Month: January 2008

Categories
Health & Freedom

The Blue Man, To Be Blue or To Be Dead?

The major media from Fox to CNN to ABC are again running what amounts to a propaganda blitzkrieg against colloidal silver with stories about a man, Paul Karason of Madera California, who developed a cosmetic condition called Argyria, from using large quantities of homemade colloidal silver. As usual, they have to dredge up “old news”; as with this case from fourteen years ago. Seldom do they ever give any substantial background to such stories, leaving in the minds of their viewers and listeners images of people turning blue from using almost any amount or any kind of colloidal silver.

Beyond the intent of mainstream media to discredit the use of silver, this story is not only about Argyria if some kinds of “colloidal silver” are used in excessive quantities, but is unintentionally a story about the life saving ability of silver. Paul started making and taking colloidal silver because of life threatening and dehabilitating diseases, Arthritis, Diabetes and an unspecified liver condition, possibly Hepatitis. It is his claims of the living saving benefits of colloidal silver that the media just skims over and in most cases completely leaves out of printed stories. He specifically credits colloidal silver for saving his life and says he had rather be blue than dead. Not a difficult choice for him when the efforts of mainstream medicine apparently failed. Not only is he alive, but he is apparently healthy and happy.

What the controlled media doesn’t tell you is that these “blue people” always use one of several “kinds” of colloidal silver to excess, drinking upwards of a quart or more a day for long periods of time. If you take any “patented drug”, “mainstream medicine”, or “over-the-counter-medication” and use any of them to a similar excess, you will not be alive to go before the news media and talk about it. The blueness or grayness you experience may well be that associated with being in a horizontal position, six feet under.

In fact, thousands die each year from simply using the recommended or prescribed doses of many patented drugs. This is what actually happens to tens of thousands of people using such drugs every year. (Read Death by Medicine, by Dr. Gary Null in our Archives ) This list of death causing drugs range from aspirin to Tylenol to anti-biotics, but you will never see a media blitz about it. If silver were even indirectly attributed to one death, there would be SWAT teams ready to pounce and shut down the manufacturers and sellers. Instead the worst they have is a rare cosmetic condition that doesn’t even cause death.

The current “blue man” admits to consuming homemade ionic silver in large and frequent quantities for a long period of time and as a result eventually developed Argyria. Without any doubt he would make a very convincing Papa Smurf for a television movie and he wouldn’t need any makeup, but he is not at all representative of a typical colloidal silver user, even one who uses silver every day. I can personally attest to that; I have averaged using from a tablespoon or so per day to occasionally using several ounces a day for a few days when I felt a bug coming on. Supposedly it is the heavy silver use and exposure to sunlight that triggers the condition. Well, I am an extraordinarily active man who is out of doors in the sun as much as I am indoors and as you can see in a recent picture on http://utopiasilver.com/about.htm; I am certainly not blue.

The news stories seldom if ever give information about the many different kinds of products called “colloidal silver”. There are products that have low PPMs and small particles, like our Advanced Colloidal Silver, which is mineral and distilled water only and has almost no chance of causing Argyria even with more than modest use. There are many so-called colloidal silver products made with animal protein, salines and nitrates that may have several thousand PPMs. These large particle, high PPM products without doubt have the capability of causing Argyria, but only with frequent and heavy use. Even then the cases are far and few between and should not be taken as representative of colloidal silver use any more than the thousands of organ failures and deaths are representative of over-the-counter painkillers, such as aspirin, Tylenol and acetaminophen. Painkillers Up Post Heart Attack Deaths,
http://www.webmd.com/heart-disease/news/20051114/painkillers-up-post-heart-attack-death

The biggest problem with such stories as this hyper-sensationalized “Blue Man” is the fact that it keeps the public attention, whether intentionally or inadvertently, away from potentially pandemic diseases and problems caused directly by the use of anti-biotics. Super-germs attributable to the use and overuse of antibiotics caused an estimated 40,000 deaths and possibly many times more in North American alone and are in the hundreds of thousands, possibly millions worldwide. It is very disturbing that although mainstream medicine and mainstream media coverage have addressed this issue somewhat, they almost always leave out the number of deaths because it is so shockingly large. They would never cover-up such numbers or even “a death” if it involved colloidal silver. I think that if someone drowned in a vat of colloidal silver, it would be reported as a colloidal silver “caused” death.

