Reich, with his wife and son

Today’s article is the last of a three-part article on Wilhelm Reich. The first article in this series, Wilhelm Reich – Putting the Body in Mind-Body Medicine, Part 1, discussed who Reich was and why his ideas were so radical and pioneering for his time, the early to mid 20th century.

In the second part of this series, Wilhelm Reich – Putting the Body in Mind-Body Medicine, Part 2, I discussed Reich’s discovery of orgone energy, and his development of the orgone energy accumulator, or orgone box.
The box was used to heal cancer and other chronic, degenerative illnesses.

Today, in the last part of this series, I’ll discuss why the U.S. government, threatened by Reich’s orgone energy, went after Reich with a vengeance.

Reich’s downfall began in 1947 with an article entitled “The Strange Case of Wilhelm Reich” that appeared in New Republic magazine.

The article, "The Strange Case of Wilhelm Reich," was the beginning of the end for Reich

Authored by freelance writer Mildred Edie Brady, it was filled with distortions and innuendos about Reich’s sexual theories and orgone research. Brady’s most inflammatory claim was that Reich was building accumulators of orgone energy “which are rented out to patients who presumably derived orgastic potency from it.”

Implying that Reich was a danger to the public, Brady challenged the medical authorities to take action against him. Two months later, the article was brought to the attention of the Food and Drug Administration. The result was a ten-year campaign by the FDA designed to destroy Reich’s work.

The FDA focused on the orgone energy accumulator which Reich and his physicians were using experimentally with patients. Convinced that the accumulator was being fraudulently promoted as a sexual and medical device, FDA agents spent years interviewing Reich’s associates, physicians, students and patients, looking for dissatisfied users. None were ever found. As the FDA’s investigation continued, so did Reich’s work.

Reich continued to develop new ways to visualize, measure, and harness orgone energy from the atmosphere. The cloudbuster, for example, was an experimental instrument that could affect weather patterns by altering concentrations of orgone energy in the atmosphere. It comprised a set of hollow metal pipes and cables inserted into water, creating a stronger orgone energy system than that in the surrounding atmosphere.

Reich and his cloudbuster

Water, which strongly attracts and absorbs orgone, draws the atmospheric orgone through the pipes. This movement of orgone from a lower to a higher energy system was used by Reich to create clouds and to dissipate them.

Reich used the cloudbuster to conduct dozens of experiments involving what he called “Cosmic Orgone Engineering (C.O.R.E.).” One of the most notable occurred in 1953. During a long drought that threatened the Maine blueberry crop, several farmers offered to pay Reich if he could bring rain to the parched region. The weather bureau had forecast no rain for several days when Reich began his cloudbusting operations.

Ten hours later, a light rain began to fall. Over the next few days, close to two inches fell. The blueberry crop was saved, and in local newspaper articles the farmers credited Reich.

In February 1954, the FDA filed a Complaint for Injunction against Reich in the Federal Court in Portland, Maine. The Complaint declared that orgone energy does not exist, and asked the Court to prohibit the shipment of accumulators in interstate commerce and to ban Reich’s published literature which they claimed was labeling for the accumulators.

An FDA letter about Reich, based on its ongoing investigation

After considerable thought and discussion of this matter, Reich responded with a lengthy letter to Judge John Clifford, explaining that he could not appear in Court, since doing so would allow a Court of law to judge basic scientific research.

He wrote:
“Scientific matters can only be clarified by prolonged, faithful bona fide observations in friendly exchange of opinion, never by litigation… Man’s right to know, to learn, to inquire, to make bona fide errors, to investigate human emotions must, by all means, be safe, if the word FREEDOM should ever be more than an empty political slogan.

Furthermore, Reich asserted, if his painstakingly elaborated and published findings “…over a period of 30 years could not convince this administration, or will not be able to convince any other administration of the true nature of the discovery of the Life Energy, no litigation in any court anywhere will ever help to do so. I, therefore, submit, in the name of truth and justice that I shall not appear in court as the ‘defendant’ against a plaintiff who by his mere complaint already has shown his ignorance in matters of natural science.”

