Propaganda Battles

...It is obvious that important studies are being routinely deflected by these AP stories -- deflected by the assumption that the news media reporting the story was knowledgeable and objective. It is my hope that readers who are cognizant that such a manipulation exists, and knowing how it works and what its objectives are, will be better able to blunt its affect on the hearts and minds of the American public."...

See also: "The Spooky Reality Behind Drug-Related News" by Chris Gupta

HOW TO COUNTER THE PROPAGANDA CAMPAIGN AIMED AT MEDICAL ALTERNATIVES

The words of the late Nobel prize winning physicist Richard Feynman bear repeating:

"The principle of science, the definition, almost, is the following: The test of all knowledge is experiment. Experiment is the sole judge of scientific "truth."

These words came to mind Monday, September 2, 1996, while watching a medical report crafted by the CBS news affiliate in Chicago. WBBM television reported that there is a substance commonly found in junk food that explains the 40% drop in heart disease mortality in the United States over the past 20 years.

New to alternative medicine, I have been slow to realize what the field is up against. Although most people are not aware of it, a major news outlet feeding the mass media is being used as a propaganda weapon to spread misinformation about inexpensive alternatives to drugs and other pharmaceutical products. While people may not base their opinions on advertising, they do tend to base their opinions around "news".

For years, as with most people, I believed that news organizations may have bias, but that they mostly held to the ideals of a free press. My naivet? dissipated rapidly upon discovering two years ago that one of the world's greatest scientists had made a significant health claim -- which was not reported by the media. It was particularly troubling to see PREVENTION Magazine's treatment of this matter.

Coincidentally, I began to notice a series of medical stories carried by the national news media. To the uninformed reader these stories appear factual and objective. However, each story provided subtly misleading information always favorable to current medical dogma. Amazingly, these stories were published everywhere simultaneously. What power, I wondered, could get many such questionable stories published universally and so regularly while efforts to publicize a milestone discovery had failed?

..."What power, I wondered, could get many such questionable stories published universally and so regularly while efforts to publicize a milestone discovery had failed?...

...This was a survey of the general public that the PAC/FDA campaign had commissioned in October 1984, in order to identify targets for the campaign. An inspection of the survey is revealing...

...Judging from the survey questions asked, it appears that those surveyed would get the impression that they were being asked these questions to solicit how effective these treatments were. However, the survey results apparently were used to identify what the public considered most effective in order to determine top-ranking priorities for the "anti-quackery" campaign...

It was soon realized that these medical stories, without author and usually published under the banner of the Associated Press, were not the work of amateurs. Carefully crafted, each sentence in a given story by itself was (mostly) factual. Together, as the examples later show, these sentences paint a slanted picture, either confusing or otherwise biased against alternative medicine.

Have alternative medicine and its tools, e.g., the vitamins, been the target of a BIG LIE smear campaign? Author and AMA infiltrator James P. Lisa thinks so. He reported such a campaign in his recent book entitled The Assault on Medical Freedom. Upon representing himself as a free lance writer working on a book about "quackery," Lisa was permitted to see confidential AMA files. On page 56 of Lisa's book the author presents evidence that alternatives have been targeted by pharmaceutical interests, at least since the year 1985:

"In a letter dated February 7, 1985, Mr[deleted] sent Mr [deleted] information about the "Roper poll on quackery." This was a survey of the general public that the PAC/FDA campaign had commissioned in October 1984, in order to identify targets for the campaign. An inspection of the survey is revealing.

Judging from the survey questions asked, it appears that those surveyed would get the impression that they were being asked these questions to solicit how effective these treatments were. However, the survey results apparently were used to identify what the public considered most effective in order to determine top-ranking priorities for the "anti-quackery" campaign.

The following is a sampling of the survey:

How effective do you think (read item) is/are?

The category that "scored" fourth-highest was alternative cancer treatments. The survey also included weight reduction, body wraps, wraps for slimming, electrical muscle stimulators for body toning, creams to eliminate cellulite, DMSO for aches and pains, air ionizers for feeling healthier, laetrile for cancer, pills for a better sex life, pills to sober up, and creams to grow hair. The BIG THREE targets for the campaign became (1)vitamins, (2) chiropractic, and (3) alternative cancer treatments."

THE MEDIA FEED

Regardless of the intentions of various groups with vested economic interests, such a propaganda campaign could not be effective without the major news organizations in the United States, particularly the Associated Press.

Whether stories masquerading as fact are disseminated by the AP because of gullibility or bribery is immaterial. The fact is that the vast majority of Americans, unaware of the economic implications, accept these stories at face value. And, by what power do they gain such easy access to the public mind?

