Natural Remedies & Why Witches Were Burned At the Stake

"Unless we put medical freedom into the Constitution the time will come when medicine will organize itself into an undercover dictatorship. To restrict the art of healing to doctors and deny equal privileges to others will constitute the Bastille of medical science. All such laws are un-American and despotic."

~ Attributed to Dr. Benjamin Rush,
Signer of the Declaration of Independence

In Benjamin Rush's time the medical dictatorship of which he spoke had not yet come to pass, and though magical potions like mercury and questionable techniques like bloodletting were used in colonial times, herbs were still considered and employed as legitimate medicines. Even if many wise women herbalists were eliminated as competition by being branded witches and sometimes murdered, the herbs themselves were not categorically demonized because no vast armory of pharmaceutical drugs had yet been created to supplant them.

The herbs and foods themselves have now been both vilified as dangerous and lampooned as completely ineffectual, generating the ridiculous contradiction that we are supposed to be dumb enough to accept as truth: namely, that they are both impotent and unsafe.

Given these circumstances confidence in the safety and efficacy of natural substances in the prevention and treatment of disease has not only waned, but the positive association between food and healing has been outright denied by medical authorities.  It is illegal for non-doctors to make health claims for natural substances even if thousands of years of use in folk medicine and a vast emerging body of scientific research now confirms their benefits.   You can't say cherries cure gout even if its true. (truth is no longer the criteria that decides what you can or cannot say).

I started the website GreenMedInfo.com in August 2008 in order to provide free and convenient access to the massive amounts of research that have accumulated on the health benefits of natural substances over the past 50 years.  The government database known as Medline (which is freely searchable) contains over 28 million biomedical citations from over 5,000 scientific journals, many of which focus specifically on the therapeutic action of foods, vitamins and spices on serious, even life-threatening disease.

I believe that it is only through the free, uncensored and democratic dissemination of health information that we can secure our health freedom and through speaking truth to power, expose the fraud which is strictly profit-driven pharmaceutically-based medicine.

Feel free to explore the 45,000 + biomedical citations posted on GreenMedInfo.com that vindicate the safety and efficacy of natural substances in the prevention and treatment of disease. View the Research Dashaboard here.

Are you interested in natural medicine? Make sure to sign up for the upcoming complimentary access to the documentary, and get exclusive access to GreenMedInfo founder Sayer Ji's interview here: REMEDY: Ancient Remedies for Chronic Illness.