Turning waste into medicine

Turning chemical waste material into profit by selling it as medicines was not initially accepted. At the time, people took natural cures and occasionally consulted a doctor for something “serious.” The best way to gain general acceptance of these new waste-based medicines became obvious: standardize the education, training, and credentialing of medical doctors and then raise their economic status to a level where they would follow these insane policies. In 1900 doctors were the lowest paid professionals.

In 1904 Andrew Carnegie noted that workers in his factories made more money than most doctors. Working with Henry Pritchett, the president of MIT, Carnegie donated $10 million to set up the Carnegie Foundation. Originally it’s purpose was to be a pension fund for retiring professors. However, with money like that comes tremendous power. Carnegie used that power to control education. The name was changed to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, and Pritchett expanded its original purpose to be “a great agency devoted to strengthening American education through scientific inquiry and policy studies.”

Whenever a billionaire tells you they’re going to devote themselves to something for your betterment, better check your wallet. The Foundation became very successful, controlling educational standards. It worked like this; to qualify for the pension system, an institution had to meet the standards set by the Foundation. In it’s first year, 52 of the 421 colleges who applied were accepted. Eventually the Foundation would go on to exert enormous control over all the best educational institutions.

The Flexner Report

The Carnegie Foundation hired a non-physician teacher named Alexander Flexner to travel across the country and “observe” medical education. In 1910 his landmark study, known as the Flexner Report, was published. Based on his recommendations, the Foundation expanded it’s control from being merely a pension plan for professors to an entirely new area: research funding.

Schools that met the Foundation’s standards from the Flexner Report were awarded research funds and endowments. Those that did not got no funding. This created an enormous incentive model for these institutions to play along. Thus, the titans of industry came to dictate the type of medical care that would flourish in America and starved out the competing types of care.

Natural methods of healing, used traditionally for centuries, suddenly fell out of favor simply because a more “scientific” approach started getting funding. “Coincidentally” those schools receiving the funding began disseminating information supporting the products of the new pharmaceutical industry. Big universities in the medical industry that rule today were all aligned with the Carnegie Foundation at that time, these include:

Case Western Reserve
Carnegie Institute of Chicago
University of North Carolina
University of Chicago
Johns Hopkins
Harvard School of Medicine

Jealous of the Carnegie Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation was established. Also utilizing the consultation of Abraham Flexner, the Rockefeller Foundation developed national standards for medical schools that were seeking “philanthropic” support. In 1904 there were 5747 medical doctors. Just 15 years later, after the Flexner Report, by 1919, there were only 2658. In that same 15 year period, the number of medical schools went from 162 to 81. The model had been proven, Rockefeller was deciding who was going to control what was medicine and what was not.

The reason so many schools closed was that schools had to be connected to a large university. The universities had to be linked to clinical departments that had laboratories and a university hospital. Using Rockefeller Funds, Flexner was able to develop a small group of elite, clinically oriented, medical schools. The raw materials for the new drugs were ready to go. All that was lacking was an academic power-base to legitimize their development and general use.

The system of education, funding, research and the organizing principles of medicine that persists today was created in less than a generation. This is why simple folk medicine, which had been around for centuries, was marginalized almost overnight.

Carnegie and Rockefeller were able gain control of organized medicine and turn it into a successful industry, with its focus on market growth. But the model has an inherent contradiction: an industry concerned with disease is not about to put itself out of business by curing a disease. This is why all these years, effective inexpensive non-pharmaceutical remedies, like nutrition, have been systematically suppressed. It’s just good business.

This model was the perfect environment for the flailing Germ Theory which was revived for a second run. Despite the fact that it had been repudiated by its creator, and most of his contemporaries, was of no concern and no longer mentioned in circles expecting next year’s funding. Germ Theory fit well with the new market-oriented paradigm of medicine: if germs are out there causing diseases, better find drugs to kill them.

Up into the 1920s, the burgeoning medical industry was gaining strength. It was aided by the declining incidence of infectious diseases due to improved sanitation and nutrition, for which medicine took credit. That is a story unto itself, “The Sanctity of Human Blood” is a good source.

