YET ANOTHER ILLUSION

JUNE 26, 2011. It was suggested that the composer, Maurice Ravel, was writing “artificial music.”

To which is he replied, “But do these people never come up with the idea that I might be artificial by nature?”

A beautiful joke.

A person lives according to his nature. He can do no more than discover his true nature and follow it. Nature dictates; we fall into line—such facile ideas presume that every individual has some rock-bottom IS he has to conform to, whether he knows it or not. He is predisposed, by forces greater than he will ever understand, to be a certain kind of person.

Well, people try to defy and ignore and sideline and minimize the notion of freedom every way they can. And if they need to posit some sort of overriding chain-link principle, they will. Whatever it takes.

Face it, people love slavery. They’ll grow that garden in the strangest places.

And one of them is NATURE. As in the natural world, or a person’s underlying nature.

Meanwhile the truth is there is absolutely no limit or boundary on imagination. What a person creates isn’t determined by anything other than his own choices. And those choices can be changed or scrubbed at the drop of a hat.

“Your underlying nature” is a psychological spin on a religious concept. It’s yet another thing to bow down to and worship. It’s yet another false trail.

I’ve mentioned before that many teachers of writing bray to their students, “Write about what you know.”

This is like saying, “My son loves candy. So we’re pointing him in the direction of growing up to be a candy salesman.”

Whereas I would tell students, “By all means, write about what you don’t know.”

If you don’t know it, INVENT IT.

Stop praying at the altar of the inevitable. “The inevitable” is just another con.

WELCOME TO THE CHURCH OF NATURE. WE MEET EVERY SUNDAY TO DISCOVER WHAT IS INEVITABLE, SO WE CAN FOLLOW IT TO THE SHORE OF SALVATION AND ENLIGHTENMENT. DROP SOME MONEY IN THE PLATE.

This lunacy has an analogue in anthropology. Imagine this—a group of researchers comes back from a distant planet with the following report:

“Well, we investigated the XYZ people on Ty-1-B, and we found they were free. Each person was intensely creative and imagined and invented what he wanted to.”

No, no, no, no. That’s not going to fly. An anthropologist is supposed to discover the binding customs and traditions and rituals and practices of the tribe or clan. He’s supposed to articulate these behaviors as if they are THE NATURE of the people being studied. He may not say that, but that’s the implication. Otherwise, he’s screwed. Otherwise, he just says, “Well, they CHOOSE. They’re FREE. They CREATE.”

And that would destroy the profession of anthropology.

I’d much rather launch a social science called un-anthropology. Its single tenet is:

YOU HAVE NO UNDERLYING NATURE.

Goodbye. That’s the end of un-anthropology. It lasted three seconds, but in those three seconds it did more good than all the studies and expeditions of all the nosy anthros in the world.

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

GOING TO THE MOVIES

JUNE 26, 2011. His Girl Friday (Cary Grant, Rosalind Russell) generates a breakneck conversational effervescence that’s unmatched in film-comedy.

Ros Russell is steel, glass, and tight-satin immortality. But she’s also in love with Cary, hopelessly, beyond her control.

Howard Hawks delivers a film of merciless happiness; the rocket you’re in is outfitted with chairs whose comfort is custom-made for the far edges of your worldly intelligence.

And if you wanted real religion, the film would be playing in your chapel every day as the central object of contemplation.

In acting schools, teachers say, “Reveal! Don’t indicate!” His GirlFriday contains not a single word or gesture that indicates.

The first time I saw it, on television, I lost track of my living room, and whether it was day or night.

It was as if curtains had parted on an astral island where the law of gravity was banished, and the inhabitants walked on the earth merely because they loved to.

Without a particle of compromise, His Girl lets you know life can be lived in this spirit—feet in the soil, head in the sky, as Dostoevsky said.

Cary Grant plays a con man you would let into your home to take away every possession you have—and you’d be ecstatic about paying the price to have him there for a little while. He’s Hermes, the trickster god, in a suit and tie, rolling along.

During the film, a few characters are dented, but by the end there are no victims. Everyone finds his level.

