Obamacare and One of Its Few Alt Med Critics

© By Peter Barry Chowka

Nicholas Gonzalez, M.D. Photo © 2005 by Peter Barry Chowka. All rights reserved.

(September 10, 2009) Over Labor Day weekend 2009, the 37th annual convention of the Cancer Control Society (CCS) took place in Los Angeles, as it has every summer since 1973. Thirty years ago I attended my first CCS convention and I was invited back to speak at a total of fifteen of them between 1979 and 2000.

With the gradual disappearance of alternative medicine conferences in recent years, the CCS convention has achieved a unique status not only for its longevity but for the fact that it may be the last conference of its kind left on the scene.

To me, this situation is nothing short of remarkable – and terribly distressing. CCS conventions, in my opinion, have always been a seriously mixed bag of credible pioneering alternative medical innovators and questionable promoters. (At least they have always been wide open affairs and one could always find something of interest there. I recall serious alternative medicine investigators, like the late Patrick McGrady, Jr., often in attendance.) In the past, CCS conventions were balanced by scores of other alt med meetings around the country, some of them grounded more exclusively in science (like the seminal Cancer Dialogue 1980 conference in New York City).

But over the years, alternative medicine, and the field of alternative cancer therapies, have been subsumed under the dominant conventional medical system. New names have been given to the field, with “complementary alternative medicine” (CAM) or “integrative medicine” replacing the original “alternative medicine.”

The name changes have not been simply academic. Today, it is very difficult in the United States to find and engage practitioners of primary alternative medicine. Periodically, I compare notes with Nicholas Gonzalez, M.D. in New York, whose practice is based on nutritional treatment as a primary therapy.  I always ask him if he knows of anyone other than him who is doing primary alternative cancer treatment these days. Inevitably, the answer is always “no.”

At the time of the aforementioned Cancer Dialogue event, the list of alternative cancer clinicians was a mile long and a large crowd showed up over the four days of the conference at midtown Manhattan’s Grand Hyatt Hotel in October 1980 to debate ideas, present research, and share information. Cancer patients were also part of the mix. Among the participants were many luminaries including Nobel laureates Linus Pauling, Ph.D. and Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, M.D., Ph.D., and other alt med pioneers like Emanuel Revici, M.D., William Donald Kelley, D.D.S., Josef Issels, M.D., and Lawrence Burton, Ph.D.

Twenty-nine years later now, all of the individuals named above are long gone and the new generation that has come onto the scene, assuming the mantle of self-selected leadership, can’t hold a candle to the original pioneers.

Nicholas Gonzalez, M.D. September 9, 2009: Part One

As I wrote earlier, one credible innovator who is still around and, more important, actively engaged in clinical practice of and research into primary natural medicine is Nicholas Gonzalez, M.D.  I have written extensively about Gonzalez since the mid-1990s. An archived version of a 2002 feature article on Gonzalez can be read here. A 2001 profile of Gonzalez in The New Yorker magazine by Michael Specter is here. And Gonzalez’s new 6,000-word article about one of his mentors, “One Man Alone: My Investigation of Dr. William Donald Kelley,” can be read here, from the August-September 2009 online edition of The Townsend Letter.

Here is part one of my September 9, 2009 conversation with Gonzalez:

Peter Chowka:  I was listening to President Obama’s speech to the joint session of Congress tonight on health care – his 29th speech on the subject. It was not a healthy thing to listen to.

Nicholas Gonzalez, M.D.: He’s so dishonest, it’s very upsetting. He lies, but he lies without a conscience and that’s what is so dangerous about him – that narcissistic sociopathic quality of lying without showing it.  He does it with impunity and with total ease.

Chowka: Recently, you sent me several e-mails that you were circulating to your list about your concerns with H.R. 3200 (House Bill 3200, the Democrats’ proposals for universal health care, a.k.a. Obamacare). I’m particularly interested in what Obamacare means for alternative medicine, or what’s left of alternative medicine. I’ve quoted so many times over the years a comment you made sixteen years ago for an article I was writing about Hillarycare:

“The goal of health care reform is to have a dictionary in Washington listing ‘acceptable’ treatments. If you look up ‘breast cancer,’ there are the ‘acceptable’ treatments -- and anything else will be disallowed. They essentially want all doctors to conform to government standards.”

