About the Author
Henry G. Bieler, MD, studied medicine at the University of Cincinnati, where he came under the lifelong influence of Dr. Martin Fischer, the great physiologist and philosopher. For more than 50 years Dr. Bieler treated great motion-picture stars, coal miners, politicians and professional men, farmers and Pasadena dowagers. He brought thousands of healthy babies into the world, including his own children and grandchildren. He died in October 1975.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1
The Cure Is Worse than the Disease
To live by medicine is to live horribly.
—CARL LINNAEUS (1707–1778)
Eighteen times in every second a prescription is filled by a white-coated pharmacist at one of the fifty-six thousand drugstores in the United States. The staggering cost of these pink, violet, yellow, white, and green tablets, capsules, lozenges, and ampules amounts to $3 billion * a year.
—MARGUERITE CLARK, MEDICINE TODAY, 1960
Twenty-five hundred years ago on the island of Cos in classical Greece a bearded physician-teacher, Hippocrates, sat in the shade of an Oriental plane tree on a lovely hillside and admonished his wide-eyed circle of medical students in one of his most pithy and precise aphorisms: “Thy food shall be thy remedy.”
No one, to date, has more eloquently given us a way of life.
The medical profession insists it strives to emulate the Father of All Physicians and, indeed, is required, before licensing, to take the Hippocratic Oath, one of the most sublime declamations for lofty ethical standards ever penned. Yet today there are thousands of dedicated bacteriologists, pharmaceutical researchers and chemists sitting in gleaming white laboratories in every major city throughout the world, busily turning out synthetic, if highly touted, magic panaceas for every known ailment. Unlike that of the venerable Hippocrates, their battle cry appears to be: “Thy remedy shall be our newly invented remedy.”
Yet despite the advances in technological knowledge and the millions spent on medical research programs, mankind sickens and dies; hospitals and mental institutions are filled to overflowing with the diseased and the hopeless. Here in our own country—where the greatest abundance of foodstuffs and the highest living standards in history are to be found—a truly radiantly healthy person is as rare as a pearl in a barrel of oysters. And although extremely low standards of physical fitness were used, approximately 40 percent of America’s young men were judged unfit for military service in World War II. Three times during the last decade military physical-fitness requirements were lowered. So that while we are the most wealthy country in the world, we are also, comparatively, one of the least healthy.
Why?
What of the future?
Our forecasts for the continued increase in the incidence of cancer, high blood pressure, heart disease—in fact, all the degenerative diseases—are most dismal.
To be sure, new drugs and techniques are waging battle against these great killers. And some succeed. “More often,” admits Furness Thompson, vice-president of a large drug laboratory, “failure is our most important product.” While it is true that no medicine is innocent, one cause of grave concern is the untoward reactions these sometimes dangerously potent drugs may cause—reactions which may extend far into the future. Another serious adverse result of the use of certain drugs is the possibility of addiction. And when the layman goes in for self-medication, using drugs prescribed for others, the result may become truly catastrophic.
Patients storm doctors’ offices, begging for a “quick cure” with a “miracle drug” they’ve just read about in their newspapers, only to discover—in increasing numbers—side effects so serious that presently they have additional disorders in urgent need of treatment. So the help they seek is often outweighed by the tragic damage to the body. And although millions are spent for clinical testing, the study of the action and effects of these extremely hazardous drugs is still in its infancy. One day a new drug is hailed, with typical Hollywood fanfare, as a potential life saver; six months later it is silently withdrawn as a lethal weapon. If patients hounding doctors for a newly available miracle drug would only realize that a sound evaluation of a drug takes months and even years of painstaking work, would they be so anxious to serve as guinea pigs?
Unhappily, anxiety-ridden Americans, following the warning voices of televised drug commercials and newspaper ads, consider health something that can be purchased in a bottle at the drugstore; they forget, or never knew, that health can be found only by obeying the clear-cut laws of nature.
Examples are numerous. Everyone recalls the dramatic headlines, following the too careless use of the European tranquilizer Thalidomide; more shocking was the tragic aftermath of armless and legless babies born to women who took the drug during the early months of pregnancy.
And yet, why did so many European and American women use Thalidomide? Why did many pregnant women offer it to friends who were expecting? Because it brought relief from natural symptoms. When nature starts a pregnancy, she makes strenuous efforts to eliminate all the old accumulated toxic matter in the woman’s body in order to have a cleaner chemical field for the gestation of the fetus. The womb suddenly is transformed from an organ through which vicarious elimination of toxins can take place into a non-menstruating organ which must act as a receptacle for the developing child.