Jane Roberts, author of the Seth books, wrote about an experience in which she saw a town’s Main Street spread out before her so lucidly that it rose to the level of being an archetype of itself.

His Girl does a similar trick. The first time you see it, you find it hard to believe you haven’t seen it before. You know some part of yourself has been waiting for and anticipating it. And there it is. Ordinary reality transformed without ever having to leave the street.

Cary Grant carries so much magnetic force around with him—but as in no other film, he meets his female match. Russell keeps up with him, line by line, and when she gives ground, it’s only because the plot needs that small movement. Dissatisfied with the way her character was written, she brought in her own writer to lift her to Grant’s level. It worked. That, plus bits of stirring improvisation, of which Hawks happily approved, made the Grant-Russell duo unique wizardry.

You want magic? This is it.

For the past few months, I’ve been writing articles that point out the nonsense of assuming magic is always and only an ancient subject. Magic has to be explored as something that can be invented now. Well, His Girl Friday, made in 1940, is as modern as it gets.

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

UNIVERSE FOR SALE

“Insanity—to have to construct a picture of one’s life, by making inquiries of others.”

Philip K Dick

“The dominant technologies of one age become the games and pastimes of a later age.”

Marshall McLuhan

“It is sometimes possible to change the attitudes of millions but impossible to change the attitude of one man.”

Edward Bernays

JUNE 24, 2011. HEY!

Bargain price. Five-minute money-back guarantee.

We’ll shave down your perceptual field so you can fit in with eight trillion-trillion androids.

You’ll never miss what you can’t see.

Hi, I’m Tom Smith. I’ve lived here myself for many incarnations, and I want to tell you it’s the most fun place you can imagine—especially when you can’t imagine any other universe!

Know what I mean?

On a scale from 1 to 10, your creative impulse will be coming in at about a 2. That’ll cement you right into the limited spectrum, where all the action is.

Now I know you’ve tried other universes, but this one has unique advantages. First of all, you’re a shareholder! That’s right! You’ll own .00000000000000000000009 of a point in the whole set up.

So you’ll feel the satisfaction of a genuine commitment.

Next, you’ll actually get down on your knees and pray to this universe. I know, it sounds odd, but don’t knock it until you’ve tried it. There’s a special hum you sense when you’re subjugating yourself to a “higher essence.”

Jack Boardhead of Alpha Centuri writes in and says: “I never knew how great being a complete schmuck could feel. It’s a jolt unlike any other I’ve ever experienced.”

Thanks, Jack. My regards to the wife and kids. I understand Cindi starts college in the fall. Kudos!

Yes, folks, there really is a sense of family in this universe. People liking people. We’re all in this together. Since you’re a stakeholder, you’ll be in touch with us at the home office, and we’ll be using your testimonials to sign up new residents. There’s room for everybody! If there’s one thing we’ve got, it’s space!

So act now and take advantage of our limited-time offer. Your ticket plus one. Buy one, get one free. Plus the blender, the set of cups and saucers, the booster narcosis vaccines, and the infinity pool. And since this is Tuesday, we have a special! Cemetery plots for the whole family, and storm windows! For the first five hundred callers, a special bonus. Automatic pre-diagnosis of Bipolar and free drugs for the first year!

How’s that for share and care?

Operators are standing by, so call now. If your last name begins with S, free tickets to Sea World!

Note: in unusual circumstances, we will entertain bids from a single buyer. In this case, several attractive options are available. Instant God status replete with heavenly hosts, lost-prophet-returns scenario (legend based on engraved stone cave tablets)—or you can operate as a straight absentee landlord and receive annual status reports in your villa by the sea…

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

IMAGINATION QUOTES

JUNE 25, 2011. Propaganda is the art of shaping a picture of reality for someone who needs one.

Imagination is an interdimensional non-material non-apparatus that doesn’t care about local opinion.

A family is a repertory theater company if it has any sense.

Gold is a theory. It’s a short story that keeps being republished.

The art of politics is faking politics.

In real theater, a character walks out on his character.

A painter wants to bang two or three oceans together.

Language didn’t start out as a practical medium. It moved into that domain after a deep and concealed sense of boredom set in.