Judge Clifford did not accept Reich’s letter as a valid legal response, and on March 19, 1954, a Decree of Injunction was issued on default as if Reich had never responded at all. But the Injunction itself was even more excessive than the initial Complaint:
•    it ordered orgone energy accumulators and their parts to be destroyed
•    it ordered all materials containing instructions for the use of the accumulator to be destroyed
•    it banned a list of Reich’s books containing statements about orgone energy, until such time that all references to orgone energy were deleted

After the initial shock, Reich continued his research, traveling to Arizona to experiment with the cloudbuster in the dry desert environment. While he was there, and without his knowledge, one of Reich’s students—Dr. Michael Silvert—moved a truckload of accumulators and books from Rangeley, Maine to New York City, a direct violation of the Injunction.

Wilhelm Reich, arrested by the U.S. government

As a result, the FDA charged Reich and Silvert with criminal contempt of court. Following a jury trial, both men were found guilty on May 7, 1956. Reich was sentenced to two years in federal prison, Silvert was sentenced to a year and a day. The Wilhelm Reich Foundation—founded in Maine in 1949 by students and friends to preserve Reich’s Archives and to secure the future of his discovery of the Cosmic Life Energy—was fined $10,000.

While Reich appealed his sentence, the government carried out the destruction of orgone accumulators and literature. In Maine, several boxes of literature were burned, and accumulators and accumulator materials either destroyed or dismantled.

In New York City, on August 23, 1956, the FDA supervised the burning of several tons of Reich’s publications in one of the city’s garbage incinerators, including titles that were only to have been banned. Among the materials burned were:
•    Orgone Energy Bulletin (12,189 copies)
•    International Journal of Sex Economy and Orgone Research (6,261 copies)
•    Emotional Plague Versus Orgone Biophysics (2,900 copies)
•    Annals of the Orgone Institute (2976 copies)
•    The Oranur Experiment (872 copies)
•    Character Analysis
•    Cosmic Superimposition
•    Ether, God, and Devil

Reich's book, "Listen Little Man," was one of the six tons of books burned

•    Listen, Little Man
•    People in Trouble
•    The Cancer Biopathy
•    The Function of the Orgasm
•    The Mass Psychology of Fascism
•    The Murder of Christ
•    The Sexual Revolution

This destruction of literature constitutes one of the most heinous examples of censorship in United States history.

On March 8, 1957, Reich signed his Last Will and Testament. Among its stipulations was the establishment of The Wilhelm Reich Infant Trust Fund as the legal entity charged with operating Orgonon (Orgonon was Reich’s 160-acre farm in Maine) as The Wilhelm Reich Museum; protecting, preserving, and transmitting his scientific legacy to future generations; and safeguarding Reich’s Archives.

All appeals denied, on March 12, 1957—two weeks shy of his 60th birthday—Wilhelm Reich was temporarily incarcerated at the Danbury Federal Penitentiary in Connecticut. On March 22, he was taken to the Federal Penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. He died there of heart failure on November 3, 1957, and was buried at Orgonon.

Wilhelm Reich

During this series on The Roots of Healing, I’ve been writing about different systems of medicine and healing. The last article in this series was on homeopathy.

Today I will veer away from discussing systems of healing to discuss a pioneer in the field, someone who put the body back in mind-body medicine.

His name was Wilhelm Reich, and he was a man far ahead of his time, but unfortunately he is for the most part forgotten.

Born in 1897 in the part of Europe that was once the Austro-Hungarian empire, he went to medical school and became a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. In the 1920s he became a protege of Sigmund Freud, and was considered one of his top underlings.

Yet as the years progressed, Reich saw limitations in the traditional psychotherapeutic approach, and felt that just working with the mind was insufficient in helping people free themselves of their burdens. He maintained that the body needed to be involved in psychotherapy also, and he founded the entire approach of body-centered psychotherapy, of which to this day there are many schools of thought.

Thus, the entire realm of mind-body medicine has Wilhelm Reich to thank, because he was willing to break with the convention and doctrine of his time and take medicine and healing into new frontiers.

Treating the whole person, so prevalent now, was radical for his time and is what Wilhelm Reich pioneered

Many well-known psychiatrists and psychologists followed Reich’s lead and developed new body-centered psychotherapies.

The first generation of Reich followers were such people as Alexander Lowen, who developed Bioenergetic Analysis; Fritz Perls, who developed Gestalt Therapy; Arthur Janov, who developed Primal Therapy; and Ida Rolf, who developed Rolfing.

