Everybody’s in Favor of Health Freedom… Right?
Some personal thoughts about the health freedom movement.

What the Natural Solutions Foundation has labeled “Health Freedom IS Our First Freedom”* is a rapidly growing movement, garnering attention around the world. In fact, this slogan has rapidly become a rallying cry for hundreds of thousands of deeply engaged supporters of the twin concepts of freedom in health choice and bodily autonomy.

Our involvement in the issue of Health Freedom reaches back to 1971 when I started practicing law. At that time, we were working with patients and alternative healthcare providers: for that work I received an Appreciation Award from the National Health Federation in 1979. My wife Kathy Greene believes so strongly in the importance of this issue that she worked side by side with me on these cases. Today she is the Community Organizing Director for Health Freedom USA.

By the mid-1990s we were campaigning for legal protection for nutrient marketers. This preceded the passage of the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Action of 1994, DSHEA, a law that, for the first time, allowed vitamin purveyors to make nutrient claims about their products — Freedom of Speech for nutrient claims — and allowed consumers access to high potency nutrients whose doses were determined by the desires and collective wisdom of the consumer and manufacturer.

The FDA immediately began a series of concerted attacks both on free speech and nutrient access, despite the guarantees of both contained in DSHEA (to say nothing of the US Constitution!), which stipulated that truthful information about the nutrients covered by that Act could be shared. Federal regulation, which has the force of law, was imposed, we believe unconstitutionally, to restrict that commercial and scientific speech.

Health Freedom, including the freedom to speak about the health benefits which could be expected from the use of nutrients, came under severe and sustained attack. With the founding of Natural Solutions Foundation and its www.HealthFreedomUSA.org web site in 2004 by my Natural Solutions Foundation co-trustees, Oath-Keepers Maj. Gen. Bert Stubblebine (US Army, Ret.) and Rima E. Laibow MD, Health Freedom finally had a consistent, effective and focused Internet voice. Everyone who reads the Health Freedom USA web site knows what extraordinary campaigners for Health Freedom Dr Rima and Gen Bert have proven to be. In this they stand with the other great names of Health Freedom, such as Dr. Mercola, Dr. Wright, Dr. Whitaker and Dr. Paul

Our supporters have enthusiastically backed all of Ron Paul’s health freedom initiatives, generating many hundreds of thousands of emails to Congress urging passage of his bills, such as HR 3394 and HR 3395.

See: http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/568/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=27732

We also urge people to tell their US Senators to adopt the health freedom protection language Dr. Paul offered in the House as an amendment to the healthcare-takeover bill.

See: http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/568/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=1677

We created the above Action Items, and have strongly urged people to take them for themselves and their family members, because we understand the powerful connection between declaring one’s support for “health freedom” and vigorously taking expressive association actions to make sure our “representatives” know that we demand respect and protection for our health freedoms. These expressive association actions, in the aggregate, create a dynamic for change which, because of the numbers involved, simply cannot be ignored. Sadly, not all who claim to be “health freedom” advocates, however, are willing, or able, to translate their claimed adherence to Health Freedom ideals into effective Push Back action.

And that truly concerns us deeply. Largely because of the stunning effectiveness of the Natural Solutions Foundation, which is the largest Health Freedom organization in the world, it has become very popular to say that you, or your group, are involved in the health freedom movement; that you oppose forced vaccinations, etc.

Health freedom has become Mom AND her apple pie! Everybody claims to be for health freedom!

Last month, for example, Senator Tom Harkin publicly addressed our concerns and our action on the disastrous “Food Safety” [sic] Bill, S. 510, acknowledging “thousands” (actually, we generated more than a 150,000) online messages in just a few days, delivered to Senators to help them support opposition to a Senate HELP Committee “mark-up” of the anti-freedom S.510. The Senator said that the bill’s enhanced power to the FDA would not damage our DSHEA rights. What? Give this corrupt and shockingly incompetent agency, as the GAO reported last November, and tragic event after event demonstrates, more power for them to “abuse” to use Dr. Paul’s word? Exactly — all while mouthing paeans to “health freedom?”

See: http://drrimatruthreports.com/?p=4014

What the Obamacare plan, in all of its versions, means is that THEY have the freedom to make YOUR health decisions. And they are not on your side.

Health freedom is certainly not about having your decisions pre-made to deprive you of the right to control what goes on, into, and out of, your body. There is nothing free at all in Obamacare: it won’t be financially free (or affordable, based on current projections, and you KNOW they will skyrocket once the bureaucrats are at their desks) or personally free (your healthcare decisions will be made by a department with 150,000 employees who know you not and care about you not one whit – think “managed care on radioactive steroids”!)

Another example: the US Senate decided to “give” integrative medicine a “seat” at the Comparative Effectiveness Research (CER) gorging-table as part of the wheeling and dealing needed to pass Obamacare. “If only…” they say, “CAM could be recognized by the government…” While some misguided so-called health freedom advocates have trumpeted this as a “victory” for health freedom, we see it as a disaster, nothing short of a clear and present danger both for those of us who choose Advanced care and for “integrative” medicine itself. We predict that this “generosity” is a giant step to the legal extinction of natural, advanced, integrative, complimentary, Oriental, Ayurvedic, Homepathic, Osteopathic and all other forms of non-pharmaceutical/surgical/radiation therapy with the probable exception of Chiropractic, which has learned very well how to tread the organizational mine-fields of conventional insurance, with serious loss of integrity to the profession, of course, in my opinion. Federal funding is a sure step to Federal control. The CER Commission is a real threat to our basic human right to freedom of choice in healthcare, threatening our very personal bodily security, as are many of the other provisions of that bloated multi-thousand page bill!

