Confidential Memorandum from the World Headquarters of Pharmaceutical Politicians, Educators and Reporters (WHOPPER)Most Secret: Your Eyes Only
Distinguished members, our decades of disparaging nutritional therapy have paid off at last. The public, and their healthcare providers, are completely hoodwinked. By pushing "evidence based medicine" on the medical professions, we have elegantly slipped in our choice of evidence to base medicine on. And this is no mere journeyman accomplishment: this is high art. Mr. Machiavelli would be pleased. Certainly the pharmaceutical cartel is. We are well on our way to eliminating the competition, namely that increasingly irritating "orthomolecular medicine" faction.
Here's how we are winning the Vitamin War: It is entirely too obvious, from our reading the nutritional literature, that vitamins and minerals are a well-proven, safe and effective therapy. Of course, anyone knows that to work they must be employed in appropriate doses, just as any drug must be given in an appropriate dose. That is the problem, but it is also our opportunity. Since high nutrient doses work all too well, we eliminate all those embarrassing positive high-dose results simply by ignoring them. By selecting, pooling and analyzing only unsuccessful low dose studies, our conclusions exactly fit what we want the public to believe.
We also make certain to use either synthetic or fractional vitamin E to "prove" that that nutrient not only has no therapeutic value, but is actually dangerous and can kill! Sure, it is an onion in the ointment that there have been no deaths from vitamin E in 28 years of poison control center reporting. But that's a mere fact, and easily ignored.
We are not going to rest on our proverbial laurels. Now that we have set the precedent for shaping medical practice into pharmaceutical hustling, there's even more we can accomplish.
Here is our master plan. We have solidly established that research data can be selected, pooled, meta-analyzed and then dictate solidly "scientific" conclusions. It is now a mere step to do the same in other disciplines, including education, politics, and the social sciences. For example:
Here is unlimited opportunity for social engineering, and we owe it all to S-EBM: Selective Evidence Based Medicine. Yes indeed: it logically proceeds from our widely-publicized analyses of vitamin supplementation, analyses that were limited to studies that used low doses. Math is a wonderful thing: when we sliced statistics into sound-byte-sized pieces, we even proved that vitamin E kills; vitamin C is worse; don't even THINK of taking those B-vitamin supplements; and even multivitamin pills are dangerous. Give us a just while longer: we will rip the carbons out of vitamin D next.
There is so much to look forward to!
(End of memo)
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| My mom, circa 1942 |
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| Mom's sister, my Aunt Rocky (Betty), not sure of the date but about 1942 also. |
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| Mom's brother, my Uncle Jack. Again, circa 1942-1943. I never met Uncle Jack, he died of a lung ailment when I was two years old. I am told I have his (and Aunt Rocky's) sharp, wicked sense of humour, and for that I am grateful! |
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