📅  28 April 2025

How natural healing was erased

How natural healing was erased.

John D. Rockefeller did not merely influence medicine,  he hijacked it in the early 1900s. An oil magnate by trade, Rockefeller used his wealth and influence to reframe centuries,old healing practices, branding herbal medicine and natural remedies as “alternative” and dismissing them as “unscientific quackery.” Meanwhile, petroleum-based pharmaceuticals were promoted as the new gold standard of care.

Taking control of the American Medical Association (AMA), Rockefeller funneled massive grants to top medical schools, but with strict conditions: only his approved, drug-centered curriculum could be taught. References to the healing power of herbs, nutrition, and natural therapies were systematically erased from medical textbooks.

Doctors and educators who challenged this new doctrine were publicly discredited, stripped of their medical licenses, and driven from the profession. Some faced arrest and imprisonment simply for speaking out.

When evidence surfaced linking petroleum-based drugs to cancer, Rockefeller responded by helping to found the American Cancer Society — not to prevent cancer, but allegedly to bury the truth and protect the pharmaceutical empire he helped build.

John D. Rockefeller’s influence established a pharmaceutical industry rooted in petroleum-derived drugs, whose dominance continues to this day.