Your mission against alternative medicine is seriously misguided. You delude yourself with certain assumptions that unfortunately are totally unsubstantiated and to put it simply not true. One such assumption is that what doctors practice represents science and what they tell their patients and the public is based on scientifically established facts. Most doctors, including you, have no scientific training nor do they possess intellectual qualities necessary to evaluate and interpret facts, experiments, and data with scientific scrutiny. For doctors to carry on their mission of helping the patients and society it is necessary to have adequate support of science, good laws, and various institutions like FDA. Unfortunately, that support system has been seriously broken for many years now. The result is that organized medicine is in serious crisis having lost both the public confidence and the ability to address the public needs.

As a spokesman for science and critical thinking you embarrassed yourself in many ways but your attack on Linus Pauling is probably the most striking example of your shortcomings. I am not talking here about who is and who is not right. I am referring to Dr. Pauling's way of talking to his readers and compare it with your ways. While Dr. Pauling discusses scientific research relevant to the topic and explains logical reasons for the conclusions he reaches, you speak like a manager in a corporation whose first concern is the bottom line and for whom the ultimate truth is the current corporate policy established by the top management. While Dr. Pauling accuses his opponent of violating the principles of sound scientific research and misrepresenting the results, you accuse Dr. Pauling of aligning himself with the wrong people. I understand, Dr. Barrett, that loyalty and political correctness is a sound virtue in a feudal structure, modern corporation, and politics but I am afraid it will not get you far in science.

While you are certainly right that the field of alternative medicine is full of unscrupulous salesmen preying on people's weaknesses you failed to realize the sins of your own profession and the underlying reasons. The real problem we have is not the billions of dollars people spent on dubious alternative cures. The real problem are some very bad laws that fuel the nonsensical war between the organized medicine and those who don't trust it for some very good reasons.

The cardinal sin of the organized medicine is the ignorance in the field of nutrition and the failure to recognize how important nutrition is in addressing the health problems. If I were a doctor I would try to keep my mouth shut knowing my own ignorance and remembering all ridiculous nutritional advice my profession was giving in the past. You openly promote just the opposite. Why? How did you and other doctors educate themselves in nutrition in the past twenty years? What is the assurance that nutritional advice you give today is not going to be ridiculed tomorrow? What is the scientific basis of your claim that taking more than RDA of a particular vitamin is of no value? What is the scientific basis of your claim that American population gets an adequate amount of nutrients in the food we eat? A quote from somebody who said that such and such study proved or disproved that? You probably never bothered to actually read the relevant papers as Dr. Pauling explained is the problem with most experts on nutrition he debated.

In nutritional circles we like to talk about the French paradox. If you ever bothered to visit France and spend some time there you would realize that there is no paradox. French people live longer than Americans, even if they smoke more, because they eat better. The French bread looks and tastes like bread. The French government protects the public from the industry when it tries to make the profit at the expense of the food quality. In America sometimes the government does just the opposite when it protects the industry from the public scrutiny.

Here, in America, we have laws assuring that no drug company will ever bother to investigate or promote herb medicine because there are no profits to be made that way. Until very recently we had practically no research on medicinal properties of herbs falling years behind Europe and Japan. In Japan they have Ministry of Health. Here we have Drug Administration. I think that even the names of our institutions are very telling. How can anybody seriously take the propaganda machine representing the drug industry and organized medicine when yesterday they were denying any health values of herbs like ginkgo biloba, green tea, or saw palmetto only to change their position today? Not only that but the very same circles are ready to take credit for whatever benefits they find in those herbs, even if their research is many years behind Europe and Japan. I also find it very curious how the same people can deny any potency and health benefits of a herb in one sentence and warn the public against 'serious and potentially dangerous interaction with drugs' of that herb in the next sentence. Sentences like that reveal two things. You just hate herbs and herbal medicine and wish they would disappear. You think that your audience is really stupid and can be manipulated with slogans like science, research, and medicine. Well, the time when doctors were treated like gods by the trusting public is gone, Dr. Barrett, and today many patients in America are better educated in nutrition than their doctors are. If you ever wondered why it all happened let me recall a very telling incident. Few years ago we admitted that our policies of protecting young people against dangerous steroids failed because, as one doctor put it, we were telling them they don't work. In other words we were telling them lies even if we meant well.

Here is my plan on how you can improve your website.

1.        Propose that bad laws be changed. No drug company should be allowed to research, patent, and sell drugs at the same time. No financial incentive should be created for a drug company to push one form of medicine (chemical drugs) over the other (herbal medicine). It should be up to the doctors and their patients, and the free market forces, to decide which forms of medicine win.

2.        Propose that doctors are educated in nutrition.

3.        Include in your list of quacks the Mayo Clinic, and similar institutions, which insist on using chemotherapy even in cases when this very unpleasant treatment was proven totally ineffective (certain forms of cancer).

Your intent of protecting the public against quacks is noble, Dr. Barrett. However, whatever you do keep in mind the old Roman maxim: 'Medice, cura te ipse' (Doctor, cure yourself [first]). Wake up to the fact that hospitals, doctors, and dangerous drugs kill or harm hundreds of thousands of people every year. Fixing just one problem of the organized medicine will save more lives than fixing all the problems of the alternative medicine combined. Also, breaking the organized medicine and drug companies cartel will save American public more money than we spend on alternative cures. Not to mention that we may succeed in saving the Medicare and Medicaid in the process.

Yours truly,

Przemek Nowicki

New Jersey