Anyone who’s written a novel knows how foolish ordinary reality is.

If scientists found a rebel ant in a colony, they would step on him and then publish what they intended to publish.

Working scientists invent personalities that are proud to have no creative urge. In other words, scientists believe in their own bullshit, but not how it got to be that way.

If a human being is entirely made up of the same particles that compose the universe, how is he making jokes?

There are different ways to use imagination. For example, I knew a guy who told me that a New York painter was a covert spy. Evidence? The painter’s father-in-law was a friend of Nelson Rockefeller. The painter won a fellowship to go to Rome and paint. “All these foundations are linked together in an elite structure.” The painter had a studio near the Vatican, so he was probably brainwashed by the Jesuits and returned to the US. I was told this was “connecting the dots.” Yeah, sure, if the dots are Donald Duck, the planet Venus, a tube of old glue in a cellar in Detroit, and a waitress at a McDonald’s in China. Still, it is imaginative.

TWO DIALOGUES

“Are you John Jones, the painter?”

“Take a look around my studio. What do you think?”

“Well, sir, we came to you because it appears you’re the only person left on the planet who isn’t bored.”

“And?”

“We want to know why. We want to know your secret.”

“Every morning I have three eggs burned badly.”

How badly?”

“Black edges, otherwise crispy. I soak each forkful in my coffee before I eat it.”

“How do you take your coffee?”

“Boiled for six hours. And the orange juice must be drunk out of a long thin test tube. Slowly. I rub my toast with sandpaper, until the browned layer is completely gone.”

“Anything else, sir?”

“Yes. Every night at midnight, I do laundry. But I never put any clothes in the machine. Only rocks.”

The men left, feeling excited.

“I asked you all here today to discuss a new project for the community. It’s about filling a much needed gap. It’s come to my attention that in our schools and local clubs, we lack a sense of creativity.”

“What do you have in mind?”

“Well, as we all know, it’s fun to be creative, so I believe we should start with a few new signs on the highway leading into town. Our town name would be done in a color we’ll choose, instead of the simple black block lettering. And then Grace, at the nail salon, has volunteered to introduce three new shades of pink and orange to her customers. Thank you, Grace. And Bob, our esteemed dentist, is going to change that giant tooth that’s been attached to his waiting-room wall for twenty years. He’s going to put up a huge toothbrush instead.”

“Didn’t you hear? Right after his last patient yesterday, Bob jumped out of his fourth-story window. Fortunately, he landed in a bush.”

“What happened?”

“He left a note on his desk. Said he was bored out of his mind.”

“Well, you see, that’s what I mean. With the new signs and shades of nail polish, and the big toothbrush, we can inspire Bob. We can turn this whole thing around.”

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

PERCEPTION IN A NEW LIGHT

JUNE 24, 2011. Just as you might find that, under the influence of a psychedelic drug, everything you look at is fascinating and engrossing—until the drug wears off—the ordinary mind’s fascination with certain harmonies and patterns seems to find perfection…until that effect wears off and is lost.

The meal was good, it promised much, it met or even exceeded expectations, and then you were sated. Then you didn’t care anymore, until you were hungry again, later in the day.

You stand on a mountain top and look out at the clouds and the sky, and you feel fulfilled and even exalted; and then you climb down the mountain and the feeling recedes.

Pattern, harmony, space, balance, proportions, symmetry—they seem to conspire to produce this exaltation…but only a for a little while.

This “setup” is a kind of spiritual consumerism. You loved the thing you bought until you didn’t, and then you went shopping again. The new became old and then it wasn’t any good anymore, it didn’t provide the same thrill, so you needed to go to the store again.

But despite this on-again off-again, a person can believe this is as good as it gets. This is the pinnacle of experience.

He is “trained” to search out and find the right harmonies, and when he does, he says to himself: THIS IS IT.

He blocks out the knowledge that every time he begins one of these searches, he already knows the perfection he’ll find is temporary. He blocks it out so he can believe “this time” he’ll find the Ultimate.

What I’m describing here is a kind of aesthetic standard and process. It isn’t trivial. It informs many decisions a person makes.

