American Medical Association hawked cigarettes as healthy for consumers
Beginning in 1933, AMA was lucratively compensated for two decades for selling cigarette advertisements in JAMA
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
Despite its stated mission, “To promote the art and science of medicine and the betterment of public health,” the American Medical Association (AMA) has taken many missteps in protecting the health of the American people. One of the most striking examples is the AMA’s long-term relationship with the tobacco industry.
Both the AMA and individual doctors sided with big tobacco for decades after the deleterious effects of smoking were proven. Medical historians have tracked this relationship in great detail, examining internal documents from tobacco companies and their legal counsel and public relations advisers. The overarching theme of big tobacco’s efforts was to keep alive the appearance of a “debate” or “controversy” of the health effects of cigarette smoking.
The first research to make a statistical correlation between cancer and smoking was published in 1930 in Cologne, Germany. In 1938, Dr. Raymond Pearl of Johns Hopkins University reported that smokers do not live as long as non-smokers. The tobacco industry dismissed these early findings as anecdotal — but at the same time recruited doctors to endorse cigarettes.
JAMA kicks off two decades of cigarette advertising
The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) published its first cigarette advertisement in 1933, stating that it had done so only “after careful consideration of the extent to which cigarettes were used by physicians in practice.” These advertisements continued for 20 years. The same year, Chesterfield began running ads in the New York State Journal of Medicine, with the claim that its cigarettes were “Just as pure as the water you drink… and practically untouched by human hands.”
In medical journals and in the popular media, one of the most infamous cigarette advertising slogans was associated with the Camel brand: “More doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette.” The campaign began in 1946 and ran for eight years in magazines and on the radio. The ads included this message:
“Family physicians, surgeons, diagnosticians, nose and throat specialists, doctors in every branch of medicine… a total of 113,597 doctors… were asked the question: ‘What cigarette do you smoke?’ And more of them named Camel as their smoke than any other cigarette! Three independent research groups found this to be a fact. You see, doctors too smoke for pleasure. That full Camel flavor is just as appealing to a doctor’s taste as to yours… that marvelous Camel mildness means just as much to his throat as to yours.”
Big Tobacco’s suppression of scientific evidence
At the same time that JAMA ran cigarette ads, it published in 1950 the first major study to causally link smoking to lung cancer. Morton Levin, then director of Cancer Control for the New York State Department of Health, surveyed patients in Buffalo, N.Y., from 1938 to 1950 and found that smokers were twice as likely to develop lung cancer as non-smokers.
Cigarette producers may have hoped that the public would remain unaware of studies published in medical journals. However, the dangers of smoking became widely known in 1952 when Reader’s Digest published “Cancer by the Carton,” detailing the dangers of cigarettes. Within a year cigarette sales fell for the first time in more than two decades.
The tobacco industry responded swiftly, engaging the medical community in its efforts. The Tobacco Industry Research Committee (TIRC) was formed by U.S. tobacco companies in 1954. By sponsoring “independent” scientific research, the TIRC attempted to keep alive a debate about whether or not cigarettes were harmful.
The industry announced the formation of the TIRC in an advertisement that appeared in The New York Times and 447 other newspapers reaching more than 43 million Americans. The advertisement, titled “A Frank Statement to Cigarette Smokers,” read:
“RECENT REPORTS on experiments with mice have given wide publicity to a theory that cigarette smoking is in some way linked with lung cancer in human beings.
Although conducted by doctors of professional standing, these experiments are not regarded as conclusive in the field of cancer research. However, we do not believe that any serious medical research, even though its results are inconclusive should be disregarded or lightly dismissed.
At the same time, we feel it is in the public interest to call attention to the fact that eminent doctors and research scientists have publicly questioned the claimed significance of these experiments.
Distinguished authorities point out:
- That medical research of recent years indicates many possible causes of lung cancer.
- That there is no agreement among the authorities regarding what the cause is.
- That there is no proof that cigarette smoking is one of the causes.
- That statistics purporting to link cigarette smoking with the disease could apply with equal force to any one of many other aspects of modern life. Indeed the validity of the statistics themselves is questioned by numerous scientists.
We accept an interest in people’s heath as a basic responsibility, paramount to every other consideration in our business.
We believe the products we make are not injurious to health.
We always have and always will cooperate closely with those whose task it is to safeguard the public health. For more than 300 years tobacco has given solace, relaxation, and enjoyment to mankind. At one time or another during those years critics have held it responsible for practically every disease of the human body. One by one these charges have been abandoned for lack of evidence.
Regardless of the record of the past, the fact that cigarette smoking today should even be suspected as a cause of a serious disease is a matter of deep concern to us.
