific inquiry this work of journalism is offered as part of an ongoing conversation, to be continued with friends, families, and physicians, with other health care providers, work colleagues, health officials, and elected representatives: a conversation that questions the corporate-sponsored selling of sickness, and explores new ways to define and understand disease. |
Joerg Gruenwald, Ph.D.
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 INDICATIONS AND USAGE
¦ Loss of appetite
¦ Travel sickness
Ginger is also used for loss of appetite, dyspepsia, prevention of motion sickness, and as a digestive for subacidic gastritis. In folk medicine, Ginger is used as a carminative, expectorant, and astringent.
CONTRAINDICATIONS
Ginger is contraindicated in morning sickness. Because of its cholagogic effect, the dmg should not be taken in the presence of gallstone conditions except after consultation with a doctor. |
Ray Moynihan and Alan Cassels
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| Selling sickness unmasks the latest marketing techniques from the drug industry's multi-layered campaigns. Technique by technique, condition by condition, a pattern emerges, a formula for changing the way we think about illness in order to expand markets for drugs. The diseases explored here are not the only ones being oversold; they are, though, among the most dramatic, compelling, and freshest examples we have. Once you become familiar with the formula, and start to recognize the tricks of the trade, you'll begin to see the black magic of disease marketing at work everywhere. |
David W. Grotto, RD, LDN
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 MOTION SICKNESS: Two double-blind studies showed that ginger had a significant effect on preventing and treating motion sickness.
OSTEOARTHRITIS: In a randomized, double-blind study, researchers found that those participants with osteoarthritis who had consumed ginger extract experienced much greater reduction in knee pain than those in the control group.
CANCER: A mouse study found that the antioxidant 6-gingerol, which gives ginger its flavor, resulted in fewer tumors and their size was considerably smaller than those of mice who did not receive gingerol. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Encouraging sickness, disease and cancer is a high priority to those who profit from such sickness. And if a few hundred thousand Americans have to die in order to meet next quarter's corporate profits, then so be it. Americans are expendable. Lives are cheap. They're so cheap, in fact, that most of the people living in America today take no steps to protect themselves against cancer. I guess some corporations figure, hey, if the people are willingly giving themselves cancer through their foods, cigarettes, toxic cosmetics and chemical exposures, then why should we stop them? |
Brenda Watson and Leonard Smith
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 Eliminating sickness from the body entails two simultaneous steps: one is to evict the main cause of the ailment and the other is to elevate the body's general vitality so that its natural and inherent ability to sustain health is allowed to dominate. Granted, sometimes we can't always remove the culprit at the root of our sickness, which can be an unknown in many cases. But we can do what we can to take as much control of our bodies as possible to balance their functions and boost the immune system. And to do this, we start by detoxifying the body at the cellular level. |
Earl Mindell, R.Ph., Ph.D.
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 A recent study confirmed that ginger's mtinausea action has been found to be more effective in relieving notion sickness than the standard motion-sickness drug. According to i report in the British medical journal Lancet, motion-sickness was nduced in thirty-six volunteers by having them sit in a computerized hair designed to cause seasickness. Some were given ginger powder and ome were given the traditional motion-sickness drug. The volunteers vere free to stop the chair whenever they felt nausea. Those taking the ;inger lasted 57 percent longer than those on the traditional drug. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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| Encouraging sickness, disease and cancer is a high priority to those who profit from such sickness. And if a few hundred thousand Americans have to die in order to meet next quarter's corporate profits, then so be it. Americans are expendable. Lives are cheap. They're so cheap, in fact, that most of the people living in America today take no steps to protect themselves against cancer. I guess some corporations figure, hey, if the people are willingly giving themselves cancer through their foods, cigarettes, toxic cosmetics and chemical exposures, then why should we stop them? |
David W. Grotto, RD, LDN
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| MORNING SICKNESS: A double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trial found that 125mg of ginger extract consumed four times per day for four days significantly reduced morning sickness in women less than 20 weeks pregnant. A trial investigated the effect of 1.05 grams of ginger on nausea and vomiting among women less than 16 weeks pregnant. Fifty-three percent of women consuming the ginger capsule reported a reduction in both nausea and vomiting associated with pregnancy. |
| MOTION SICKNESS: Two double-blind studies showed that ginger had a significant effect on preventing and treating motion sickness.
OSTEOARTHRITIS: In a randomized, double-blind study, researchers found that those participants with osteoarthritis who had consumed ginger extract experienced much greater reduction in knee pain than those in the control group.
CANCER: A mouse study found that the antioxidant 6-gingerol, which gives ginger its flavor, resulted in fewer tumors and their size was considerably smaller than those of mice who did not receive gingerol. |
| Ginger root against sea sickness: a controlled trial on the open sea. Otorhinolaryngol Relat Spec. 1986;48(5): 282-286.
Han-Chung L, et al. Effects of ginger on motion sickness and gastric slow-wave dys-rythmias induced by circular vection. Am J Physiol Gastrintest Liver Physiol. 2003;283:G481-G489.
Manju V, Nalini N. Chemopreventive efficacy of ginger, a naturally occurring anticar-cinogen during the initiation, post-initiation stages of 1,2 dimethylhydrazine-induced colon cancer. Clin Chim Acta. 2005 Aug;358(l-2):60-67. |
Pam Montgomery
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 Acupuncturist and author Diane Connelly says "all sickness is home sickness," meaning that when we are not at home with ourselves or not living according to our own true nature, the energy becomes contradictory causing misalignment or vulnerability.
