What the War on Chlorine Dioxide Reveals About Medicine

While medicine has produced remarkable and life-changing results for a variety of challenging conditions, the present reality of our medical system is that:

• Large amounts of research dollars are collected each year to seek out solutions for incurable diseases creating immense suffering for many patients with “incurable” conditions.

• Since many diseases lack satisfactory treatments, patients and health care systems begrudgingly accept paying for and using the unsatisfactory treatments that are available.

• When medicine is ultimately unable to address a condition patients have, this is justified under the logic “we tried everything we had and nothing more could be done” (e.g., for a hospitalized patient, or more recently, for a disabled patient being funneled into medically assisted dying).

Our medical system, in turn, is structured so that:

• For a therapy to enter regular use (and particularly for it to be paid for) it must secure a regulatory approval.

• Regulatory approvals require a body of preclinical science (which if often the results of years of public research dollars), a mechanistic basis (that typically draws upon those studies), costly large randomized controlled trials and effective regulatory lobbying (all of which results in drugs now typically costing 1-2 billion dollars to bring to market^1,2,3). However, while there is a strong correlation between spending money to secure an approval and receiving it, a much weaker correlation exists between the intrinsic value of a treatment and its approval (resulting in many unsafe drugs being approved that provide negligible benefits).

• Once a drug is brought to market, payers will pay vast sums of money for the treatment, in part to cover the cost of bringing it to market.

• The regulatory approval process typically rewards drugs having a specific mechanism for a specific disease. Because of this, each disease becomes a lucrative franchise that is reserved for a limited number of pharmaceuticals (which utilize a limited number of approved mechanisms) that in most cases provide an unsatisfactory treatment, making it possible to reuse the franchise in the future with a new class of drugs once the patents on the original ones run out.
Note: “franchise” is a term routinely used in the pharmaceutical industry.

• While the rules for getting an FDA approval are quite strict, once approved, the rules for using an approved drug for something else are quite lax, and as such, pharmaceutical drugs are routinely used to treat conditions they lack evidence for treating.

If you take a step back, this entire paradigm relies upon two things:

1. The belief that a substance, by virtue of being labeled as a pharmaceutical (through regulatory approval), is “real medicine” that works (and must have extensive credible evidence behind it).
2. For each of these disease franchises to remain incurable so that an endless funnel of money can go into bringing us closer to a cure (which occasionally new pharmaceuticals accomplish, but typically do not).

Many hence find the existing paradigm extremely frustrating, in part because of how much money it sucks up (which has now hit the point socialist states are pursuing medically assisted dying to balance their budgets), and in part because of how much the people with these “incurable” diseases suffer year after year after year.

A History of Medicine

Understanding where the current paradigm comes from requires understanding the history of medicine.

In the earliest recorded history, disease was widely attributed to supernatural causes (e.g., angry gods, demons, ancestral spirits, curses, or soul loss) and medicine typically involved shamans, priests, or medicine men using rituals, incantations, charms, amulets, sacrifices, and exorcisms, often combined with herbal remedies or basic surgery (e.g., trepanation to release evil energy from the head).
Note: while these supernatural approaches have still been largely discarded, some are still utilized by spiritual healers and indigenous traditions (e.g., Native American and Amazonian shamans) and every now and then, I hear of someone treating a fairly challenging illness with one.

Around the time of Christ (400 BC – 100 AD) a new perspective entered the world that led to medical systems across numerous major civilizations concluding illness resulted from innate qualities within the body being out of balance or obstructed (e.g., the four humors, yin and yang, the five elements, the doshas etc) and hence that healing arose from harmoniously rebalancing them. Due to the success of this approach, it supplemented and then gradually displaced old approaches like human sacrifice.
Note: certain points of evidence suggest the “balance” school of medicine originated from a much older society that predated recorded history (e.g., it’s referenced in the opening of the original text of Chinese of medicine and Graham Hancock has built an extensive case an older advanced civilization was mostly but not completely erased by a planetary disaster).

After the classical balance systems became established, they remained the dominant medical framework for well over a thousand years. In Rome, Galen (129-216 AD) then refined Greek humoral theory with extensive anatomy and physiology derived from animal dissections and experiments (human ones were illegal), causing the synthesis of the four humors with detailed organ function and bodily structure to become the authoritative medical model across Europe and then the Islamic world.

