Devious New Public Health Legislation
Recently we have been involved in writing submissions to the Health Committee with regard to the New Zealand Public Health Bill. The principles in this document change the focus from infectious disease management to addressing the huge impact of the burden of chronic disease that we are facing in this country – in fact worldwide – with the increase in non-communicable diseases which now pose a greater risk to public health than infectious diseases (i.e. obesity and associated diseases such as heart disease, cancer and diabetes).
The Bill, along with a subsequent press release statement in 2000 made by the then Minister of Health, Annette King, set out the purposes for the Bill. These were to rebuild New Zealand’s public health service, restore community involvement and ownership, restore public and health profession confidence, achieve the best health and disability outcomes, ensure a population health focus, and replace the current commercial and collaborative model with a cooperative and collaborative approach.
The Charter is in substantial agreement with these purposes. However, it is our view that the purposes outlined above will not be achieved by the Bill. The Bill lacks detail on how these objectives are to be achieved. It appears this is left up to District Health Boards and the Director of Health.
It would also appear that the writers of this legislation with their medical mindset lack an understanding of what public health is all about and it is certainly not clear in the document how a population focus will be achieved.
A great deal of public health work is carried out by community-based, not-for-profit organisations and NGOs (non-governmental agencies), including the Charter and its members. These groups are not mentioned or protected by the shape of the current Bill. There are also numerous clauses in the Public Health Bill which are concerning to us because they appear to be too wide open and may present with downsides that could be considered as covert in nature.
We commend Green Party MP Sue Kedgley who has played a major role in initiating the serious debate over our chronic public health issues that highlight massive implications for New Zealand and the current lack of sustainability of our health system. The Charter congratulates the Government in updating fragmented and outdated legislation for public health, however this legislation document has been prepared by bureaucrats with a medical mindset and no real or practical understanding as to how to rectify the crisis that our public health system is facing.
The Health Select Committee must address existing and future shortcomings of the Public Health Bill that could see many young New Zealanders miss out on vital health services. It appears that only Medical Practitioners are acknowledged as being the appropriate health professionals to carry out a number of duties that natural health practitioners have the prerequisite skills and extensive experience to undertake.
Due to the lack of detail and focus on how objectives are to be achieved it is our view that the purposes outlined above will fail to be achieved by the Bill. Alarmingly this is left up to District Health Boards whose primary role is to ensure administrative success, which means health considerations end up coming a distant second.
Witch Hunt
Members will by now be aware that the Ministry of Health has entered into a full-scale witch-hunt against natural therapy practitioners and products. We believe that situation has occurred due to the ignominious defeat of the discredited Australia New Zealand Therapeutic Goods Agency. It has been reported that this vengeful act has had severe repercussions for member practitioners creating a serious decline in patient appointments for targeted practitioners
Unconfirmed reports from Wellington indicate that government has allocated, out of taxpayer funds, some three to six million dollars for a concerted campaign persecuting practitioners and producers.
With our overloaded waiting lists for elective surgery in public hospitals, how many chronic pain relieving hip replacements would three to six million dollars alleviate?
From the Ministry’s perspective this campaign has been very successful in limiting health, wellness and longevity options for New Zealanders who rely on Natural HealthCare practitioners and products.
The claim by a Medsafe official “that the action was undertaken to highlight the need for new legislation” was an interesting response surfacing as it did at the same time as the introduction of the New Zealand Public Health Bill; creating pandemonium to highlight a “problem” (or a bothersome) situation and at the same time conveniently offer the “ideal final solution” is a time-worn Nazi propaganda modus operandi.
The New Zealand Public Health Bill
Under the proposed New Zealand Public Health Bill the Ministry intends to incorporate strategies for the treatment of three major causes of death, Diabetes, Cardiovascular Disease and Cancer. How this is to be achieved remains a mystery as the ever-increasing numbers of those affected by these conditions are a tribute to the present ineffectiveness of the public health system.
Public Health reliance on the continued use of pharmaceutical medicine has not produced corrective outcomes for at least the last half a century. A possible reason for this failure could well be illustrated by an extract from the British Medical Journal on page 3.
British Medical Journal Clinical Evidence.
They found that of about 2,500 treatments offered in pharmaceutical medicine:
That there is a 64 percent chance that the treatment will be either harmful, ineffective, or we have no idea what might happen!
This statement confirms our opinion that pharmaceutical medicine is not based on, cold hard scientific facts, but on dogmatic, biased and misleading dogmatic assumptions which encapsulates the worst of pseudo science.
On the other hand empirical observation of Natural HealthCare therapies over decades of clinical practice highlights the fact that the three major causes of death in New Zealand and developed countries respond extremely effectively to natural healthcare, wellness and lifestyle programs.
We note:— that the Ministry and its New Zealand Public Health Bill fail to address the fourth major causes of death which is attributed to both correct and incorrect as well as excessive prescribing of a number of pharmaceutical prescription drugs for individual patients, both in private practice and importantly in public hospitals. The end result of the excessive and wrongful prescribing of prescription drugs is the creation of adverse reactions, hospitalisation and thousands of preventable and unnecessary deaths annually.
