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IAHF List: Orthomolecular medicine saved my life after allopathic psychiatry almost killed me. What follows is my response to an outrageous email I just received from a public figure- Loren Mosher, MD. Dr.Mosher does not have to like any of my opinions as expressed in my response to him below, but I have never been the sort to meekly accept by urinated on by tyrants, and I regard all of the people (including Dr.Mosher) who were on the APA Task Force which "produced" the biased, unscientific, once and for all hatchet job known as APA Task Force Report # 7 to be tyrants for reasons that are amply expressed below. Contrary to the belief of some "doctors" MD does NOT stand for "medical divinity."
Whether or not he likes it, Dr.Mosher is a public figure. He became a public figure by being on the APA Task Force which produced the biased, unscientific report which was used by every hospital I was once in to block my access to the healing nutrients which saved my life.
At 09:31 PM 1/19/04 -0500, you wrote:
i will take a very short time to mr. hammell-it is a long time since 1972
and although my mind has changed about many things since that time it
appears yours has not. i do want to ask how i PERSONALLY kept you from
obtaining over-the-counter vitamins and other nutritional substances? i
routinely encourage folks who seek my consultation to try various of them
to see if they are helpful.
please confine your diatribes to facts-otherwise you are at risk of
defamation of my professional reputation. loren mosher
Mosher /Schreiber
Soteria Associates
2616 Angell Avenue
San Diego, Ca. 92122
www.moshersoteria.com
Dr.Mosher-
It has indeed been a long time since 1972. The clarify this matter, the only way ANYONE could PERSONALLY block MY access to dietary supplements would be if they put a GUN to my head, which quite truthfully....... you never did.
What YOU (and your colleagues DID back then was none the less extremely injurious to not only ME, but to huge numbers of OTHER people all over the USA and the world who WERE BLOCKED from accessing dietary supplements that they needed to heal due to the American Psychiatric Association's publication the APA Task Force Report #7 on Megavitamins and Orthomolecular Treatment in Psychiatry.
The reason you were chosen to be on this APA Task Force is that you had a well known bias at that time against orthomolecular medicine. Abram Hoffer, MD who lives near me in Victoria, BC Canada can certainly attest to this fact. If you no longer harbor such a bias, that is a GOOD THING and I am VERY GLAD because when I was a patient at Fair Oaks Hospital in Summit, NJ, when I requested to TRY orthomolecular medicine, the REASON they DENIED my request was this APA Task Force Report which they still have, to this day, in their Medical Library, and they refuse to allow Hoffer and Osmond's Reply to this mine of misinformation to be placed on the shelves for the sake of balance.
As a matter of FACT- several years AFTER I made my ORTHOMOLECULAR RECOVERY from schizophrenia, I was employed at a psychiatric facility in Vermont were I was fired for giving an unauthorized lecture about orthomolecular medicine, complete with a slide show. The medical director was a professor of psychiatry at University of Vermont and he was very BIASED against orthomolecular medicine due to the aforementioned APA Task Force Report, and when I attempted to urge him to read Hoffer and Osmond's very scholarly REPLY to this MINE OF MISINFORMATION, he arrogantly declined and got just as DEFENSIVE as you are right now. I found that very unimpressive, just as I find your incredibly defensive email to be very unimpressive.
What especially disgusts me about your email is that you might have called me in a spirit of humility simply for the sake of picking my brain about the things that helped me, rather than accuse me of defaming you this way, and in fact I'd still be open to such a discussion, and I harbor no animosity towards you, but I must say I am unimpressed given the fact that you regard yourself to be a healer and I had a profound and quite noteworthy healing experience as a result of the nutrients which you and your colleagues sought so vehemently to discredit back in '72.
Arrogance is never something I've respected, be it coming from an MD or from any other person in society, and in my humble opinion sir, you are a very arrogant man. My personal view might change if you were to read Hoffer and Osmond's reply to the aforementioned Task Force and if you were to issue a public APOLOGY to Dr.Hoffer for the role you played back then, but to my knowledge, you have never done this. (Please correct me if I am wrong in this view.)
