[GJM] Fw: [globalnetnews-summary] How the American Medical Association Got Rich, and comment by mary rose on the arise of the Neo-cons.

[mary rose]

Mary Rose: Comment below:
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Subject: [globalnetnews-summary] How the American Medical Association Got 
Rich


How the American Medical Association Got Rich
http://www.alternet.org/healthwellness/81659?page=entire
By Dana Ullman, North Atlantic Books. Posted April 10, 2008.

The "AMA Seal of Approval" on drugs and food becomes a legal form of 
bribery.

The following is an excerpt from "The Homeopathic Revolution: Why Famous 
People and Cultural Heroes Choose Homeopathy" (Berkeley: North Atlantic 
Books, 2007) by Dana Ullman, MPH.

History reveals that the AMA was dictatorially led for the first half of the 
twentieth century by George H. Simmons, MD (1852-1937) and his protégé, 
Morris Fishbein, MD (1889-1976). Simmons and Fishbein both served as general 
manager of the organization and as editor of its journal, the Journal of the 
American Medical Association (JAMA). While these two leaders provided 
substantial benefit to the organization and to medical doctors, their 
methods of doing so have been severely criticized, with some historians 
referring to them as "medical Mussolinis."

When George H. Simmons began in 1899 what became a twenty-five-year reign as 
head of the AMA, it was a weak organization with little money and little 
respect from the general public. The advertising revenue from the medical 
journal was a paltry $34,000 per year. Simmons came up with the idea to 
transform the AMA into a big business by granting the AMA's "seal of 
approval" to certain drug companies that placed large and frequent ads in 
JAMA and its various affiliate publications. By 1903, advertising revenue 
increased substantially, to $89,000, and by 1909, JAMA was making $150,000 
per year. In 1900, the AMA had only 8,000 members, but by 1910, it had more 
than 70,000. This substantial increase in advertising revenue and membership 
was not the result of new effective medical treatments, for there were 
virtually no medical treatments from this era that were effective enough to 
be used by doctors today or even just a couple of decades later.

Some critics of the AMA have called their seal-of-approval program a form of 
extortion because the AMA did no testing of any products. When George 
Abbott, owner of a large drug company, Abbott Biologicals (known today as 
Abbott Laboratories), did not provide "blackmail" money to the AMA and when 
none of his products were granted AMA approval, Abbott went on the 
offensive. He arranged for an investigation of the AMA president that 
revealed that Simmons had no credible medical credentials, that he worked 
primarily as an abortion doctor for many years, and that he had had sex 
charges brought by some of his patients as well as charges of negligence in 
the deaths of others. After this meeting, the drugs made by Abbott 
Laboratories were regularly approved, and the company was not required to 
place any ads.

Simmons was shrewd enough to have the AMA establish a Council on Medical 
Education in 1904. This council's mission was to upgrade medical 
education -- a worthy goal. The formation of the council seemed a good idea 
to homeopaths because surveys in JAMA itself had consistently shown that the 
graduates of the conventional medical schools failed the medical board 
examinations at almost twice the rate of graduates of homeopathic colleges. 
However, the AMA developed guidelines to give lower ratings to homeopathic 
colleges. For instance, just having the word "homeopathic" in the name of a 
school had an effect on the rating because the AMA asserted that such 
schools taught "an exclusive dogma."

In 1910, the same year that the Flexner report was published, the AMA 
published "Essentials of an Acceptable Medical College", which echoed 
similar criteria for medical education and a disdain for non-conventional 
medical study. In fact, the AMA's head of the Council on Medical Education 
traveled with Abraham Flexner as they evaluated medical schools. The medical 
sociologist Paul Starr wrote in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book: "The AMA 
Council became a national accrediting agency for medical schools, as an 
increasing number of states adopted its judgments of unacceptable 
institutions." Further, he noted: "Even though no legislative body ever set 
up ... the AMA Council on Medical Education, their decisions came to have 
the force of law". With the AMA grading the various medical colleges, it 
became predictable that the homeopathic colleges, even the large and 
respected ones, would eventually be forced to stop teaching homeopathy or 
die.

In 1913, Simmons and the AMA went on the offensive even more strongly by 
their establishment of the "Propaganda Department," which was specifically 
dedicated to attacking any and all unconventional medical treatments and 
anyone (MD or not) who practiced them. In this same year, Simmons hired 
Morris Fishbein, MD, as a publicity man for the AMA.

In 1924, Simmons was forced out of the AMA due to the many scandals around 
him, and he took home all his personal files and burned them, though Simmons 
was again wise enough to have trained his replacement, Morris Fishbein. 
Fishbein's specialty was publicity and the media, and he used the media to 
attack anyone who provided a real or perceived threat to conventional 
medicine. Besides severe attacks against anyone who practiced unconventional 
medical treatments, Fishbein and the AMA were also initially extremely 
antagonistic to those conventional medical doctors who supported pre-paid 
health insurance.

Fishbein was a medical doctor who never practiced medicine. He was, however, 
an effective advocate for conventional medicine and a vocal critic of 
unconventional treatments. Shortly after he became head of the AMA, he wrote 
several books sharply critical of "medical quackery." He called chiropractic 
a "malignant tumor," and he considered osteopathy and homeopathy "cults." 
While Fishbein certainly provided benefit to the general public by warning 
them about some of the medical chicanery that existed at the time, he lumped 
together everything that was not taught in conventional medical schools and 
considered all such modalities quackery. When one considers that the vast 
majority of medicine practiced in that era was inadequately tested and 
dangerous to varying degrees, Fishbein's obsessive fight against certain 
treatments provided direct benefits to the physicians he was representing.

