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One needs to be slow to form convictions, but once formed they must be defended against the heaviest odds.
A masterpiece of investigative journalism and alternative scholarship, elegantly written Dirty Medicine embodies investigative reporting at its best. |
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Dirty Medicine Contents list
This book was commissioned in 1989, by a group of doctors who practiced environmental medicine, together with some lay patients, who while accepting treatment from clinical ecologists, found themselves attacked by ‘Health Fraud’ campaigners. The book took almost four years of research. The first 3,500 copies sold out within a year despite the fact that they had to be sold by mail order after British distributors and retailers refused to stock it. The second printing in 1994, had to be printed by a new printers with new plates, after the initial printer was threatened by ‘health fraud’ activists. Altogether the two printings cost almost £25,000, all of which money, despite claims from ‘health fraud’ activists that my work was subsidised by corrupt doctors and Big Pharma, I had to raise using the profits from the first printing and through no strings attached gifts and some small loans. Following the books publication, I was vilified and harassed by ‘Health Fraud’ activists and inundated with letters from lawyers, none of whom actually put their money where their mouths were and took me to court. In response to a letter from Bindman’s a well respected Labour Party leaning legal practice, acting on behalf of Duncan Campbell a journalist, I took out a number of words, some sentences and a couple of paragraphs from the first edition before publication of the second. I did this because I felt it would be better in the long run to aceed without question to minor edits which I considered made no real difference to the message of the book. Bindman’s threatening letter to me, included the hilarious passage: There was always apparent interest in the book from television producers, film makers, publishers and others. In 1995, a small independent publisher offered to publish an updated version of the book, however, by the time the new version was finished, the independent publisher had been bought up by a larger less independent one who wasn’t at all interested in the re-write. Between 1993 and 2003 no one who expressed an enthusiastic interest in the book backed up their words with actions or funding. In 2003, Ivan Frazer who runs the Truth Campaign website offered to re create an electronic manuscript by copying the whole book by character recognition technology and issue it as an e-book. Ivan was as good as his word and working with friends, within the space of a few weeks he had released the e-book. Ivan retains the sole rights for e-book publication and distribution for Dirty Medicine and the e-book can be downloaded from the www.truethcampaign.com website. A Taster Reproduced below is the very short introduction to the book, the contents pages can be seen on the Truth campaign web site from which the book can be downloaded.
This book is the result of a two-year investigation. I was first asked to provide background material on the Campaign Against Health Fraud (CAHF) late in 1989. My report was finished in two months. I did not resume the investigation until I was approached a year later in November 1990, by a group of people who had been 'attacked' by the Campaign, which by then had changed its name to HealthWatch. My first short investigation developed quickly from an examination of CAHF to cover a conflict which had divided the gay community in London. The conflict centred upon the right of people who were HIV antibody positive, or had AIDS, to choose their own treatment and be given the full information about the Wellcome-manufactured AIDS drug AZT. Those who had faith in the pharmaceutical companies and medical orthodoxy supported the prevailing medical research establishment in its propagation, testing and prescription of AZT. Others, wary of apparent medical altruism, and previous iatrogenic disasters, began to organise self-empowering treatment and therapy programmes. In the main, they did this by making information available on non-pharmaceutical treatments. My first investigation showed that when a small number of gay men and alternative medical practitioners tried to minister to their own community, they were immediately labelled 'quacks'. AZT often appeared to be at the centre of these conflicts. The conflicts around AZT and AIDS treatment were located within a much more extensive terrain of struggle involving alternative medicine, the processed food industry and the pharmaceutical companies. When I began to explore this wider landscape, keeping the Campaign Against Health Fraud firmly in sight, I found it difficult to orientate myself. Why was a 'health-fraud' campaign aiming at health food products and progressive nutritionists? Why was a 'health-fraud' campaign attacking qualified doctors who, after years of orthodox practice, had made the decision to practise a non-pharmaceutical approach? Perhaps most confusing of all: should not a health-fraud campaign called Health Watch be critical of the food industry and agribusiness over such things as additives and pesticides? Why was Health Watch attacking those therapists and scientists who thought that the destabilisation of our natural environment was making us ill? Why was this particular 'health-fraud' campaign focusing on immunologists and those non-orthodox practitioners who might treat AIDS or cancer sufferers? In this book, I have tried to answer some of these questions, although even I have to admit that the route to my conclusions seems on occasions tenuous. This is not due to any lack of intellectual rigour on my part, but more to do with the fact that my investigation only scratched the surface of a powerful and extensive underworld spawned by big business. It will be some time before we are able to understand fully and record in detail the present period of crisis and the shifts in paradigm which have thrown up the surveillance, sabotage, harass¬ment and fraud which are increasingly becoming an everyday part of commercial competition. In the last months of writing, three unrelated things affected me, forcing me to focus my mind more sharply on the importance of finishing the book. On May 6th 1992 the United States, the surgery and the laboratory of a well-respected nutritionist and doctor, Jonathan Wright, was raided by officers of the Federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The clinic was surrounded and then stormed by armed police officers. Clinic employees were made to raise their hands and stand against the wall, while officers pointed guns at them. Fourteen hours after the raid began, the FDA and accompanying police officers had stripped Dr Wright's laboratory and surgery of all its patient records, equipment, vitamin and mineral supplement preparations. 