And given that this instinct is alive and well in most people, a culture, a civilization can be designed that is automatically acceptable and even pleasing and authoritative to the general population.

The Pentagon. Not the eight-sided figure with two arms sticking out at weird angles.

The White House is a colonial structure. It isn’t a dome or a Frank Lloyd Wright series of ascending spirals.

And when a president speaks to the nation, a measured tone with even pauses tends to carry the day, because at some level the mind is looking for those rhythms and harmonies.

It’s lock and key.

The object of perception supplies what the mind wants.

This is all, obviously, happening at very superficial level. But that doesn’t diminish its convincing power.

When the subject of magic is introduced, most people automatically assume its images and explanations—and its very substance—is going to follow this familiar lock-and-key pattern. Whatever magic is, it’s going to mirror the superficial mind’s need to discover yet another experience of harmony. Of course. How could things be different?

However, magic is precisely that which moves in at a greater depth than the the percolations of the superficial symmetry-seeking mind.

Magic doesn’t lay itself out like a blueprint of columns and porticoes and balanced wings.

Magic isn’t “speaking that language.” Which is part of the reason it’s magic.

Human beings long and yearn for a certain range of rhythms and symmetries and harmonies…and I don’t care what you’re selling; if you sell it with those qualities intact, they’ll pay for it. They’ll bite.

Doesn’t mean what you’re selling is good or useful or needed. It just means you made the right moves on the chessboard of the superficial mind and its desires.

But what happens when something from the outside is projected into the superficial mind and that something doesn’t carry the right “harmony signatures and ID cards?” It’s rejected.

“I don’t understand it. It doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t add up. This couldn’t be right.”

People can accept the idea that magic is a secret practice from ancient times, and was hidden away by its practitioners for various reasons. They can readily accept that, even though it’s complete nonsense.

The REAL hidden nature of magic is this: it penetrates the superficial mind like an invisible arrow. It isn’t seen at all, because it isn’t in the range of acceptable harmonies.

Of course, as I’ve been saying many times, magic is imagination deployed with great intensity over a long period of time. If you imagine and create those acceptable symmetries and harmonies long enough, because that’s what you gravitate toward, you’ll eventually invent something NEW. Something that lies outside those harmonies. And then you’ll glimpse other dimensions. You’ll INVENT other dimensions. That’s the beginning of the road.

Now, after reading this, you disagree, fine. Find yourself a good photo of the Parthenon and sit down and draw it over and over and over. Make it as perfect as you can. Invent that.

INVENT SOMETHING.

AND KEEP INVENTING.

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

MAGIC IN THE GARDEN

“All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them.”

“To think that realistic fiction is by definition superior to imaginative fiction is to think imitation is superior to invention.”

Ursula Le Guin

JUNE 24, 2011. During the years 1973-1988, I wrote journals. Some of that material made its way into later articles and books and poems.

1973-1988; I learned that boredom was an interesting challenge, because on many days, I couldn’t think of anything to write—until I realized boredom itself could be a prime subject.

How do you dress it up? In what garden can you plant it and watch it grow? Once you address boredom, you find you can’t keep it in one spot. You have to do something with it. You have to twist it and chop it up and burn it and praise it and defame it and stretch it out and tie it into unusual knots.

At that point, it ceases being boredom. When you return to it, it’s not there. There’s a hole where it used to be.

Of course, eventually, I didn’t need it as a starting point. I had worn it out. I’d become bored with boredom.

My journals were a proving ground.

When I opened them up for a look-see in the mid-1990s, I found fragments I wanted to keep. I had no idea what to do with them.

Around 2000, it became clear. Not knowing what to do with the fragments was based on an erroneous notion: that I should write in traditional arcs: beginning, middle, end. This was absurd. I didn’t have to do anything.

I could create, for example, a non-form form in which the fragments were the core and essence and material of the work. I could kick the addiction to arcs.

And so I did.

I did it because I wanted to and because something quite different was exciting to me.

Well, all that’s distant history now. I sketch it in because magic is the alternative time you invent which is composed of fragments.

Each piece implies a new space, which is yours and yours alone.