Advanced Healthcare, like so many other aspects of our lives, is safest when government ignores it! As Drs. Mercola, Wright, Whitaker Laibow and Paul well know, the medical term for this is “Tincture of Divine Neglect”. Health freedom requires the US Government to provide a permanent dose of this tincture. Now.

Thus, any new bit of bureaucracy set up to placate CAM (Complementary and Alternative Modality) practitioners will eventually be used to control (which means “limit”) their freedom to heal and will, since the big dog in the yard is Big Pharma, kill the economic competition: safe, efficient, gentle, effective natural treatments.

The threats are not just from the Federal bureaucracy, of course. A committee of Codex Alimentarius (the so-called World Food Code, a UN agency) this past November moved to institute its long-sought upper limit “Nutrient Reference Values” (NRVs) for daily intake. For everyone. Everywhere. No matter what their biological or health status. The NRVs are designed to be so low that they are actually insufficient to avoid deficiency diseases (ex: Vit. C, restricted to 45 mgs, while at least 60 mgs are needed daily just to prevent clinical scurvy, Vit. D restricted to 5 IU while at least 1000 is necessary to support immune functioning). This, of course, is an excellent business model for the Illness Industry which, with the deep commitment of the US at Codex, is in the process of degrading the global food supply and, with it, the global immune system, resulting in decreasing longevity and increasing disease, preventable deaths and, of course, increasing profits. This is a prime example of what happens when government, in this case, Global Government, interferes with natural processes and regulates health. The result is always restriction and, ultimately, illness of both your body and the body politic. The FDA is, of course, firmly committed to bringing these international restrictions, for which it works hard at Codex, home to the US where our freedoms will be sharply abridged to their limitations and restrictions.

How can we exercise health freedom if the marketplace is not permitted to provide the goods and services, including the nutrients and clean foods, we choose to patronize?

Yet another example: there is an – at best – misguided “health freedom” group out there campaigning for state-level laws licensing CAM practices. I say “at best” because we strongly suspect this group is funded indirectly by Big Pharma, while they pretend to be in favor of “health freedom.” How, you ask, do ‘freedom’ and ‘license’ get confused in their minds, given that this group is headed by a lawyer? Well it would certainly appear that at the very least they don’t understanding freedom the way Health Freedom USA supporters do. We know the difference between natural liberty and grants of privilege. Those “at the table” and those hanging around it to scarf up the crumbs they can collect as they fall, certainly do not.

But with our knowledge comes new responsibility. YOU are responsible for your own health. YOU are responsible for your own freedom. No one “gives” you either. The governmental level of control is certainly trying to take both away from you. Only your rational, self-protective actions in the real world will achieve either of these goods… and when combined, perhaps Thomas Jefferson said it best:

“Liberty is to the collective body what health is to every individual body. Without health no pleasure can be tasted by man; without liberty, no happiness can be enjoyed by society.”

Therefore, what are you, as a Campaigner for Liberty supporter, who is concerned with Health Freedom, prepared to do to preserve, protect, defend and extend and preserve Our First Freedom?

We have extraordinary human resources, new communication techniques, inspired leaders like Drs. Mercola, Wright, Whitaker Laibow, Paul and Gen Stubblebine. We here at Health Freedom USA have the will to achieve and maintain a free society and a progressing wellness market, unhampered by the greedy politics of international, Federal and state power and their favored corporatist interests.

We’ve seen the power of Push Back. We pushed, and state vaccine mandates (in NY and NJ) were suddenly suspended! We pushed, and bills, such as the Kennedy 2007 FDA “enabling act” was changed to exempt dietary supplements; the fake “Food Safety” bill has been changed to exclude some farmer-to-consumer sales.

Note the distinction: true Health Freedom advocates support freeing the People from rules and regulations that restrict their health freedom choices while the pseudo-“freedom” disinformation agents celebrate getting a seat at the trough and seek, like Chamberlain dealing with Hitler, to appease, compromise, placate and sooth the forces that fully intend to destroy them.

When it comes to choosing between principled opposition to tyranny and “pragmatic” compromisers, we know where we stand. All we need do now is exercise our freedom of expression and take back the debate, changing its outcome through focused, strategically place Push Back…

Ralph Fucetola JD
Counsel and Trustee
Natural Solutions Foundation
www.HealthFreedomUSA.org
www.VitaminLawyer.com

* Dr. Laibow coined this slogan when we campaigned to have Health Freedom recognized as one of the Top Ten social issues on Change.org, a “semi-official” web site that fed into the official Obama transition site, Change.gov and the “President’s Briefing Book.” The issue went “toe to toe” with all the hot-button issues… and, because of the Natural Solutions Foundation, prevailed! Many of the alleged “Health Freedom” organizations actually mobilized AGAINST the item, indicating how important this strategy was.

Of course, the “change” web sites were little more than window-dressing for “new boss… same as the old boss…” but the purpose of the exercise was to show that Health Freedom, as an issue, appealed to the left as well as the right. Health is transpartisan, as is freedom. As a transpartisan issue, it directly confronts the fascistic tendencies of America’s official, tax-supported political parties and their government. Health Freedom is an issue that can make a practical difference in the lives of the People on a daily basis.

Health Freedom is Our First Freedom because without the right to control our own bodies, we cannot exercise any of the other enumerated rights and liberties.