3 Coincidentally, at around the same time, I received a call from a doctor and research scientist in Europe. Much of his work has concentrated upon chemical food additives and their effect upon the immune system. From 1986, he has been the victim of threats from an unknown source. An anonymous caller tried to lure him to a meeting in another country; when he checked the address with the country's embassy he found that it did not exist. Phone calls threatened his life and that of his partner. Anonymous letters to his local tax office falsely claimed that he had assets in Swiss accounts. Again in May, I read Christopher Bird's book, which narrates the criminal trial, in Canada in 1989, of the renowned cancer scientist, Gaston Naessens.4 In a re-run of the charges brought in the sixties against Dr Josef Issels, the German cancer doctor, Naessens was charged with having caused the death of a woman to whom he gave treatment. Like Issels, Naessens was exonerated. His acquittal did not however diminish the terror, suffering or social destruction which such a case brings. Bird's book and the case it describes address a matter of growing importance - the developing legal power of orthodox scientific medicine. * * * This book was difficult to structure because the investigation from which it grew covered many diverse areas of health practice. It is not a book with a simple or linear message. I have tried to create a narrative running from beginning to the end, but I realise that in places it is interrupted and is unlikely to engage the attention of many readers from start to finish. The book is divided into five parts. Part One looks at the growth of scientific medicine and the history of health-fraud campaigns in America. It lays the basis for understanding the role of Rockefeller interests in defending orthodox medicine and scientific research. Part Two examines in detail the early training and practices of some of the therapists who were 'attacked' by the health-fraud campaign in Britain. It follows their careers up until 1989. The story is taken up again in Part Five of the book which details attacks upon them after 1989. Part Three looks at the British science lobby and its relationship to industry. Part Four traces the historical conflict between orthodox and complementary medicine in Britain, and deals with the beginnings and growth of the London-based Campaign Against Health Fraud. It outlines the careers of the campaign's major activists. Included in this section is an analysis of the Wellcome Foundation and Trust with particular emphasis on the licensing, manufacture and sale of AZT. Part Five picks up on the stories of those practitioners whose work was discussed in Part Two. Given the relative complexity of the book, its large number of subjects and lack of continuous narrative, some readers may prefer to read sections separately. I structured the book as I did, because I felt that the information was most accessible when presented in this way. I reasoned that readers would want to become familiar with the individuals and practitioners involved in alternative medicine before they read about the attacks mounted against them. * * * Words are often an inadequate means of communication. In this book, I have frequently found myself using terms which do not describe what I wish to say. Much of the underlying discourse in the book is about science. Often this is not however a pure or noble science but a corrupted science, one which serves profit rather than truth. Scientific medicine does not always reflect the highest standards of medicine and is sometimes not at all scientific. On the other hand some of the research carried out into the basis of such things as homoeopathy and acupuncture has been high quality science. Despite these contradictions, I have had to use the word science. I could have appended 'bad' to the word in some contexts or I could have called it pseudo-science, or something similar. I did not do this. Although it is not stated, on some occasions when I use the word science I am referring to a corrupted 'industrial science' or 'vested interest science'. I hope that people will be able to read between the lines. The other concept which is referred to throughout the book is 'health fraud'. Naturally we are all against fraud of any kind, at the least it robs us of our expectations and at worst deprives us of our innocence. We might disagree about the prevalence of fraud in health care, but we are all against it. While investigating and researching this book, I came across very little deliberate health fraud amongst alternative or complementary practitioners. Those practitioners who are not effective in their work are rarely fraudsters, more often they are naive but sincere individuals who would accept regulation if the matter were discussed. On the other hand, very real fraud in science, industry, business and research is increasing. In these areas, the intent of the fraudster is often blatantly criminal and their actions utterly unaccountable. Part of this book is about the British Campaign Against Health Fraud and the American National Council Against Health Fraud. I hope that it will become clear to readers that I do not believe these organisations are using the term 'health fraud' in its generally accepted sense. If anything, those whom they tar with the brush