The Providence Journal
75 Fountain Street
Providence RI 02902 20 January 2010
To the Editor:
For more than twenty years as chiropractic physician in Portsmouth, RI, I have recommended to my patients nutritional supplements and natural remedies from the Daniel Chapter One company. Seeing many patients who benefited, and none harmed, I wish to reply to the one-sided article in the Providence Sunday Journal on January 10 entitled, “Company ordered to stop advertising its ‘bogus’ cures.”
In apparent endorsement of the Federal Trade Commissions’ findings that “there is no scientific evidence that they [the company’s products] work,” the Journal ignores an extensive pharmacopeia of herbal medicine. In fact, the Portsmouth company advertises and markets natural substances that have been known for years, even centuries, for effectiveness against cancer and other diseases.
In the Journal article the FTC belittles testimonials by ordinary people, deferring instead to “science.” While true science shines in its commitment to unbiased investigation, actual practice can be another matter. Medical authorities often craft research studies to favor the products of large corporations. Sometimes the studies are conducted by persons with a financial interest in the outcomes. The magnitude and expense of the research required is clearly out-of-reach of all but big-budget companies, thus locking out grass roots evidence from herbal and natural sources.
The article’s suggestion that Daniel Chapter One’s owners keep a lavish lifestyle is, from my own observations over many years, false and misleading.
The Journal quotes at length Stephen Barrett, an unlicensed psychiatrist whose website pushes a private grudge against all forms of non-traditional, drugless healthcare. A “consumer advocate” only in a self-styled sense, Barrett is taken seriously by no reputable consumer protection authority.
In the article, Dr. Barrett assures that effective healthcare interventions naturally rise to the surface. But the experience of my own profession belies that position. Dismissing our research studies, orthodox medicine rejects the premises and clinical outcomes of chiropractic as “unscientific.” Chiropractic gained its inclusion in Medicare and most insurance programs by the endorsement of patients who know they’ve benefited.
The FTC, like certain other government agencies, may serve the very industries it is supposed to regulate. The campaign against the Rhode Island-based company is part of a larger effort by the FTC and FDA to restrict public access to non-pharmaceutical health care. Effectively this limits competition to pharmaceutical companies by natural remedies and bolsters their market share.
At its administrative hearing, Daniel Chapter One confronted government commissioners who had no knowledge of the properties and clinical history of the company’s herbal ingredients. That did not stop the agencies from attempting to deny them the right to give information about the ingredients. As a result of these tactics of intimidation, many herbal remedy suppliers have been forced out of business. To its credit, and perhaps to its peril, Daniel Chapter One has resisted.
Not content to attack natural medicine, the FTC in 2006 tried unsuccessfully to prevent chiropractic publisher Tedd Koren from printing descriptions of chiropractic health benefits that lay within the established literature of the profession.
Curiously, the FTC seems unconcerned over the lack of consumer complaints against the company they are trying to put out of business. American medical care, in grotesque contrast and by its own admission, directly causes the deaths of hundreds of thousands.
Executive government claims they know what’s good for us, but consumers may know better. The outcome of this case– and of current legislation in Congress to safeguard our rights to proven natural remedies– may determine whether pharmaceutical giants gain the force of law to guarantee not only their profits, but our own dwindling health. Bigger than either the FTC or Daniel Chapter One is the issue of citizens’ rights to receive information on natural remedies, and to purchase those remedies.
Sincerely,
Ronald P. Marsh, DC
dc1freedom 