An Invented Disease?

By Victor Deaton

On the news a few days ago, we learned about the discovery that children who drink raw milk don’t have asthma. “How about that!” they said, “But what are we to do because raw milk is full of harmful bacteria?”

I grew up drinking raw milk along with one brother and two sisters. We didn’t know anyone who had asthma. We were seldom sick except for the chicken pox. One sister got measles, one brother got whooping cough but none of us got the mumps, although it was going around in school.

I have come to the conclusion that COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease) is an invented disease. I have emphysema which the doctors think is caused by over fifty years of smoking. I was over in the Mediterranean area for three years during WWII and started smoking like almost everybody else did then. My sisters both smoked as much or more than I did. One died at 85 but the lung x-rays didn’t indicate she ever smoked. One died last week at age 89. They blamed it on smoking. But you wonder how long she would have lived if she hadn’t smoked.

There is no treatment for emphysema but most sufferers like myself go to a doctor when they develop shortness of breath. Doctors start them on inhalers. Eventually the inhalers give a person asthma and chronic bronchitis, which they never had before. The expensive sprays for these conditions are addictive, and the patient can’t get off them for life.  It’s a multibillion dollar bonanza to drug companies. They then call this new condition COPD.

Victor Deaton
Beardstown, Illinois

Letter to the Editor of Wise Traditions, published in the Fall 2007 issue