naturopathydigest.com -- How the Public Is "Educated" to Rely on Drugs

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How the Public Is "Educated" to Rely on Drugs

The Role of Formal Education, News, Television Shows and Direct-to-Consumer Advertising

By Alex Vasquez, DC, ND, Editor, Naturopathy Digest

One of the most important tools for any large-scale strategic campaign, whether it's political, military or merely commercial, is the shaping and controlling of the information and options people are exposed to, such that the targeted population is subtly corralled into making "appropriate" decisions.

Choices deemed "appropriate" are those that benefit the prevailing power structures, many of which are interconnected and symbiotic, often at the expense of what is in the best interest of the public in general and patients in particular.
Rather than assuming that corporations and other agencies are altruistic and beneficent, and that the policies they advocate are made with our best interests at heart, we can look to the effects of their actions and determine their intentions retrospectively. This approach is effective for deciphering and deflating the promotional platitudes that precede and surround events that at first appear reasonable and beneficial, but which, upon final analysis, restrict our options, limit our potentials and keep us bound within a corral from which we can neither escape nor control our own destinies. The limitations applied to patients are different from those applied to professionals, but the intention is the same: to limit the "appropriate" options to those which benefit the powers that shape the policies and paradigms within which we live.¹
Tools used to control the public also apply to professionals, since professionals become "the public" when they leave the office or turn on the television. The three largest tools in this regard are formal "education," "news" and television in general, including both shows and advertisements. Regarding the first, you will notice that the vast majority of public and private educational programs - primary, secondary, undergraduate and graduate - have omitted health education and physical exercise from their graduation requirements. This is important because, to have a general public that can easily be influenced by advertisements and "the latest news," they must first be uninformed: blank slates upon which the latest "medical breakthrough" and direct-to-consumer advertisement can be inscribed.
Knowledgeable and empowered people with fully developed internal loci of control do not make for very profitable consumers, and they are relatively immune to simplistic and flashy advertising that promotes the latest symptom-suppressing drug. Importantly, with regard to lifestyle, classroom-based educational settings also perform the important role of training people to be sedentary.
Second, it's important that news stories are sufficiently contradictory that the public is maintained in a perpetual state of confusion about the value of diet, exercise and "alternative" therapies. Thus, research refuting the value of vitamin D and calcium for bone health,² and "expert opinions" stating that herbs such as kava³ and willow bark⁴ are dangerous because they are unregulated, must receive front-page headline priority. No mention should be made of the 3,500 Americans killed every week by the "appropriate" use of medical drugs (greater than the number of deaths in the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, every week) or that hospital-supervised medical treatments are one of the leading causes of death in the U.S.^5-7 (If this news received public attention, our health care system might change!
Third, entertainment also can be leveraged to influence "appropriate" decision-making. Television shows can glorify medical doctors as "modern-day heroes" and depict them as having penetrating insight and unending compassion.
Interspersed between television segments will be drug advertisements, which have now become the largest single source of health-related information for the U.S. public. According to a recent article, "Americans who watch average amounts of television may be exposed to more than 30 hours of direct-to-consumer drug advertisements each year, far surpassing their exposure to other forms of health communication."⁸ So, if a patient watches an average amount of television and one hour of medically centered television per week, he or she is being exposed to more than 82 hours per year of sound, color, drama and enticements that adore and aggrandize the medical profession and its pharmacocentric paradigm. Every advertisement for a pharmaceutical drug is an advertisement for the allopathic medical profession, particularly as drug ads generally convey the message that "your disease is not your fault and is not caused by your unhealthy diet and sedentary lifestyle; your condition is probably either idiopathic ("the cause is not known"⁹) or genetic, and in either case, you should ask your doctor if a prescription is right for you."
Rather than seeing America's abysmal health status, unbearable costs and lethality as a problem or mistake, I suggest we might attempt to understand the forces that have shaped our society into its current form. Disease does not occur without cause, nor does an entire society destroy itself without being taught, encouraged and seduced to do so. In the slow process of lifestyle-induced decline, disease and disability, patients are excellent customers for pharmaceutical products; this is great for business if you are a drug company or a health care profession that requires a customer base of passive and uneducated patients.^10-17 How strange it is that naturopathic physicians have the audacity to resist these trends by empowering and educating their patients in the cause and prevention of disease, and the proper use of diet and exercise. More power to us!
References

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Vasquez A, Manso G, Cannell J. The clinical importance of vitamin D (cholecalciferol): a paradigm shift with implications for all healthcare providers. Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine 2004;10:28-37. Click to view it online; Vasquez A. Subphysiologic doses of vitamin D are subtherapeutic: comment on the study by The Record Trial Group. The Lancet 2005. Published online May 6; Vasquez A, Cannell J. Subphysiologic doses of vitamin D are subtherapeutic: Comment on the study by Porthouse and colleagues. [rapid response]. British Medical Journal, May 4, 2005. Click to view it online; and Vasquez A, Cannell J. Calcium and vitamin D in preventing fractures: data are not sufficient to show inefficacy [letter]. British Medical Journal 2005;331:108-9.
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"Recent estimates suggest that each year more than 1 million patients are injured while in the hospital and approximately 180,000 die because of these injuries. Furthermore, drug-related morbidity and mortality are common and are estimated to cost more than $136 billion a year." Holland EG, Degruy FV. Drug-induced disorders. Am Fam Physician 1997;56:1781-8, 1791-2.
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Vasquez A. Twilight of the idiopathic era and the dawn of new possibilities in health and health care. Naturopathy Digest, March 2006. Click to view it online.
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Smith R. Medical journals are an extension of the marketing arm of pharmaceutical companies. PLoS Med May 2005;2(5):e138. Epub May 17, 2005: Click to view it online.

About the Author: Dr. Alex Vasquez graduated from Western States Chiropractic College in Portland, Ore., in 1996, and then enrolled in the naturopathic medicine program at Bastyr University. By the time he graduated from Bastyr in 1999, Dr. Vasquez had published 13 articles in magazines and peer-reviewed medical journals and was a recognized authority on disorders of iron metabolism. Dr. Vasquez was later appointed to teach rheumatology, orthopedics, and radiographic interpretation at Bastyr. For family reasons, Dr. Vasquez returned to his hometown of Houston in 2002 and started a new private practice of natural medicine.