Dr. Richard Amerling is co-author of “The Next Wave is Brave: Standing Up for Medical Freedom.” He is the former president of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons and the chief academic officer of The Wellness Company, a health care organization promoting medical freedom and patient-centered care outside of the mainstream medical establishment.
With lifestyle and dietary changes, most common diseases are reversible, said Amerling, but that’s not the approach of the modern medical establishment.
The medical system trains doctors to use drugs to treat diseases instead of trying to get at the root cause, he said, and many of the drugs prescribed for these common diseases actually have very little benefit and many side effects.
‘Expert’ Guidance
The Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) nutrition pyramid is an example of guidance put out by a small group of experts which has been widely adopted by the medical system, Amerling said. The FDA-recommended diet is heavy in carbohydrates, sugars, and bad oils and fats, and is ultimately toxic to the body, he added.In the ‘50s and ’60s, when Amerling grew up, there were no FDA nutritional guidelines, he said.
“And everybody was slim. Back in those days, obese people stood out,“ he said. ”Now, if you’re slim you stand out. So, what changed?”
What changed was that the FDA’s dietary guidelines came out and pushed everybody to give up animal fat, Amerling said.
“Because they took a lot of the healthy fat out of food, it didn’t taste good anymore, so they amplified everything with sugar and high fructose corn syrup, and they created a very toxic food environment that is very hard to avoid,” Amerling continued.
The vast majority of Americans eat a high carb and sugar diet, which for most people leads to weight gain and to metabolic syndrome, both of which are linked to Type 2 diabetes and hypertension, said Amerling.
Many store-bought foods contain high fructose corn syrup, which is particularly toxic to the body, said Amerling.
“Fructose is metabolized in the liver exclusively, into mostly triglycerides—fat—which ends up depositing in the liver,” Amerling said. This causes fatty liver disease and metabolic syndrome, which is an insulin resistant, high-insulin state, he added.
Wellness Through Diet
“In The Wellness Company, we’re trying to get people off medications and onto healthy eating patterns,” said Amerling.While practicing at New York’s Beth Israel Hospital as a full-time nephrologist, and seeing no improvement in his patients through the drugs they were prescribed, Amerling started looking into the diet as a cause and discovered the high-protein Atkins diet book.
“I started to give this [book] to patients with Type 2 diabetes, and they were able to shed their medications and improve. That really opened my eyes,” he said.
Doctor–Patient Relationship Is Primary
“If we reject this notion that there are these experts who can decide the truth, then you can do what you want to do, and that is the essence of Hippocratic medicine,” he said, which is to “practice for the benefit of your patient, according to your best judgment and ability,” he added.A doctor’s Hippocratic Oath is not to just follow the “guidelines,” he said, but to make decisions based on each patient’s own set of needs.
Doctors in the medical industry have “given up authority to central bodies of so-called experts, all of whom have agendas,” said Amerling.
Lacks Scientific Integrity
A number of factors contributed to the destruction of medicine, including doctors’ loss of autonomy, said Amerling.“Doctors lost control of their practices,“ he said. ”They turned them over to corporations and large insurance companies, if you will, and they stopped being able to bill directly for their services.”
Then they lost their scientific roots, he said.
Amerling made a distinction between science-based medicine and evidence-based medicine.
Evidence-based medicine is a construct created by two Canadian doctors who developed a hierarchical system to evaluate the best evidence and then incorporate that evidence into medical practice, he said.
The problem has to do with who decides what the best evidence is, he said, and the pharmaceutical industry dominates this process by sponsoring the studies to test new drugs.
He cited the work of Leemon McHenry, co-author of the book, “The Illusion of Evidence-Based Medicine: Exposing the crisis of credibility in clinical research.”
Amerling said the majority of the experts writing the guidance for evidence-based medicine are paid by the pharmaceutical industry as consultants, speakers, and researchers. The database upon which these guidelines are based is corrupted and can’t be used to practice medicine, said Amerling.
