Current Health News You Can Use

Townsend Letter for Doctors and Patients, June, 2001 by Joseph M. Mercola

This column will highlight recently published articles in the major peer-reviewed medical journals that have practical relevance for you. If you have access to e-mail you can receive the most recent and expanded weekly version of this column. All you need to do is go to www.mercola.com and follow the instructions. This newsletter is FREE with no ads and your address is not shared with anyone. It is published twice a week. Back issues of the newsletter are also available at www.mercola.com along with a search engine to locate items in the more than 15,000 pages of information that are posted on the site.

How The Media Deceives You About Health Issues

Think about how many times you've heard an evening news anchor give out some variation on the phrase, "According to experts...." It's such a common device that most of us hardly hear it anymore. But we do hear the "expert" -- the professor or doctor or watchdog group -- tell us whom to vote for, what to eat, when to buy stock. And, most of the time, we trust them. Now ask yourself, how many times has that news anchor revealed who those experts are, where they get their funding, and what constitutes their political agenda? If you answered never, you'd be close.

That's the driving complaint behind Trust Us, We're Experts, a new book co-authored by John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton of the Center for Media and Democracy. Unlike many so-called "experts," the Center's agenda is quite overt -- to expose the shenanigans of the public relations industry, which pays, influences and even invents a startling number of those experts.

There are two kinds of "experts" in question -- the PR spin doctors behind the scenes and the "independent" experts paraded before the public, scientists who have been hand-selected, cultivated, and paid handsomely to promote the views of corporations involved in controversial actions.

By financing and publicizing views that support the goals of corporate sponsors, PR campaigns have, over the course of the century, managed to suppress the dangers of lead poisoning for decades, silence the scientist who discovered that rats fed on genetically modified corn had significant organ abnormalities, squelch television and newspaper stories about the risks of bovine growth hormone, and place enough confusion and doubt in the public's mind about global warming to suppress any mobilization for action.

The news media regularly fails to investigate so-called "independent experts" associated with industry front groups. They all have friendly-sounding names like "Consumer Alert" and "The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition," but they fail to reveal their corporate funding and their propaganda agenda, which is to smear legitimate health and community safety concerns as "junk-science fear-mongering."

The news media frequently uses the term "junk science" to smear environmental health advocates. The PR industry has spent more than a decade and many millions of dollars funding and creating industry front groups which wrap them in the flag of "sound science." In reality, their "sound science" is progress as defined by the tobacco industry, the drug industry, the chemical industry, the genetic engineering industry, the petroleum industry and so on.

The truth is that the situation is getting worse, not better. More and more of what we see, hear and read as "news" is actually PR content. On any given day much or most of what the media transmits or prints as news is provided by the PR industry. It's off press releases, the result of media campaigns, heavily spun and managed, or in the case of "video news releases" it's fake TV news -- stories completely produced and supplied for free by former journalists who've gone over to PR. TV news directors air these VNRs as news. So the media not only fails to identify PR manipulations, it is the guilty party by passing them on as news.

Those who have the most power and money in any society are going to use the most sophisticated propaganda tactics available to keep democracy at bay and the rabble inline. The public clearly doesn't understand that most nonprofit groups take industry and government grants, or are even the nonprofit arm of industry.

Detroit Metro Times February 6, 2001

COMMENT: One of the reasons I write this column is to provide you, the reader, with the truth so you can weed through much of the nonsense that the media throws at you. My goal is to change the entire system. The way that will be done is through the Internet, which is the world's cheapest printing press.

Antibiotics Not Necessary For Ear Infections

Waiting a few days to see whether symptoms of an ear infection improve before beginning a course of antibiotics appears to be a practical way to reduce the use of antibiotics. This may help prevent the overuse of the drugs, and thus prevent bacteria from becoming resistant. A wait-and-see approach in the management of acute otitis media is feasible and was acceptable to most parents, and resulted in a 76% reduction in the use of antibiotic prescriptions. Each year millions of children are prescribed antibiotics to treat the middle ear infection, but the evidence that the drugs speed a child's recovery is mixed. Plus, antibiotics can cause side effects such as diarrhea, and widespread prescription of the drugs is thought to be increasing the risk that bacteria will become resistant to antibiotics. The study showed there was no significant difference in the reduction of pain or distress in children given antibiotics versus those who were not.