Thus, without the pioneering work of Wilhelm Reich, there would have been none of these other breakthrough therapies.

Yet today, Reich is sadly forgotten. Part of that is because he died in jail a broken man, in 1957 at the age of 60, completely humiliated by the U.S. government. He was sentenced to two years in prison in 1956, for the crime of inventing something called an orgone energy accumulator, which he claimed could heal illness and restore a person’s energy field.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration investigated the orgone accumulator and decided it had no merit, and put a cease order on their sales. When an associate of Reich’s violated the order by selling some, the FDA came after Reich and threw him in jail.

Also in 1956, in conjunction with Reich being jailed, in one of the worst incidents of censorship in U.S. history, several tons of Reich’s publications were burned by the FDA.

Reich was living in Germany in 1933 when Hitler and the Nazis came to power, and he immediately left, going to Vienna, then Scandinavia, and then eventually settling in the U.S. in 1939.

His pioneering work broke many taboos of psychiatry. The field was dominated by the work of Freud, and focused on individual neuroses. But Reich was more interested in character structure.

From 1930 onwards, Reich became more interested in his patients’ physical responses during therapy sessions, and toward the late 1930s, he began to treat patients outside the limits of psychoanalysis’s restrictions, though well within the scope of general medicine.

In 1956, Wilhelm Reich was arrested by the FDA

He began to sit next to his patients, rather than behind them, in order to make stronger “contact.” He started touching them, to both increase awareness of tension and contraction and to relieve it directly. He began talking to them, answering their questions, rather than the stock, “Why do you ask?” analyst’s response.

From a psychoanalytic point of view, this undermined the position of neutrality. The analyst is meant to be a blank screen onto which the patient projects his old desires, his loves, his hates, his neurosis—a process known as transference.

Reich wrote that the psychoanalytic taboos reinforced the neurotic taboos of the patient. He slowly broke away from them, writing that he wanted his patients to see him as human.

He would press hard on their “body armor,” his thumb or the palm of his hand pressing on their jaws, necks, chests, backs, or thighs, aiming to dissolve their physical and mental rigidity. He wanted to see their movements soften, their breathing ease.

This dissolution of the “body armor” also brought back the repressed memory of the childhood situation that had caused the repression, he wrote. If the session worked as intended, he wrote that he could see waves of pleasure move through their bodies, a series of spontaneous, involuntary movements. Reich called these the “orgasm reflex.”

The two goals of Reichian therapy became the attainment of this orgasm reflex during therapy, and orgastic potency during intercourse. Reich called the flow of energy that he said he observed in his patients’ bodies, “bio-electricity.”

He felt this could free their body, mind and emotions, and lead to a full recovery of their health problems.

And herein is where Reich touched a raw nerve: he delved into the taboo area of sex in a way that Freud had never. Whereas libido and sexual repression was an important part of Freudian psychology, it was all still conceptual, and the work with patients was all conventional psychotherapy.

Reich took it one step further, and worked with people to break free of what he called the body armor, the holding patterns that caused rigidity of the body, mind and emotions.

Reich’s work was like a breath of fresh air for 1940s America, and he enjoyed a largely uncritical press in the U.S. Along with that, his psychoanalytic theories were taught in universities and discussed in the Journal of the American Medical Association and the American Journal of Psychiatry.

To be continued next time…

In yesterday’s article, Drug Ads on TV – A Brief History, I laid the blame for the epidemic of exponential growth in pharmaceutical consumption in the U.S. to August 1997, when the FDA allowed drug companies to begin advertising on TV.

A typical ad telling you to "Ask You Doctor"

The ubiquitous line you always hear in the ads, “Ask your doctor,” is the catchphrase to get you to mention that specific drug to your doctor, so that your doctor may prescribe that specific one, as opposed to a generic variation.

In the above video, Kathleen Slattery-Moschkau, a former pharmaceutical sales rep gives the inside dirt. Slattery-Moschkau, who since leaving the field has gone on to become a filmmaker, making the feature film Side Effects, starring Katherine Heigl as a pharmaceutical sales rep, discusses the billion dollar psycho/pharmaceutical marketing campaign designed to get millions of people on psychotropic drugs through slick drug ads and marketing campaigns that include ghost writing pro-drug articles for medical journals.

