Andy Comfort: Heart disease is one of the U.K.’s biggest killers. Around 2.5 million people in the country live with this, and it kills 250 people every day. An optician in Hull [England] claims to be able to cure this, and Dr. Sydney Bush joins me in the studio to tell me all about this. Good morning, Sydney. Thank you for coming in.
I know you’ve got signs in your shop windows saying you cure heart disease. Now that’s a huge claim. Why do you say that?
Dr. Sydney Bush: Well, it’s quite simple. The doctors are stuck with a system of diagnosing heart disease that involves X-rays, and X-rays are hopelessly inadequate for demonstrating coronary atheroma [atherosclerosis]. They simply pass right through it.
Until there is a very, very substantial blockage, the X-rays fail to show that it is there. So the optometrist can legitimately claim to cure heart disease at a stage long before the doctors can demonstrate its presence.
Mr. Comfort: When you say “cure heart disease,” I understand that you can spot early signs of it. That’s different, isn’t it?
Dr. Bush: Going back to 1979, three very clever cardiologists and an ophthalmologist rather shot the medical profession in the foot because they found that there is a very tight correlation between the amount of disease showing in the eye (which wasn’t recognized until I did this work), … in the retinal arteries, and the same amount showing in the heart, using the crude X-rays of the day.
They were able to prove quite conclusively that the eye is in fact a perfect surrogate outcome indicator of the increase or decrease of coronary artery disease.
We were taught in optometry school that the arterial disease was [in the] sheathing around the arteries, and it isn’t in fact [in] the sheathing at all. It is cholesterol inside the arteries. The confusion came because—just like tropical fish that you can see right through—we are looking at these miniscule arterioles in the eye, and we are looking right through them. And so you can see the cholesterol inside them.
Mr. Comfort: What have doctors said to you about your claims because they still use X-rays to this day? What have they said?
Dr. Bush: Well, they don’t want to know.
Mr. Comfort: Why not?
Dr. Bush: Because it puts them in a very difficult position because the medical archive is corrupt. It has been distorted.
All the work that should have been done on vitamin C has not been approved for funding, and the work that has been done doesn’t gain prominence because it is hardly quoted in the newspapers that tend to be controlled by pharmacy. So the public never gets to hear what is in the learned journals.
Mr. Comfort: Which journals are these then because … there has been a lot of criticism of your claims?
Dr. Bush: Yes. Well, for instance, I have written five letters, which have been published. To the credit of the British Medical Journal, they have published five letters from me since 2004, but they fail to be reported in the media, and these letters are of vital public interest.
One, for example, was—and I wrote twice—to say that MRSA bugs can be cured, and the media completely ignored that. In the final letter … I said that [if I had MRSA] if the doctors didn’t provide [me with] sufficient vitamin C to cure MRSA, I would discharge myself from hospital to do it myself.
Mr. Comfort: Let me just read what the NHS [National Health Service] says. We did ask them to come on and talk to us. They have given us a statement and said that NHS Hull is aware that Sydney Bush is making claims regarding the prevention and cure of coronary heart disease.
NHS Hull has advised Mr. Bush that all cardiovascular services are commissioned using evidence set out by the National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence. The Primary Care Trust has sought the advice of the General Optical Council with regard to Mr. Bush’s continued promotion of CardioRetinometry.
Later in the program we will hear more about … that. … They clearly … are not happy with what you are saying. They clearly are quite adamant that their evidence is there, set out by NICE, the National Institute of Clinical Excellence.
Dr. Bush: Yes. Well, apropos of that there is a very interesting story [that] just came out from New Zealand where a New Zealand family had to actually fight the doctors to get them to inject the vitamin C to save a farmer from dying of swine flu. I don’t know if you saw that story. But it came to a stand-up fight between the family and the doctors.
The family had to get the law on their side and force the hospital to provide the injections of vitamin C. The farmer’s lungs … [cleared up] magically on the X-ray within two days of being injected with vitamin C.
So then the farmer was discharged to his local hospital, and again there was a stand-up fight between the family and the doctors in the hospital. Neither hospital in Auckland [n]or the local hospital would provide an interview with the media.