of fraud are involved in nothing more than fair competition with orthodox medicine or medical research. Such organisations have however stolen the moral high ground, by incorporating 'against health fraud' in their titles. One of the book's proof readers suggested that whenever the title 'Campaign Against Health Fraud' was used in the book, it should be prefixed by 'so-called' or 'self-styled'. This would have been impossibly clumsy. Instead, I have tried wherever possible to hyphenate 'health-¬fraud' and miss out the prefix 'anti' or 'against'. Where reference is made to the specific campaigns, readers will just have to bear in mind that I do not think that their titles befit their true aims. The retrovirus HIV is usually spoken of in the same breath as the complex of illness which are called AIDS; people will say, 'HIV the AIDS virus', or of someone 'he was diagnosed HIV and then developed AIDS'. I think that the jury is still out on whether a virus known as HIV is causally related to AIDS. I am however certain that the condition called AIDS is not solely the product of a virus and therefore think that it is misleading to refer to HIV as the AIDS virus. I have also tried hard to avoid suggesting that people have been diagnosed as having the HIV retro-virus, simply because no one is actually tested for the virus. Rather they are tested for the presence of antibodies to the virus. Because there is a body of opinion which says that if a person has antibodies then the virus itself is not a danger, I have made a point of saying that the test shows a person to be 'HIV antibody positive' rather than 'HIV positive'. In relation to AIDS, this semantic battleground is of great importance. There can be no doubt that certain people and institutions have created an enormously powerful construct in AIDS. This construct however often lacks scientific verification. As in war or under a totalitarian regime, language rather than verifiable facts has shaped our understanding of the illness. Part of the Preface to the revised edition Since the first printing of this book in October 1993, its distribution in Britain has faced considerable opposition. This opposition has come almost exclusively from the journalist Duncan Campbell a journalist associated with Campaign Against Health Fraud. From the time of the book's post-publication launch, Campbell has campaigned ceaselessly, through his solicitors, Bindman and Co., and through his own enterprises to stop the book's distribution. He has sent long legal letters threatening anyone who distributed or wrote about the book with libel actions. 1 He threatened the Finnish printers of the first edition, WSOY, with a libel action: they immediately withdrew from any involvement in a second printing. After writing a biased and defamatory account of a number of people whom I had defended in the book, in an Observer supplement,2 Campbell threatened the paper when it printed replies refuting his article. The 'liberal' Observer was apparently so concerned that it paid Campbell an undisclosed sum thought to be in the region of £8,000, in an out of court settlement. Despite spreading rumours to the contrary, Campbell did not take any legal action against either myself or Slingshot Publications. In some ways I do not care that Dirty Medicine has been marginalised. There is something very comforting about being in the company of such fiercely independent investigative writers as Ruesch and Bealle. For these are people of whom it can genuinely be said that their thesis has not been corrupted by financial inducements or the degenerative fast-track to intellectual stardom. One of the reasons Dirty Medicine has been marginalised is that it reaches within that problematic area, deserted by most academics and respected journalists, belittlingly termed 'conspiracy theory'. I believe that theories of conspiracy are acceptable post-modern ways of recounting late twentieth century history. In fact, the large scale histories or sociologies of late twentieth century society, with its many secretive and competing power networks and its government against the people, could hardly be written up within any other framework. Unlike the citizens of earlier societies, we have very little information about power and we are consequently left to make assumptions. It would never cross my mind to wonder whether it was true that large multinational drug companies place individuals under surveillance, tap their phones or illegally enter their premises, set up front organisations or publish untruthful research data, for I know that such things have become common practice in a post-industrial free-market economy. To prove such things in a specific cause and effect manner is almost impossible; for this reason many people writing in this area work on the basis of assumptions which others unkindly call 'conspiracy theories' . Inevitably, being called a 'conspiracist' makes one insecure. It is then always a relief when events prove you right. I was somewhat consoled when I heard recently that London's Metropolitan Police Complaints Investigation Bureau (CIB2) has for some time been carrying out an investigation into the use by big-business and government departments of firms of private investigators. I under¬stand that there have already been a number of arrests, including staff from British Telecom, police officers, civil servants and private investigators. Clearly those individuals I have written about, who suffered invasions of their privacy, had their mail intercepted, were fearful that their phones were tapped, or their property had been burgled, should make representations to CIB2• They should also get together and press for an open, public, legal tribunal which will make public the names of the large companies involved in these illegal competitive strategies. Following on from Dirty Medicine, I am about to begin researching a book about health and pollution. I should be glad to hear from anyone interested in publishing such a book and from those who would like to send funding, references, research material or accounts of personal case histories. There are pages at the back of the book outlining this next project.