The disingenuity of the mainstream media has made statements related to Paul Karason saying such things as, “While it is true that microscopic silver particles have some germ-killing properties, they've since been replaced by much more effective and safer drugs.” While grudgingly admitting some benefit of silver, they always overstate the positive aspects of “patented” drug use. One can only wonder where these safer and more effective drugs are. The popular antibiotic erythromycin reportedly causes six deaths for every 10,000 people taking it in conjunction with other drugs and this is only the tip of the iceberg.

Just remember, there is often an agenda associated with stories that are regularly “planted” in the mainstream media about “colloidal silver” and other alternative healthcare products. That ultimate agenda is to bring all “healthcare” under the regulatory authority of “government” agencies such as the FDA and sooner than later under the authority of CODEX (http://www.codexalimentarius.net/web/index_en.jsp), which is simply a giant step into the integration of our society into the advancing International Federalist Governance (The Novus Ordo Seclorum).

Here is side note that I will elaborate on in a later article:
Believe it or not, the USFDA has no regulatory authority over the manufacture or sale of any food, supplement or over any drug for that matter in my opinion. It may only regulate interstate commerce, which is only the transportation and shipment between any state or territory and within the District of Columbia or within any other territory not organized with a legislative body. Read the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act that brought this “out of control” agency into existence in 1938. I will post it later on our website, because you must read the original act to get most of the correct language. In recent government postings, certain key phrases are deliberately left out so that we will forget what they were originally intended to do and to mean.

Further proof that the FDA has a very narrow and limited authority as do all “federal” agencies can be found in the 18th and 21st Amendments to the Constitution, where alcohol was initially “outlawed” and then later was purported to have been “re-legalized”. In fact, what was done with the 21th Amendment was to bring the 18th Amendment “the alcohol prohibition amendment” back into compliance with the Constitution. The 18th Amendment had overstepped the boundaries of the federal government regulatory authority; the 21st corrected that Constitutional violation. I will detail this in a later editorial/opinion piece that will give you some insight into the truth about many of our so-called laws used by Federal agencies to treat us as mere cattle/animals and beat us into submission.

We must all be independent-thinking Men and Women and not allow ourselves to be controlled, coerced, and manipulated by forces that have hidden agendas for our lives. Our lives belong to us, not to the government and not to the mega-corporations. We all (you and I) have certain God-given unalienable Rights, including, but not limited to, the Right to determine how to best care for our health, without restriction, but if don’t make the decision to keep it regardless of the consequences, we will lose that Right along with all other Rights of self determination.

Categories
Silver Archives

Statistics Prove Prescription Drugs Are 16,400% More Deadly Than Terrorists

America was rudely awakened to a new kind of danger on September 11, 2001: Terrorism. The attacks that day left 2,996 people dead, including the passengers on the four commercial airliners that were used as weapons. Many feel it was the most tragic day in U.S. history.

Four commercial jets crashed that day. But what if six jumbo jets crashed every day in the United States, claiming the lives of 783,936 people every year? That would certainly qualify as a massive tragedy, wouldn’t it?

Well, forget “what if.” The tragedy is happening right now. Over 750,000 people actually do die in the United States every year, although not from plane crashes. They die from something far more common and rarely perceived by the public as dangerous: modern medicine.

According to the groundbreaking 2003 medical report Death by Medicine, by Drs. Gary Null, Carolyn Dean, Martin Feldman, Debora Rasio and Dorothy Smith, 783,936 people in the United States die every year from conventional medicine mistakes. That’s the equivalent of six jumbo jet crashes a day for an entire year. But where is the media attention for this tragedy? Where is the government support for stopping these medical mistakes before they happen?

After 9/11, the White House gave rise to the Department of Homeland Security, designed to prevent terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. Since its inception, billions of dollars have been poured into it. The 2006 budget allots $34.2 billion to the DHS, a number that has come down slightly from the $37.7 billion budget of 2003.

