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to avoid disease and how to treat it before it turns into a crisis. Doctors don't get paid for helping people to stay well, despite the fact that this is exactly the stated aim of their profession. All they can do is wait until we get sick and show up in the office, then write us a prescription or recommend surgery. We know that preventing a heart attack or stroke is a lot cheaper than treating cardiac arrest in the emergency room, and there's evidence from other areas of the world that shows how other cultures are achieving much lower rates of disease than we are. Some places even pay their health care providers for keeping people's diseases from advancing to the serious or critical stages that are so often seen here in the US. But our system of reimbursement gives us a giant disincentive to adopt such preventive care.

The second result is that lots and lots of prescription drugs are being taken, and other options are being ignored. Treatments that have been safely, effectively used for decades or centuries in places like Europe and Asia are discredited in the US. As the late Patrick O'Grady, former director of CANHELP, noted in his "Patient Bill of Rights," cancer patients are especially victimized by the stranglehold of Big Pharma on US medicine. He cites one particular example:
"For nearly two decades, European medical journals have described the unique remissions obtained in some of the most difficult-to-treat tumors by an extraordinarily versatile alkylating agent called ifosfamide. Finally, its pioneer developer, Dr. med. Wolfgang Scheef of Bonn, West Germany, showed in the March 1979 Cancer Treatment Reports, the National Cancer Institute's most prestigious journal, that the major urinary tract toxicity associated with this drug could be eliminated with Mesna, a rescue agent. Yet it was not till 10 years later that the Food & Drug Administration finally approved this lifesaving agent for use in the United States. Two precious years were lost as unsophisticated FDA officials tested Mesna for tumor-killing power and concluded it was worthless. National Cancer Institute experts, aghast at this blunder, informed the agency that Mesna's only claimed purpose was protection of the urinary tract - which function it performed superbly." (Visit www.canhelp.com for more information).

Is it any surprise that drug companies have set up a system that exclusively rewards the use of the drugs they manufacture and sell? Despite glossy PR ads on TV and in consumer magazines,

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