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5.0 von 5 Sternen
"The 'Silent Spring' of Alternative Cancer Therapies", 17. Juli 2000
WHEN HEALING BECOMES A CRIME, Kenny Ausubel, Rochester, VT: Healing Arts Press, 2000, 461pp., $19.95 Despite being involved in alternative medicine (specifically homeopathic medicine) since 1972, I have always had strong skepticism of alternative therapies for cancer. I questioned their true effectiveness, and even more, I questioned the ethics of their advocates. After reading Kenny Ausubel's newest book, I realize now how effective the propaganda against alternative cancer therapies have been on me, despite my own predilections towards alternative medicine and my strong skepticism of conventional approaches. I was truly blown away by WHEN HEALING BECOMES A CRIME. What the SILENT SPRING did for the environmental movement, his book does for the alternative cancer movement (perhaps this book should have been called or sub-titled THE SUPPRESSED SPRING, since the AMA, the FDA, and the drug companies have been so effective in suppressing any positive information about these therapies and have been extraordinarily effective in providing misinformation about them). The general public is interested in alternative medicine, not only in recent times, but Ausubel references a Chicago Medical Society survey that discovered that 85% of Americans used "drugless healers" in the early 1940s. The misinformation and demonization of alternative medicine by the AMA and the FDA is quite remarkable and sad (no, St. Johns wort won't cure this depression!). This McCarthyization of alternative healers predated McCarthy and didn't simply destroy people's lives as McCarthy did, but also led to earlier death of hundreds of thousands of people by foisting upon them as the only appropriate treatment for cancer, the notoriously ineffective and dangerous primitive radiation and chemotherapy of the day. This book details the experience of Harry Hoxsey and his herbal formulas for people with cancer. Despite getting arrested over a hundred times in one two-year period and hundreds of more times before and after this, Harry Hoxsey's leading nemesis, AMA leader Morris Fishbein, acknowledged under oath that Hoxsey's therapy was indeed effective in treating certain types of cancer, though this statement never changed his heavy-handed efforts to make access to Hoxsey's treatment difficult or impossible. Hoxsey's clinic has been forced out of the US and into Mexico since the early 1960s, but it still provides care for people, even though, remarkably enough, it STILL is not allowed back in the US. The book also provides a fascinating history of the AMA's rise to respect in the 20th century, in large part to its leader, Morris Fishbein, MD, who never practiced a day of medicine himself and who flunked anatomy in medical school. His efforts to get drug and tobacco companies to advertise in AMA journals made the AMA rich and ultimately powerful, and it led the AMA to attack any others who questioned conventional medical treatment or who offered viable alternatives. This book is riveting but can and will lead to fits of anger at orthodoxy's impressively effective PR efforts to make successful spokespersons for alternative medicine into quacks and criminals. This book is also extremely well referenced, both to historical records as well as modern scientific literature. The amount of scholarship that went into writing this book is admirable. Dana Ullman, M.P.H. Homeopathic Educational Services
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