We live on the cusp of unbelievable change. The era of industrial production and the mass society which it created is coming to an end. The evolutionary necessity of the industrial revolution created enormous problems. The new means of production, the factories, belched out pollution and filled the air with chemical toxins. The noisy metal machines imposed upon their operatives the anonymity of yet another part of that machine. Contemporary Western society is a product of that industrial revolution. The monumentally rewarding ideas which gave birth to it, concepts of rationalism and scientific enquiry which were to free the human body from its travail of work, were twinned with the debilitating effects of the new industry, effects which were inseparable from it. Nowhere was exempt from this maelstrom of the machine: from the depths of the sea to the bowels of the earth, to the planet's poles, the effluents of the new riches came to permeate everything. The science which accompanied the industrial revolution was a science which grew from engineering, the making of metal machines. It was locked irrevocably into the understanding of industrial production. Science re-created a structure of knowledge which was itself based upon knowledge of the machine. The new science fought ceaselessly with the older and often religious ideologies through which people had previously understood their condition. From the beginning of the nineteenth century in Europe and America, the dominant ideology, of the most powerful groups, came to be based upon science. As the industrial revolution advanced, it was accompanied by the complete separation of objective science and the subjective conscious¬ness of the scientist. Medical science and its teaching forbade, at the risk of exile, the involvement of the non-scientific mind of either the doctor or the patient in the mechanics of healing. It was to be as if one machine operated upon another. The society which grew with the industrial revolution was a mass society. The individual of the eighteenth century was gradually displaced by the collective power of the nineteenth. In medicine particularly, the older individual-based art of healing, which depended upon the specific relationship between the healer and the sick individual, was crushed by machine-based medicine. It was not until Freud and psychoanalysis that medicine was confronted again with the idea that individuals might be essentially, if sensitively, different. By that time, however, it was too late for the mechanised world which science had created to divert its energies and cater for individually specific treatments. The pharmaceutical remedy had already been invented, and this was a remedy for the masses. The barbiturate paid no heed to the individual's history nor the idiosyncrasy of their dreams. Like a hammer blow, it sent all into the same deep and unreasoning sleep. The period of post-industrial production began in the latter part of this century. Like all new epochs, it came quietly at first, heralded by almost unnoticed changes in the means of production. Profit no longer needed the great machines of the industrial revolution. Their demise gave birth to cleaner machines, able to create even greater but less visible power. A revolution in the method of production changes everything, even our ideas and our relationships. The change which is upon us now, from material power to invisible information-based power, is a vortex. It is passing over the globe leaving nothing unquestioned. The new post-industrial social relations affect all aspects of our lives. In the most conservative and power-based sciences the transition from the old physically based knowledge to the new more imaginative age has been hard won. The knowledge of the sciences which grew out of the industrial revolution consisted of immutable abstractions welded to social power. This power will not be transcended without a way of life coming to an end. Those who hold this power will hang on like grim death
Dirty medicine was well reviewed, especially by those who could see the oncoming battles for health freedom. The late Christopher Bird wrote a review for Explore More! Magazine (Number 6, 1994), an understanding review appeared in the US journal, the Townsend Letter for Doctors (Lies and Misdirection, Jule Klotter. May 1994) and Jad Adams also gave a down to earth account of the book in i to i (Dirty Tricks to Discredit Alternative Medicine, April – June 1994. The review which I like best, was written by John Abraham, for Captal and Class, the journal of the Conference of Socialist Economists, in 1996 and is reproduced below. I like the review because it drew attention to real failings in the book, which I recognised even while writing it and it was by an academic who had written good books himself about the regulation of medicine. Abraham gave serious consideration to my much maligned book. The other good account of the battle which raged around the book when It came out was in the sadly short lived magazine Open Eye (Heretical Science: Alternative medicine, AIDS – and Duncan Campbell. Open Eye 3, 1995). This ten page account is well written and solidly researched, the unnamed author having struggled hard to interview original participants and carefully report what they said. Two later articles which also describe the general terrain of the battles which went on around the book and both cast a new light on the material are: Emma Brooker, Quackbusters Under Siege. Independent on Sunday magazine, 26 November 1996 and, Jerome Burne, Healing in Harmony The Guardian, Saturday February 26, 2000. Dirty Medicine: Science, Big Business and the Assault on Natural Health Care Capital & Class, Autumn 1996, John Abraham
