Why Don't Many Doctors Know Much about Nutrition?

"Economics is the driving force behind medicine." Dr. Ray Strand (1)

This article examines why many doctors are ignorant about nutrition. Why so many of them are unaware of the breakthroughs in nutritional medicine. It discusses the influence of the pharmaceutical industry over their education. I have assumed that you are aware of the large amount of medical evidence that high-quality nutritional supplements can provide you with major health benefits. For instance, that they can greatly reduce your risk of developing degenerative diseases like cancer and heart disease, amongst others. If you aren't aware of such information, please contact the person who provided you with this article, or the author, for such information.

Only 6% or so study nutrition at medical school.

The fundamental reason why doctors do not know much about nutrition is because very few of them study anything about it at medical school. As discussed further on, this is largely because the curriculum is heavily influenced by the pharmaceutical drug industry.

Dr Ray Strand comments on his own lack of education about nutrition:

"In medical school I had not received any significant instruction on the subject. I was not alone. Only approximately 6 percent of the graduating physicians in the United States have any training in nutrition. Medical students may take elective courses on the topic, but few actually do… the education of most physicians is disease-oriented with a heavy emphasis on pharmaceuticals - we learn about drugs and why and when to use them." (2)

Dr Ladd McNamara:

"Doctors usually make good teachers, but not good students. Most doctors fear not knowing the answers to medically-related issues, and will try to present themselves with as much authority as possible. Dietary supplements are a very foreign subject for most doctors, and most doctors show no interest in learning more. We were not taught much in medical school about the power of nutrition in medicine, only about the power of prescription drugs and surgery as treatment for diseases. The focus was on treatment and not on prevention. It is this mindset that causes most physicians to be unreceptive to new ideas in medicine." (3)

The influence of drug companies on medical education.

A major reason why this happen is because pharmaceutical companies provide very large funds to medical school and universities. For example, consider that the Rockefeller organisation, which encompasses over 200 pharmaceutical and associated enterprises, is the largest single private source of funding for Western medical science and education. The impact of this is clearly demonstrated by an example from the first half of the twentieth century - the formative years of modern drug-based medicine. In his book Naked Empress - the Great Medical Fraud, Hans Ruesch quotes extensively from a 1948 book titled The Drug Story by Morris Bealle.

Bealle revealed that: "The last annual report of the Rockefeller Foundation itemises the gifts it has made to [medical] colleges and [government] public agencies in the past 44 years, and they total somewhat over half a billion dollars. These colleges, of course, teach their students all the drug lore the Rockefeller pharmaceutical houses want taught.(Read the Complaint Against Genocide and Other Crimes Against Humanity Committed in Connection With the Pharmaceutical 'Business With Disease' )

Otherwise, there would be no more gifts just as there are no gifts to any of the 30 odd drugless colleges in the United States... the Rockefeller interests have created, built up and developed the most far reaching industrial empire ever conceived in the mind of man". (4)

And remember, that was written in 1948. Imagine how much money that would equal in modern terms! That's a lot of influence over what students are taught in medical colleges. It's also a lot of influence over public agencies such as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. They also have a lot of influence over public education through advertising and ownership of media outlets. In his book The Unmasking of Medicine, Ian Kennedy provides another example of drug companies funding medical education. The Eli Lilly drug company (famous for products such as Prozac (and once headed by George Bush Senior)) spent over $250 million on medical schools in the U.S. in the fifty years or so up to 1983. (5)

As you might imagine, under the weight of all that influence, the medical colleges that teach drugless medicine have all but vanished. Thus, it is inevitable that medical students are taught very little or nothing about alternatives to pharmaceuticals.

Dr. Ray Strand comments:

"There definitely is not any money in [advising people of the benefits of nutritional supplements] for the pharmaceutical industry… As I have become more and more knowledgeable of the benefits of nutritional supplements I have become acutely aware of the fact that economics is the driving force behind medicine… Maybe physicians need to reassess their total reliance on FDA-approved drugs and the information physicians all receive from the drug companies and begin to look at our own medical literature." (6) (emphasis added)

The impact of pharmaceutical-based medicine.

A result of all this is shown in a 1998 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The investigators found that "in 1994 overall 2,216,000 hospitalised patients had serious Adverse Drug Reactions [ADR] and 106,000 had fatal ADRs, making these reactions between the fourth and sixth leading cause of death." (7) In case you didn’t catch that, pharmaceutical-based medicine is recognized as being between the fourth and sixth leading cause of death in the USA. That’s the conservative opinion of the very conservative Journal of the American Medical Association.

