Greetings family, clients, friends and colleagues!

Today I was made aware of an interesting article posted on www.BlackAmericaweb.com. 

This is an article written to Tom Joyner (radio host) from a medical doctor exposing personal truths and experiences, regarding the pharmaceutical industry and the American practice of administering medicine as a business.

The information provided is very thought provoking and hopefully will ignite your interest to conduct your own personal research regarding medications and make a conscious and informed decision concerning your health.

If you are unable to view the attachment below, you can go to the following website for the entire article posted today, 11/1/10...

http://www.blackamericaweb.com/q=articles/life_style/fitness_life_style/23162/1   

Dear, Mr. Joyner:

I know that you are passionate about the well-being of the African-American community. Your commitment is shown in your sponsorship of a broad range of uplifting activities, including "Take a Loved One to the Doctor Day." I truly admire your courage. I would like to share with you some of the things that I have grown to understand in my 24 years as a family practice doctor.

The decision to become a doctor was made with the desire to help people, but it took me almost two decades to learn the difference between the science of medicine versus the business of medicine. Medical training only taught me the former. For 18 years, I followed that training, before I awoke from my fog, to understand that I was little more than a glorified drug dealer. Today, medical training leaves doctors with only one of two skill sets - prescribing drugs or performing surgery - and I was not a surgeon. Nowadays, going to the doctor means getting one of these two options. My epiphany came when I realized that drug companies were not really pursuing cures. Research is being conducted for treatments, drugs that people need to take every day of their lives. That realization sent me on another journey to find out how I landed in that place.

Here's how it works: The way to make money selling prescription drugs is to have a monopoly. This is provided to companies by drug patents. You cannot get a patent on substances that occur naturally in the body. Therefore, they come up with substances that are close to natural ones. This strategy is even better for them because you don't really fix the patient; you merely Band-Aid their symptoms so you can keep them going to the pharmacy each month. The drugs also all have side effects (they routinely downplay) and because these often do not occur right away, neither the doctor not the patient attributes new symptoms to the old drugs and merely add another drug. When I audited my own practice years ago, I realized that the drugs I was prescribing for acid reflux and indigestion (Prilosie, Nexium, Prevacid) were causing my patients nerve problems like sciatica, carpal tunnel syndrome, migraines, numbness in fingers, etc. The only way I connected the dots was because I also treat those things. If I were a gastroenterologist, no one would even return to me complaining of those things; if they did, they would most likely get referred to a neurologist. The new doctor is not likely to blame the old guy's drugs; instead, he rather adds one and continues the cycle.

My profession did not sell out patients knowingly, but we sold them out nonetheless. This is why the Medicare generation takes so many drugs. In the conventional medical model of care, there is no effort to find out what is actually wrong with patients; instead, the economics dictate that doctors earn a living by volume. This is especially true for family doctors. The standard of care has become running into the exam room, doling out a handful of prescriptions and running out the door and hiring PAs and nurse practitioners to do the same.

Many in the drug industry are laughing at doctors, bragging that they own us and that "we are too arrogant and stupid" to even know it. This is a problem for the entire society, especially the African-American community. People lead us to believe that researchers are looking for cures when they are just looking for steady drug sales. Two decades ago, I sat in lectures that warned of a looming ..... diabetes epidemic. The epidemic is here, and there is no economic incentive to make it go away. You can sell diabetes drugs, testing supplies, and when you then have complications, you can sell them surgical procedures, durable medical supplies and even more drugs. There is a new line of frozen foods coming especially for diabetes. Diabetes is a cottage industry, Today's warning about a pending Alzheimer's epidemic feels all too familiar.

