“Trust your doctor” or so goes the saying. You wouldn’t blindly trust a car salesman. You’d ask a lot of questions to see if a car is right for you. But most of us have been conditioned to believe our doctors are infallible. To question their judgment is akin to blasphemy. Students of medical history know better.
Bloodletting
Bloodletting was a popular treatment for all manner of ailments, widely used for more than 3,000 years. In 19th century Europe, bloodletting reached the height of its popularity.
In order to understand the rationalization of bleeding patients in order to “get them better” a (somewhat) convincing argument for the practice was made by the father of medicine, Hippocrates.
Hippocrates believed illness was caused by an imbalance of one or more of the four humors: blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile. To correct the imbalance, bloodletting, purging, catharsis, diuresis, and other treatments were utilized. Bloodletting became the most popular means of balancing the humors and “restoring health.”
Famous bleedings (Quoted from The History of Bloodletting)
When Charles II (1630–1685) suffered a seizure he was immediately treated with 16 ounces of bloodletting from the left arm followed by another 8 ounces from cupping. Then he endured a vigorous regimen of emetics, enemas, purgatives, and mustard plasters followed by more bleeding from the jugular veins. He had more seizures and received further treatment with herbs and quinine. In total he had about 24 ounces of blood taken before he died.
After riding in snowy weather, George Washington (1732–1799) developed a fever and respiratory distress. Under the care of his three physicians he had copious amounts of blood drawn, blisterings, emetics, and laxatives. He died the next night of what has been diagnosed retrospectively as epiglottitis and shock. His medical treatment aroused significant controversy, particularly the bloodletting.
The tools used in bloodletting included various cutting instruments, lancets, fleams, and the medicinal leech, Hirudo medicinalis.
Presently, bloodletting is rarely seen as beneficial and it is used in only a select few instances, such as severe cases of hypertension.
Smoking Cigarettes is Good For You
It is common knowledge that smoking is bad for your health. This knowledge is so commonplace now that many of us take it for granted. For decades, tobacco companies used doctors, and actors portraying doctors, to raise confidence in the safety of their products.
These promotions were very successful, and many doctors, especially throat doctors, were not only assuring the public that cigarette smoking wasn’t bad, they claimed smoking was healthy and could even be used as a treatment for throat irritation. Beyond recommendations, doctors were also hired to do pseudoscientific studies, studies paid for by the tobacco industry that consistently produced unrealistic results that supported smoking. When physicians and science are for sale, lies can be perpetuated for a very long time.
According to Stanford,
The list of recruitments who served as experts testifying on behalf of tobacco interests includes a virtual who’s who of leading otolaryngologists in the 20th century, including many leading head and neck cancer surgeons,” Jackler said.
In 1949, the average physician income was $11,058. In that era, a $5,000 payment — which was common from tobacco companies to otolaryngologists — represented a major inducement.
Even after the Surgeon General’s Report of 1964 definitively linked smoking with cancer of the voice box (larynx), the otolaryngology departmental chairs of four major universities testified before Congress in opposition to the findings.
Despite the fact that doctors are ethically bound to put the health of their patients before corporate profits, we have numerous historical examples of how industry can corrupt science. This kind of practice continues to this day.
Eat a High Carb Low Fat Diet
The USDA food pyramid was a low fat, high carbohydrate diet that was far from healthy. Our bodies are not designed to eat like this, but the government and many medical doctors still recommended it. The food pyramid was based on very expensive, highly flawed science.
During the 1980s, nearly a million Americans a year were dying of heart disease. Something had to be done. Problem is, what was done was worse than doing nothing at all.
Low-fat options are everywhere. In lieu of real ingredients like natural fats, highly processed or synthetic chemicals are added to boost flavor and appeal such as artificial flavors, artificial colors, high-fructose corn syrup, amino sweet (aspartame), MSG, and so on. Food-like products are marketed as food, and the differences between good (healthy) fats and bad (unhealthy) fats are lost on many people.
Healthy fats were discovered when anthropologists noted that arctic people, such as the Inuit and Yupik, ate high protein, high fat diets and yet had very low rates of heart disease. This called into question the demonization of fat.