You too would probably feel as I do had you also been forced to smuggle nutrients into a Hospital and to hide them in a cavity gouged from the underside of a foam mattress in order to keep them from being confiscated due to the APA Task Force Report's influence, if they had saved YOUR life- as the vitamins I took did.
After I was fired from that hospital in Vermont, I started writing a book for schizophrenics and their families from an orthomolecular survivors perspective. I completed 5 chapters after interviewing numerous people across North America who had also recovered via this means, but I was forced to stop working on this book in 1989 in order to fight the FDA which at that time was trying to destroy the dietary supplement industry via the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act of 1990. I was forced to jump in with both feet as a volunteer organizer, and this was the beginning of my becoming a professional organizer, lobbyist for the dietary supplement industry.
I was instrumental in helping to pass the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 (DSHEA), and am well known globally for my outspoken view that the pharmaceutical industry is the most evil, most malevolent force on the face of the earth. I feel that this is a view that we share, but I am not sure if our views on the American Psychiatric Association are congruent or not, but since you helped them to suppress my access to nutrients as a member of the aforementioned Task Force, I would have no way of knowing how you feel about the APA today unless you called me and we had a conversation about this.
I am not an unapproachable person, as Lynn Michaels, David Oaks and many others in the health freedom movement know, and if you would ever like to call me to discuss any of this, feel free to call any time at 800-333-2553 home and work.
If your views have changed since 1972, and you no longer seek to assist the APA in killing people by denying their access to dietary supplements, then that is a good thing, but it is a historical fact that you were on the aforementioned APA Task Force, and I think it is a good thing that I am apprising you of how your actions back then impacted me, because if I had not told you, you never would have known. (Presumably you CARE about how your actions impact others.)
Rather than attempt to feed me a ration of shit, you might consider APOLOGING to me for the role you played in the suppression of access to dietary supplements as a member of the APA Task Force.
The APA Task Force Report was a direct factor in my being forced to suffer the torment of the damned for 4 straight years in a variety of psychiatric hospitals, both state and private, in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. This is not some figment of my imagination, and I am certainly not the only person who was forced to suffer as a result of this imminently unscientific, and imminently egregious action.
After being fired from the aforementioned hospital in Vermont, when I was writing my book, I attempted to GIVE Fair Oaks Hospital a copy of Hoffer and Osmond's scholarly REPLY to the APA Task Force Report. I went to their medical library and spoke with the librarian, desiring that this Report be placed on the shelves alongside the APA Report so that doctors and patients could have the chance to read both sides in this debate and decide for themselves how they felt about this approach to healing.
The librarian told me she could not place any book on the shelves without permission from the Medical Director of the Hospital.
I had a meeting with this man.
He is very lucky I am NOT a violent person.
He had the nerve- the collosal GALL to DENY me this request.
I was most UNIMPRESSED by his attitude, and told him the story of how when I had been a patient in his hospital, just a few years before, about how I had gone to see Dr.Pfeiffer while on a pass and following orthomolecular lab work which Fair Oaks did not know how to do, he'd put me on an orthomolecular treatment program and I'd been forced to smuggle vitamins in to his hospital and to hide them in my mattress, taking them on the sly while mouthing the useless toxic medications they attempted to force me to take and spitting them down a toilet where they belonged. Three weeks later I was given a full medical discharge with the staff of Fair Oaks left scratching their heads wondering which of their drugs were helping me, when none of them were.
I looked this man in the eye when he refused my request to put Hoffer and Osmond's Reply to the APA Task Force Report on the shelves, and I told him I regarded him to be a genocidal killer, and that God would judge him after he died, that I didn't need to do anything more, but my conscience could at least finally be at peace because I had at least ATTEMPTED to avert any further suffering at that Institution.
As I walked away from there, I shed many tears. My whole face was streaming with tears as I said a silent prayer for those poor suffering souls still being forced to suffer the torment of the damned, despite my best effort to shine some light into the darkness.