In the final chapter the author cautions against conspiracy theory and suggests that the attacks on `alternative medicine' documented in the book may be the result of widespread coincidental allegiances to `orthodox medicine', rather than a conspiracy. Nevertheless, the tone of the rest of the book is conspiratorial. We are told that the assailants on `alternative medicine' originated from the big philanthropic Foundations in the US, such as Rockefeller, Ford and Carnegie, who supported progressivist scientific development. After Roosevelt's New Deal some of these progressivists joined the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in a crusade against 'quackery'. In this they found strong allies in the American Medical Association (AMA) and the pharmaceutical industry, who welcomed the FDA's focus on 'quacks' and `alternative medicine' because it diverted attention away from the inadequacies of allopathic products and untested pharmaceuticals. Indeed, Martin Walker reveals that in 1987 the AMA was found guilty of conspiring to destroy the profession of chiropractic-a practice similar to osteopathy involving manipulation of bones (p.19). He argues that the alliances between a rationalist and scientistic `orthodox medicine', on the one hand, and business interests, on the other, were cemented from the late 1970s when the New Deal gained ascendancy in Britain and the US. Government was to be rationalised and science privatized. In the US such alliances are best illustrated by the fact that the American National Council Against Health Fraud is supported by the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH) which campaigns on behalf of the chemical and food industries by defending such delicacies as Alar, Red Dye No.3 and 2, 4, 5, T (pp.37-47). By 1988 an equivalent British organization was inaugurated as the Council Against Health Fraud (CAEF), later known as Health Watch. Perhaps the most impressive aspect of this book is the author's extensive documenting of the financial and/or institutional links between the various protagonists involved in the `health fraud movement'. For example, we learn that ACSH has received funds from Monsanto Fund, Shell Companies Foundation, Coca-Cola, National Soft Drink Association, Kellogg Co., Burroughs Wellcome Fund, Ciba Geigy, Pfizer and the AMA. But nowhere is the seamless web of commercial and institutional interests more vividly pertinent than in Walker's fascinating discussion of AZT and medical interventions to treat AIDS (pp.239-271). AZT was developed by Wellcome as an anti-viral drug which was fast-tracked on to the market by the British and American regulatory authorities in 1987 Just months after the completion of clinical trials. According to Walker, the licensing of AZT as the `anti-AIDS drug' put back the licensing of other HIV treatment for many years because it dictated that research would be directed towards a search for anti-virals and, moreover, all other treatments would have to be subjected to trials and licensed in comparison with AZT. Walker recounts how Wellcome's presence was felt in all the major institutions relevant to AZT licensing and marketing in the UK. From 1985 to 1989 one of the most prominent members of the Medicines Commission, which oversees the licensing of medicines by the Department of Health (DoH), was also Director of R&D at Wellcome; in 1989 at least one fifth of the membership of the Medicines Commission had interests in Wellcome. From its inception in 1986 the All Party Parliamentary Group on AIDS (APGOA) which hosted meetings with experts on AIDS research and briefed MPs on AIDS treatment via its publication Parliamentary Aids Digest received regular input from Wellcome and in 1988 accepted funding from the Wellcome Foundation to the tune of 10,000. From 1988 APGOA meetings were dominated by `Wellcome-oriented speakers' or doctors involved in clinical trials with AZT (p.249). Wellcome's close relationship with the BMA could also facilitate the company's access to doctors. In 1987 the BMA established its own AIDS Foundation. A few months later Wellcome gave a four year covenant totalling 144,000 to the Foundation. Furthermore, in 1988 Wellcome helped to fund a campaign by the BMA Aids Foundation comprising a 150,000 educational package for GPs about HIV and AIDS. The more AZT was used by AIDS patients the greater the commercial success enjoyed by Wellcome, but the more they turned to alternative treatment the more that success