According to the study led by Null, which involved a painstaking review of thousands of medical records, the United States spends $282 billion annually on deaths due to medical mistakes, or iatrogenic deaths. And that’s a conservative estimate; only a fraction of medical errors are reported, according to the study. Actual medical mistakes are likely to be 20 times higher than the reported number because doctors fear retaliation for those mistakes. The American public heads to the doctor’s office or the hospital time and again, oblivious of the alarming danger they’re heading into. The public knows that medical errors occur, but they assume that errors are unusual, isolated events. Unfortunately, by accepting conventional medicine, patients voluntarily continue to walk into the leading cause of death in America.

According to a 1995 U.S. iatrogenic report, “Over a million patients are injured in U.S. hospitals each year, and approximately 280,000 die annually as a result of these injuries. Therefore, the iatrogenic death rate dwarfs the annual automobile accident mortality rate of 45,000 and accounts for more deaths than all other accidents combined.” This report was issued 10 years ago, when America had 34 million fewer citizens and drug company scandals like the Vioxx recall were yet to occur. Today, health care comprises 15.5 percent of the United States’ gross national product, with spending reaching $1.4 trillion in 2004.

Since Americans spend so much money on health care, they should be getting a high quality of care, right? Unfortunately, that’s not the case. Of the 783,936 annual deaths due to conventional medical mistakes, about 106,000 are from prescription drugs, according to Death by Medicine. That also is a conservative number. Some experts estimate it should be more like 200,000 because of underreported cases of adverse drug reactions.

Americans today are used to fixing problems the quick way – even when it comes to their health. Thus, they rely heavily on prescription drugs to fix their diseases. For every conceivable ailment – real or not – chances are there’s a pricey prescription drug to “treat” it. Chances are even better that their drug of choice comes chock full of side effects.

The problem is, prescription drugs don’t treat diseases; they merely cover the symptoms. U.S. physicians provide allopathic health care – that is, they care for disease, not health. So, the over-prescription of drugs and medications is designed to treat disease instead of preventing it. And because there are so many drugs available, unforeseen adverse drug reactions are all too common, which leads to the highly conservative annual prescription drug death rate of 106,000. Keep in mind that these numbers came before the Vioxx scandal, and Cox-2 inhibitor drugs could ultimately end up killing tens of thousands more.

American medical patients are getting the short end of a rather raw deal when it comes to prescription drugs. Medicine is a high-dollar, highly competitive business. But it shouldn’t be. Null’s report cites the five most important aspects of health that modern medicine ignores in favor of the almighty dollar: Stress, lack of exercise, high calorie intake, highly processed foods and environmental toxin exposure. All these things are putting Americans in such poor health that they run to the doctor for treatment. But instead of doctors treating the causes of their poor health, such as putting them on a strict diet and exercise regimen, they stuff them full of prescription drugs to cover their symptoms. Using this inherently faulty system of medical treatment, it’s no wonder so many Americans die from prescription drugs. They’re not getting better; they’re just popping drugs to make their symptoms temporarily go away.

But not all doctors subscribe to this method of “treatment.” In fact, many doctors are just as angry as the public should be, charging that scientific medicine is “for sale” to the highest bidder – which, more often than not, end up being pharmaceutical companies. The pharmaceutical industry is a multi-trillion dollar business. Companies spend billions on advertising and promotions for prescription drugs. Who can remember the last time they watched television and weren’t bombarded with ads for pills treating everything from erectile dysfunction to sleeplessness? And who has ever been to a doctor’s office or hospital and not seen every pen, notepad and post-it bearing the logo of some prescription drug?

Medical experts claim that patients’ requests for certain drugs have no effect on the number of prescriptions written for that drug. Pharmaceutical companies claim their drug ads are “educational” to the public. The public believes the FDA reviews all the ads and only allows the safest and most effective drug ads to reach the public. It’s a clever system: Pharmaceutical companies influence the public to ask for prescription drugs, the public asks their physicians to prescribe them certain drugs, and doctors acquiesce to their patients’ requests. Everyone’s happy, right? Not quite, since the prescription drug death toll continues to rise.