You don't impress me much at all. What WOULD impress me would be if you were to read Hoffer and Osmond's Reply to the APA Task Force Report, and issue a public apology to Dr.Hoffer and to all the people who were harmed as a result of that biased, unscientific report even though you did not DIRECTLY cause harm to them, none the less, however well meant your actions may have been back then- you were flat out WRONG.
If you have changed since the days when you were on that APA Task Force such that you now urge people to try anything they want including orthomolecular medicine, then that is a very good thing, especially given the uselessness of social mileu theory, an approach which has seriously limited value in my opinion. My view of social milieu theory is that it is just as dangerous as allopathic medicine is because it could not have helped me at all either back when I was sick. It could not have even REMOTELY addressed my biochemical imbalances.
As things stand, your toolbox is not big enough to properly help your patients. There are two ways you could handle this assertion: one would be to arrogantly deny the truth of what I am saying, and the other would be to examine what I am saying in a very honest and forthright way, but it takes a big man to admit that he made a mistake, and to be blunt, I have serious doubts as to your capacity for being self effacing given the gutless way in which you are approaching me in this email.
If you find my "tone" distressing, and "disrespectful", well thats just too bad because no one will ever be able to give back those 4 years that were taken from me as a result of the influence of the APA Task Force Report, and if you lack the capacity to apologize and to humbly seek to learn about the approach to treatment which helped me, theres not much I or anyone else can do about it.
Throughout the history of science and medicine the truth has always been violently suppressed, at first, but over the course of time the old guard dies off, and new people come along who aren't so biased and in time a paradigm shift occurrs. On average it takes about 40 years for a generation to come and go.
As a former member of the ad hoc Advisory Board which created the Office of Alternative Medicine at the National Institutes of Health, and as one of the authors of the book Alternative Medicine- Expanding Medical Horizons http://www.opengroup.com/mnbooks/089/0898759137.shtml I have the satisfaction of knowing that a day will come when no one will ever be denied access to the healing nutrients which saved my life, and I also have the satisfaction of knowing that medical history will judge those who were on the APA Task Force which wrongly condemned orthomolecular medicine in a fair and just manner.
As it says in the Bible "By their fruits you will know them."
If you are making efforts to attone for the sins of your past by making every effort humanly possible to learn about orthomolecular medicine, and to help your patients with it, then that is a good thing. The 33rd Annual International Conference on Orthomolecular Medicine will be held in Vancouver Canada from April 21st to May 2nd at the Fairmont Waterfront Centre Hotel. Get information from http://www.orthomed.org If you are there to learn, and if you have sufficient humility to apologize to Dr.Hoffer and to me, then I will have no problem forgiving you for the harm that I feel you and your colleagues caused to me years ago.
But if you are not there, I just want you to know that there is a Judge, a Judge who we all must face, a Judge to whom we are all accountable and a time will come when you and I will both come before this Judge- who gave us the vitamins, minerals, amino acids, trace elements, hormones and herbs for healing purposes.
I am not your Judge, that is not for me to do, and I am not doing that here, but I am telling you that you along with all the others who were on that APA Task Force came close to killing me years ago, and I was very lucky to survive and to heal as I did through this suppressed alternative treatment mode.
If you have anything to say to me, hence forth, dare to say it to my face, in Vancouver. THAT would impress me.
The email that you have sent me here does not impress me at all.
All things expressed in this email have been my opinions, amply protected by my first amendment rights, sent to a public figure. Sit on that and rotate, "sir."
cc: Ralph Fucetola, III, JD http://www.vitaminlawyer.com
John C. Hammell, President
International Advocates for Health Freedom
556 Boundary Bay Rd.
Point Roberts, WA 98281 USA
http://www.iahf.com
800-333-2553 N.America
360-945-0352
For Health Freedom,
John C. Hammell, President
International Advocates for Health Freedom
556 Boundary Bay Road
Point Roberts, WA 98281-8702 USA
http://www.iahf.com
jham@iahf.com
800-333-2553 N.America
360-945-0352 World
