An outspoken doctor calls the pharmaceutical industry a national fraud that promotes disease and prevents prevention

As pharmaceutical companies continue their march toward profitability and domination over our "modern" health care system, more and more doctors are speaking out against them. One of the most interesting and outspoken doctors is Dr. Rath. Dr. Rath, who is based outside the United States, has started the Dr. Rath Foundation, and has made it his mission to fight the ongoing dominance and influence of the pharmaceutical industry. He points out some very important and educational facts about Big Pharma that all Americans would do well to learn.

One of the first fundamental philosophies of Dr. Rath's foundation is that patients must have a bill of rights that allows them to sue drug makers for the devastating side effects of synthetic drugs. This is something that most patients would agree with, but in the United States the Bush administration has been working hard to make sure that drug companies are immune to lawsuits by patients. Part of the reason for this may be due to a second fact that is pointed by Dr. Rath, which is that many of the policy makers in the Bush administration are former top executives in pharmaceutical companies. For example, our Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, is what Dr. Rath calls, "A highly decorated drug maker executive."

Dr. Rath also points out that 5 of the 10 key legislative initiatives promoted by the Bush administration from 2000 to 2004 were actually multi-billion dollar government subsidy programs designed to generate profits for the pharmaceutical companies. The most notable legislative initiative that falls into that category would be the so-called Medicare drug discount card, which actually isn't a discount at all, and is more of a system that tricks elderly consumers who are dependent on prescription drugs into buying from monopoly-controlled U.S. drug outlets.

Some of the other things that Dr. Rath points out, and quite rightly so in my opinion, is that the pharmaceutical industry has donated far more heavily to the Republicans in the recent presidential election campaign than to Democrats. In fact, the Bush administration could quite accurately be described as bankrolled by pharmaceutical companies. In response, the Bush administration has pursued these legislative initiatives that favor drug companies and that continue to pour profits back into the monopoly system operated by Big Pharma and the FDA.

It's hard to imagine how we can have any sort of serious pharmaceutical reform in this environment if the people running the country are getting financially supported by pharmaceutical companies. With the present situation, it's almost impossible to create any sort of meaningful reform that would scale back the dangerous dominance of the pharmaceutical industry.

Let's move on to some of the other fundamentals of Dr. Rath's philosophy on pharmaceuticals. He rightly points out that prevention and eradication of diseases will never be in the interests of the drug industry. Why? Because the only way to make money in the drug industry is to get a return on investment, and that can only happen by expanding the number of customers who are purchasing drugs. And that, in turn, is accomplished by expanding the number of diseases and disease names as well as avoiding any investment in prevention that would reduce the number of long-term customers.

In other words, as Dr. Rath explains, the pharmaceutical industry promises health and promises cures, and yet what it delivers is a lifetime of continued disease and dependence on profit-building pharmaceuticals. Dr. Rath also explains that the damage caused to the American people and the national economy caused by Big Pharma far surpasses the damage ever caused by the tobacco industry. Millions of people are having their health compromised and their lives prematurely terminated by what he calls a "deliberate withholding of life-saving health information from the public."

That's because life-saving health information isn't patentable, and it certainly isn't profitable for pharmaceutical companies. There's really no reason for them to educate people on how to ward off disease and be healthy for their entire lives, because for each person that learns how to take care of their own health and discovers the simple solutions to avoiding all chronic disease, the pharmaceutical industry loses a customer, and that hits them in the pocketbook. It reduces their return on investment, and it makes their investors unhappy.

I strongly agree with the fundamental philosophy being offered by Dr. Rath, and encourage you to read more about his foundation and his work. He is outspoken, he is medically trained, he has the freedom to say what he believes about medicine because he lives outside the United States and can't have his medical license suspended by corrupt U.S. authorities. If more people in the United States were to speak up in the same way, perhaps we could actually make some meaningful change in our modern medical system.