The Renaissance (roughly 1300–1600) and the Scientific Revolution that overlapped and followed it (roughly 1500–1700) produced major anatomical and physiological discoveries (most notably William Harvey’s 1628 demonstration that blood circulates in a closed circuit pumped by the heart) as well as philosophical shifts such as Descartes’ separation of mind (or soul) from body. Together these developments encouraged a new view of the body as a mechanical structure governed by physical laws and amenable to external analysis and intervention.

This gave birth to “heroic medicine” which used invasive methods, mineral remedies and toxic remedies (e.g. mercury, opium and antimony) to powerfully shift the body in the belief that would achieve health (with this school of medicine eventually coming to be known by many as “allopathy,” after the founder of homeopathy in 1810 critically coined this term to denote that this system worked by forcefully producing effects opposite to the symptoms of the disease).

Between the 1850s-1880s, advances in germ theory (Pasteur and Koch), cellular pathology (Virchow), controlled laboratory methods, and clinical observation shifted the understanding of disease toward specific, measurable causes such as microorganisms, cellular damage, chemical imbalances, and structural failures. The body was hence increasingly viewed as a complex biological machine that could be diagnosed and fixed through targeted interventions and in the early 1900s, this mechanistic approach had become the prevailing paradigm in Western medicine, after which it spread globally.

However, since allopathy had major shortcomings (e.g., it failed to treat many diseases, its remedies—particularly mercury and early vaccines like smallpox—created a horrendous wave of illnesses never seen before, and patients often died from allopathic methods), in the 1800s a variety of other medical schools emerged that gradually outcompeted allopathic medicine (homeopathy, osteopathy, “the eclectic” naturopathic school of medicine and to a lesser extent chiropractic—with doctors at the time often also being licensed in many of these schools).

Medical Monopolization

The American Medical Association, founded in 1847 partly to counter the newly established American Institute of Homeopathy, for decades remained relatively weak in membership and finances (as most MDs in the country did not wish to join that and homeopaths were far more prosperous due to them being preferred by the wealthy and most educated). However, two developments changed that trajectory.

First, internal reorganization of the AMA itself. In 1899 George H. Simmons became general manager (and later editor of the AMA’s widely read medical journal JAMA). Under Simmons and his successor Morris Fishbein (editor roughly 1924–1950), the association professionalized its operations, expanded membership dramatically, and created revenue streams tied to pharmaceutical advertising. The AMA Council on Pharmacy and Chemistry (1905) introduced a “Seal of Acceptance” program: companies disclosed ingredients and limited certain claims in exchange for the right to advertise in AMA publications.
Note: a friend knew Morris Fishbein’s secretary and shared with me the secretary witnessed highly unethical behavior from him consistent with his unscrupulous behaviors highlighted throughout this article.

Advertising revenue (according to the most commonly cited source) rose from roughly $34,000 in 1899 to $150,000 by 1909, while membership grew from about 8,000 to over 70,000. Critics at the time called the arrangement commercially self-serving but the AMA nevertheless gained resources and visibility.
Note: in many later accounts of the events, the AMA’s activities were characterized as monopolistic blackmail (with the AMA having a lengthy conflict with the founder of Abbott Laboratories), and while that seems likely given the AMA’s other activities, I have not located any sources from the time that substantiated overt blackmail occurred.

Likewise, the AMA had earlier used a “consultation clause” in its code of ethics that forbade members from associating with homeopaths (or other “irregulars”), with expulsion from local societies sometimes resulting in loss of licensure. Even after the clause was formally removed in 1901, homeopaths could join only by renouncing homeopathy in practice.

Second, there was a concerted push for higher educational and licensing standards. The AMA’s Council on Medical Education (established 1904) began rating schools. In 1910 the Carnegie Foundation published Abraham Flexner’s “Medical Education in the United States and Canada.” Flexner, working with input from AMA reformers (including close consultation with Nathan Colwell of the AMA Council and correspondence that treated the report as “ammunition” for the AMA while publicly distancing the collaboration), harshly criticized proprietary, under-resourced, and most sectarian schools—including the majority of the roughly 20–22 homeopathic colleges then operating—for inadequate laboratories, weak science prerequisites, and commercial incentives. State licensing boards increasingly aligned with these ratings. The result was rapid closure or conversion of many competing schools; by the 1930s the number of U.S. medical schools had fallen sharply (with Women’s and Black medical colleges disproportionately affected), homeopathic schools had dwindled to two by 1923, and the remaining institutions were almost entirely scientific and allopathic in orientation.
Note: a case can be made Flexner did this not to monopolize medicine, but simply to address poor standards in medical schools across the country, but many of his “standards” were based upon an allopathic worldview that placed a much greater weight on subjects like anatomy than homeopathic medical schools (where a precise knowledge of anatomy was not necessary to practice the discipline). That said, from having spoken to (now deceased) people directly familiar with the events at the time, they felt Flexner approached the non-allopathic schools with the intent of discrediting them.