Today, 80 percent of our health care dollars are being spent on care referred to as chronic diseases, which have no clear cause and effect. They contrast problems like a broken arm or having appendicitis that usually have a quick surgical fix, referred to acute care. We have a great rescue system of care, which makes those reality emergency room reality shows so popular. We are all awestuck by some of the headline-making medical accomplishments - like transformational surgical procedures such as organ or face transplants, separation of conjoined twins, saving someone with a pole impaled through their chest, but this is not what most doctors do. We are facing growing epidemics in obesity, diabetes, Alzheimer's, heart disease and cancer, etc., and believing that there is the pursuit of cures. When I emerged from my drug-prescribing stupor and saw that these substances were stopgap measures at best, I realized that cures would require a different approach. We would have to return to the use of basic science (abandoned by doctors, in lieu of prescribing drugs), understand how the body works and restore it to its normal way of working. Since drugs were never a part of the original healthy design, they can never be a part of the permanent healthy solution. The design calls for nutrients, but most people are surprised to learn that nutrition is not a part of regular medical training.

The omission of nutritional training for physicians (when the body is designed to run on nutrients) left me curious about training. I now understand; drug companies begin underwriting medical education at the medical school level. In effect, they grow their own prescribers, and I was a product. They continue to "educate" us by underwriting medical conferences in which they continue to supply us with their studies. The scientific study was their tool to outsmart my profession. I was naive and believed I was learning how to provide better care for my patients in these lectures. In truth, they were merely veiled sales pitches.

The majority of my colleagues still have not realized this. So, it makes me sound like a kook to say these things. I have been reluctant to say them to people other than my patients and those close to me, but I am aware that my silence is costing people their lives. I am not alone in being "in the closet." There is a growing cadre of doctors just like me. Drugs are big money makers. Before I realized I was being pimped, I thought my weekend trips to places like Las Vegas and the Doral (I don't even golf, so it was a spa weekend for me), and all sorts of professional sporting events, which all included an hour-long lecture, were purely educational.

The entire country has been convinced that high cholesterol is the cause of heart disease, and I was a huge Lipitor prescriber. It turns out that high cholesterol is not the problem; it's having your cholesterol rusted (oxidized) that is the problem. Rather than lowering cholesterol with drugs, people should be focused on increasing their antioxidant levels, and the drugs don't do this. Millions of people are taking these drugs, but still having ..... angioplasties, bypasses, stents, heart attacks and strokes - all the things I was told I would be preventing by prescribing them. It ain't happenin'.

A big side effect of cholesterol-lowering drugs is that they cause the body to shift away from the production of hormones like testosterone towards cortisol (a stress hormone). This results in the inability to build muscle - even when working out - and impotence. Men in their 40s thinking Viagra is normal. Doctors are taking these drugs and causing themselves the same problem, and don't know it. Lipitor is the best-selling drug in the world. The same company (Pfizer) also makes Viagra. The new commercials for Low T (for testosterone) are a continuation of the cycle of causing a problem and adding another drug, keeping people at the pharmacy every month. The same hormone shifts also lead to more estrogen and more body fat.

In the late 1990s, drug companies lobbied Congress and got the right to engage in direct to consumer advertising of drugs; prior to that, it was illegal. Now, every other TV commercial is for a drug. Why would you market to someone something that they can't even go out and buy? The public was always the real mark for the companies. First, they controlled the doctors, then they used the doctors to sell drugs to the public. Con men always get you by gaining your trust. We trusted the drug companies (they scammed us with their scientific studies), and the public trusts the doctors.

I now practice functional medicine, a style of practice that seeks to find out what is really causing patients' symptoms. I use drugs as a stop-gap measure and use nutrition, supplements and botanicals as I look for patients' underlying problems. I have been flying under the radar screen because when you think and act differently than the group, you often face scrutiny of licensing entities, which are all about preserving the status quo.

I actually started this letter to you a year ago. For the past five years, I have been spreading my message through women, who are usually the ones who determine what their families do for health measures and the family diet. I have grown my functional medicine practice this way. I belong to the Institute for Functional Medicines (IFM) and encourage you to check out the IFM website. There are my peers. I could not remain silent about this any longer.

Sincerely,

Maxine J. Thomas, MD

I WILL YOU WELL AS ALWAYS,

Doris Moton-Spruill,

Certified Health & Wellness Coach

Health And Wealth Management LLC

310 Bert Lane Inkster, MI 48141

Direct Line 734-895-7409 Fax 734-895-6597

YBPO411@yahoo.com

www.yourhealthiswealth.org

"It is cheaper and more effective to maintain good health than to regain it once it's lost."

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