It is obvious that important studies are being routinely deflected by these AP stories -- deflected by the assumption that the news media reporting the story was knowledgeable and objective. It is my hope that readers who are cognizant that such a manipulation exists, and knowing how it works and what its objectives are , will be better able to blunt its affect on the hearts and minds of the American public.

A METHOD TO THE MADNESS

A top marketing dictum is: "Advertising is everything." Poorly conceived advertising may not work well, but advertising is fundamental when marketing to a mass audience. However advertising is costly, and the audience realizes the advertiser's intentions.

Any seller that can generate "news" articles advantageous to its image, products or services, almost "at will", truly has an unfair marketing advantage. First, such an approach is not likely to cost much; but more important, the people receiving the message perceive it as factual news and are more likely to accept the message and to believe it.

How does one go about getting their advertising message presented in the guise of respected news articles? The most obvious way is to issue a press release. There may be less obvious (or ethical ways). In the case of the pharmaceutical propaganda campaign, these strategically timed and carefully constructed articles occur too frequently for amazing good luck to be the only reason they appear.

SCIENCE BY DESIGN

Can public opinion really be influenced by a steady drone of "news" articles designed to create an image of "scientific" allopathic medicine or of "miracle" pharmaceuticals? Lets turn it around.

What if there were a (imagined) steady stream of "news" articles about the number of people that die every year from side effects to common pharmaceuticals, especially if compared to the side effects of vitamins and herbs? Consider the effect of a steady stream of "news" articles in the major media that most allopathic cancer treatments themselves are carcinogenic, or that overuse of common antibiotics is creating a crisis that allopathic medicine may not be able to conquer, but that oxygen therapies will.

Or articles questioning prescription drugs requiring careful supervision one day -- and available over the counter the next. Furthermore, consider the effect of a steady stream of news articles favorable to practitioners of alternative medicine; and how many people are using them, how their therapies are more affective and cheaper, etc. Think of the new image that alternative medicine would have?

Much depends on the credibility of the messenger -- its reputation and the reputation of those providing the "advertising" messages. People must generally perceive propaganda as objective news. The primary intent of this article is to whittle away at that perception.

SOME EXAMPLES

The following examples were clipped from local Chicago papers; the full text of each article can be found on the internet at http://www.internetwks.com/pauling/lie/index.html. These are the tip of the iceberg.

CASE #1: GREAT MAGNESIUM SCARE

On August 29, 1995 the news hit. The essential mineral magnesium, previously thought to be nontoxic, and now widely recognized as first line therapy against heart attack, was implicated in 14 deaths since 1968! This mass murderer was exposed by researchers of the Food and Drug Administration and reported in a publication of the American Medical Association.

It would be news, by the way, if magnesium were really toxic. How and why did this story make all the network and local television news casts and newspapers on August 29-30, 1995?

For the uniformed reader, it is instructive to consider magnesium in the historical perspective. As far back as 1972 the late Dr. Roger J. Williams reported in his book Nutrition Against Disease that a 1957 study showed magnesium to be beneficial to the heart:

"The possibility that magnesium deficiency may also be implicated in coronary heart disease arose when it was reported that injections of magnesium sulfate brought about "dramatic clinical improvement" in patients who had suffered from angina pectoris and coronary thrombosis, and that the lipoprotein levels were brought to normal in many cases."[Bersohn & Oelofse, Lancet: 1:1020, 1957]

More recently, Dr. Brian Leibovitz, Ph.D., editorialized in a recent issue of the Journal of Optimum Nutrition that magnesium:

"is now recognized as a first-line medicine for the treatment of heart attacks. A study published in The Lancet, for example, reported the effects of a double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled study in 2,316 patients with suspected myocardial infarction. The dose of magnesium was high (about 8.7 grams given intravenously over a 24 hour period), but the results were remarkable: magnesium reduced cardiovascular mortality by 25 percent. The author's conclusion: "

"Intravenous magnesium sulfate is a simple, safe, and widely applicable treatment. Its efficacy in reducing early mortality of myocardial infarction is comparable to, but independent of, that of thrombolytic or antiplatelet therapy..."

These findings have been confirmed and reconfirmed in many clinics and laboratories. Teo and colleagues in an analysis of seven clinical studies, for example, concluded that magnesium (in doses of 5-10 grams by intravenous injection) reduced the odds of death by an astounding 55%.Studies of magnesium have revealed it to be Nature's 'calcium-channel blocker'; unlike its drug counterparts, however, magnesium has no toxic side-effects.

Another important effect of supplemental magnesium is its ability to mitigate the cardiotoxic effects of catecholamines. Prielipp and associates, for example, published results of a clinical trial in which magnesium (10 mg per kg body weight per hour, or approximately 700 mg per hour for an average adult) attenuated the cardiotoxic effects of epinephrine in 17 bypass patients."