Many people have asked us what we are doing to meet the public’s concern aroused by the recent reports. Here is the answer:
- We are pledging aid and assistance to the research effort into all phases of tobacco use and health. This joint financial aid will of course be in addition to what is already being contributed by individual companies.
- For this purpose we are establishing a joint industry group consisting initially of the undersigned. This group will be known as TOBACCO INDUSTRY RESEARCH COMMITTEE.
- In charge of the research activities of the Committee will be a scientist of unimpeachable integrity and national repute. In addition there will be an Advisory Board of scientists disinterested in the cigarette industry. A group of distinguished men from medicine, science, and education will be invited to serve on this Board. These scientists will advise the Committee on its research activities.
This statement is being issued because we believe the people are entitled to know where we stand on this matter and what we intend to do about it.”
Doctors’ involvement in the tobacco deception
The statement — signed by presidents of major tobacco interests including Phillip Morris, Brown & Williamson, and R.J. Reynolds — was designed to launch the “controversy” which I mentioned earlier. In fact, there was no controversy. The research results were clear: smoking had been proven harmful — not just to mice, but to people who had for years been advised that smoking offered health benefits.
The TIRC promised to convene “a group of distinguished men from medicine, science, and education” and it did so. Early members of the TIRC’s Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) included: McKeen Cattell, PhD, MD, professor of pharmacology from Cornell University Medical College; Julius H. Comroe, Jr., MD, director of the University of California Medical Center’s cardiovascular research institute and chairman of University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Medicine; and Edwin B. Wilson, PhD, LLD, professor of vital statistics, Harvard University.
According to the New York State Archives, the TIRC’s functions “included both the funding of research and carrying out public relations activities relating to tobacco and health.” Faced with mounting evidence that smoking was harmful, “it became evident that this was not a short-term endeavor, and that it was difficult to manage both scientific research and public relations in one organization. As a result the Tobacco Institute was formed to assume the public relations functions, and the Council for Tobacco Research (CTR) was formed and incorporated to provide funding for scientific research.”
Whether or not individual doctors supported smoking, lending their names to the TIRC gave it credibility. The Center for Media and Democracy has reported that many of the scientists who were members of the Scientific Advisory Board privately “disagreed with the tobacco industry’s party line.” According to the center’s website: “In 1987, Dr. Kenneth Warner polled the SAB’s 13 current members, asking, ‘Do you believe that cigarette smoking causes lung cancer?’ Seven of the SAB members refused to answer the question, even after Warner promised individual anonymity. The other six all answered in the affirmative. ‘I don’t think there’s a guy on the [Board] who doesn’t believe that cigarette smoking contributes to an increased risk of lung cancer,’ one said, adding that the SAB’s members were ‘terrified’ to say so publicly out of fear of involvement in tobacco product liability lawsuits.”
If it was fear that kept doctors on board with the TIRC and its renamed version, CTR, it did not stop them from handing out research grants. The Center for Media and Democracy describes some of the early grants: “Research projects attempted to show that both lung cancer and smoking were caused by some other ‘third factor,’ such as a person’s psychological makeup, religion, war experiences or genetic susceptibility. One research project asked whether the handwriting of lung cancer patients can reveal characteristics associated with lung cancer. Another looked for enzyme markers predicting susceptibility to lung cancer.”
After three decades, the AMA finally admits smoking is harmful
After the 1964 Surgeon General’s landmark report on the dangers of cigarettes, the CTR stepped up its work, providing materials to defend the tobacco industry against litigation. The same year — three decades after medical research demonstrated the dangers of cigarettes — the American Medical Association finally issued statement on smoking, calling it “a serious health hazard.” It was not until 1998 that the CTR was shut down — and only after the tobacco industry lost a major court case brought forward by states across the country.
Allan M. Brandt, a medical historian at Harvard, writes about the role that medical research played on both sides of the smoking debate in his new book, The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall and Deadly Persistence of the Product that Defined America. After reviewing research, court transcripts and previously restricted memoranda from tobacco companies, Brandt summed up the misleading nature of “expert” medical testimony in tobacco litigation: “I was appalled by what the tobacco expert witnesses had written. By asking narrow questions and responding to them with narrow research, they provided precisely the cover the industry sought.”
In a recent interview with The New York Times, Brandt acknowledged that his research is a combination of scholarship and health advocacy — pointing out the means by which the American public was intentionally misled for most of the twentieth century. As Brandt stated, “The stakes are high, and there is much work to be done.”
The medical conspiracy continues today
It is my belief that just as private industry and the medical community conspired to deceive the public on tobacco (and thereby profit from the public’s ignorance of tobacco’s extreme health hazard), the same story is repeating itself today in the cancer industry, the sunscreen industry, and the pharmaceutical industry. In each case, so-called “authoritative” doctors insist that whatever they’re pushing is safe for human consumption, and that the public should buy their products without any concern about safety.