The organized medicine was becoming stronger with each passing year, as new institutions were built and funding was given out for those research projects that had the best potential for future market value. Then the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918 killed millions proving that the new “scientific” approach had a lot to learn about disease prevention. There was no cure, as the virus traveled around the world.

The as yet proven Germ Theory came to be accepted as policy largely because any opposition to it had little chance of being published. This is similar to how fake food producers attack the competition, except in this case the competition is denied a platform. None the less, a small group of scientists, aware that the work of Bechamp was a much more reasonable view of physical reality, continued to develop research in the direction that the environment played a key role in the cause of disease. Corporate “science” was up and running though, fueled by money from the new drug markets, but the scientific method had been abandoned. The Germ Theory was anointed as the underlying dogma of a new medical religion. Doctors like J.H. Tilden, MD, and others, were apparently not willing to convert:

“…doctors fight the imaginary foe without ceasing. The people are so saturated with the idea that disease must be fought to a finish that they are not satisfied with conservative treatment. Something must be done, even if they pay for it with their lives, as tens of thousands do every year. This willingness to die on the altar of medical superstition is one very great reason why no real improvement is made in fundamental medical science.”
- Toxemia Explained 1926

1926? Sounds like today.

The First Wonder Drug

However, in 1928 the Germ Theory got a huge boost that has lasted to the present. Dr. Alexander Fleming, a British scientist, was annoyed to discover that his cultures were being destroyed by a certain mold. Over the next 14 years, scientists in England and America worked successfully to isolate and test penicillin, but did not publish to keep the work secret. But in 1942 a fire at The Cocoanut Grove, Boston’s oldest nightclub, killed and injured hundreds of people. Penicillin was rushed to Boston in time to prevent infection from burns in hundreds of patients. The news got out, and the race was on to mass-produce penicillin. By 1944, Merck was producing enough to satisfy all the demand from the American military.

This single event, the commercialization of penicillin, did more to bring credibility to organized medicine than anything else in its history to that point. To be able to prevent infection was a nearly miraculous and compelling power. Countless people had died from infection down through the ages. And finally here was proof of the Germ Theory: these patients had died from bad bacteria, and when the bacteria are killed with penicillin, the patients live.

However, mother nature was to show that she does not deal in black and white.

Mother Nature Always Bats Last

Even in his early research of penicillin, Fleming knew very well that living things could change and adapt when exposed to stress. He knew the dangers of resistance from overuse of penicillin, and warned against such overuse from the start, here in an interview Fleming gave to the New York Times in 1945:

” The greatest possibility of evil in self-medication is the use of too-small doses, so that instead of clearing up infection the microbes are educated to resist penicillin…”

The oldest living things on earth are bacteria and viruses. They are billions of years old. They have persisted through every change in the environment that has ever occurred: hot, cold, wet, dry, high oxygen, no oxygen, earthquakes, volcanoes, glaciers – they’ve seen it all. And they’re still around. Millions of plant and animal species of have come and gone because they couldn’t adapt.

Now suddenly in the 1940s, we start mass production and administration of a substance into the human population: penicillin, a substance which kills all bacteria. And ever since it’s introduction, bacteria have been doing their best to survive by adapting. Exposed to antibiotics, if bacteria can change and survive, they are said to be drug-resistant. Superbugs.

Since the 1940s, many antibiotics have been developed and today there are about 160 types. The problem is that most are just slightly different versions of a few main types. And resistance to those main types has increased year by year.

Drug resistance is now one of the leading causes of deaths in the U.S. More than 70,000 people die each year from it, according to the National Institutes of Health. Most of these people acquired the infection while they were in a hospital being treated for something else, according to the May 1997 documentary “The Coming Plague”. No known antibiotics can help these patients, and they die.

A 1992 study by the CDC’s Institute of Medicine showed that mortality from infectious disease has risen 22% worldwide from 1980-1992.

We can see the steady increase in drug resistance as Staphylococcus adapt:

• 1946, about 88% of staf infections could be cured by penicillin.
• 1950, only 61% of staph infections could be killed by penicillin
• 1982, fewer than 10% of staph cases could be cured by penicillin.
• Today it is less than 5%.

Part 3 Part 5