These words were prophetic and I’m dismayed that most people in the alt med or CAM worlds don’t seem to get it.

Gonzalez: It’s funny: When I was growing up, people always said that conservatives live in the past. The trouble with liberals is that they never learn from the past. Socialized medicine – they look to England or Canada, but the real place to look is the Soviet Union. They had cradle to the grave health care from 1921 until the Soviet Union collapsed in 1992. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the average lifespan of a Russian male was 57 years. Hospitals lacked even soap and water. All of the community hospitals didn’t even have sewerage – it was like Fourth World, not even Third World. There were two tiers: The leaders, of course, got the best medical care but the rest of the masses – because the leaders realized they couldn’t survive getting the masses medical care.

All you have to do is to look at the Soviet Union – they had exactly what Obama talks about, a single payer plan, the government controls everything – and it just collapses – just a total collapse of health care along with the economy. That’s what people should be studying, health care in the Soviet Union.

If you want to look at government-controlled health care in the US, look at the Veterans Administration system. It’s a disaster! Doctors who don’t care, doctors are not incentivized. You know, people always work best when they’re their own boss. When they work as a slave for the state, there’s no incentive.

In the Soviet Union, a physician made $55 a month. In Cuba, physicians make $15 a month and they live in hovels. That’s why they all want to leave.

If the health care [in these countries] was so great, why did Gorbachev’s wife, when she had leukemia, fly a team of doctors in from the West, or when Boris Yeltsin had heart disease, he flew a team in from Boston?  Even though they had the “best” care in Russia, they still flew in teams from the West. If the leaders didn’t like it, that’s what we need to know. We don’t need to know any more.

No one can name a single great medical advance from the Soviet Union in the last fifty years, no one can name any – there aren’t any, because the government controlled everything, the experts regulated research and medical care, and the end result was that research and medical care collapsed.

In terms of alternative medicine specifically, I’ve spoken to the Liberty Counsel which has really studied the House bill at length and they say it’s a great danger to alternative medicine for the simple reason that Obama keeps talking about this group of experts in Washington that will determine what doctors are going to be allowed to do based on the “best” science. That’s assuming that experts know what they do. You’ve spent 25-30 years studying the fact that experts rarely know what they’re doing, particularly in the sciences and medicine.

The idea that there’s a group of experts in Washington that can do things right – that they’ll determine what doctors can do – that’s the problem. One of the nice things now about Medicare is that you can opt out, in which case patients pay for care themselves, and I’m not in Medicare because they don’t allow alternative medicine, they don’t pay for it. There’s no assurance that doctors will be able to opt out of Obamacare if it passes in its current form – the House version. Once it passes, all doctors will have to become part of it. This is in the bill. There’s no provision for opting out. The Liberty Counsel says, “Doctors will have to abide by the regulations put out by the experts in Washington that will determine what they can do [clinically].” And believe me, the experts in Washington determining what doctors can do are not going to be favorably interested in herbal medicine or coffee enemas. According to what the Liberty Counsel person told me, there’s the potential that they would criminalize medical practice – that if you didn’t follow what the experts in Washington allowed – and every doctor’s practice would be monitored à la George Orwell – you could be fined or even have criminal charges brought against you.

The bill is so vaguely-worded, it’s hard to get a firm accounting. The Liberty Counsel is a non-profit religious freedom defense group in Washington. They’ve studied H.R. 3200 with their legal team and they’ve said there’s no evidence that you will be able to opt out – as a physician you will be forced to join the plan, you will have to abide by the dictates of a Washington group of experts, whatever they say. And if you don’t abide by that, if you try to do it on your own –  meanwhile your practice will be monitored electronically – you will be fined or criminalized.

Chowka: You’d be on a very short leash. Obamacare is full of mandates, for both doctors and patients. I heard him say again tonight (after denying that he would support an individual mandate all during the 2008 campaign) that he’s going to mandate that every American purchase government-approved conventional allopathic medical insurance. It’s irresponsible and it hurts the collective to not have this insurance, he said, trying to demonize people who take responsibility for their own health and perhaps choose natural alternatives to allopathy.