And yet these industries are much like the tobacco industry in the fact that they primarily seek profits, not health. Medicine today is in the business of making money, and that goal is achieved by selling chemical products to consumers regardless of their safety or efficacy. Big Medicine is the modern version of Big Tobacco, and over the last several decades, the American Medical Association has proudly supported both cigarettes and pharmaceuticals. In my opinion, the AMA is indirectly responsible for the deaths of millions of Americans — not just from pushing cigarettes but also for continuing to push dangerous pharmaceuticals while discrediting nearly everything in natural medicine or alternative medicine.
The AMA is a truly evil organization, in my opinion, that I believe has directly and knowingly contributed to the suffering and death of Americans for more than 75 years. Read my story, What the AMA hopes you never learn about its true history to learn more. In a just society, AMA leaders would be arrested and tried for their crimes against humanity, just as top FDA officials should be.
The cancer industry, similarly, is extremely dangerous to the health and safety of Americans thanks to its outright refusal to support anti-cancer nutrition (vitamin D, broccoli sprouts, spirulina, rainforest herbs, etc.) as well as its refusal to fight for the removal of toxic chemicals from consumer products and the workplace.
In studying the history of product commercialization by medical groups, what we consistently find is a series of cons perpetrated against consumers, masterminded by profit-seeing medical groups that conspire with corporations to maximize profits at the expense of public health. Nothing has changed today, either. The AMA isn’t pushing cigarettes anymore, but it’s still pushing deadly pharmaceuticals that will one day be regarded as just as senseless as smoking. Let’s face it: pharmaceutical medicine is hopelessly outdated, ineffective and dangerous. Nobody intelligent today actually believes that pharmaceuticals help people heal. In fact, the more drugs people take, the worse their health becomes! Modern medicine is actually harmful to patients!
Medical science is slow to change, and slow to give up its closely-guarded (false) beliefs. In time, however, virtually everything now supported by the medical industry (the FDA, AMA, ACS, etc.) will be regarded as insanely harmful to human health. One day, future scientists will look back on medicine today and wonder just how such an industry of evil and greed could have gained so much power and authority. The answer is found in “groupthink” and the strange knack for humans to defer to anyone in an apparent position of authority, regardless of whether such authority is warranted.
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What the American Medical Association hopes you never learn about its true history
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
To most Americans, the concept of “nonprofit” goes hand-in-hand with trust. If a person or an agency isn’t driven by money, they seem more likely to be trustworthy and unbiased. They should have the public’s best interests at heart, right?
The American Medical Association (AMA) is a nonprofit agency whose mission is “to be an essential part of the professional life of every physician and an essential force for progress in improving the nation’s health,” according to the AMA’s website. It makes you wonder, then, why the AMA gladly accepted huge sums of advertising fees from tobacco companies who advertised heavily in its flagship journal, JAMA, throughout the 20th century.
The AMA claims to support “progress,” but history shows that the AMA has worked diligently to block much in the way of real progress in order to control medicine and shut out competition. Consider chiropractic medicine, which is categorized as an “alternative” treatment by most Americans. It involves healing the human body through adjusting the spinal column and other musculoskeletal structures in the body. More than 60,000 chiropractors are practicing in the United States today, and 10,000 students are studying to become doctors of chiropractic medicine, or DCs. It is a legitimate medical practice that often solves medical problems conventional medicine can’t.
As an agency that proclaims itself to be concerned with improving the nation’s health, the AMA has a duty to accept the field of chiropractic medicine as having proven medicinal value. But history shows just the opposite. Until recently, the AMA viewed chiropractors as competition and tried to destroy the practice of chiropractic medicine in its entirety. In When Healing Becomes and Crime, Kenny Ausubel writes,
“For over 12 years and with the full knowledge and support of their executive officers, the AMA paid the salaries and expenses for a team of more than a dozen medical doctors, lawyers and support staff for the expressed purpose of conspiring (overtly and covertly) with others in medicine to first contain, and eventually, destroy the profession of chiropractic in the United States and elsewhere.”
This was not speculation. The actions taken by the U.S. Court of Appeals 7th circuit support Ausubel’s accusation. In 1990, chiropractic doctors Chester A. Wilk, James W. Bryden, Patricia B. Arthur and Michael D. Pedigo won a landmark antitrust lawsuit against the AMA. The court ruled that the AMA had violated the Sherman Act by “conducting an illegal boycott in restraint of the trade directed at chiropractors generally, and at the four plaintiffs in particular.” This 1990 verdict against the AMA followed three other antitrust cases against the association in 1978, 1980 and 1986, all of which were settled.
