Cancer survivor barred from talking about diet to save his diabetic patients
In Australia, the Medical Board of Tasmania told Dr. Fettke he could not give nutritional advice to his patients. Why? Was any of his patients harmed? No. The complaint was delivered anonymously.
Dr. Fettke is naturally a intriguing person. An orthopedic surgeon, he also survived brain cancer. (Read his cancer story here.) He says himself that he was tired of amputating the legs of diabetic patients are began promoting a low carb high fat diet to them. He then hoped to improve the food offerings at the hospital where he worked.
Hospital food guidelines recommend two desserts with biscuits and other carbohydrate foods as part of a normal meal for diabetics. This is not actually healthy for anyone, diabetic or not. If you recall in a previous blog I explained Dr. Joseph Kraft's findings that more than 90% of teenagers are already prediabetic.
When a hospital dietician made a complaint, he was informed that he was speaking outside of his scope of practice. He soon made the decision to leave the hospital and not renew his contract. He stated in interviews that he could not be the best physician under the rules put on him and accused the board of bullying.
When my patients share with me their medical chart notes I still see the outdated advice of low fat, low salt diets. Food manufacturers still add huge amounts of sugar to make low fat foods taste good and we wonder why obesity is such an epidemic. People still think Dr. Atkins was fringe and that saturated fat will kill us.
Old habits are hard to break. And old lies are hard to give up. Dr. Ancel Keys, a physiologist who was given a number of conscientious objectors to experiment on during his starvation studies during WWII, gave us the poorly studied hypothesis that saturated fat was harmful.
It took a couple of years, but eventually Dr. Fettke was completely exonerated and given a flimsy apology.
His wife, Belinda, documents some of his story in the blog http://www.nofructose.com. She discusses the risks imposed on free speech as well as the potential harm to patients who get progressively worse on outdated food pyramid, especially the terrible effects it has on children.
Follow Dr. Fettke's story here. And also check out his talks on the YouTube Channel: Low Carb Down Under. He has remained very busy as a speaker and teacher spreading his mission to reduce suffering with simple food changes.
The Failure of Medical Education: Why is LCHF not being shouted from the rooftops?
No comments:
Post a Comment