Killing Us Softly: The Sense and Nonsense of Alternative Medicine. Dr Offit Paul

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      How could this be? Given that free radicals clearly damage cells—and given that people who eat diets rich in substances that neutralize free radicals are healthier—why did studies of supplemental antioxidants show they were harmful? The most likely explanation is that free radicals aren’t as evil as advertised. Although it’s clear that free radicals can damage DNA and disrupt cell membranes, that’s not always a bad thing. People need free radicals to kill bacteria and eliminate new cancer cells. But when people take large doses of antioxidants, the balance between free radical production and destruction might tip too much in one direction, causing an unnatural state in which the immune system is less able to kill harmful invaders. Researchers have called this “the antioxidant paradox.” Whatever the reason, the data are clear: high doses of vitamins and supplements increase the risk of heart disease and cancer; for this reason, not a single national or international organization responsible for the public’s health recommends them.

      In May 1980, during an interview at Oregon State University, Linus Pauling was asked, “Does vitamin C have any side effects on long-term use of, let’s say, gram quantities?” Pauling’s answer was quick and decisive. “No,” he replied. Seven months later, his wife was dead of stomach cancer. In 1994, Linus Pauling died of prostate cancer.

      Despite a wealth of scientific evidence, most people don’t know that megavitamins are unsafe. So why don’t more people know about this? And why haven’t regulatory agencies sounded an alarm? The answer is predictable: money and politics.

Part III

       3

       The Supplement Industry Gets a Free Pass: Neutering the FDA

      Liberty for the wolves is death for the lambs.

      —Isaiah Berlin

      Government oversight of the pharmaceutical industry has been a long, tortuous journey filled with unimaginable tragedies. “The story of drug regulation,” wrote historian Michael Harris, “is built on tombstones.”

      It started with purveyors of patent medicines.

      “How much is your health worth, ladies and gentlemen? It’s priceless, isn’t it? Well, my friends, one half-dollar is all it takes to put you in the pink. That’s right, ladies and gents. For fifty pennies, Nature’s True Remedy will succeed where doctors have failed. Only Nature can heal and I have Nature right here in this little bottle. My secret formula, from God’s own laboratory, the Earth itself, will cure rheumatism, cancer, diabetes, baldness, bad breath, and curvature of the spine.”

      In the 1800s, medical hucksters could claim anything. Boston Drug cured drunkenness. Pond’s Extract treated meningitis. Hydrozone prevented yellow fever. Peruna calmed inflammation of the ovaries. Liquozone cured asthma, bronchitis, cancer, dysentery, eczema, gallstones, hay fever, malaria, and tuberculosis. And Dr. Williams’ Pink Pills for Pale People treated all that and more. Sales were limited only by what customers were willing to believe. By the turn of the century, patent medicines were a $75-million-a-year business. It didn’t last. On June 30, 1906, the federal government stepped in, passing the Pure Food and Drug Act. Three men led the charge; one was concerned about foods, another about drugs, the third about neither.

      Harvey Washington Wiley was raised on a farm in southern Indiana. He studied classics at nearby Hanover College before serving as a corporal in the Civil War. Although Wiley later graduated from Indiana Medical College, he never practiced medicine. Rather, he pursued his love of science, obtaining a degree in chemistry from Harvard. In 1874, Wiley became the chair of the chemistry department at the newly opened Purdue University. Ten years later, he was chief chemist at the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), at a time when the food industry, like the drug industry, was unregulated. Wiley watched helplessly as Americans consumed spoiled meat, sawdust-adulterated flour, and formaldehyde-preserved milk. It was time, Wiley argued, for the federal government to step in.

      Samuel Hopkins Adams graduated from Hamilton College before joining the staff of the New York Sun, one of the nation’s most influential newspapers. On October 7, 1905, Adams published the first of a series of articles in Collier’s magazine titled “The Great American Fraud.” Adams wanted Americans to know what they were buying. So he sent samples of patent medicines to chemists, finding that many contained large quantities of alcohol: Paine’s Celery Compound contained 21 percent; Peruna, 28 percent; and Hostetter’s Stomach Bitters, 44 percent. (To put this in perspective, beer contains 4 to 6 percent alcohol, wine 10 to 15 percent, and whiskey 35 to 45 percent.) Patent medicine makers were in the liquor business. They were also in the narcotics business. Adams found that several medicines contained opium, morphine, hashish, and cocaine. These drugs were often given to babies; Winslow’s Soothing Syrup, for example, was loaded with morphine. When Adams asked his maid how she had left her small children alone at night, she replied, “They’re all right. Just one teaspoon of Winslow’s and they lay like dead until morning.” Perhaps the best example of the subterranean narcotics industry was Coca-Cola, introduced in 1886 as an “Intellectual Beverage and Temperance Drink” that offered the virtues of cocaine without the stigma of alcohol.

      By the last installment of “The Great American Fraud,” in February 1906, Samuel Adams had exposed 264 companies and individuals, listed scores of people who had died from dangerous drugs, and shown that many patent medicines had caused diseases rather than treated them. “Every man who trades in this market, whether he pockets the profits of the maker, the purveyor, or the advertiser, takes [his] toll of blood,” wrote Adams. “Here the patent medicine business is its nakedest, most cold-hearted. Relentless greed sets the trap, and death is partner in the enterprise.” More than 500,000 Americans read “The Great American Fraud.”

      With the public up in arms about Adams’s publication, Harvey Wiley felt the time was right. He proposed a federal law to “cover every kind of medicine for external and internal use,” which would require manufacturers to list all ingredients and prohibit them from selling narcotics without a prescription. Wiley’s proposal angered the Proprietary Association of America, lobbyists for the industry. “Such a law,” advised its Committee on Legislation, “would practically destroy the sale of proprietary remedies in the United States.” Industry executives successfully lobbied to kill the bill.

      And that would have been the end of it had it not been for a die-hard socialist who, if anything, wanted less government, not more.

      Upton Sinclair was an unknown journalist who railed against the sins of American capitalism. In the early 1900s, he traveled to Chicago to write a fictional work about the plight of immigrant workers in the meatpacking industry. With The Jungle, Sinclair wanted to inspire his readers; instead he nauseated them. “There would be meat that had tumbled on the floor, in the dirt and sawdust, where the workers had tramped and spit uncounted billions of consumption germs,” wrote Sinclair. “There would be meat stored in great piles in rooms; and the water from leaky roofs would drip over it, and thousands of rats would race about on it. It was too dark in these storage places to see well, but a man could run his hand over these piles of meat and sweep off handfuls of the dried dung of rats. These rats were nuisances, and the packers would put poisoned bread out for them; they would die and then rats, bread and meat would go into the hoppers together.” Sinclair described how employees occasionally СКАЧАТЬ