Miracle drug for multiple sclerosis pirated from molecules in cordyceps mushroom

[djohnston]

I know this one's off the beaten path of topics, but it speaks to being truthful and doing things the open source way. Speaking of which:

Source

(NaturalNews) A new "miracle" drug for the treatment of multiple sclerosis turns out to have been stolen ("derived") from cordyceps mushrooms. The drug is called Gilenya and it's being sold in the USA by Novartis AG -- at the monopolistic price of $4,000 / month per person.

The drug is projected to be a blockbuster seller, with estimates putting it in the top 10 drugs by 2018 when it is expected to reach $5.3 billion in sales. A one-year course of Gilenya costs $48,000.

The drug was discovered by studying compounds used in Traditional Chinese Medicine, a 5,000-year-old medical art form that still out-performs western medicine at every level (cost, safety and effectiveness). Japanese researcher Tetsuro Fujita began studying what he calls "Himalayan fungus" in the 1980's, and his "discovery" (if you can even call it that, as Chinese Medicine has known about this for millennia) looks likely to earn Mitsubishi Tanabe Pharma Corp up to $5 billion.

The drug works by selectively suppressing the immune system, preventing the mechanism of muscular sclerosis from attacking the body's own tissues.

Now that the drug has been approved by the FDA, it is legal to claim that this isolated molecule can treat muscular sclerosis, but it remains illegal to claim that the fungus from which it was derived -- cordyceps -- can accomplish the same thing.

This is routine for the drug industry: Steal from nature, patent the molecules, "approve" the isolated molecules as medicine, then attack the original source as "quackery."

Steal molecules from nature, then get a patent monopoly

To this day, even as Big Pharma continues to explore Traditional Chinese Medicine for its goldmine of treatments and cures, the entire western medical system routinely attacks Chinese Medicine and says it's all hokum. But once they find a molecule that can earn them billions of dollars, suddenly it's heralded as "scientific medicine!" ...but only with the brand name, not the original plant name from which it was derived.

Statin drugs, the best-selling pharmaceuticals on the market today, were derived from lovastatin molecules naturally found in red yeast rice. After pirating these molecules from nature and patenting their variations, the drug industry urged the FDA to attack red yeast rice supplements, calling them "adulterated" because they contained lovastatin molecules. The FDA then warned the public that red yeast rice was adulterated with pharmaceuticals.

This is the scam of western medicine: You are told by "scientific experts" that plants, herbs, mushrooms and nutrients are worthless quackery; yet the industry routinely steals powerful therapeutic molecules from precisely those sources in order to formulate new drugs. These new drugs are then heralded as "miracle treatments" and marketed at thousands of times their actual cost in order to make billions of dollars for drug companies. It's all a monopolistic racket that works because the people are kept ignorant about the real sources of medicine (plants).

Physicians, too, are brainwashed by drug companies to believe that only pharmaceutical chemicals have therapeutic value while natural substances from the world of plants are all completely useless. So they prescribe chemicals instead of telling people to use herbs, mushrooms and nutrients to prevent and even reverse chronic degenerative disease.

Big Pharma piracy is alive and well across our planet

While music industry and movie industry executives scream about online piracy of their digital products, the most criminal piracy of all is happening in our medical system: Drug companies routinely steal molecules from nature while giving nature no credit. By changing the name into a scientific-sounding drug brand name, they avoid anyone recognizing that their drugs often come from plants. Thus, they also avoid people figuring out that you can treat and cure disease at a fraction of the cost by using therapeutic plants, mushrooms, superfoods and nutrients.

For $4,000 a month, you could of course swallow Gilenya and hope it works. But for a fraction of that -- just $400 a month -- you could purchase and consume large quantities of high-grade cordyceps mushrooms from a far better source such as Dragon Herbs.

You can also buy high-grade magnesium supplements for yet another fraction of that. Magnesium is often deficient in those who are diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.

In fact, you could eat an entirely organic, high-nutrient-density diet that's rich with superfoods and potent supplements for far less than $4,000 a month. And in addition to preventing multiple sclerosis, you'd also be preventing cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer's, diabetes and practically every other common disease now ravaging society.

But Big Pharma wants you to pay $4,000 a month for one pill, then another $4,000 a month for another pill. Each "disease" you have might require thousands of dollars a month in "treatment" -- all approved by the FDA whose job is to funnel an increasingly large percentage of the U.S. economy into the coffers of the pharmaceutical industry.

It's not unusual for one patient suffering from several diseases to cost $50,000 / month just to maintain their so-called "health care."

This is not health care, however: It is profit extraction. The system is designed to keep you sick in perpetuity while Big Pharma soaks you (and Medicare, Medicaid, health insurance companies) for everything you've got. That's how the pharma game is played: Profiteering combined with a complete abandonment of any recognition of the value of human life.

(NOTE: All the emphasized words are in the original.)