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FILMMAKERS NOTEBOOK 148
CHRONIC ILLNESSES: Who’s killing us, and how?
We at Snowshoefilms first learned of microbiologist Garth Nicolson
from epidemiologist Rosalie Bertell when we interviewed her in
Buffalo, N.Y. in 2003. We finally caught up with Nicolson five years
later, in Sudbury, Canada, at the 9th annual Common Cause Medical
Research Foundation Conference (August 29-31, 2008), where he was a
keynote speaker. After his extraordinary lecture, we put a few quick
questions to him, one of the nation’s leading medical scientists.
WEAPONIZED MYCOPLASMA “Mycoplasma is a bacteria, but it’s a bacteria
without a cell wall, so it’s a very primitive bacteria. It’s lost a
lot if its genetic information, so it has to depend upon the host to
survive and grow…these are all naturally occurring organisms; in some
cases they’ve been
modified by the techniques of genetically engineering, for different
uses. One of the uses has been to make a ‘non lethal biological
warfare agent.’
AN ATTACK ON OUR HEALTH
“I think it’s turned out to be an attack on our health because
biological agents are not controllable. And so, whenever they’re used
in experiments, for example, or human protocols in any way, they can
get loose and have gotten loose over the years, and spread into the
human population. This is a fact; you just cannot control biologic
agents. So I think in these cases [mycoplasma experiments, e.g.,
Huntsville, Texas prison], there were mistakes that were made. They
got loose; they get loose naturally; and they penetrate into the
population.
The real problem here is that they’re continuing to penetrate deeper
and deeper into the population because people, physicians, scientists
and so on don’t recognize the danger of these pathogenic agents.
MYCOPLASMA AIDS CO-FACTOR
“HIV AIDS, HIV virus doesn’t really kill people. It has to have a
co-factor and the mycoplasma is thought to be one of the co-factor
organisms that goes along with HIV virus. And that really causes the
pathogenic event, not the HIV virus because reducing the CD4 levels
doesn’t really kill anyone, but these opportunistic infections – or
purposeful infections – do. So, in that regard, I think it’s
imperative that we not only find these infections where they occur,
but they need to be appropriately treated.
PROFITS OVER PEOPLE
“We do know that pharmaceutical companies depend upon a lot of their
profits from drugs and so on to treat chronic illness – and these are
patients that they think they’re going to have for the rest of their
lives, so it’s a big profit center for them, so they’re trying to move
into the area of chronic illness in general. They don’t really like
solutions to these illnesses because it cuts into their profits,
long-term profits. So, that regard, they have not been our best
friends. Now whether there’s collusion between industry and
government, we really don’t know. We know that industry was involved
in some cases in the development of biological warfare agents, for
example, in their testing. But that’s sort of out of my realm. We see
what happens in the end result, the patients that come down with these
different diseases, and so on, of unknown origin. And we have to deal
with those problems and that’s what we do, primarily.
THE INCEST: Big Pharma & the Medical Industry
“There’s kind of an incestual relationship between the pharmaceutical
industry and the medical industry as a whole. The medical industry is
dependant on the pharmaceutical industry to support research, for
example, clinical trials and so on. On the other hand, the medical
industry is quick to use pharmaceuticals to solve some of the
problems, just because it seems like a quick fix. There’s also a lot
of marketing going on, marketing to physicians, for example, to employ
certain pharmaceuticals in the treatment of certain illnesses and so
on, even though they might be of questionable value, for example, in
terms of treatment. So, you might think there’s conflict of interest
here, at a minimum. But these relationships have kind of been
ingrained in western medicine, between the pharmaceutical companies
and the physicians who treat patients. So, it’s kind of hard to
counter that, break that stranglehold, more or less, on the medical
community, that is apparent in terms of the drug manufacturers and
their influence on them.
PATIENT SUPPORT GROUPS
“What we’ve found over the years is that the best place for patients
getting information about physicians and health care workers in
general, is to go to patient support groups. These are groups that
collectively get together and they often know the right and the wrong
physicians to go to in a general area. So your local support group is
often the best source of information about local physicians. And I
think this is really what people need to know.
CHRONIC ILLNESS TREATMENT
“There’s always hope for anybody that’s chronically ill. There are a
number of reasons for their chronic illness and they have to find
different physicians, for example, that can sort through these
problems. They need to seek out medical care that is broad-based, that
is not simply using traditional medicine but also uses untraditional
medicine because often this gives tremendous relief to patients; it
may not cure them but it gives them relief. And we’ve tried to take a
very open-minded view of this whole problem. So we recommend, on our
website (www.immed.org), for example, a lot of non-traditional
treatments, either considered naturopathic treatments, for example, or
supplements, for example, to treat illness. It’s not a panacea but it
does help patients. But overall it really requires a kind of a
comprehensive, holistic approach to treat these chronic illnesses. It
can’t just be done simply by going to your GP, for example, or going
to your holistic practitioner, as well. So it requires a little bit of
push and pull between the traditional and non-traditional approaches;
every patient is different and each patient requires a lot of personal
attention and care.
“People, for example, that come to us, have been to on average to over
20 different physicians and found no relief whatsoever. And they’re
just desperate to find anything that will help them. And we give them
some clues on our website; it gives information to patients on what
they can do for themselves, to help themselves. A lot of it depends
upon some very fundamental issues. We start with diet, modification of
diet; we go from there to supplements and from there to more
traditional western type medicine, pharmaceutical medicines that are
useful, not those that are just palliative but those that are actually
useful in really eliminating the disease process. And it seems to
require that type of holistic approach.
CODEX ALIMENTARIUS
I think in terms of the Codex problem that you mentioned, it’s all
about money. The large pharmaceutical companies would like to control
the whole vitamin and supplement industry because they see that as a
threat to their future profits, or they see it as a profit center they
would like to acquire as one of their own profit centers. So one way
they have, influence the government so they can seek to control that
through governmental regulation and force us to go to them to get our
supplements and vitamins. I’m absolutely dead against that because I
just don’t think the major pharmaceuticals companies are friends to
patients that have these illnesses.
PROFIT OVER PEOPLE
I’m mostly directing my comments to the higher levels of the
pharmaceutical companies. Most of these large multinational
corporations have been taken over by the bean-counters, so these are
the ‘bottom line’ people that are worried about profits. In the old
days, there actually used to be scientists and physicians in command
of these large pharmaceutical companies, and that’s no more. So, if
anything, I think we need to have a little bit of readjustment there.
We need to have a little bit of balance in these pharmaceutical
companies so they’re not just interested in the bottom line, they’re
interested in the overall health of their constituents.”
Transcribed by yoryevrah
see also www.immed.org |
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