In summary, magnesium is inexpensive, safe and effective. Now, some 38 years after the Lancet report, it is widely recognized as a crucial life saver, if and when used in the fight against heart attack. All unbiased studies have shown it to be nontoxic, even in very large (gm) amounts.

Why "smear" magnesium? Even more interesting, why would all the mass media be so willing to print the smear? Magnesium is not only a direct competitor for a wide array of expensive cardiac medications: It seems to work better, however its effectiveness directly challenges allopathic medicine's assertions that "simple nutrients" are ineffective in and of themselves therapeutically.

It is bad enough that a story like "the magnesium scare" could make ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, and the papers in the United States based on a single questionable study; one among hundreds that are published each month, but why pick up a story that even the authors admit contain numbers of incidents affecting less than 2 people per year? (By the way, experts we spoke with offered their opinion that the large amount of aluminum consumed was much more likely to be the root cause of the reported problems.) A balanced report would have mentioned the great therapeutic value that is now attributed to magnesium.

CASE #2: VITAMIN A CAUSES BIRTH DEFECTS

The "major" story that a new study identified vitamin A as dangerous and causes fetal defects was given quite a bit of air time on all the local networks October 7 1995. The Boston University study was deemed to be so "important to public health" that results were released two months prior to publication! In other words, two months before the study could be critically analyzed by other scientists.

The reader should be aware that the possibility of "fetal defects" has already been listed in orthodox nutrition text books as a "side affect of vitamin A." That makes for an interesting conundrum. If this is "old news" -- why was it a "major story"? If this is, as we believe, one of the first such study in humans, how did the nutrition text book writers know? Are they clairvoyant?

The absurdity is revealed by the numbers: Boston University's idea of a statistically significant public health risk is an "estimated 5 or 6 per 23,000". Yet this "major" story appeared everywhere.

For the record, here is Dr. Roger J. Williams on Vitamin A and birth defects from page 59 of his 1971 book "Nutrition Against Disease" (paperback edition):

"Vitamin A was one of the first nutrients found to be necessary in the process of healthy development. Many years ago high grade breeding sows were fed a diet deficient in vitamin A during early pregnancy. In one litter of eleven pigs, every animal was born without eyeballs. On the same diet, other abnormalities were also observed -- cleft palate, cleft lip, accessory ears, arrested axcension of the kidneys.

That the lack of vitamin A alone was responsible for the abnormalities was shown by feeding the same animals exactly the same diet with vitamin A added. There were no abnormalities in the litters to which plenty of vitamin A was supplied. Similarly, rats require about twenty times as much vitamin A for maximum reproduction as they need merely to maintain passable health and normal vision."

CASE #3 : VITAMIN C INJECTIONS HELP SMOKERS

On July 1, 1996 the following story was reported nationwide. According to the Munzel study published in the Journal Circulation of the American Heart Association, Vitamin C injections were shown to "almost totally reverse" endothelial dysfunction in chronic smokers. The intent of this story was to "blunt" a vitamin C bombshell.

The AP report glossed over the fact that heart disease is known to result from arterial "endothelial dysfunction," as the story put it. The AP story dodged a bullet by quoting Harvard Professor Eric Rimm who said, "another study in which smokers were given vitamin C pills over eight years found no effect on their rate of heart disease".

As far as I can tell, this claim is false. There was no eight year study at Harvard that gave smokers vitamin C pills. Undoubtedly, the study referred to was the 1992 study "Vitamin E and Coronary Heart Disease in Men" published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

However, that study of health professionals limited its analysis to 667 males suffering cardiovascular disease (CVD), out of 39,910 males given follow-up questionnaires. Only those participants who had originally been free, and then either died of coronary artery disease or suffered a coronary episode were considered.

As an aside, since the antioxidant intake of 39,243 individuals who participated in the study (or 98.3%) that did not develop coronary disease were specifically excluded from the analysis, the Harvard Vitamin E study should not have been used to counter the Munzel study. Rimm could not have noticed a "completely protective affect of vitamin C." No pills were handed out, in any case.

CASE #4 LIPOPROTEIN (A) AND PREMATURE HEART DISEASE IN MEN

This AP article reported on the Lp(a) study by Bostom, et. al. in the August 21, 1996 Journal of the American Medical Association. It was a follow-up to earlier Framingham studies, and where LP(a) measurements were apparently questioned. The study confirmed the earlier work that lipoprotein(a) is an independent risk factor in cardiovascular disease.

The AP title implied that LP(a) is a "new" discovery. I sense the medical profession is about to claim credit itself for discovering LP(a). However, the research on Lipoprotein(a) was well enough developed in 1991-1992 that Dr. Matthias Rath of the Linus Pauling Institute had conducted studies, and Pauling had lectured for years on this danger.