The fact that the AMA tried to eliminate the profession of chiropractic is fairly well known in the medical community. But there are other skeletons in the AMA’s closet that aren’t as well known. Have you ever heard of Morris Fishbein? The University of Chicago’s Center for History of Science and Medicine is named after him. He was editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) from 1924-1949. Oh, and he was a racketeer, too.
Fishbein apparently operated the AMA for the sole purpose of dominating medicine and discrediting anything he could not control. He also masterminded a scam where he determined what products were fit to carry the AMA’s “seal of acceptance” and then accepted money from the manufacturers of those products in exchange for permission to use the AMA seal.
But in reality, the association had no facilities in which to conduct tests of foods or drugs to evaluate their so-called “fitness.” Gaining the seal was merely a matter of paying Fishbein shady advertising fees to feature the products in AMA publications. Those fees were in fact “protection” fees paid to keep AMA membership. As editor of JAMA, Fishbein had full control over what information reached the public and what did not.
Thanks to Fishbein, you most likely haven’t heard of the Rife Beam Ray. It is a holistic treatment for cancer and infectious diseases. Fishbein single-handedly stifled its research when he learned of the technology. “Sadly, the research was suppressed by medical authorities under the covert direction of Morris Fishbein … who sought to buy into and control the use of the Rife Beam Ray,” writes Richard Gerber, author of Vibrational Medicine. “Fishbein (who was later convicted of racketeering charges) was spurned by Rife [creator of Beam Ray treatment] when he attempted to buy into his company. In response, Fishbein decided that if he could not control the therapy, he would suppress it.”
Although Fishbein’s legacy is tainted with corruption and his misuse of an agency the public trusts, he is remembered by many as the AMA’s spokesman for medical orthodoxy, which advocates sticking to what is commonly accepted, customary or traditional.
Take the case of Hoxsey Cancer Clinic in Dallas, which was the world’s largest private cancer center in the 1950s. Harry Hoxsey, the clinic’s founder, was a self-taught healer who treated cancer patients with herbal folk remedies that proved amazingly effective.
“A Dallas judge ruled in federal court that Hoxsey’s therapy was ‘comparable to surgery, radium and x-ray in its effectiveness, without the destructive side effects of those treatments’,” writes Dr. John Heinerman in Natural Pet Cures. “[Hoxsey] faced unrelenting opposition and harassment from a hostile medical establishment. [But] even his archenemies, the American Medical Association and the Food and Drug Administration, admitted that his treatment could cure some forms of cancer.” Despite the courts’ approval of Hoxsey’s treatment, the Dallas clinic was shut down in the 1950s at the end of the McCarthy Era. “The AMA, NCI (National Cancer Institute), and FDA organized a ‘conspiracy’ to ‘suppress’ a fair, unbiased assessment of Hoxsey’s methods, according to a 1953 report to Congress,” writes Heinerman.
But that was all in the 50s. Surely the AMA has improved with time, right? Perhaps not. According to a 1998 article in The New York Times, the AMA paid Sunbeam Corp. $9.9 million to avoid a breach-of-contract trial with the company after pulling out of a five-year, multi-million-dollar endorsement deal. The AMA would have made millions of dollars in royalties by endorsing Sunbeam’s blood pressure monitors, humidifiers and other products, but the association backed out of the deal after being criticized because it had no plans to test the products. The AMA had basically made a profit-making deal to endorse products they had no plans of testing beforehand. The AMA only pulled out once the public got wind of the deal.
Does this situation sound familiar? It sounds a bit Fishbein-esque; although Fishbein’s “seal of acceptance” program was abandoned in 1955 after a lawsuit was brought against the AMA. It was settled out of court – much like the Sunbeam suit.
After the settlement with Sunbeam, the AMA said it was “now fully focused on its historic mission to serve America’s patients and the quality of American medicine.” What, then, had been its focus before the Sunbeam settlement? Was it making money? Was it controlling what medical information is “fit” to reach the American public?
Despite the fact that the AMA is stated to be a nonprofit association, it nevertheless has a troublesome history of focusing on money and control. Even its longtime campaign against chiropractic medicine appears grounded in money-making motives, since the association was attempting to eliminate orthodox medicine’s “competition.”
Today, the AMA boasts that its core purpose is “to promote the science and art of medicine and the betterment of public health.” The AMA further claims “only the AMA has the national voice, the reputation and the stature to be a strong advocate for physicians and their patients.”
Reputation? For those inclined to place trust in the “reputation” and “stature” of the AMA, just take a look at the association’s history. In doing so, you will find an organization operated with questionable ethics.
