Benefiting from people's ignorance: The case of Diabetes Associations

What stimulated me to undertake this analysis was the approach by the medical establishment to paint a doom-and-gloom picture about diabetes and the fact that the poor diabetic will have to live with the diseases for the rest of his/her life.

To them, diabetes cannot be cured even with some available scientific studies that indicate otherwise and have proven the disease can be reversed or cured. I am not a medical doctor, but I am a strong advocate of helping patients heal and more importantly, give them back the power to heal themselves.

I really couldn’t believe my ears when I heard on radio that Ghana has joined the likes of the US, UK, Canada etc. and formed Diabetes Association right here in the country.

Growing up watching poor people die from diabetes, hypertension and cancer, I just can’t sit aloof and watch them go through unnecessary psychological trauma because of what they have been told by medical doctors and scientists that they could only manage those diseases.

In fact, your physician will become upset if you even mention the cure word around him. His medical school training does not allow him to subscribe to that view. For him, the cure word does not exist.

One is tempted to accept the conspiracy theory out there that the pharmaceutical and the medical establishment are hiding the cure for the so-called chronic diseases, but are only interested in keeping us hooked so that they could profit from insulin, blood glucose strips, and other supplies. No wonder they haven't found cures for diabetes, even after 40 years of research.

Do you know why this conspiracy theory might be true and why I believe that those Diabetes Associations are formed just to benefit financially through donor support funding from the ignorance of the diabetes patients? For example, Diabetes UK deliberately refused to capture on its webpage a report of a research study on diabetes by the Newcastle Magnetic Resonance Centre, which they themselves have sponsored.

The Newcastle central findings were that diabetes can be cured or reversed, but the Diabetes UK rather chose to put on its webpage: “Diabetes medication cannot cure diabetes, and most people will have to take it for the rest of their lives.” I will leave it to your discretion.

I don’t want to sound cynical, but I can definitely say that the advent of affordable, accurate meters and insulin products have been the single most important advance in good diabetes control. Truth must be told, if for instance, about half of diabetics who purchase those drugs no longer needed them; those pharmaceuticals would lose over a billion dollars a year in revenues.

Business ethics and health care ethics are always in conflict. For over two decades, drug industry profits have outranked those of all other manufacturing industries worldwide.

The question I would want to ask is that, do we as people also done our own research either to confirm or debunk the view of the ‘whites’ that diabetes is incurable. There is still a lot to be learned, but it can only be learned, once we accept that diabetes can be cured, and undertake more studies.

Fortunately for us, there are available scienti?c evidences which seek to substantiate the therapeutic use of medicinal plants prescribed by the Traditional Medicine Practitioners.

All the scientific studies, including Ghana Herbal Pharmacopoeia 1995 and the revised version, Floristic Studies in Ghana and Pharmacopoeia 2001 by CSIR, African Herbal Pharmacopoeia by the AU and other pharmacopoeias provide evidence of experimental and clinical data of plants in Ghana that can cure diabetes.

Some of the plants include Allium sativum (Gyene kankan in Akan), Canthium subcordatum, Trichilia monadelpha (Tanuro), Mangifera indica (mango), Momordica charantia (nyinya).

I didn’t conduct those researches and so I see no reason why we can’t accept that diabetes can be reversed. Or maybe they want the poor herbalist to cough up millions of dollars to go through clinical trials. I think we can do better than that. What we should know is that each culture defines its own diseases and creates a response for such diseases.

The Church of health myth and half truth
Although officially, according to medical experts, diabetes is incurable, some people attain complete recovery. There are people who are tested, and diagnosed with diabetes. And later, they are tested and found to be diabetes free. Why can’t the “Diabetes Associations” find these people? If diabetes was curable, what would these organizations do? What would their mission change to?

Indeed, I can say with authority that with my experience in the herbal industry, I have seen a lot of people cured not only of diabetes, but also hypertension, typhoid fever, stroke etc.

Herbal medicine was used and so I get upset when I hear medical doctors talk about how you can only manage diabetes but can’t cure it. I have personally administered an herbal medicinal product to a guy at Bogoso who was suffering from epilepsy and he was cured. He is no more epileptic and God is my witness.

Why can’t we believe in ourselves and plants God gave us? When someone with diabetes is cured, who notices? Those diabetic who are ‘cured’ are ignored simply because the medical establishment does not believe diabetes can be reversed. There is no clear definition of cure, or cured, in our medical system.

We only have a medical establishment that is more interested in the growth of the pharmaceutical industry than healing people. They've failed to cure virtually everything. The pharmaceutical cartel fights natural, effective cures that actually work.

We often pat ourselves on the back when a patient’s diabetes is “managed” while these poor people still continue to battle with complications of diabetes, such as heart disease, stroke, and nerve damage.

I am not a medical doctor, but my several years experience working with an herbal company has taught me that the standard care of treatment of diabetes and hypertension in our hospitals is fundamentally flawed.

Diabetes (also known as diabetes mellitus) is a condition in which the body either can't make or can't use insulin properly. Insulin is a hormone normally produced by the pancreas. Basically, there are two (2) main types of diabetes. They are known as type 1 and type 2.

People with type 1 diabetes can't make insulin. In fact, 90-95% of diabetes is type 2. People with type 2 diabetes make some insulin but either it's not enough, or their bodies just aren't able to use it properly.

From the above explanations of diabetes, it is obvious that there are no pathogens that cause diabetes and so it can't be cured with chemicals. The problem is that the conventional advice for managing this disease is wrong.

People with type 1 diabetes are always injected with insulin every day to live because the pancreas of a person with type 1 makes little or no insulin. Treatments with the motive of lowering blood sugar while raising insulin levels can actually worsen rather than remedy the actual problem of metabolic miscommunication.

Western medicine consistently makes the mistake of thinking the human body is nothing but an assembly of isolated parts. Kidney and liver failures aren’t caused by the organs themselves. It is not the liver or the kidney that causes the problem but the result of systemic failures.

So the ineffective insulin is no different from effective insulin. Its ineffectiveness lies in the inability of our cell population to respond to it. This is not the result of any biochemical defect in the insulin itself.

So you can inject a diabetic full of insulin, but it doesn't make his insulin metabolism any stronger. It important to note that diabetes affects almost every cell of the human body and all the cells depend largely upon the proper diet as raw materials that they need for self repair and maintenance.

So diabetes is just a result. Cholesterol drugs, for example, may artificially lower cholesterol numbers, but they completely ignore the root cause of elevated cholesterol.

From the above explanation, I believe diabetes would be much better treated or cured with Traditional Herbal Medicine that looks at the whole patient, not just isolated organs. We’ve failed as a people to educate our people that the body has the ability to heal or repair itself if we rely on natural way of eating and living.

Why must we abandon the poor diabetic patient to die while there are various herbal medicinal products that can cure diabetes easily? Is it because the ‘white man’ said he has no cure for diabetes? It’s so sad. Why must we deceive them into forming diabetes associations and spend all their savings on insulin even though we are surrounded by plants and herbs?

You may call me names, but if I were an African leader, herbal medicine would be used to cure diabetes and we will say a big NO to conventional medicine. The good old Bob Marley hit the nail right on the head when he said “in the abundance of water the fool is thirsty.”

I'll finish with this quote from the speech of Kwame Nkrumah in 1963 when he addressed some scientists at a dinner in KNUST. He said: “Unless science is used for the betterment of mankind, I am at a loss to understand the reason for it at all. It does not require a clever brain to destroy life”.
By: Jerry Kweku Asomaning
A public health advocate and a student of history and politics
Email: [email protected] or whatsapp: +233244879544