Well, there are people who’ve never had health insurance by choice, they’ve taken responsibility for their own health, paying for it as you go and, more importantly, putting one’s discretionary health care spending into true prevention strategies like diet, natural and organic foods, nutritional supplements, homeopathy, etc. The ability of anyone to pay for that – for what we feel will really help us – after we are forced to pay thousands of dollars a year for Obamacare – will be severely impaired.

Meanwhile, as you’ve just pointed out, the American clinicians and others who are now able to practice with some degree of freedom and autonomy will lose that freedom. The natural, alternative clinical options will dry up and our ability financially to put discretionary dollars into things like nutritional supplements, herbs, or whatever will also be impeded. A witches’ brew of ideologies, pressures, and politics have come together and given rise to these universal health care proposals and their noxious effects are going to be felt by everyone right down to the grassroots of American life.

You mentioned the panels of experts – I looked into the basis of this scheme, so-called evidence based medicine (EBM), several years ago. Even putting alternative medicine aside, EBM is still a Faustian bargain because the experts can’t even agree about conventional treatments. And opening this door, what quickly rushes in is the bottom line, the financial imperative based on the limitations of a collective global health care budget, which will have to result in rationing and a lower quality of care overall. For Obama or anyone else to claim that they can wave a magic wand, expand care to fifty million more people, make first class health care available to everyone without restraint, defies logic. For one thing, where are all of the primary care doctors going to come from? In Massachusetts, where state run universal health care went into effect in 2007, the wait time to see a primary doctor has stretched to months from days or a few weeks before universal health care went into effect. And the health plan is bankrupting the state’s budget.

You’ve pointed out the historical angle for evaluating universal health care proposals. One should be scared to death looking at the history of it in other countries. But you can also look at it here, right on the face of it, at what Obama is saying and promising – he pledges not to increase the deficit or the debt, to expand care to all, to improve care and make it superior, to cap individuals’ maximum medical care spending – this is simply not possible!

Gonzalez: That’s what the Soviet Union tried and it totally collapsed. In England, where health care is “free,”  the first thing they found is that a certain percentage of the population who aren’t really sick will overuse it – that’s when rationing comes in – because when it’s “free,” you don’t care, you just go to your doctor whenever you feel like it. People who have nothing better to do with their time, who are retired or whatever, just go to the doctor, over and over again. When you have to pay for it yourself, it brings in personal responsibility – “do I really have to go to the doctor because I’m itching three times?” Whereas, if it’s free, you just go. You end up with people with little problems taking up a lot of time so that there are not enough resources to take care of the bigger problems. The result is to ration everything.

The other thing is, when you take away personal responsibility and the government pays for everything – it’s the Nanny State – let’s take cigarette smoking. I live organically, I’ve lived organically for twenty-seven years, I’ve been on the [William Donald] Kelley program since I met him in 1981, I really watch my health and I’m in excellent health, I never need a doctor. A cigarette smoker – what’s his incentive to stop? Because he’s been scolded that it’s not healthy? If he knew that he’d have to pay if he got lung cancer – that it might cost $300,000 or $500,000 – if someone saw his neighbor go bankrupt to pay for the chemotherapy – a few stories like that and people might say, “I don’t think I want to smoke these cigarettes.” But when the government is there to pay for it, there’s no incentive to stop. Healthy people basically subsidize people who don’t care about their health. The average American is obese because he averages 62 lbs. of sugar a year. If he was told, you know, diabetes is going to cost you $2 million in medical costs over 25 years, and you’re going to have to pay for it – you’re going to have to mortgage your house, sell your kids into slavery, sell your car, and start growing potatoes in your backyard because you can’t afford food – a few stories like that, and that diabetic might say, “Geez, do I really want o be 300 lbs?” He’s going to think twice about it. When you have to pay for it yourself, you think more carefully about it. When someone else pays for it, there’s no incentive to stop.

To be continued on September 15, 2009.

Peter Barry Chowka is a writer and investigative journalist who writes about politics, health care, and the media.

Source:  http://www.naturalhealthline.com/

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