Just occasionally, I come across a doctor willing to break the conspiracy of silence on the damage caused by their tools. My hero of the hour is American psychiatrist Grace E. Jackson, who is utterly and refreshingly horrified by psychiatric and most other forms of pharmaceutical medicine. In fact, so incensed was Jackson over the current state of affairs that she felt compelled to self-publish a whistle-blowing book—Drug-Induced Dementia—that painstakingly catalogues the vast amount of scientific proof that modern medicine is the primary culprit behind all forms of dementia, one of the more rampant epidemic conditions of our time.
One of her more outrageous snippets of information is that, in the 1950s, doctors discovered that synthetic-dye and rocket-fuel derivatives had what they considered to be medicinal effects on psychiatric patients. Chlorpromazine, the first antipsychotic agent, was born.
There was only one hitch: the drugs caused the patient to ape the symptoms of sleeping sickness. The doctors also noted that, over time, the drugs produced all the hallmarks of Parkinson’s disease—abnormal gait, tremor, dementia and involuntary movements. Patients were also stupefied, with no feelings or excitation—in effect, a vegetable.
However, with the sort of logic peculiar to modern medicine, these debilitating effects were welcomed as being better than having a crazed hallucinating patient. Indeed, doctors viewed the arrival of parkinsonian effects as a benchmark of the patient’s therapeutic progress: they were proof-positive that the drugs were working.
Yet, the damage caused by psychiatric medicine is only the tip of the iceberg. As our cover story this month reveals, a number of the major classes of drugs can bring on dementia, including heart drugs, cholesterol-lowering drugs, sleeping pills, antidepressants, narcotics, stimulants, anticholinergics and antiepileptics.
As most people over the age of 50 are taking at least one prescription drug, and up to six or more a decade later, it’s small wonder that dementia is one of the world’s fastest-growing disorders, now absorbing one-third of the entire US Medicare bill. It’s now expected that one in four of us will have some form of dementia by the time we reach 80.
This giant problem, created entirely by the pharmaceutical industry, is once again a byproduct of the refusal of our current medicine to consider the body a holistic entity.
In 1970, German physicist Fritz-Albert Popp stumbled upon the fact that humans emit a tiny current of photons, or light, from the DNA of every cell. He also discovered something else remarkable. If a medicine was applied to one part of the body, a massive change occurred in the amount of light emitted not only from where he’d applied the agent, but also from other, more distant parts of the body. Popp soon recognized that this light was a communication channel within a living organism—a means of instantaneous, or ‘non-local’, global signaling.
Popp’s work affords us a glimpse of the body at work as an exquisite, interconnected whole. What affects one part affects every other part simultaneously. Whenever we atomize anything, such as our body—dividing it up and treating each piece separately—we invite calamity.