Even today, the AMA continues to make decisions obviously designed to protect organized medicine, not patients.
For example, the AMA is right now engaged in the following actions:
- Refusing to support the ban of direct-to-consumer drug advertising, a dangerous phenomenon that is partly responsible for the vast over-prescribing of prescription drugs that are right now killing 100,000 Americans each and every year.
- Continuing to support the prescribing of antidepressant drugs to children, even though such drugs are now clearly linked to violent thoughts and suicidal behavior and have been banned from use in children in the U.K.
- Continuing to accept tens of millions of dollars each year in advertising funds from drug companies whose products dominate the pages of the Journal of the American Medical Association. Many of the drugs advertised in JAMA are, in fact, the very same drugs that are right now killing tens of thousands of Americans each year, according to senior drug safety researchers at the FDA. This massive funding of the AMA by drug companies creates a clear conflict of interest.
The experts speak on the AMA and Fishbein
Judge Getzendanner ruled, “I conclude that an injunction is necessary in this case. There are lingering effects of this conspiracy; the AMA has never acknowledged the lawlessness of its past conduct and in fact to this day maintains that it has always been in compliance with the antitrust laws.” The AMA was forced to circulate the contrite Order of Injunction through medical journals, hospitals, and many other outlets, and to cease and desist from obstructing the professional rights of the chiropractic profession. The conviction marked the third time in the century that the AMA was found guilty of antitrust violations for conspiracy and restraint of trade.
The medical association was first convicted in 1937 under Dr. Fishbein for trying to destroy an autonomous doctors’ group applying cost-cutting health delivery and insurance in Washington, D.C. It was again found guilty in 1982 by the Federal Trade Commission—a decision upheld by the Supreme Court, just as the earlier conviction was. This time the verdict confirmed the AMA’s decades-long, systematic violation of antitrust statutes.
When Healing Becomes A Crime by Kenny Ausubel, page 265
Cigarette manufacturer Philip Morris, the Journal’s biggest single advertiser, also ran into some problems. Blitzing the AMA Journal and thirty-one state and regional medical journals, the start-up tobacco company was eager to publicize its innovative use of diethylene glycol as a hygroscopic agent (to retain moisture), in place of the glycerin used by other manufacturers. Philip Morris pegged its campaign on hyping the breakthrough that its cigarettes were consequently “less irritating to the throat.”
When the corporation approached the Journal with its ads, Dr. Fishbein courteously advised it how to go about conducting acceptable scientific testing to validate its unsubstantiated claims and thereby qualify. The cigarette manufacturer was eager to link its product with health benefits, and Dr. Fishbein saw a vast new opportunity for revenues from nonmedical products, despite the fact that by this time in the 1930s medical journals were already publishing studies associating smoking with lung cancer.
The company completed its testing at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons with findings that the cigarettes with diethylene glycol caused three times less swelling than other brands. The company used these studies to launch its medical ad campaign, while supplying free smokes to doctors. One Journal ad read, “Patients with coughs were instructed to change to Philip Morris cigarettes. In three out of four cases, the coughs disappeared completely. When these patients changed back to cigarettes made by the ordinary method of manufacture, coughs had returned in one third of the cases. This Philip Morris superiority is due to the employment of diethylene glycol.”
When Healing Becomes A Crime by Kenny Ausubel, page 90
The AMA was also composed almost entirely of male doctors and there were many swipes at women in Fishbein’s writing. It is interesting from a sociological point of view that nutrition and herbalism were opposed, in part, because they were associated with women. For example, Fishbein considered Eclecticism “the apotheosis of the old grandmother and witch-doctor systems of treatment.”
It arose out of “the medical practice of an old-woman herb doctor.” Herbal remedies, built up over decades of careful observation, were mockingly derided as “veritable vegetable soups”. Fishbein considered anything traditional in medicine to be abhorrent. He saw the botanical drugs of the late 19th century as “almost a replica of the herbals of the 17th and 18th century Europe.” …Of course, the vast majority of phytochemicals now known to reside in plants and herbs (many with unique physiological effects) were undreamed of in Fishbein’s day. To put it colloquially, he was simply blowing smoke. While the AMA was successful in eliminating most competition, Fishbein became concerned, and then obsessed, by “the worst cancer quack of the century,” Harry Hoxsey. Herbs Against Cancer by Ralph W Moss PhD, page 75-76
One of the landmark days in the recent history of alternative medicine in the U.S. was August 27, 1987. On that day, District Judge Susan Getzendanner found the American Medical Association (AMA) and fourteen associated parties guilty of waging a conspiracy against chiropractors to contain and eliminate them entirely, in violation of the Sherman Antitrust law. …the fourteen litigators probably cost AMA at least $15 million. Physician by Richard Leviton, page 28
Fishbein’s early success combating quackery revealed to him a gold mine of limitless possibilities. In rapid-fire succession he cranked out three books: Fads and Quackery, Medical Follies, and The New Medical Follies. “As one reads the rolls of fakirs down through the ages,” Fishbein gleefully penned, “one becomes almost convinced of the doctrine of transmigration of souls.” Dr. Fishbein also utilized the “Devil theory of history,” as one observer put it, exemplified by his quackdown. In Medical Follies, he dubbed the profession of chiropractic a “malignant tumor” whose theory was “so simple that even farm-hands can grasp it. It has been said that osteopathy is essentially a method of entering the practice of medicine by the back door.
