'America's foremost consumer advocate'
For the sake of your health, avoid the snake-oil billionaire who has grown rich exploiting America's poor
John Sutherland
Monday August 29, 2005
The Guardian
America loves "how to" books. Typically they are about how to be a better American: richer, thinner, happier, sexier, and more beautiful. For the past few weeks the how-to charts have been headed by a book which has provoked more controversy than anything since The Anarchist's Cookbook instructed America's disaffected youth how to make Molotov cocktails.
Kevin Trudeau's book, Natural Cures "They" Don't Want You To Know About, offers, for a mere $25 (£14), "natural cures for more than 50 specific diseases" - including cancer, heart disease, bad breath, gout, male erectile dysfunction, obesity, dandruff, multiple sclerosis and gloom.
Buy this book, Trudeau promises, and "never get sick again". That's not quite accurate. Buy this book together with products that have included coral calcium on Trudeau's website,
www.naturalcures.com, and subscribe to his email newsletter (lifetime subscription $499) and then enjoy eternal health. Just because it's natural, doesn't mean it's free.
Mr Trudeau has no medical, pharmaceutical or therapeutic qualifications. He did, however, spend two terms in Federal prison for credit-card fraud. In his book, he admits that "I have made major mistakes in my life. I have paid my price and I have turned my life around."
Before he turned around into bestsellerdom, Trudeau's most successful self-help publication offered a surefire remedy for snoring. Nowadays, he presents himself as "America's foremost consumer advocate". He is the lone voice speaking up against the all-powerful "they": regulatory government bodies, such as the Food and Drug Administration and the Federal Trade Commission in alliance with NGOs such as the American Medical Association and - behind them - the drug companies, the health insurers and the fast-food chains.
"Did you know," asks Trudeau, "that the medical profession, in partnership with the pharmaceutical industry, has a huge interest in keeping you sick rather than healing you? Do you realise the Federal government is doing everything in its power - and some things well beyond its stated power - to keep this a secret?" Now you know.
The problem faced by the authorities ("they", that is) is whether, even in the land of the free, the public should be allowed to buy snake oil.
Some of Trudeau's "cures" are so harmful as to verge on the homicidal. "Pacemakers," he alleges, "cause heart failure." "Stop taking all non-prescription and prescription drugs," he urges. If you take them, "you absolutely will get sick and develop disease". Throw away the aspirin and live for ever.
Instead of popping the poisons prescribed by your family doctor, Trudeau recommends 15 colonic irrigations in 30 days, magnetic rings on the fingers (especially at night), and no alarm clocks ("they have profound effects on your body's pH"). And lots of coral calcium. That, not chemotherapy, was supposed to keep the big C at bay.
Last September, the FTC slapped a $2m fine on Trudeau for claiming that his magic powder, procured from the swirling depths of the barrier reef, could cure or prevent cancer. Since he has made a reported $2bn over the past few years the fine, as with others he has been obliged to pay, was small change. He admitted no wrongdoing, agreed to stop marketing the coral calcium, but kept on with his bestselling books (carefully "updated" to avoid any more irritating inroads into his royalties). He has a follow-up on the way: How to Lose 30 Pounds in 30 Days: the Weight Loss Secret "They" Don't Want You to Know About.
It would be easy to dismiss Trudeau's ability to separate the great American public from their hard-earned dollars as confirmation that there's one born every minute and somebody else eager to profit by it. But the runaway success of Natural Cures also bears witness to genuinely troubling aspects of the American healthcare system. It has been estimated that some 50 million citizens have no health insurance. For these desperate people, who fall sick like everybody else, "natural cures" are all they can afford. "Socialised medicine", as the Clintons learned the hardway, has no place in America. Capitalistic medicine does. What John le Carré calls "Big Pharma" has made America the most drugged nation in history. Big burgers, as the film-maker Morgan Spurlock amusingly suggests, has made it the fattest. The profits roll in, as Americans become more chemically zonked and unwell. Why don't "they" do something about it? Dig into your wallet, read Trudeau, and have your most paranoid suspicions confirmed.