According to Harvard:
Your body needs some fat from food. It’s a major source of energy. It helps you absorb some vitamins and minerals. Fat is needed to build cell membranes, the vital exterior of each cell, and the sheaths surrounding nerves. It is essential for blood clotting, muscle movement, and inflammation. For long-term health, some fats are better than others. Good fats include monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats. Bad ones include industrial-made trans fats. Saturated fats fall somewhere in the middle.
…Omega-3 fatty acids may help prevent and even treat heart disease and stroke. In addition to reducing blood pressure, raising HDL, and lowering triglycerides, polyunsaturated fats may help prevent lethal heart rhythms from arising.
Replacing fats with carbohydrates may indeed slightly lower heart disease, but its close cousin, cardiovascular disease, often afflicts those who follow high carb diets along with countless other health problems such as obesity and diabetes. The pyramid and the new program, choose my plate.gov dietary guidelines (which is almost as unhealthy), point Americans in the direction of chronic disease and an early grave.
Mercurial Medicines
Mercury is a neurotoxin, but in the past medical professionals didn’t understand how toxic it is to all forms of life. It was included in elixirs and ointments for thousands of years.
Qin Shi Huang, the man credited with unifying China, will probably always be best remembered for his military conquests. He was also obsessed with cheating death. Ironically, his efforts to extend his life drastically shortened it. It is believed that he died of mercury poisoning, an unintended side effect of his “immortality treatments”. His memorial was built with rivers of mercury, and an army of intricately crafted terracotta soldiers.
Mercury has been used to treat all manner of diseases, none of them successfully. Mercury is 500- 1,000 times more toxic than lead. It was the active ingredient in quicksilver, an ointment that was used as a remedy for a number of skin diseases. Mercury was later used as a treatment for syphilis and used in many other ointments, in steam baths, pills, and other concoctions. Mercury treatments often caused mercury poisoning, a condition that if not fatal could also manifest as tooth loss; mouth, throat, and skin ulcerations; or neurological damage.
Today, mercury, under the name thimerosal, can be found in hundreds of prescription and over the counter medicines. It continues to be used in lotions, creams, eye drops, eardrops, and nasal sprays. Mercury is widely used in dentistry and it is still used in many vaccines. Mercury also has many names, making it harder for consumers to identify.
Mercury is also known as:
- Thimerosal
- Phenylmercuric acetate (PMA)
- Phenylmercuric nitrate (PMN)
- Mercuric acetate (MA)
- Mercuric nitrate (MN)
- Merbromin (MB)
- Mercuric oxide yellow (MOY)
Chemotherapy Kills Faster Than No Treatment At All
There is no finer example of bad medical advice than advising patients to undergo chemotherapy. Most people dismiss the idea that you can cure any cancer naturally with over a 90% success rate. Generally speaking, people do not put much faith in alternative medicine or natural cures. Even those who ascribe to the idea of a natural and organic lifestyle tend to dismiss natural cancer treatments, thinking that cancer is too big, too strong, and too deadly for alternative medicine.
New research is confirming what the most committed natural practitioners already knew. It is likely that the radiation and chemotherapy that are used as treatments are too deadly, too heavy handed for cancer.
Dr. Jones’s study published in the journal Transactions of the New York Academy of Sciences shows chemotherapy is killing cancer patients four times faster than no treatment at all.
Conclusion
Bad advice is everywhere, and it can stem from every profession, even the medical profession. History has taught us that there are times the experts are nearly unified in their advice and are still dead wrong. The reasoning has always been the same, that the benefits outweigh the risks. When you’re given bad medical advice, you run the risk while the benefits belong to the physician. Ultimately our health is too important to trust the experts without doing our own research.
Suggested Reading:
- How to Detoxify From Antibiotics and Other Chemical Antimicrobials
- Circumcision, the Primal Cut – A Human Rights Violation
- Doctors Against Vaccines – Hear From Those Who Have Done the Research
- Scientists Against GMOs
Sources:
- The History of Bloodletting – BC Medical Journal
- Big Tobacco Led Throat Doctors to Blow Smoke – Stanford Medicine
- The truth about fats: the good, the bad, and the in-between – Harvard Health
- Syphilis – Harvard University Library
- Mercury–a major agent in the history of medicine and alchemy. – Pub Med
- Over 200 Consumer Medical Products Still Contain Mercury – Safe Minds
- Periodic Table Mercury – Royal Society of Chemistry
- Chemo Will Kill You Faster Than No Treatment at All – Natural On
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