Chiropractic, by contrast, is an attempt to arrive through the cellar. The man who applies at the back door at least makes himself presentable. The one who comes through the cellar is besmirched with dust and grime; he carries a crowbar and he may wear a mask.” Under Dr. Fishbein’s direction, the AMA Bureau of Investigation’s quack files swelled to a prodigious 300,000 names. When Healing Becomes A Crime by Kenny Ausubel, page 88
…Even the American Medical Association (AMA) was complicit in suppressing results of tobacco research. In 1964, the Surgeon General’s report condemned smoking, however the AMA refused to endorse it. … Death By Medicine by Gary Null PhD, page 25
…. By the 1950s, the Hoxsey Cancer Clinic in Dallas was the world’s largest private cancer center, -with branches in seventeen states. Born in Illinois, the charismatic practitioner of herbal folk medicine faced unrelenting opposition and harassment from a hostile medical establishment. Nevertheless, two federal courts upheld the ‘therapeutic value’ of Hoxsey’s internal tonic. Even his archenemies, the American Medical Association and the Food and Drug Administration, admitted that his treatment could cure some forms of cancer. A Dallas judge ruled in federal court that Hoxsey’s therapy was ‘comparable to surgery, radium, and x-ray’ in its effectiveness, without the destructive side effects of those treatments.’ But in the 1950s, at the tail end of the McCarthy era, Hoxsey’s clinics were shut down. The AMA, NCI [National Cancer Institute], and FDA organized a ‘conspiracy’ to ‘suppress’ a fair, unbiased assessment of Hoxsey’s methods, according to a 1953 federal report to Congress.” Natural Pet Cures by Dr John Heinerman, page 81
The campaign was wildly successful and established Philip Morris as a major tobacco player, until, in 1937, seventy-two people died as a result of using a drug called Sulfanalamide Massengill. With help from the AMA itself, the toxic agent was determined to be diethylene glycol. Dr. Fishbein hit the ground backpedaling. He defended his advertiser in an editorial by saying “There is no evidence that the ordinary use of diethylene glycol in industry, or as an ingredient in the manufacture of cigarettes, is harmful.” The company was so grateful that it offered him a retainer for his services, which he refused, tipping his editor’s public health hat. Other cigarette manufacturers quickly followed suit in their entry into the medical market using physician testimonials.
More Doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette was the slogan at Camel’s exhibit at the 1947 AMA convention. Only in the 1950s, when overwhelming evidence of the causation of lung cancer by smoking reached the public, did the Journal stop accepting tobacco ads, though Dr. Fishbein was by then serving as a paid consultant to the Lorillard tobacco company. Through its Members’ Retirement Fund, the AMA continued to own tobacco stock in the seven figures until the mid-1980s. Numerous physicians complained of other high-pressure tactics from Chicago. Dr. George Starr White, a respected physician who lectured extensively to doctors and reputedly had the largest private practice in the country, described how two doctors from AMA headquarters approached him with a proposition.
When Healing Becomes A Crime by Kenny Ausubel, page 91
The AMA could not survive on membership dues alone, and without the income secured by him, the Association would undoubtedly flounder. The key to financial solvency for the organization has been its monthly publication, the AMA Journal. It was begun in 1883 by Dr. Simmons as a last-ditch effort to save the infant association from bankruptcy.
Its first press run was 3,500 copies and sold at a subscription rate of five dollars per year. But it was anticipated that the bulk of the revenue would be derived from advertisers. By 1973, under the tight control of Managing Editor Dr. Morris Fishbein, it had a print run of almost 200,000 copies each month and had extended its publication list to include twelve separate journals including the layman’s monthly, Today’s Health.
Altogether the AMA now derives over ten million dollars per year in advertising, which is almost half of the Association’s total income.
Who advertises in the AMA Journal and related publications? The lion’s share is derived from the Pharmaceutical Manufacturer’s Association whose members make up ninety-five percent of the American drug industry.