"SEEING" THE ENERGY BODY
Many years ago I dreamed I was shaking a bunch of dice and had rolled them out onto the floor. The dice were letters that formed words. The words formed a sentence, but there was a key word missing. It spelled out, "Seeing is not looking with your_. |
Ron Garner
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 Mercury's primary mode of action is as an enzyme poison and the net effect is metabolic sickness.4
Mercury contributes to a lowering of the body's ability to fight disease. It weakens the immune system and lowers resistance to the process of degeneration. Drs. Hal Huggins, dds, and Thomas Levy, md wrote the book Uninformed Consent: The Hidden Dangers in Dental Care. This is an excellent book that I encourage everyone to read. It is full of facts and revelations from Dr. Huggins' own research and experience as a dentist. |
Roberta Bivins
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 As his theory suggests, many 'regular' physicians regarded gout as a salutary sickness, one that prevented far more serious diseases: 'a fit of the gout terminates symptoms which threaten something worse'.7
Because of its perceived prophylactic effects on the body as a whole, many physicians regarded treatment of gout's specific and local symptoms as dangerous to the patient's overall health—and thus as quackish. Indeed, patients were often congratulated by their friends and medical attendants on the occasion of their first attack, as gout was associated with both good breeding and long life. |
| She also felt heat, oppression, sickness, and disorder of the stomach.
Unsurprisingly, given such powerful experiences, mesmerism remained a popular topic of debate and demonstration, and mesmerists and their opponents cluttered the Victorian lecture circuit. Mesmeric societies spread across Britain, some cities supported mesmeric infirmaries (though all had closed by the 1860s), and access to mesmeric journals was widespread. |
| Biomedicine claims unique, exclusive, and absolute knowledge about the body in sickness and health, knowledge that is universally valid and ostensibly independent of cultural or social constraints or meaning. As a society, we accept these claims largely because we believe that biomedical knowledge is based on rigorous and objective scientific investigation of the natural world. Yet the sweeping cultural authority currently granted to science is, in historical terms, fairly new. |
| These intimate links between the body and the external world profoundly affected the ways in which healers and philosophers in each of these medical cultures understood sickness and health. Across all three medical systems, practitioners regarded disease to be a state of imbalance within the body, caused or perpetuated by disharmony in the interactions between individuals and their environment. The aim of all medical treatment was consequently to preserve or restore a healthy dynamic equilibrium both internally and externally. |
| If the eighteenth century presents a vision of medicine as a commodity of the marketplace, and embodiment (in health or sickness) as a franchise shared between practitioners and patients, the nineteenth exhibits medicine as one, or perhaps more accurately, as several, professions, all competing for exclusive rights to interpret and prescribe bodily experience. The theoretical fluidity and syncretism of Enlightenment medicine gave way to a medical culture marked by competing sects, each with its own overarching theory, and each claiming a monopoly on true knowledge of the body and disease. |
| Like all of India's medical systems (and like the prevailing medical systems in East Asia and Europe), Unani Tibb incorporated astrology and prayer with more materialist pharmaceutics, hydraulic and alchemical notions of the body, and much close and astute observation of the processes of sickness and health. Because of its substantial overlap with pre-modern western medicine, Unani Tibb will not be discussed separately here. |
Devra Davis
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 If the result of exposure is cancer, sickness and debility can extend for years. In the interim, treatment can involve surgery, pharmaceutical chemicals and ironically, more radiation. Still there is no guarantee of cure, and the cancer plus the "treatment" can severely disable or kill the person. . . .
The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission and its successor, the Department of Energy (DOE), denied any harm from bomb fallout for years, but in 1997 the National Cancer Institute released a report that showed doses of Iodine-131 (1-131) more than 100 times greater than earlier government estimates. |
| All the drugs and sickness made it hard for her to hold papers, let alone read them. Writing was out of the question. So I asked, "Do you want me to read to you from some of the next book?"
"I guess so," she replied, with just a hint of interest. I sat next to her at the laminated dining room table to which her wheelchair had been rolled. I knew I would not have much time. I also knew that though her life was near its end, she had no interest in talking about this. |
Mehmet C. Oz., M.D. and Michael F. Roizen, M.D.
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 Take, for example, one of life's most frustratingly nauseating events, morning sickness, which is actually designed to protect your genes. In our Stone Age years, nausea evolved during pregnancy as a fail-safe mechanism to help women minimize their exposure to toxins, since even mild toxins can be devastating to a developing fetus, especially during the first trimester.
As we've evolved, our bodies have developed a variety of ways to combat the natural toxins we may run into. |
Dr Ron Roberts
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 All the Orgone Institute's mice died and many workers were affected by radiation sickness. Much adverse publicity followed Reich through a number of years of other orgone energy experiments, which finally led to his arrest. American government authorities ordered all his accumulators, equipment and printed matter destroyed on the basis that orgone energy did not exist. Reich died in jail of a heart attack in 1957.
Although Reich's theories have been rejected by many psychologists and scientists, some of his ideas and methods are still considered credible and have undergone a recent revival. |
| Particular areas of the iris are considered to be related to parts of the body and sickness in that organ will show itself as markings in that section of the iris. þChinese medicine uses changes in the pulse rate to determine whether the patient has a particular condition. þSouth East Asian practitioners may use tongue diagnosis to assess the health of the patient.
There are also lesser known methods of diagnosing asthma, which must be considered to be of dubious value. þHair sampling, where hairs from your head are examined under a microscope to make a diagnosis. |
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