Meanwhile, you think advertising on TV is the final resting stop for the drug companies? Think again.

The newest fertile ground is the online marketing of drugs.

There’s been an explosive growth in online advertising: the pharmaceutical industry spent more than $1 billion on Internet ads last year and is projected to spend $1.7 billion on such marketing efforts in 2012.

And with that growth comes the potential for more unscrupulous advertising, because it’s much harder for the FDA to monitor all the websites that drug companies advertise on. Both Eli Lilly and Merck have received warning letters this year from the FDA accusing them of misleading online advertisements, but many more online ads escape the eyes of the FDA.

An increasing number of pharmaceutical firms are now using social media sites such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and MySpace, to market their products.

The drug company McNeil developed their own social media site called “ADHD Allies”—aimed at adults with ADHD—and on the site offer an online podcast on financial advice and an ADHD self-assessment tool.

A typical online ad is disguised as an educational message

What McNeil and many other drug companies are doing with their online advertising is slick and unscrupulous. The websites don’t mention the company’s product but rather market the disease, under the guise of attempting to share information and educate the public, especially those with the disease.

On these websites, the tone is educational, with the specific disease discussed, but the only options given are pharmaceutical ones. It’s not so easy to tell that a specific drug company is behind the website.

By doing things this way, drug companies can overcome fears of running afoul of FDA regulations that govern drug advertising and at the same time help brand and position their companies in a positive light with both the general public and doctors.

The top 10 drug companies using social media are: Pfizer, Johnson and Johnson, Novartis, Boehringer Ingelheim, AstraZeneca US, Bayer, GlaxoSmithKline, Sanofi-Aventis, Roche, and Merck.

So next time you hear the slogan “Ask Your Doctor,” remember that the slogan is not being used with your best interests in mind.

I started this series on drugs last week, stating that we are a drugged-out nation, and that when you take medications, it lessens your ability to achieve true health.

I’m not saying to quit taking your medications right now, as that may not be a wise thing to do. What I am saying is that you have to consider what your health goals are, and if it’s becoming healthy, then you have to start becoming proactive in getting off or at least cutting down on your medications.

Pharmaceutical drugs are not the answer to health, but it seems to be that people are being programmed to think they are.

That’s because the drug companies are doing a good job of making people think they are the savior.

A patient of mine recently told me she was on high blood pressure medication. Her blood pressure was 118/80 before she went on medication, and I told her that she does not have high blood pressure and shouldn’t be on a drug for it.

She went to see her doctor, who said that new regulations are stating that her blood pressure puts her in the pre-high blood pressure category, and that it’s now recommended that when people are in that category they should go on blood pressure medication.

I couldn’t believe when she told me this, and I told her that drug companies must have written that regulation, as the only one that serves is them.

She was wise enough to stop the medication, and she’s doing fine.

But how did we get to this point that drugs use is at such an epidemic level?

Blame it on drug ads on TV, which before August 1997 did not exist. It was at that point in time when everything changed. That’s when the FDA allowed it to happen.

Prior to 1997, the FDA rules said, “Advertisements promoting the medical use of prescription drugs must contain a ‘brief summary’ of all important information about the advertised drug, including its side effects, contraindications and effectiveness. In addition, advertisements broadcast over radio, TV or through telephone communications systems must include a ‘major statement’ prominently disclosing all of the major risks associated with the drug.”

Prior to August of 1997, print advertisements for prescription drugs were able to meet the “brief summary” requirement by including the risk-related sections of drug labeling together with the advertising copy. As the drug companies looked wistfully at the enormous marketing potential of television, they saw that there was no way to provide the required information about the drug in 30 second or one minute television ads.

Did Congress act? No, the FDA made the August 1997 rule change quietly and without consulting Congress or really anyone else. Their change allowed the drug companies to “…include information about any major risks, as well as instructions for how consumers can easily obtain more detailed information about the drug’s approved uses and risks.”

FDA Lead Deputy Commissioner Michael J. Friedman, M.D was one of the driving forces behind this change long sought by the drug companies. Dr. Friedman said in 1997, “Today’s action can help promote greater consumer awareness about prescription drugs. By describing realistic standards for television advertising of prescription drugs, we hope to end the uncertainty which has plagued both consumers and industry about the use of this medium. The FDA is committed to making sure that accurate and complete information is available to consumers.”