The public seems to genuinely believe that drugs advertised on TV are safe, in spite of the plethora of side effects listed by the commercial’s narrator, ranging from diarrhea to death. Patients feel justified in asking their physicians to prescribe them a particular drug they’ve seen on TV, since it surely must be safe or it wouldn’t have been advertised. Remember all those TV ads heralding the wonders of Vioxx? One might wonder how many lives could have been spared if patients didn’t see the ad on TV and request a prescription from their doctors.

But advertising isn’t the only tool the pharmaceutical industry uses to influence medicine. Null’s study cites an ABC report that said pharmaceutical companies spend over $2 billion sending doctors to more than 314,000 events every year. While doctors are riding the dollar of pharmaceutical companies, enjoying all the many perks of these “events,” how likely are they to question the validity of drug companies or their products?

Admittedly, not all doctors reside in the pockets of the pharmaceutical companies. Some are downright angry at the situation, and angry on behalf of an unaware public. Major conflicts of interest exist between the American public, the medical community and the pharmaceutical industry. And although the public suffers the most from this conflict, it is the least informed. The public gets the short end of the stick and they don’t even know it. That is why the pharmaceutical industry remains a multi-trillion dollar business.

Prescription drugs are only a part of the U.S. healthcare system’s miserable failings. In fact, outpatient deaths, bedsore deaths and malnutrition deaths each account for higher death rates than adverse drug reactions. The problems run deep and cannot be remedied without drastic, widespread change in the system’s money and ethics.

The first issue – money – is the main reason the medical industry cannot seem to change. Prescribing more drugs and recommending more surgeries means more profits. Getting more drugs approved by the FDA, regardless of their safety, means more money for the pharmaceutical industry. As the healthcare system stands today, physicians and drug companies can’t seem to pass up earning loads of money, even if a few hundred thousand people lose their lives in the process. Even in drastic cases of deadly drugs, everyone involved has a scapegoat: Drug companies can blame the FDA for approving their product and the doctors for over-prescribing it, and doctors can blame the patients for wanting it and not properly weighing the risks.

What ultimately arises is a question of ethics. In layman’s terms, ethics are the rules or moral guidelines that govern the conduct of people or professions. Some ethics are ingrained from childhood, but some are specifically set forth. For example, nearly all medical schools have their new doctors take a modern form of the Hippocratic Oath. While few versions are identical, none include setting aside proper medical care in favor of money-making practices.

On the research side of the issue, “Death by Medicine” cites an ABC report that says clinical trials funded by pharmaceutical companies show a 90 percent chance that a drug will be perceived as effective, whereas clinical trials not funded by drug companies show only a 50 percent chance that a drug will be perceived as effective. “It appears that money can’t buy you love, but it can buy you any ‘scientific’ result you want,” writes Null and his team of researchers.

The government spends upwards of $30 billion a year on homeland security. Such spending seems important. Since 2001, 2,996 people in the United States have died from terrorism – all as a result of the 9/11 attacks. In that same period of time, 490,000 people have died from prescription drugs, not counting the Vioxx scandal. That means that prescription drugs in this country are at least 16,400 percent deadlier than terrorism. Again, those are the conservative numbers. A more realistic number, which would include deaths from over-the-counter drugs, makes drug consumption 32,000 percent deadlier than terrorism. But the scope of “Death by Medicine” is even wider. Conventional medicine, including unnecessary surgeries, bedsores and medical errors, is 104,700 percent deadlier than terrorism. Yet, our government’s attention and money is not put into reforming health care.

Couldn’t a little chunk of the homeland security money be better spent on overhauling the corrupt U.S. healthcare system, the leading cause of death in America? Couldn’t we forfeit the color-coded threat system in favor of stricter guidelines on medical research and prescription drugs? No one is attempting to say that terrorism in the world is not a problem, especially for a high-profile country like the United States. No one is saying that the people who died on 9/11 didn’t matter or weren’t horribly wronged by the terrorists that day. But there are more dangerous things in the United States being falsely represented as safe and healthy, when, in reality, they are deadly. The corruption in the pharmaceutical industry and in America’s healthcare system poses a far greater threat to the health, safety and welfare of Americans today than terrorism.

If the Bush Administration really wants to save lives — a lot of lives — it needs look no further than the chemical war has been declared on Americans by Big Pharma.