That’s a shocking realisation for many people. Some then ask: what about the number of lives saved by pharmaceutical medicine and the apparent extension of the human lifespan due to them? Surely this offsets the numbers of people who die from it? A well-known study by academics John & Sonya McKinlay looked into this issue. They showed that medical intervention accounted for only one to three-and-a-half (1 to 3.5) per cent of the increase in the average lifespan in the United States since 1900. (8) That study is pretty much universally accepted in academia as valid. Similarly, academics almost unanimously agree with the findings of Professor Thomas McKeown - that the decline of infectious disease and the increase in human life expectancy was due to improvements in water supplies, nutrition, hygiene, housing and general living conditions. (9) In other words, the increase in human life expectancy was not due to the commercial products of drug companies. It was due to social reforms that mainly benefited the poor.

One doctors conversion with nutritional medicine.

We’ve looked briefly at the great influence drug companies have on medical education and the results of that. I’ll now return to the topic of why doctors don’t know much about nutrition. Dr. Strand explains the effect that his medical education had on him for the first 23 years of his medical practice:

"To be honest, I knew next to nothing about nutrition or nutritional supplementation… Because of the respect people have for doctors, they assume we are experts on all health-related issues, including nutrition and vitamins. Before my conversion experience with nutritional medicine, my patients frequently asked me if I believed their taking vitamins produced any health benefits… Handing the bottles back, I'd say that the stuff was absolutely no use at all… What I did not share with my patients was that I had not spent a minute evaluating the hundreds of scientifically conducted studies that proved the value of supplementation to health". (10) (emphasis added)

He explains further that:

"For the first twenty-three years of my clinical practice, I simply did not believe in nutritional supplements. During the past seven years, however, I have reconsidered my position based on recent studies published in the medical literature. What I've found is so astonishing, I have changed the course of my medical practice…
… most practicing physicians don’t fully understand the cause of degenerative diseases… Even though research scientists are making tremendous discoveries into the root causes of these diseases, very few physicians are applying this science to their patients. Doctors simply wait until patients develop one of these diseases then begin to treat it.

Physicians seem content to allow the pharmaceutical companies to determine new therapies as they develop new drugs. But… it is our own bodies that are the best defense against developing a chronic degenerative disease - not the drugs doctors can prescribe…

As I have applied these principles in treating my patients the results have been nothing short of amazing". (11)

Dr. Strand details many of these successes in his books like What your Doctor doesn't know about Nutritional Medicine may be killing You (2002). He explains that that book is "the outcome of more than seven years of personal research into the medical literature as it pertains to nutritional medicine. I wasn't immediately convinced either." (12)

In closing, Dr. Strand asserts another important point on why most doctors aren't knowledgeable about nutritional medicine:

"… physicians are simply too busy treating disease to worry about educating their patients in healthy lifestyles that help avoid developing degenerative diseases in the first place". (13)

Reference

1. Dr. Ray Strand, The Medical Evidence that Demands a Verdict. Should you be taking Nutritional Supplements?, 2002, Audio album, Vintage Enterprises.
2. Dr. Ray Strand, What your Doctor doesn't know about Nutritional Medicine may be killing you, 2002, page 5, Thomas Nelson Publishers, Nashville.
3. Dr. Ladd McNamara, Dr. McNamara's Medical Resource Manual, 5th Edition, 1999, page 206, Orthomolecular Medicine
4. Hans Ruesch, Naked Empress - the Great Medical Fraud, CIVIS, Massagno/Lugano, Switzerland, 1992, p.100.
5. Ian Kennedy, The Unmasking of Medicine, Granada, London, 1983, p.23
6. Dr. Ray Strand, The Medical Evidence that Demands a Verdict. Should you be taking Nutritional Supplements?,
   2002, Audio album, Vintage Enterprises.
7. J Lazarou, B Pemeranz, PN Corey, "Incidence of adverse drug reactions in hospitalized patients: a meta-analysis of prospective studies," Journal of the American Medical Association, 1998, vol. 279, nr 15, pp. 1200-1205.
8. John McKinlay, Sonya McKinlay , R Beaglehole, "Trends in Death and Disease and the Contribution of Medical Measures" in Handbook of Medical Sociology (H.E. Freeman and S.Levine, Eds), Englewood Cliffs, NJ, Prentice Hall, 1988 p.16

9. Thomas McKeown, The Role of Medicine: Dream, Mirage or Nemesis?, Oxford: Blackwell, 1979.
10. Dr. Ray Strand, What your Doctor doesn't know about Nutritional Medicine may be killing you, 2002, page 5  Dr. Ray Strand, What your Doctor doesn't know about Nutritional Medicine may be killing you, 2002, pages xv-xvi.
11. Dr. Ray Strand, What your Doctor doesn't know about Nutritional Medicine may be killing you, 2002, page xvi.
12. 13- Dr. Ray Strand, What your Doctor doesn't know about Nutritional Medicine may be killing you, 2002, page 13, Thomas Nelson Publishers, Nashville.