The date of the discovery that LP(a) is a "major" player in heart disease most probably would be in the year 1989. (1988 was the year the Wall Street Journal first reported on lipoprotein(a).)

The more damaging part of the AP lipoprotein(a) article were assertions that "LP(a) is hard to measure accurately" and even when measured, "there are no known ways to reduce its level in the body." Both these assertions are probably false. LP(a) can be measured sufficiently well to establish risk.

Vitamin B3 and Vitamin C have been shown to lower LP(a) blood levels. These studies were not mentioned. Of course the real "bomb shell" that is glossed over is that it is now known that the binding of LP(a) to the walls of damaged blood vessels can be inhibited. Pauling and Rath received the patent for this in 1994. These binding inhibitors, especially the amino acid l-lysine, offer a safer and possibly more effective alternative to angioplasty, coronary by-pass and even Chelation.

CASE #5 VIRUS BLAMED FOR ANGIOPLASTY FAILURE

On August 29, 1996 the following AP article "Study: Virus may negate benefits of angioplasty" appeared. In this case the Associated Press seems willing to print "rank speculation" as news because it appears in a medical journal.

It was infuriating that the Associated Press would allow itself to be used again as a tool by organized medical interests (which can well afford the advertising.) Now we learn that angioplasty fails so often because of a virus that everybody has in their body? Incredible!

I believe that part of the reason a "possible viral role in heart disease" was chosen for this particular piece/study is the important news that Vitamin E prevents the Coxsackie virus from mutating. According to other articles this month, Vitamin E prevents the virus from causing myocarditis, or inflammation of the heart. This unsigned AP article is designed to create confusion on the vitamin E issue.

The AP article does contain some interesting information. For example, it correctly points out that approximately 1/3 of the 400,000 angioplasty operations fail. Restenosis. (Chelation doctors have been pointing to this phenomenon for years and explaining the double standard: Neither angioplasty nor coronary by-pass were ever studied clinically before coming into widespread use, yet the safer Chelation therapy is "criticized" because conventional medicine claims that Chelation lacks appropriate studies.)

It is transparent that in this one article the AP , either wittingly or unwittingly, is misinformation specifically designed to:

1. Delay the recognition of the real reason heart disease is so prevalent. (Chronic vitamin C deficiency). This allows up to 100 billion dollars a year to flow into medical and pharmaceutical coffers in unnecessary expenditures. (By publicizing these 'red herring' articles in the guise of news, the AP has helped certain unscrupulous members of the medical community impede the march of science.),
2. Blunt the effect of the news about vitamin E and viruses, thereby causing confusion,
3. Provide an excuse for the recognized long-term failure of angioplasty.

It Ain't Our Fault!

SUMMARY

The pattern is clear. Mix fact with fiction to protect the status quo, or at least not harm the reputation of pharmaceuticals. When studies damaging to these vested interests are published, a decision is made whether the "news" is likely to get much press on its own.

As most readers already know, much legitimate science is collectively ignored by the mass media. (By the way, the campaign badly misjudged the public reaction and viability of Melatonin, but recently has been trying to make up for that error.)

On the other hand, if some issue considered threatening to the status quo appears, a seemingly favorable "propaganda" article is crafted and disseminated, such as the VITAMIN C INJECTIONS or the NEW FORM OF CHOLESTEROL (LP(a)). These propaganda articles are maddingly accurate, but deflect the importance of the study by subtly distorting the results.

Finally, if facts can not be challenged, then throw out much confusing disinformation to reduce the impact of these facts. For example, silly propaganda stories are released trying to discredit legitimate science, e.g. the "junk food reduces heart disease mortality." It works because the average person can not make sense of a stream of confusing articles. (The question is, how do these articles and theories get publicized so easily?)

The public accepts these AP stories as objective and factual. They are neither. Interested readers can view the actual AP articles cited here and clipped from the newspaper, along with several others, at our internet site http://www.internetwks.com/pauling/lie/index.html.

COUNTERATTACK

It has been said that knowledge is power; people cannot fight something without knowing it exists. First the reader should dispel the notion that much of what is reported by the major media, and medical magazines such as PREVENTION, has anything to do with the betterment of human health. The objectives of the propaganda campaign are to promote the good health and serve the welfare of organized allopathic medicine and pharmaceutical interests.

It seems to me that you, the reader, can be a powerful weapon against the campaign -- a campaign that exists and works only as long as people don't generally realize that it exists. Each and every one of you should write to your newspapers, with a copy to the Associated Press, every time one of these questionable articles appears -- on any subject you happen to know something about.

If sufficient numbers of readers took the time to write and question the accuracy and fairness of these questionable articles, they may be stopped and a major weapon against alternative medicine would be effectively silenced.