World Without Cancer by G Edward Griffin, page 274
The National Council Against Health Fraud (NCAHF) is widely considered the unofficial propaganda arm of the American Medical Association. After a federal court ruling that found the AMA and other medical organizations had conspired to disseminate misinformation about chiropractic in an attempt to destroy its “competition,” the NCAHF became the front man for the attack.
Under The Influence Modern Medicine by Terry A Rondberg DC, page 143
When Dr. Fishbein took the stand under cross-examination, the digging done by Hoxsey’s lawyers paid off. Under oath, Dr. Fishbein made shocking admissions. He failed anatomy in medical school. He never completed his internship before going to work at the Journal. He never practiced a day of medicine or treated a single patient in his entire career. Dr. Fishbein was sweating profusely by the time he left the stand. His definition of a quack as “one who pretends to medical skill he does not possess” now reflected back in an unseemly mirror.
When Healing Becomes A Crime by Kenny Ausubel, page 117
One may ask why no one has heard of the Rife Beam Ray if it had such a high success rate in treating cancer and infectious diseases. Sadly, the research was suppressed by medical authorities under the covert direction of Morris Fishbein, a powerful editor of JAMA (the Journal of the American Medical Association) who sought to buy into and control the use of the Rife Beam Ray. Fishbein (who was later convicted of racketeering charges) was spurned by Rife when he attempted to buy into his company. In response, Fishbein decided that if he could not control the therapy, he would suppress it.
Vibrational Medicine by Richard Gerber MD, page 515
… The American Medical Association had just been convicted in federal court of a “conspiracy to destroy and eliminate” the chiropractic profession.” The court judgment was unequivocal. “For over twelve years and with the full knowledge and support of their executive officers, the AMA paid the salaries and expenses for a team of more than a dozen medical doctors, lawyers, and support staff for the expressed purpose of conspiring (overtly and covertly) with others in medicine to first contain, and eventually, destroy the profession of chiropractic in the United States and elsewhere.” Also convicted with the AMA were the American College of Surgeons and the American College of Radiologists.
When Healing Becomes A Crime by Kenny Ausubel, page 263
Historically, this was a period in which the AMA had recently established its hegemony over American medicine. It was headed by Morris Fishbein, a pugnacious physician who was to make himself infamous in the eyes of many advocates of unconventional cancer therapies for his attacks on Gerson, Hoxsey, and other pioneers of unconventional therapies. It is no surprise to me that Fishbein, faced with congressional hearings inimical to conventional cancer treatment and AMA hegemony, went on the attack. The details of the process by which the AMA destroyed Gerson’s professional reputation have been described by Ward and others. Gerson lost his hospital affiliation and was denied malpractice insurance:
Choices In Healing by Michael Lerner, page 612
The Journal, after all, solicits advertisers to pay top dollar for its pages, whose 750,000 circulation still commands the greatest market share of doctors (including fifteen international editions in 150 countries). The lure of advertising profits continues to compete with the impartiality of “scientific medicine.” The AMA medical publicity machine Dr. Fishbein founded is running in perpetual overdrive today. The “JAMA Report,” a video news release, goes out weekly on satellite to every TV network and local station in the United States, reaching between 25 and 110 million viewers. Most major newspapers routinely scan JAMA for breaking stories, as do wire services and radio. The AMA also floods about 2,500 press outlets worldwide with weekly e-mails and faxes. The credibility of the AMA’s vaunted Code of Ethics, which ostensibly puts the profession of healing above business, is in tatters today.
In 1998 the AMA once again was mired in negative publicity as the Seal of Acceptance experienced its latest devaluation. After the AMA granted the Sunbeam corporation an exclusive product endorsement for the manufacturer’s medical devices without even testing them, the medical association was set to receive millions of dollars in licensing fees, which it planned to use to offset declining membership dues. Outrage from the medical community and other competing companies crashed the nakedly commercial transaction. The mass media roasted the AMA’s signature cupidity.
When Healing Becomes A Crime by Kenny Ausubel, page 331
Historian Harris Coulter, PhD, has called Eclecticism “a more sophisticated system of practice drawing on the same intellectual and philosophical sources” as Thomsonianism (86). However, they had no systematic theory of diagnostics or pharmacology, and basically accepted allopathic medicine’s systems, substituting their own vegetable cures. Regular and Eclectic physicians competed for the same clients and generally despised each other. JAMA editor Morris Fishbein, MD, called Eclecticism “the apotheosis of the old grandmother and witch-doctor systems of treatment” (132). He championed chemotherapy and denied any utility to herbs, whatsoever. Herbs Against Cancer by Ralph W Moss PhD, page 39
In 1912, 1921 and 1936, the AMA issued three volumes called Nostrums and Quackery. These described the “evils” of patent medicines, which a few years before had been a mainstay of the Journal of the American Medical Associations revenue. In 1927, Morris Fishbein, MD, the editor of JAMA, issued a popular book that included an “Encyclopedia of Cults and Quackery.” Fishbein saw “cults” everywhere. It is amusing that he even considered beauty parlors to be part of the medical cult phenomenon. And he filled page after page with descriptions of cults from Aero- to Zonotherapy.