Many of the dadaists and the surrealists and the collage-makers and cubists realized that a critique of society and conventional reality was only the first step. After that, you just made worlds and universes.

Each fragment is a world.

You stay with a fragment/world as long as you want to. A minute, an hour, a year, ten years. Then you move on to the next one.

The pull away from magic is consensus. What other people think, whether other people will praise you, and how much you need that to go on. The gravitational pull of consensus. As you work, you develop new and better thoughts and insights about that subject.

“It is not necessary for the public to know whether I am joking or whether I am serious, just as it not necessary for me to know it myself.”

Salvador Dali

I did two fictional interviews with Orson Welles because his movies defy the traditional arcs. He doesn’t do beginning, middle, end. He stages progressive episodes (fragments), scenes that are whole and complete in themselves. It really doesn’t matter what happens at the end.

Stravinsky once wrote, “Much of the music is a Merzsbild [combination of all conceivable materials], put together from whatever came to hand. I mean, for example…the Alberti-bass horn solo accompanying the Messenger. I also mean the fusion of such widely divergent types of music as the FoliesBergeres tune at No.40 (‘The girls enter, kicking’) and the Wagnerian 7^th chords at Nos.58 and 74.”

Here is one of the fragments from my old notebooks:

“People don’t realize that, if you paint a picture that is One Whole Beauty, and if others come and look at it wherever it’s hanging, the most you can hope for is that they’ll work a little and then they’ll see that One Whole Beauty, too. And then it’s done. There’s nowhere left to go. People say this is what they want, but when they get it, they leave with a sense of dissatisfaction. Which turns into boredom.”

Of course, people will energetically deny this. They’ll do everything in their power to deny it, because they have a vested interest in One Whole Beauty. They assert it’s “an enduring value.” Or something. They want to avoid the alternative, which is Something Left Over. Something unsettled, unresolved.

They’re programmed for satisfaction, and when they get it, they’re dissatisfied three minutes later. It’s like an itch, and they don’t know where it comes from.

Whereas, if you just give them Something Left Over to begin with, which could engage them for a long time, they reject it.

What they’re rejecting is magic.

It’s not what magic is supposed to be, but it is.

Something Left Over unhitches and neutralizes the ardent little molecules in the superficial mind that seek out perfection. It’s necessary for that to occur, because the superficial sectors of the mind are never going to approach magic or be able to make magic.

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

qjrconsulting@gmail.com

MEDICALLY CAUSED DEATH IN AMERICA: AN EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH DR. BARBARA STARFIELD

By Jon Rappoport

December 6-7, 2009

Inquiries: qjrpress@gmail.com
www.nomorefakenews.com
For Jon’s radio show every Wednesday at 4PM Pacific Time:
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I’ve had many requests for a reprint of this piece.  Here it is.

As the national healthcare bill winds its way through the legislative process (now passed), one explosive factor is being ignored: the American health system, like clockwork, causes a mind-boggling number of deaths every year.

The figures have been known for ten years.  The story was covered briefly when a landmark study surfaced, and then it sank like a stone.

The truth was inconvenient for many interests.  That has not changed.  “Medical coverage for all” is a banner that conceals ugly facts.

On July 26, 2000, the US medical community received a titanic shock to the system, when one of its most respected public-health experts, Dr. Barbara Starfield, revealed her findings on healthcare in America. Starfield was, and still is, associated with the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health.

The Starfield study, “Is US health really the best in the world?”, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association on July 26, 2000, came to the following conclusions:

Every year in the US there are:

12,000 deaths from unnecessary surgeries; 

7,000 deaths from medication errors in hospitals; 

20,000 deaths from other errors in hospitals; 

80,000 deaths from infections acquired in hospitals; 

106,000 deaths from FDA-approved correctly prescribed medicines.

The total of medically-caused deaths in the US every year is 225,000.

This makes the medical system the third leading cause of death in the US, behind heart disease and cancer.

The Starfield study is the most disturbing revelation about modern healthcare in America ever published.  The credentials of its author and the journal in which it appeared are, within the highest medical circles, impeccable.    