In the 1997 rule revision, the FDA “…presumes that the broadcast ad is truthful, not misleading, and contains information about the major health risks associated with the drug.

In lieu of providing a “brief summary,” the advertiser would have to provide a mechanism to ensure that consumers can easily obtain full product labeling.” In other words it is enough to quickly list some of the side effects along with a toll-free phone number or web address or advise the listener to speak with a physician.

Shortly after the FDA gave their blessing to the drug companies to advertise on TV, thanks to Dr. Michael Friedman, the good doctor left the agency. In 1998, President Clinton nominated Dr. Jane Henney to be the next commissioner of the FDA, and Dr. Friedman resigned to become a senior vice president at Searle, a subsidiary of Monsanto.

Which begs the question: In whose interests was Dr. Friedman looking after?

The United States and New Zealand are the only two industrial nations that allow the drug companies to advertise on television in this fashion.

As a result of being given the green light to advertise on TV, drug companies have quadrupled expenditures on ads aimed at consumers. Spending on direct-to-consumer advertising increased by 296.4% from 1997 to 2005, from $1 billion to $4 billion.

And the five single drugs with the highest expenditures for direct-to-consumer advertising were Nexium, Lunesta, Vytorin, Crestor, and Advair.

So next time you see an ad on TV, and you hear the famous tagline at the end to “ask your doctor,” remember that drug use in the U.S. has increased exponentially over the last 10 years, thanks in no small part to all that advertising on TV.

And of course, cutting down or cutting out meat consumption plays a key role in living a Low Density Lifestyle.

But one of the detrimental health ramifications that I haven’t mentioned to this point is the fact that livestock – chickens, pigs, and cattle – are fed antibiotics on a routine basis. They are fed the drugs not to stop illness but to encourage rapid growth, by promoting weight gain or more efficient feed consumption.

This is a public health nightmare, because the widespread use of antibiotics in livestock can lead to the spread of dangerous bacteria in humans, because it causes the development of bacteria that are immune to many treatments.

70 percent of antibiotics used in the United States is given to healthy chickens, pigs and cattle annually – a total of twenty-five million pounds of antibiotics per year fed to these animals. This is eight times more than the amount used as human medicine.

The FDA reports that 2 million Americans contract bacterial infections during hospital stays annually, and “70 percent of the infections are resistant to at least one antibiotic.”
This is the price that Americans pay for the widespread use of antibiotics in livestock.

With that in mind, in July the Obama administration announced that it would seek to ban many routine uses of antibiotics in farm animals in hopes of reducing the spread of dangerous bacteria in humans.

In written testimony to the House Rules Committee, Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, principal deputy commissioner at the FDA of food and drugs, said feeding antibiotics to healthy chickens, pigs and cattle should cease. And Dr. Sharfstein said farmers should no longer be able to use antibiotics in animals without the supervision of a veterinarian.

In July, Congressional hearings were held to discuss a measure proposed by Representative Louise M. Slaughter, Democrat of New York and chairwoman of the Rules Committee. It would ban seven classes of antibiotics important to human health from being used in animals, and would restrict other antibiotics to therapeutic and some preventive uses.

These drugs are penicillins, tetracyclines, macrolides, lincosamides, streptogramins, aminoglycosides, and sulfonamides, along with any other drug used to treat bacterial illness in people.

The legislation is supported by the Union of Concerned Scientists, Pew Environment Group, and the American Medical Association, among other groups, but opposed by farm organizations like the National Pork Producers Council. The farm lobby’s opposition makes its passage unlikely, but advocates are hoping to include the measure in the legislation to revamp the health care system.

Of course, we know how famously well legislation to revamp the health care system is faring. It’s been watered down many times by interest groups – primarily the insurance and drug companies – who have much to lose if the status quo is upended.

The use of antibiotics for “purposes other than for the advancement of animal or human health should not be considered judicious use,” Dr. Sharfstein said in his written testimony. “Eliminating these uses will not compromise the safety of food.”

Much of Dr. Sharfstein’s testimony summarized information that has been widely accepted for years by medical groups.

Robert Martin, a senior officer at the Pew Environment Group, which has paid for an advertising campaign to support the measure, said the prospects for the measure’s passage were improving.