Hooray for Diabetes

Over the past few decades scientists have been busy conducting diabetes research. Most Americans assume that the goal of all this research would be the discovery of a final cure for the disease.

Truth is, the medical system has no interest whatever in ever finding a cure for diabetes.

From a for-profit perspective cures are not very profitable. If the drug companies tried to market a pill that cured diabetes they'd demand a very high price.

Neither the patients nor the insurance companies could afford to pay the huge cost such a pill would command. So the cure would become an unaffordable, low-profit product, something all businesses avoid like the plague.

Here's the medical industries deep, dark secret. The really big, big money is not in cures but instead lies in the management of disease. Just reduce the symptoms and leave the underlying disease process untouched. This is the royal road to massive profits. This is the mantra of the heartless drug barons.

Search for a cure for diabetes? Are you crazy? We got a great thing goin' here - why kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.

The huge and rapidly growing diabetes industry now generates something in the neighborhood of $400 billion in spending each year. Best of all, profits are growing over 18% a year so you could think of this as a kind of new gold rush.

Though they’ll never admit it publicly, the medical community is extremely excited about the fabulously lucrative business opportunity that diabetes presents. Funds are flowing so freely, who wouldn't get excited?

Oh sure with great sadness and a long face your doctor will warn you how terrible a disease diabetes is. But at the end of the month when he scans his bank balance, there will be a very wide smile on his face.

Why is diabetes so incredibly profitable? From a profit perspective diabetes is the perfect disease. There are literally hundreds of different ways to make money off the terrible suffering of diabetics.

First you have those cute little blood glucose monitoring devices. Their sale and the sale of the test strips they consume is a wonderfully profitable industry. The average diabetic uses three test strips a day which cost around a buck each. Let’s see – 26 million diabetics each spending $1,200 a year equals – over $31 billion dollars a year!

Then you have the doctors who manage the disorder. Every doctor knows that in order to build a highly-profitable private medical practice they’ll have to accumulate a throng of sick patients, keep them sick and keep them doing what the doctor most wants them to do - keep making more appointments.

Diabetic patients fill that bill perfectly as they need to keep coming back to doctors for many different reasons. They need appointments for lab tests, appointments for prescription renewals, appointments for blood sugar and A1C monitoring, appointments for examinations, for specialized foot, eye, heart and kidney care and don’t forget all the many kinds of surgery diabetics often need including the crown jewel of the diabetic industry - the insanely profitable coronary bypass.

As a result of this sweeping epidemic, diabetes has made it possible for today's doctors to quickly and easily amass incredibly lucrative private practices in record time. One California endocrinologist remarked after building a massive 27 million dollar mansion overlooking the ocean “this is the house that diabetes built!”

And the podiatrists are in on the diabetes gravy train too! Diabetics have foot problems that require constant medical attention. The foot industry is making big bucks also through the manufacture of highly customized diabetic footwear and special stockings. The food people rake in fortunes selling special diabetic foods, and the publishing industry is happily grinding out an endless variety of specialized magazines for diabetics (each loaded with ads for all the other goodies that diabetics will need.)

And let us not forget the biggest opportunity of them all – the mother load of diabetes - the manufacture and sale of diabetic drugs. Never mind that none of these drugs do anything to actually heal the disease and that many have been proven so dangerous they've been banned all over the world – but that doesn’t stop the U.S. drug industry from cranking out a steady stream of highly-profitable new diabetes drugs.

When it comes to diabetes - today's new "miracle drug" is tomorrow's class action law suit. Just look at Avandia. It was billed as a major breakthrough in the treatment of diabetes. In July of 2010 the maker, GlaxoSmithKline agreed to pay $460 million to settle 10,000 lawsuits. When the lawyers get done the total compensation will be around $1.1 billon. Some breakthrough!

When you add it all up you get the whopping figure of $400 billion a year. And here’s the best news of all – because the diabetic epidemic is spreading like wildfire, the profits from diabetes will continue to grow for many years at the staggering rate of 18% a year!

When you take everything into consideration – the diabetes epidemic represents the single most profitable business opportunity in all of human history!