On the heels of Starfield’s astonishing findings, media reporting was extensive, but it soon dwindled.  No major newspaper or television network mounted an ongoing “Medicalgate” investigation.  Neither the US Department of Justice nor federal health agencies undertook prolonged remedial action.

All in all, it seemed that those parties who could have taken effective steps to correct this situation preferred to ignore it.        

On December 6-7, 2009, I interviewed Dr. Starfield by email. 

What has been the level and tenor of the response to your findings, since 2000? 

My papers on the benefits of primary care have been widely used, including in Congressional testimony and reports. However, the findings on the relatively poor health in the US have received almost no attention. The American public appears to have been hoodwinked into believing that more interventions lead to better health, and most people that I meet are completely unaware that the US does not have the ‘best health in the world’.

In the medical research community, have your medically-caused mortality statistics been debated, or have these figures been accepted, albeit with some degree of shame? 

The findings have been accepted by those who study them. There has been only one detractor, a former medical school dean, who has received a lot of attention for claiming that the US health system is the best there is and we need more of it.  He has a vested interest in medical schools and teaching hospitals (they are his constituency).  They, of course, would like an even greater share of the pie than they now have, for training more specialists.  (Of course, the problem is that we train specialists-at great public cost-who then do not practice up to their training-they spend half of their time doing work that should be done in primary care and don’t do it as well.)

Have health agencies of the federal government consulted with you on ways to mitigate the effects of the US medical system?

NO.

Since the FDA approves every medical drug given to the American people, and certifies it as safe and effective, how can that agency remain calm about the fact that these medicines are causing 106,000 deaths per year?

Even though there will always be adverse events that cannot be anticipated, the fact is that more and more unsafe drugs are being approved for use. Many people attribute that to the fact that the pharmaceutical industry is (for the past ten years or so) required to pay the FDA for reviews—which puts the FDA into an untenable position of working for the industry it is regulating. There is a large literature on this. 

Aren’t your 2000 findings a severe indictment of the FDA and its standard practices?

They are an indictment of the US health care industry: insurance companies, specialty and disease-oriented medical academia, the pharmaceutical and device manufacturing industries, all of which contribute heavily to re-election campaigns of members of Congress. The problem is that we do not have a government that is free of influence of vested interests. Alas, [it] is a general problem of our society-which clearly unbalances democracy. 

Can you offer an opinion about how the FDA can be so mortally wrong about so many drugs?

Yes, it cannot divest itself from vested interests. (Again, [there is] a large literature about this, mostly unrecognized by the people because the industry-supported media give it no attention.

Would it be correct to say that, when your JAMA study was published in 2000, it caused a momentary stir and was thereafter ignored by the medical community and by pharmaceutical companies?

Are you sure it was a momentary stir?  I still get at least one email a day asking for a reprint—ten years later!  The problem is that its message is obscured by those that do not want any change in the US health care system.

Do medical schools in the US, and intern/residency programs in hospitals, offer significant “primary care” physician training and education?

NO. Some of the most prestigious medical teaching institutions do not even have family physician training programs [or] family medicine departments. The federal support for teaching institutions greatly favors specialist residencies, because it is calculated on the basis of hospital beds.. [Dr. Starfield has done extensive research showing that family doctors, who deliver primary care-as opposed to armies of specialists-produce better outcomes for patients.] 

Are you aware of any systematic efforts, since your 2000 JAMA study was published, to remedy the main categories of medically caused deaths in the US?

No systematic efforts; however, there have been a lot of studies.  Most of them indicate higher rates [of death] than I calculated.

What was your personal reaction when you reached the conclusion that the US medical system was the third leading cause of death in the US?

I had previously done studies on international comparisons and knew that there were serious deficits in the US health care system, most notably in lack of universal coverage and a very poor primary care infrastructure. So I wasn’t surprised.

Has anyone from the FDA, since 2000, contacted you about the statistical findings in your JAMA paper?

NO. Please remember that the problem is not only that some drugs are dangerous but that many drugs are overused or inappropriately used.  The US public does not seem to recognize that inappropriate care is dangerous—more does not mean better.  The problem is NOT mainly with the FDA but with population expectations.