Dr. Bush (continued): Doctors have been holding this, covering this up for 50 years. Dr. G. C. Willis was the first doctor to show that vitamin C reverses heart disease.
He proved with guinea pigs that scurvy causes heart disease, and he was able to play with the scurvy. He was actually able to reverse it, bring it on, and reverse it.
Time after time, his X-rays showed that he was curing the heart disease, but the doctors refused to mention that worked because bypass was then perfected and that meant billions of pounds [dollars] in profit for hospitals doing these bypass operations.
Mr. Comfort: So can you produce any patient that you treated, you can say, Here’s somebody who walked into my shop in Hull, into my optician’s [office], and I cured … [the person] of heart disease?
Dr. Bush: I’ve got several thousand images to show the reversal of arterial disease. Finally, I stood before the British Medical Association on the second of December last year, and I said to their faces quite bluntly, because I was annoyed with them, with these doctors, … “These many images of reversals of disease, which I am showing you show that optometry has bypassed the bypass and made coronary cardiology kiddology.”
Mr. Comfort: What did they say?
Dr. Bush: The wife of one of the doctors jumped up, had hysterics, and ran out shouting that I shouldn’t be there and that I hadn’t enough evidence. Of course, I had far too much evidence for her. Of course, I am not the only person reversing arterial disease.
Mr. Comfort: If this is the case, surely there must be other optometrists who will stand behind you and say this is true.
Dr. Bush: What has happened in Hull is that they threatened me. … The official National Health Service threatened me, saying that unless I was prepared to stop telling people that arterial disease is reversible, they wouldn’t renew my National Health Service contract.
I felt that I couldn’t be part of a corrupt National Health Service, and so I said, OK we’ll leave it, but … I didn’t go ahead, and I haven’t had a contract for two years. It has cost me thousands of pounds. But I am sticking to my principles that the National Health Service is corrupt.
The public is being led up the garden path by this organization called NICE [National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence], which has no equivalent in any other country in the world, and we are paying the price for it.
Mr. Comfort: The National Health Service will speak of the evidence they have as they have told us, and it is a heck of a claim to come in and say “cure heart disease,” but to accuse the NHS of being corrupt is equally a heck of a claim isn’t it?
Dr. Bush: Let’s talk about the fictitious case of a man who goes to the doctor with angina pains and is sent as precautionary measure to the infirmary to the cardiology department for an examination and is told that he has grade-zero heart disease. He comes out smiling.
Now my patient would say: “Well, hang on a minute. Grade zero? I’ve got pains. Does this have grades?”
The cardiologist would say, “Yes. We have grades up to four.”
And the question that is never asked is, “Well, OK, how much or what percentage blockage can I have in my arteries and still be grade zero?”
The cardiologist would be very embarrassed and have to say, “Well, up to 49 percent blockage of all the major heart arteries.”
That is not exactly what the public expects to hear, but my patient who knows a thing or two about this would then question the cardiologist, and say, “What’s your next grade? Is it grade 1?”
The cardiologist would say, “No. It’s grade 0.5”
And my patient would then say, “Well hang on. How much, what percentage blockage can I have in my major heart arteries and not be more than grade 0.5?”
And the cardiologist would have to say, “Well, up to 49 percent blockage of all your major arteries and one of the major arteries blocked up to 70 percent.”
That’s not exactly what the public wants to hear. This is deception, and that has been going on for 40-odd years.
Mr. Comfort: So you lost your license to the NHS. … Where do you go from here, then?
Dr. Bush: My colleagues are all too scared and quite rightly so because they depend on being good boys. Effectively what the National Health Service has done is to gag the whole of the optometrists’ profession in the British Isles so that it is no use going to any optometrist and asking … about the state of your arteries because they dare not tell you.
Mr. Comfort: Well we are going to have to leave it there for this week. It’s been nice talking to you. Thank you for coming in this morning.
Dr. Bush: Thank you for having me.
From an interview on BBC Radio Humberside, Aug. 23, 2010.
Transcript provided by Dr. Bush.
Dr. Bush is an optometrist and professor of CardioRetinometry practicing in London. His website is publicprotection.org