Categories
The Best Years In Life

Colloidal Silver Has Mainstream Medicine Singing the Blues

by Tony Isaacs the author of Cancer's Natural Enemy

The recent widespread mainstream media coverage of the “blue man” Paul Karason and his rare skin condition known as Argyria is the latest in a series of largely misleading and sensationalized scare stories about the dangers of colloidal silver turning a person’ skin blue.

Although this latest story did not appear to originate from mainstream medicine or the FDA, there is little doubt that they have welcomed it with open arms and have been quick to trot out “medical experts” and past FDA warnings to help “sing the blues” about colloidal silver. The truth is that mainstream medicine has a very good reason to cry long and loud about colloidal silver, because it does represent a very real danger – a danger to the huge profits of the pharmaceutical industry’s patented antibiotics.

The truth is that silver has been used effectively by mankind to fight germs and ailments for thousands of years, and the instances of it turning people’s skin blue are so rare as to be almost non-existent. As a matter of fact, almost all of the relative handful of reported instances have involved one or more of the following: older silver products that contained as much as 10% or more silver (compared to mere parts per million in modern colloidal silver), silver nitrate, home made colloidal silver that was contaminated with salt, and silver that has been consumed continuously in very large quantities over a very long period of time

What is also true is that colloidal silver is far safer, more effective and less expensive than the marginally effective and side effect laden mainstream antibiotics. The best and strongest of the FDA approved antibiotics are effective for a handful of bacteria at best, whereas colloidal silver is supremely effective against just about every kind of single celled pathogen, including bacteria, fungal growths and viruses (which antibiotics are often miss-prescribed for, but have zero effect on).

If the public were told the truth, a rarity when it comes to mainstream drugs versus natural competition, colloidal silver would represent a threat to literally billions of dollars of profits and so it is no wonder that mainstream medicine and their duped allies in the mainstream media are singing the blues – just as they have repeatedly done with many other natural plants, supplements, vitamins and minerals that represent safer, more effective and less expensive alternatives to the synthetics created in the labs of the powerful world pharmaceutical empire.

Since the early 1900’s the modern pharmaceutical industry has been all about profits and controlling the world drug trade and their only marketplace is our bodies. They have a longstanding and clear track record of doing whatever it takes to suppress any and all competition, including lies, misleading industry funded studies, and the suppression and persecution of competition through the agency much of the public thinks is protecting the general public, but in reality serves foremost to protect the profits of the pharmaceutical empire it serves and depends on. The same can be said of mainstream germ theory medicine, whose American Medical Association, along with the FDA, also has a track record of supporting industry at any and all costs and suppressing and harassing competition.

While there are a great many natural threats to mainstream profits, whose track records of being used safely and effectively by mankind for hundreds and even thousands of years cast very dark shadows of doubts on industry claims of their dangers and ineffective, perhaps no natural alternative to mainstream drugs represents as big of a threat to industry profits as colloidal silver, and it is no coincidence that colloidal silver has been placed at the very top of the FDA/mainstream medicine hit list.

When it comes to warning and scaring people away from silver, both the mainstream medical industry and the FDA have some very big credibility problems. As noted earlier, silver has a history of safe and effective use dating back thousands of years. Today it is used by NASA, the US military and Potters for Peace for water purification, is used as a germicidal agent by hospitals, medical suppliers and recently was incorporated into a new line of hospital pajamas to prevent the spread of infection.

Moreover, at one time silver products were very much in favor with both mainstream medicine and the FDA. No fewer than 34 different prescribed and over-the-counter medications containing silver were not only widely sold by industry, they were also approved by the very same FDA which now seeks to warn us of its dangers and have us believe it is ineffective. What changed their minds? The obvious answer can be found in the fact that silver fell out of favor at the very same time that patented sulfa drugs and patented antibiotics created in drug company labs came on the market. Once that happened, the non-patentable silver was no longer a tool for healing, but a threat to profits.

Zealous protection of mainstream approved drugs and suppression of natural competition is nothing new – look at the estimated 100,000 or more deaths caused by Vioxx before the FDA finally removed it from the market. Look at the ridiculous actions of the FDA when it threatened Washington cherry growers for telling the truth about the health benefits of eating cherries, or at the storm trooper actions against the makers of Charantia (bitter melon) tea in Florida who dared put references to some of the 650 plus PubMed studies and citations about bitter melon on their website.