… Some drugs are downright dangerous; they may be prescribed according to regulations but they are dangerous.

Concerning the national health plan before Congress-if the bill is passed, and it is business as usual after that, and medical care continues to be delivered in the same fashion, isn’t it logical to assume that the 225,000 deaths per year will rise?

Probably—but the balance is not clear. Certainly, those who are not insured now and will get help with financing will probably be marginally better off overall.

Did your 2000 JAMA study sail through peer review, or was there some opposition to publishing it?

It was rejected by the first journal that I sent it to, on the grounds that ‘it would not be interesting to readers’!

Do the 106,000 deaths from medical drugs only involve drugs prescribed to patients in hospitals, or does this statistic also cover people prescribed drugs who are not in-patients in hospitals?

I tried to include everything in my estimates.  Since the commentary was written, many more dangerous drugs have been added to the marketplace.

106,000 people die as a result of CORRECTLY prescribed medicines.  I believe that was your point in your 2000 study.  Overuse of a drug or inappropriate use of a drug would not fall under the category of “correctly prescribed.”  Therefore, people who die after “overuse” or “inappropriate use” would be IN ADDITION TO the 106,000 and would fall into another or other categories.    

‘Appropriate’ means that it is not counter to regulations.  That does not mean that the drugs do not have adverse effects.

INTERVIEWER COMMENTS:

This interview with Dr. Starfield reveals that, even when an author has unassailable credentials within the medical-research establishment, the findings can result in no changes made to the system.

Yes, many persons and organizations within the medical system contribute to the annual death totals of patients, and media silence and public ignorance are certainly major factors, but the FDA is the assigned gatekeeper, when it comes to the safety of medical drugs  The buck stops there.  If those drugs the FDA is certifying as safe are killing, like clockwork, 106,000 people a year, the Agency must be held accountable.  The American people must understand that.

As for the other 119,000 people killed every year as a result of hospital treatment, this horror has to be laid at the doors of those institutions.  Further, to the degree that hospitals are regulated and financed by state and federal governments, the relevant health agencies assume culpability.

It is astounding, as well, that the US Department of Justice has failed to weigh in on Starfield’s findings.  If 225,000 medically caused deaths per year is not a crime by the Dept. of Justice’s standards, then what is?

To my knowledge, not one person in America has been fired from a job or even censured as result of these medically caused deaths. 

Dr. Starfield’s findings have been available for nine years.  She has changed the perception of the medical landscape forever.  In a half-sane nation, she would be accorded a degree of recognition that would, by comparison, make the considerable list of her awards pale.  And significant and swift action would have been taken to punish the perpetrators of these crimes and reform the system from its foundations.

In these times, medical schools continue turning out a preponderance of specialists who then devote themselves to promoting the complexities of human illness and massive drug treatment.  Whatever the shortcomings of family doctors, their tradition speaks to less treatment, more common sense, and a proper reliance on the immune systems of patients.

The pharmaceutical giants stand back and carve up the populace into “promising markets.”  They seek new disease labels and new profits from more and more toxic drugs.  They do whatever they can-legally or illegally-to influence doctors in their prescribing habits.  Some drug studies which show negative results are buried.  FDA panels are filled with doctors who have drug-company ties.  Legislators are incessantly lobbied and supported with pharma campaign monies. 

Nutrition, the cornerstone of good health, is ignored or devalued by most physicians.  Meanwhile, the FDA continues to attack nutritional supplements, even though the overall safety record of these nutrients is good, whereas, once again, the medical drugs the FDA certifies as safe are killing 106,000 Americans per year.

Physicians are trained to pay exclusive homage to peer-reviewed published drug studies.  These doctors unfailingly ignore the fact that, if medical drugs are killing a million Americans per decade, the studies on which those drugs are based must be fraudulent or, at the very least, massively incompetent.  In other words, the whole literature is suspect, unreliable, and impenetrable.

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com   

An investigative reporter for 30 years, Jon is the author of an 18-lesson course, LOGIC AND ANALYSIS. To learn more about the course, click here.

Jon is the associate producer on a film in progress, American Addict, detailing the effects of pharmaceuticals on the US population.