I’m telling you all this for a very simple reason. I want you to know the cold, hard truth. Our current medical system is incredibly corrupt! We should never have let our health care system become a greedy profit-hungry business. And like any business it’s sole goal is the generation of ever-increasing levels of profit. In short, this kind of system puts profits before people.

The first physician to accurately describe diabetes was a Persian physician who lived a thousand years ago. His description of the disease and it's complications was extremely accurate given the extremely limited tools he had to work with.

But here's the real shocker. Way back then he used a medicine made from the seeds of the fenugreek plant to cure a third of his diabetic patients!

Today doctors in China and other areas of southern Asia are using this very same herbal pill with exactly the same results.

In other countries such as Germany and Japan doctors approach diabetes treatment from an entirely different perspective. Instead of using powerful drugs to merely suppress symptoms, they instead prescribe safer, natural medicines such as herbal and nutritional supplements that have been scientifically proven to effectively slow or reverse the progress of the underlying disease. They have also been able to cure some of their patients.

In Germany the government formed a special government agency called "Commission E" that reviewed the scientific research and published a large guide listing the various natural medicines, rating their effectiveness and providing safety and dosage guidance for physicians.

But nothing like that will happen here I can guarantee you. That's because many of these safer and more effective natural medicines sell for mere pennies a pill. There's just not enough profit in them to get our greedy and corrupt medical system interested.

And where is the government in all this you might ask? Aren’t they supposed to protect us? That’s what the Food and Drug Administration is for right? Unfortunately for us it too has been corrupted by corporate money.

The FDA has taken in millions in fees from corporations and is staffed by and often run by former drug company executives. (Many work for drug companies until they become vested in their employer’s retirement systems and then “retire” and take a regulatory job with the FDA.)

In short, a pack of ravenous wolves have taken over the hen house and we the American people are the birds they’re devouring.

When foreign countries ban our drugs because they kill patients often through heart attacks and strokes, you’d expect the FDA to follow suit and issue a ban in order to protect our people too. But that’s often not the case.

Instead the FDA tends to move very slowly and often issues bland advisory notes or has pharmacists put little warning labels on dangerous, sometimes lethal drugs while leaving the drug companies free to peddle their poisons and rake in their enormous profits.

If you don't believe me Google the banned drugs Orinase and Rezulin and you'll see what I mean. According to the government Orinase was killing 15,000 Americans a year yet all the FDA did was require a warning label.

Rezulin was another diabetic wonder drug that killed people's livers but that didn't seem to matter as it was making billions in profits for it's maker. The FDA defended Rezulin until public pressure forced it's eventual ban.

The newer diabetes drug Avandia has been banned in India and throughout Europe. One British doctor published an article in the British Medical Journal saying that the drug should never have been approved in the first place. Yet, despite all the suffering and deaths caused by the drug, Avandia is still available in the U.S.!

The sad fact is - the FDA is dedicated to protecting drug company profits
– not the American people.

How can we fight back and change the system? We can’t. The drug companies and the doctors have vast armies of lobbyists and prostitutes scurrying around Washington making sure the cash tsunami keeps rolling. When it comes to health care, the voice of the people has been silenced.

The drug and medical systems make huge donations to both political parties so don’t expect any politician on either side of the isle to make any waves. The media has also been corrupted and are now so dependent on their drug company advertising revenue they too will fall in line and keep their mouths shut. The academic world too has been corrupted by the drug companies control of research funding.

As long as this unholy trinity of doctors, government and media exists there will be no cure for diabetes for the simple reason that cures don't generate huge profits. The people behind the diabetes scam know there’s far more money to be made managing the disease through the use of high-profit drugs that only manage the symptoms and then leave the disease to fester and grow.

Millions are suffering and dying needlessly sacrificed on the altar of profit! We could wipe out this terrible epidemic in a generation if we could only find a way to overcome the vast corruption that now grips our nation.

Now more than ever it’s up to you to educate and empower yourself to take full responsibility for your own health care. If you don’t you’ll soon fall into the clutches of those who would exploit your suffering for their own personal financial gain. Don’t become yet another statistic. ■

Hooray for Diabetes!