What we need to do, of course, is invest in prevention, and actually teach people how to be healthy and well. And as you know from reading other articles on this site, being healthy and preventing disease really isn't very complicated. Things only get complicated if you already have a disease, and then get drawn into the system of conventional medicine, where pseudo-science masquerades as good medicine. The fact is, once an individual is diagnosed as having a chronic disease, and actually enters the influence of conventional medicine, it's only a worsening journey from that day forward -- people only get worse. They almost never get better. People who actually "cure" their diseases usually do so because they move away from conventional medicine and take charge over their own health outcome.

In conventional medicine, people are subjected to toxic chemicals known as prescription drugs. They undergo radical, inhumane procedures such as chemotherapy and surgeries that are more often than not medically unnecessary. And then when new symptoms appear, they are given a new round of prescription drugs to mask the symptoms that were caused by the first round of drugs. Within a few years, that person is typically on 10 or 12 prescriptions, their liver is failing, their mental focus is cloudy, their memory is affected, they have increasing muscle aches and pains, they have low levels of energy are frequently diagnosed with depression.

All of this is great news for drug companies, because the more prescriptions you're on, the more money they make, and they will keep making money from you as long as you don't die. It's the same strategy as a parasite -- they want to attach to you and siphon off as much energy (or money) from you as they can without actually killing you, the host. Eventually, of course, pharmaceutical companies always lose the customer in the end, because the customer dies, usually as a result of a side effect or complication from the prescription drug.

And it's interesting to note that when people die, the cause of death is never listed as a prescription drug side effect. It's often listed as natural causes, or liver failure, but the question is rarely asked -- what caused the liver failure in the first place? Could it have been ibuprofen, or another over-the-counter painkiller? It could have been a dangerous combination of prescription drugs that the patient dutifully followed for years, even while it was destroying his or her liver function. But all that's okay with the pharmaceutical company, because they were able to extract twenty or fifty thousand dollars from that customer during the years when he or she was alive, and they know they can do it again with the next generation.

In fact, there seems to be a never-ending line of customers lining up and willing to have their insurance companies pay for whatever prescription drugs are being hyped by Big Pharma. But you already knew all that, and so, apparently, does Dr. Rath. The key question, however, is, are you acting on it? Are you actually making changes in your life based on the information you are learning here?

I've talked to far too many people who agree with everything they read on this site, yet who continue to take prescription drugs because their doctor tells them to. They know that statin drugs are destroying their brain function and making their muscles ache. They know that the statins are interfering with their CoQ10 production and thereby affecting their heart health and greatly impairing their level of energy. They know all of this, but yet they continue to take statin drugs for some absurd reason, because their doctors told them their cholesterol is too high and they need to take drugs to bring it down.

What are you doing with this information? Is this just an intellectual exercise, or are you actually using it to change your life? If you are educating yourself in order to make changes, and you are actually pursuing those changes, I applaud you, because you are the kind of person who is going to make a difference in our national health care system. The more you integrate this information into your own life and move away from conventional medicine, and move towards prevention, nutrition, and holistic health, the higher the quality of life you will experience and the longer you will live. Inevitably, you will become a proponent of the very same information you've been learning here. People will ask you -- how can you be so healthy at your age? How come you look younger now than you did last year? Why is it that you haven't been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease when all your other friends of the same age have? Well, the answer, you'll be able to tell them, is that you don't take prescription drugs. And you learn about nutrition, superfoods, physical exercise and the healing power of natural sunlight.

All of this will become obvious to the entire nation in a matter of years, or, in the worst case, decades. It will be very easy to tell who is taking prescription drugs and who isn't. In fact, it's somewhat obvious to me right now. When I go outside and intermingle with the public at grocery stores or bookstores or movie theatres, I can quite readily tell who's on multiple prescription drugs and who isn't just by observing the way they hold their posture, the way they move their bodies, the way they talk and the way they look at you during conversation. As more and more pharmaceuticals are promoted to the public, and people are increasingly taking these drugs, the differences will become so obvious that even those in conventional medicine will, at some point, no longer be able to deny the basic truth that Dr. Rath has revealed to us here: that prescription drugs help no one, they don't cure any diseases, and only harm your health.

If you want to be healthy, say goodbye to prescription drugs (find a way to get off them with the help of a naturopathic physician). As a side effect, you'll also have a lot more money left in the bank.