Fishbein's frequent and strident attacks on "health fraud" were broadcast 
far and wide, in part through his own newspaper column, syndicated to more 
than 200 newspapers, as well as a weekly radio program heard by millions of 
Americans. His influence on medicine and medical education was significant, 
and it is surprising how few medical history books mention his influence or 
his questionable tactics. Time magazine referred to him as "the nation's 
most ubiquitous, the most widely maligned, and perhaps most influential 
medico."

There are also numerous stories about Fishbein's efforts to purchase the 
rights to various healing treatments, and whenever the owner refused to sell 
such rights, Fishbein would label the treatment as quackery. If the owner of 
the treatment or device was a doctor, this doctor would be attacked by 
Fishbein in his writings and placed on the AMA's quackery list. And if the 
owner of the treatment or device was not a doctor, it was common for him to 
be arrested for practicing medicine without a license or have the product 
confiscated by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) or the Federal Trade 
Commission (FTC). Although Fishbein denied these allegations, he and the AMA 
were tried and convicted of anti-trust violations for conspiracy and 
restraint of trade in 1937. Further, Fishbein wrote numerous consumer health 
guides, and his choice of inclusion for what works or what doesn't work was 
not based on scientific evidence.

Fishbein extended Simmons's idea for the AMA seal of approval to foods, and 
by including a significant amount of advertising from food and tobacco 
companies, he was able to make the AMA and himself exceedingly rich. In 
fact, under his reign, the tobacco companies became the largest advertiser 
in JAMA and in various local medical society publications. In fact, Fishbein 
was instrumental in helping the tobacco companies conduct acceptable 
"scientific" testing to substantiate their claims. Some of the ad claims 
that Fishbein approved for inclusion in JAMA were: "Not a cough in a 
carload" (for Old Gold cigarettes), "Not one single case of throat 
irritation due to smoking Camels," "More doctors smoke Camels than any other 
cigarette," "Just what the doctor ordered" (L&M cigarettes), and "For 
digestion's sake, smoke Camels" (because the magical Camel cigarettes would 
"stimulate the flow of digestive fluids").

By 1950, the AMA's advertising revenue exceeded $9 million, thanks in great 
part to the tobacco companies.

Coincidentally, shortly after Fishbein was forced out of his position in the 
AMA in 1950, JAMA published research results for the first time about the 
harmfulness of tobacco. Medical student Ernst Wynder and surgeon Evarts 
Graham of Washington University in St. Louis found that 96.5 percent of lung 
cancer patients in their hospitals had been smokers. Very shortly after the 
AMA withdrew its seal of approval for Morris Fishbein, he became a high-paid 
consultant to one of the large tobacco companies."

mary rose:  While this is an expose of JAMA which largely influenced the 
policies of the AMA, this tale is similar to how other corporations and 
companies made it to the top, placing themselves in a position to "control 
the world" along with those who controlled the world monetary system. We've 
discussed previously the tale of Edward Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud, 
who was also called the "Father of the public relations industry."  But as a 
refresher, let's review the role Bernays played in social engineering 
society. Let us go back to the 1950's, shortly after the end of WWII, when 
the LAWCAPS (lawyer capitalists) were just beginning to engineer the 
dominance of the corporations, which having made their initial wealth from 
selling both information and products to all parties involved in the war, 
were now being taken into offshore tax shelters so as to avoid any form of 
regulation by either national or international authorities by the law firms 
who would make billions with them. All without the knowledge of the public. 
(Fuller, R. Buckminster - Critical Path, 1981)   And Bernays fit the same 
mold of the LAWCAPS as is shown in this excerpt taken from High Beam 
Encyclopedia,  http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-15764933.html .

"Bernays sat through an education in agricultural science at Cornell, but 
soon found that his true calling lay elsewhere, in shaping public opinion 
or, as he put it, engineering consent. The formula he came up with was to 
rally the prominent to whatever his cause happened to be in the expectation 
that others would follow--an indirection that raises him above common 
salesmen and lends his efforts an aspect of civic merit. Editors, municipal 
worthies, physicians, health commissioners--all were quite willing to be 
used by Bernays. If Bernays were hired to boost the sales of ping-pong sets, 
he would gather a committee of experts to extol the physical and social 
benefits of ping-pong, and they would comply. Newspapers in particular were 
his toy; time and again he placed material in their pages with ease. The 
publicity that fills our public space the way ether was once thought to fill 
physical space is an homage to Edward Bernays."

Once the wheels of "engineering consent" were put into motion by the likes 
of those mentioned above, including the Chicago School of Economics, the 
U.S. American public and the rest of the world had little "free will' left. 
They/we became the willing consumers of the capitalist economy, pandering to 
every whim of the elite in our desire to become the largely white middle 
class, gaining some of the privileges of the "upper class," with the sleek 
lawyer capitalists and public relations firms greasing the way for the "old 
Europeans," that is, those who, like the Rothchilds, had inherited the 
Kurgan Cattle Culture consciousness, now controlling the majority of the 
world's wealth, were quick to proceed in taking control of the world.  And, 
as Mayer Rothchild once said:  "Give me control of the money and I don't 
care who controls the vote."  .   . .
 .