“The appeal of the bizarre is strong even to enlightened men,” wrote the enlightened Fishbein. “To a public educated to a belief in the black art, magic, alchemy, and the miracles of the saints, the unusual necessarily has an absolute fascination. Medicine in this way became inordinately complex and chaotic”.
Fishbein and his colleagues set out to make medicine simple and well organized, by centralizing everything under the control of the AMA. They especially aimed at the destruction of Eclecticism and its heirs. This set the stage for the great battle of the 20th century concerning herbs and cancer, the Hoxsey saga. Herbs Against Cancer by Ralph W Moss PhD, page 48
Throughout Hoxsey’s era, organized medicine denied any link between diet and cancer. As Dr. Morris Fishbein contended, “There is no scientific evidence whatsoever to indicate that modification in the dietary intake of food or any other nutritional essentials are of any specific value in the control of cancer.” Science has since contradicted him. In general terms, contemporary research has shown that the Hoxsey diet does directly serve important anticancer functions. When Healing Becomes A Crime by Kenny Ausubel, page 211
Over the years Fishbein not only established himself as the gifted editor of the most widely read medical journal in the United States; he also learned how to extend his editorial position, how to project his opinions nationwide. He became, as the saying went in those years, a “personality.” TIME referred to him as “the nation’s most ubiquitous, the most widely maligned, and perhaps most influential medico.” In addition to his development of JAMA as an editorial and personal voice, Fishbein also continually railed against “quackery.” Textbook of Natural Medicine Volumes 1-2 by Joseph E Pizzorno and Michael T Murray, page 35
In a brief twenty years, the AMA came to dominate medical practice through brute financial force, political manipulation, and professional authority enhanced by rising public favor with “scientific” medicine. The AMA emerged as the supreme arbiter of medical practice, making binding pronouncements regulating even the most picayune details. American medicine surged forward as a profit-driven enterprise of matchless scope. By the time Dr. Morris Fishbein assumed the mantle of Dr. Simmons, who had himself started out as a homeopath, the AMA was at the helm of a strapping new industry flying the allopathic flag. The code word for competition was quackery. When Healing Becomes A Crime by Kenny Ausubel, page 291
Rife’s discovery was mysteriously burned to the ground. Rife was dragged through the California court system on trumped-up charges. So powerful were Fishbein’s connections to major medical groups of the day that many doctors who were successfully using the Rife Beam Ray had to cease their use of it for fear of being blacklisted. Because the Rife Beam Ray was suppressed by greedy, unscrupulous people, this cure for cancer was buried and nearly forgotten. It turns out that Rife was not the only researcher experimenting with using an electromagnetic field device to treat cancer. Vibrational Medicine by Richard Gerber MD, page 516
Dr. Fishbein’s crusade to eliminate the irregulars played no small part in the AMA’s financial success by throttling economic competition. While member dues accounted for half the AMA’s revenues, the balance flowed from the Journal, now the most profitable publication in the world. Flush with revenues, it soon became known as “the tail that wagged the dog.” In addition, the Journal owned or controlled another half-dozen medical journals along with the thirty-five state society journals, with advertising revenues of over $2 million, a huge sum in those days. When Healing Becomes A Crime by Kenny Ausubel, page 89
The AMA’s core mission of preserving the power, privilege, and financial prosperity of doctors has established it as an organization “notorious for confrontation, ultimatums, and hardball politics”.
Its political action committee, AMPAC, has given over $100 million over the last twenty years to 83 percent of federal congressional representatives and senators. The AMA actually owns the very building in the nation’s capital that the government leases for its federal political action committee monitoring program. When Healing Becomes A Crime by Kenny Ausubel, page 330
Morris Fishbein became a lot more to the AMA than his title of Managing Editor would suggest. He was its chief executive and business manager. He brought in the money and he decided how it was spent. His investments on behalf of the Association were extremely profitable, so the grateful membership could not, or at least dared not, complain too bitterly. One of the reasons for this investment success was that over ten-million dollars of the organization’s retirement fund had been put into leading drug companies. World Without Cancer by G Edward Griffin, page 274