The FDA persecutions and prosecutions of cherry farmers, bitter melon, and a long line of other natural alternatives points out just how extreme the protection of the big drug companies products and profits really is. Consider this: other than issues of national security, only in natural health is it a crime to tell the truth. For example, only the makers of FDA approved drugs can use the word cure, or even imply and health benefits without the FDA considering the product a drug.

The catch is that in order to be FDA approved, no matter how many PubMed cited studies or other studies have been performed, and no matter how much of a history of hundreds or thousands of years and users, the FDA only approves drugs that go through its specific approval process – one that costs hundreds of billions of dollars.

When it comes to natural alternatives, spending such money on a natural product that cannot be patented is prohibitive and, though the process is purported to be one which protects the public from unsafe medicines (we see how well that worked for hall of shame list of drugs like Vioxx, Avandia, et al), the net effect of the FDA’s drug definitions and approval process is to exclude natural competition and insure that only the patentable and profitable synthetics created in drug company labs can be approved.

The most recent example of such one-sided treatment favoring industry came in the following news story earlier this past week about a lawsuit filed against the FDA by Public Citizen after the FDA ignored years of complaints about the dangers of ruptured tendons caused by one of the drug industry’s most powerful and profitable antibiotics:

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Despite long-standing evidence that fluoroquinolone antibiotics can cause tendon ruptures, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has failed to increase its warnings to patients and physicians about the dangers of the medicines, Public Citizen told a federal court Thursday.

Public Citizen sued in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, asking the court to force the FDA to act upon a petition the consumer group filed with the agency 16 months ago. The FDA has failed to respond to the petition, which asked the agency to put a “black box” warning on fluoroquinolone antibiotics (such as Cipro, Levaquin and others) to make doctors and patients more aware of the risk of serious tendon injury before tendons actually rupture.

The petition also urged the FDA to send a warning letter to physicians, as well as require an FDA-approved medication guide to be dispensed when prescriptions are filled. Public Citizen contends that the FDA is violating the Administrative Procedure Act by not acting upon the petition.
Stronger warnings could lead to earlier intervention and prevent needless injuries by allowing doctors to switch patients to other antibiotics, said Dr. Sidney Wolfe, director of Public Citizen’s Health Research Group.

“While the FDA sits idly by and ignores the problem, more people will suffer serious tendon ruptures that could have been prevented,” Wolfe said. “The current warning is buried in a long list of possible adverse reactions and is far too easy to miss.”

From November 1997 through December 2005, the FDA received 262 reports of tendon ruptures, mainly of the Achilles tendon, 258 cases of tendonitis and 274 cases of other tendon disorders in patients using fluoroquinolone antibiotics. An additional 74 tendon ruptures have subsequently been reported to the FDA for a total of 336. Because only a small fraction of cases are typically reported to the FDA, the actual number of ruptures and other tendon injuries attributable to the antibiotic is much higher

Source: Healthy News

One can only imagine the FDA's reaction if 336 tendon ruptures had been reported for those who take the best antibiotic and pathogen destroyer on the planet – colloidal silver. No doubt, they would have raided the manufacturer with storm troopers and shut it down years ago, just as they have done many times with the manufacturers and sellers of other natural competitors to drug company products.

In conclusion, as far as I can tell, not one single instance of Argyria has been attributed to properly made colloidal, that has not stopped the FDA from continuing to "sing the blues" about silver or from going after those who make and sell colloidal silver products, not because silver represents a whit of threat to human health but rather because it represents a threat to the inflated bottom line profits of the mainstream drug manufacturers.

Finding out who the FDA really serves is a simple task – all you have to do is follow the money. Don’t take it from me– see what a noted past FDA commissioner has to say:

"The FDA 'protects' the big drug companies and are subsequently rewarded, and using the government's police powers they attack those who threaten the big drug companies. People think that the FDA is protecting them."

It isn't.

"What the FDA is doing and what the public thinks it is doing are as different as night and day."

Dr. Herbert Ley
Former U.S. FDA Commissioner