was threatened. AZT was initially licensed in the UK for patients with AIDS and not for people who were AIDS-free though HIV positive. However, Wellcome campaigned to obtain a licence to supply AZT to patients diagnosed as asymptomatic HIV positive, arguing that in the initial stages of infection, when the subject's immune system was still strong and the virus thinly spread, AZT could be most effective. As Walker explains, this argument was based on a somewhat contested supposition that HIV is a sufficient cause of AIDS. In response to Wellcome's arguments an agreement was reached between Wellcome, the MRC and the DoH to set up a large three-year Anglo-French clinical trial (known as Concorde) to test the effectiveness of AZT against placebo on patients who were asymptomatic HIV positive. Given that the MRC is government-funded and the involvement of DoH, the Concorde trial was, in effect, a partnership between Wellcome and the British Government. As Walker notes, Wellcome stood to benefit from this arrangement in a number of ways: a large patient base would become used to treatment by AZT; the controlled trial meant that a large group of patients could not experiment with alternative treatments; and the MRC was paying for the trial-that is, public money was being used to test a drug manufactured by a private company using NHS facilities and staff. Apparently the casualties of this `dirty medicine' are those doctors, journalists and others who have criticised AZT treatment or the idea that HIV is a sufficient cause of AIDS or both. Walker's account draws a disturbing picture of how the interests of the food and drug companies and the orthodox medical profession combined with crusaders against 'quackery' can deter and destroy alternative approaches to medicine while simultaneously distracting attention from the toxic effects of food processing chemicals and pharmaceuticals. His research offers a thought-provoking expose of the politics of medicine, which is to be highly recommended to any reader who cares about the future of medical treatment. However, the main weakness of the book is that, with the exception of the excellent discussion of the Bristol Cancer Help Centre (pp.571-607), it is light on the technical aspects of science, medicine and nutrition. From Walker's account it seems clear that Duncan Campbell and CAHF/ HealthWatch were heavy-handed in their condemnation of `alternative medical practices'. What is less clear is how technically substantial those criticisms were. The fact that many of the `alternative practitioners' were good caring physicians, as Walker presents them, does not really resolve this important question. Is it possible that Duncan Campbell and the health fraud campaigners actually did some good in the public interest by discrediting some `alternative medicines', even though methods of harassment and so on are not defensible? This question raises another unresolved theme recurring throughout the book, namely, should a physician have the right to practise according to the philosophy of a minority of physicians; and should patients have the right to choose whatever therapy they want for their own bodies? The drug regulatory authorities in the UK and the US believe that physicians and patients do not have those rights, and that (in theory at least) medical treatments must meet scientific standards of safety and effectiveness in order to protect patients. That these regulatory authorities have been biased towards the commercial interests of industry at the expense of patients' best interests has been well documented (Abraham 1995; Collier 1989), but I finished this book in some doubt as to whether vigorous regulation of `alternative medicine' was to the benefit or detriment of patients' interests; and how far patients' desires and interests coincide on this matter? Despite leaving these sticky problems in the air, Martin Walker is to be commended for an extensively researched investigation into the murky side of medicine. Abraham, J. (1995) Science, politics and the pharmaceutical industry: controversy and bias in drug regulation, UCL Press, London. Collier, J. ( 1989) The health conspiracy: how doctors, the drug industry and the Government undermine our health, Century, London. Copyright Conference of Socialist Economists Autumn 1996.
…If you read only one book in 1994 this has got to be the one. ... Despite its length, in many parts it reads like a detective story, exposing many of the secrets and mysteries that multinational drug companies would rather remain hidden. ... Our clients have instructed us to write to you with the aim not of enriching themselves but of bringing a rapid halt to the flood of poison in which 'Dirty Medicine' seeks to engulf them. ... A masterpiece of investigative journalism and attentive scholarship, elegantly written. ... This excellent and well researched book gives, for the first time in this country, a history of the worldwide attacks on complementary and alternative medicine which started in the last century. ... One of the most important books written on health in the last decade. |