Pharmaceutical prescribing is under the control of the Ministry and the Medical Association
No additional legislation is required for the responsible rectification of this ongoing problem which if and when corrected would have a huge impact on the mortality rate and effectively lower the high incidence of the three major causes of death.
The First section of the Bill has laudable aims.
All the other sections are not clearly defined, are very much open to individual interpretation and are not up to the standard of legal drafting that clearly sets out the intention of the legislators.
On balance it appears that the (purposely-deceptive) wording of this Bill is an attempt to remove from Parliament real and effective control by elected Parliamentary representatives.
The Rest of the Bill
The rest of the proposed provisions in the Bill are basically the Ministry requesting an open license to impose unbridled regulations that can only be challenged in a court of law.
Under the Medicines Act 1981 regulations could be challenged before the Parliamentary Regulations Review Committee which examines all regulations, investigates complaints about regulations, and performs other functions so that regulations are subject to effective parliamentary scrutiny and control.
New Zealand has in the past been used by overseas corporations and agencies as a social laboratory, to trial legislation. The Introduction of this Bill presents New Zealand with the opportunity to implement legislation dedicated to health, wellness and life style correction that could be an example to the rest of the world.
It is only a few months to the next general election and we may well need to enter into our own campaign to ensure that proactive Natural HealthCare policies are adopted by the next government regardless of their political flavour.
On a non political note we have sighted recently a scare mongering article in the New Zealand Herald titled:
“Antioxidants May Increase Mortality”
According to research carried out at Copenhagen University Hospital in Denmark researchers concluded their findings indicated that "We could find no evidence to support taking antioxidant supplements to reduce the risk of dying earlier in healthy people or patients with various diseases”.
I reviewed the research, which was first published in the Journal of the American Medical Association February 2007 over 12 months ago. While reading the research – Mortality in Randomized Trials of Antioxidant Supplements for Primary and Secondary prevention; systematic Review and Meta-analysis” Goran Bjelanovic, Dimitrinka Nikolova, Lise Lotte Gluud, Rosa G. Simonetti, and Christian Gluud. JAMA 2007;297:842-857. Vol. 297 No. 8, Feb 28 2007 – it appears that the study excluded all healthy people and focused only on vitamins given to people who were sick or about to die. The result! Some of them did die anyway, and from that, scientists have concluded that "Vitamins will kill you!" Hilarious, to say the least and is typical of the continuing scientific fraud being produced to attack the natural healthcare industry, and the use of antioxidant vitamins A, C, E, selenium and beta-carotene.
With all the benefits of antioxidants already extensively known to the well-informed, how was it then that the Cochrane Library arrived at their conclusion? It appears that was quite easy: The researchers considered 452 studies on these antioxidant vitamins, and they threw out the 405 studies where no one had died! That left just 47 studies where subjects died from various causes – one study was conducted on terminally ill heart patients, for example. From this handpicked selection of studies, these researchers concluded that antioxidant vitamins increase mortality.
These scientists claimed to be studying the effects of vitamins on mortality. What they were in fact doing was conducting a meta-analysis based on reviewing established studies. However, instead of conducting an honest review of all the studies, they arbitrarily decided to eliminate all studies in which vitamins prevented early mortality and kept people well and alive!
They did this by "excluding all studies in which no participants died”. What was left to review? Only the studies in which people died from various causes.
This type of fraud and pseudo-science by so called legitimate scientists would earn any teenager an "F" in secondary school science class. But apparently it's good enough for the Cochrane Library, not to mention all of the mainstream media who are repeating these fraudulent conclusions as scientific fact.
Modern "Scientific" Research Is Pure Fiction
For those of us who can think for ourselves it is plain to see (especially when considering the appalling increase in the number of science fiction studies on antioxidants) that the credibility of much of what happens under the guise of modern "science" is now so patently absurd that we would have to ask ourselves how many of these wonderful synthetic pharmaceutical drugs are these researchers taking. These people literally have to be on heavy medication to come up with such poorly designed and deliberately misleading “scientific” studies and then have the gall to announce their results with a straight face.
According to further research published just recently drug companies are reeling from recent revelations about their common practice of using in-house marketing writers to ghost write "scientific" studies. It turns out they were conducting drug safety studies in-house, writing up the "scientific" papers in-house, and then bribing doctors and academics to put their names on the papers as if they were the actual authors. The feature story reveals this massive scam and how all four of the big players in conventional medicine have conspired to deceive the public: Drug companies, the FDA (American Food and Drug Administration), the medical journals and the academics. There is a time proven maixim of law that states “Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus”. False in one thing, false in everything; meaning that if part of your research has been falsified then all of it must be considered tainted and false.
Also it turns out that my comments above with regard to scientists being on drugs may have some substance. A recent survey in the Journal Nature found that twenty percent of science academics use mind altering drugs for non-medical reasons to boost academic performance. This equates to one out of five researchers engaging in illegal drug use!
Oh Dear! What a tangled web they weave.
Page top
|