My studies have shown that to facilitate the cleansing process, the mother’s body throws out a great deal of its background toxemia through the liver as an irritating bile. As this is eliminated it causes all the side reactions which may be classified under the heading “toxemia of pregnancy”: nausea, vomiting, fatigue, nervousness, indigestion, headache. Many afflicted women gulped Thalidomide as a miraculous cure for their distress. How tragic that the penalty for numbing the distressing symptoms of early pregnancy should have resulted in such catastrophe!
When a fad develops for a new drug, it can cause extensive damage; the tranquilizers and corticoids are prime examples. Not so well known was the great fad of cod liver oil therapy, now happily on the wane. One cannot help but wonder how many new diseases have been created en route by the barrels and barrels of fish oil for the cure and prevention of rickets. The livers of the dolphin, the cod, the halibut and the shark have been duly processed, clarified, bleached, boiled and refined until they have lost all possible resemblance to their original state:
Although I have delivered thousands of babies over the years (including my own children and grandchildren), I have never used cod liver oil. The babies thrived on a diet of raw milk and raw sugar, with fruits and vegetables added after six months.
The cod liver oil theory was knocked flat by the experiments and observations of Dr. Francis F. Pottenger, Jr. (I will have more to say about his monumental work in another connection.) Dr. Pottenger, in proving that a diet of cooked meat was totally inadequate for carnivorous animals, found that his experimental cats quickly developed rickets. Cod liver oil (the classic remedy) was then administered in increasing doses until it thoroughly purged the sick cats. Unhappily, the rickets remained and a new complication appeared: disturbed digestions. For cod liver oil not only upsets the chemistry of digestion and of the liver but it also causes injury or degeneration to other important organs of the body, especially the thyroid gland, the heart and liver. Yet how many well-meaning mothers are still cramming this evil-tasting oil down their babies’ throats today.
Experiments confirming the harmful effects of drugs, from slight to sinister, axe legion. Yet public interest in new drugs just off the laboratory assembly line is so phenomenal that newspapers and magazines make them front-page news. After amazing reports of an experimental “miracle” drug (written in a bang-bang! style) appear in a weekly news magazine, doctors may be certain that next morning patients will storm in demanding it.
One bang-bang! drug is the celebrated penicillin. As everyone knows, penicillin is a most powerful and valuable agent for the treatment of staphyloccocal and other infections in man. But given indiscriminately for fevers and infections of the respiratory tract, it may have allergic and toxic qualities which are highly dangerous. Just recently, the Los Angeles Times carried the report of a twenty-two-year-old mother who died twenty minutes after she was given a penicillin shot as a precautionary measure to fend off an oncoming cold. She suffered a fatal reaction, despite having experienced no ill effect from “numerous injections” of the drug in the past.
One of the great dangers of the ever lengthening list of antibiotics arises when physicians use them too freely. Some people become very sensitive to antibiotics after they have been given them too many times. The reason for this is that the large molecules in antibiotics readily form antigens with proteins. When this happens, antibodies are formed in the body. If, then, another injection of penicillin is given, disaster arises when it comes in contact with the antibodies within the cells. People who become sensitive also become allergic to the drug. This allergy may show merely as a mild skin rash in some cases; in others it may mean sudden death as a result of anaphylactic shock. Medical literature lists well over a hundred deaths following injections of penicillin. One of the cases described was that of a woman who sprained a toe: as she had for all sorts of minor illnesses in the past, she gratefully accepted a penicillin injection; but she did not survive her visit to the doctor’s office.
From my own files I know of two cases in which physicians used penicillin with unhappy results. A woman of thirty-six, in apparent good health, suffered from a cold and headache. Penicillin was given, although the symptoms were mild and there was no fever. The injection increased the headache. The following day the injection was repeated. This increased the headache enormously. As a result of overstimulation, the pituitary gland increased in size and pressed against the delicate optic nerve. Total blindness followed, from which the patient has never recovered Thus, pressure blindness resulted from the excessive swelling of the pituitary gland brought on by penicillin, a toxic drug. It is, in fact, so toxic that it is thrown out by the kidneys just a few seconds after it is injected, despite the scientific efforts of the pharmacologists to prevent its rapid elimination. Penicillin often accomplishes truly miraculous results by whipping the endocrine glands into hyperactivity. But in the case cited above—over stimulation of the pituitary gland—it brought a tragic result.