Rockefeller philanthropy supplied key capital for the new model. The Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (organized 1901) and the General Education Board directed tens of millions of dollars (enormous sums at the time) toward laboratory-based research, full-time faculty systems, and university-affiliated schools that met Flexner-style criteria. Frederick T. Gates, Rockefeller’s principal philanthropic adviser, viewed scientific medicine as a strategic social investment: it promised healthier, more productive workers and framed disease as a technical and biological problem rather than a social or environmental one. Rockefeller funding hence favored institutions that aligned with this biomedical approach; support for homeopathic or other sectarian emphases was withdrawn.
Note: E. Richard Brown’s critical Rockefeller Medicine Men (1979), provides the most detailed summary of what occurred here, but argues it was class-aligned philanthropy rather than a simple personal profit scheme and was framed by Gates as long-term institutional shaping, not a direct buyout of the AMA. That book and this article are the primary sources for the above section.

Finally, recently made available primary sources shed further light on exactly what happened. In 1911 Gates prepared five private “Notes on Homeopathy” reports exclusively for John D. Rockefeller Sr. These documents (now available through the Rockefeller Archive Center) harshly criticized homeopathy and its founder Samuel Hahnemann while praising William Osler and laboratory-based scientific medicine. Critics however noted that Gates overstated the reach of germ theory, misrepresented Hahnemann’s views on the body’s self-healing capacities, and asserted that homeopathy had never cured a single patient (despite hospital mortality data at the time indicating otherwise and Osler’s having publicly expressed respect for homeopathy). So, despite Rockefeller’s lifelong personal reliance on homeopathic physicians for decades and his repeated instructions that homeopathic institutions should receive “fair, courteous, and liberal treatment” equal to allopathic ones, the foundations under Gates’s influence (and later under John D. Rockefeller Jr.) provided no grants to any institution bearing the word “homeopathic” in its name. Abraham Flexner himself was later hired by the (Rockefeller) General Education Board to help implement the report’s recommendations, further concentrating societal resources behind the scientific model. Homeopathic schools, starved of capital and forced by licensing exams and equipment requirements to dilute their curricula, either closed or abandoned rigorous homeopathic training and by mid-century none remained.
Note: I believe the reason the medical system (and scientific community) has been so strongly opposed to homeopathy is because it was the initial opponent the AMA had to vanquish to establish their monopoly—illustrating how often large actions create unintended consequences (as Rockefeller explicitly stated he did not want the status quo that followed).

In short, the combined effect of AMA organizational power, state licensing leverage, Flexner’s influence, foundation capital, and the deliberate withholding of support from competing systems monopolized medical education and practice by the science-focused allopathic model as alternative systems lost schools, licenses, and institutional legitimacy. Then, once the monopoly was established, the same institutions that had raised barriers to entry could define what counted as “real medicine,” what research received funding, and which therapies were branded quackery. Later federal drug regulation (e.g., the FDA) operated within this already-consolidated professional and educational framework.

When the above events are recounted, they are typically portrayed as the Rockefellers and the AMA attempting to monopolize medicine, both so that MDs could earn more (shifting them from being some of the lowest to highest paid members of society) and because Rockefeller had recognized that immense amounts of money could be made from the new scientific model of medicine (which is why he sought to enshrine it as the gold standard). I am inclined toward these arguments, both because Rockefeller and Carnegie had a history of brutal and methodical suppression of competitors when they established their respective monopolies in oil and steel (Rockefeller’s largely secret and conspiratorial, Carnegie’s more open) and because after their “philanthropy” medicine rapidly became a far more profitable enterprise. However, strictly on the basis of what the available sources substantiate, the outcome could instead be explained as a combination of unfortunate factors (most notably Rockefeller placing Frederick T. Gates in charge of his philanthropy), the broader institutional momentum that already favored laboratory-based scientific medicine and unscrupulous individuals quickly recognizing the immense profit potential of science-focused medicine.

Note: in the 1970s police raided and arrested Chinese immigrants practicing acupuncture (which was in high demand from the community).^1,2,3,4 I vividly remember despondently asking someone who witnessed a raid “why are they doing this?” to which he said “the Rockefellers…control everything,” illustrating that this viewpoint has existed for a long time.

Read the Whole Article