Don't get injured with prescribed drugs. You will receive no support.

Blogger has 'deleted' this post because they said it did not conform to their censorship rules - which mean that it is too critical of the Pharmaceutical Medical Establishment! It is an important subject. Many people take drugs and are harmed but they find it difficult/impossible to get any assistance from the medical profession, and are too often left to suffer. 

But I am pleased to tell you that you can now read it - courtesy of my new website on Substack. This is the URL, click on it, and read without the need of wondering whether it has been censored.

https://safemedicine.substack.com/p/do-not-get-injured-with-prescribed.

All my other blogs on blogger, all 15 years of them, have now been copied over to the new website - and I am busy trying to negotiate how to use the new site.

I will continue using this blog, but I would be grateful if you could follow me on Substack; there is a button at the bottom of the article in which to do so. 

Thanks for all your support on this platform.

Blogger: A Censorship Organisation?

I regret to say that the website that hosts this blog, "Blogger" is, or has become, a censorship organisation. I say this regretfully as I have been posting on this blog since 2018. But it seems increasingly likely that this blog will be soon be banned entirely - this has already been threatened by "Blogger".

The recent facts about Blogger's censorship activity against this blog are as follows:

On 31 May 2024 my blog "The Contaminated Blood Scandal and Covid-19 vaccines. The only difference is 50 years!" was deleted.

On 15th January my blog "Covid-19 Vaccines: have two vaccines already been banned? And are we allowed to know" was deleted.

On 5th May 2025 three of my blogs, (i) "The Largesse of the Pharmaceutical Industry: Why did doctors recommend that we take Covid-19 vaccines", (ii) "Measles Vaccine Campaign targets 'Unprotected Millions'", and (iii) "Don't get injured with prescribed drugs: you will be alone with little support" were all deleted.

I asked for all these decisions to be reconsidered. One of the deleted posts ("Don't get injured.....") was indeed reconsidered and reinstated on 9th May 2025.

However, quite amazingly, on 13th May 2025 "Don't get injured....." was again deleted! 

Deleted! Reviewed! Deleted again!?!

What sort of 'review' or 'reconsideration' was this? And on what basis have these blogs been deemed to have "violated' Blogger's "misleading content" policy in the first place? 

I am more sad than angry about this as I suspect the problem did not involve humans, but some AI computer programme! Perhaps a programme allied to, and written by people with a vested interest in pharmaceutical medicine.

My regular readers will be aware that I do not 'mislead'. If I make a statement, however challenging, it is based on evidence, my blogs always refer to that evidence, and always seeks to provide the reader with reference to that evidence.

So I will continue to use "Blogger" to post my blogs on medicine, until such time as the entire site is taken down. We all have to realise that censorship is happening regularly around the entire world. Big Corporations (not least Big Pharma) use their supporters to 'report' critical articles, and might damage their vested interests. And the media, clearly including Blogger, are pressurised into taking action. 

Rich and powerful vested interests have always controlled the media agenda in this way. So it is difficult to write about the patients harmed by the contaminated blood scandal, and similarities now with patients harmed by Covid-19 vaccines. It is difficult to point out that two Covid-19 vaccines have been withdrawn, effectively banned, because of patient harm. It is difficult to point out that there is evidence that doctors are paid to prescribe pharmaceutical drugs. It is difficult to point out that measles is now a mild disease, and to question whether vaccines are necessary. It is difficult to point out that patients who have been harmed by drugs/vaccines have an almost impossible tiask to convince the medical establishment that this is so, and to get compensation.

Perhaps all this information is "misleading", as Blogger has told me. If so the most appropriate response, within a democracy, is to counter the information with arguments and facts. In this way we are all assisted in making an informed choice - which is an important element in health freedom. It is certainly not democratic to remove/censor the information.

So this blog is prior notification to my regular readers that there is a problem - I suspect that unless I stop being critical of the pharmaceutical medical establishment this entire blog will soon be taken down.

There are clearly things we are not supposed to know about; and the medical establishment has enough influence and power to stop us hearing about them!

Medical Breakthroughs (when the principles of homeopathy are followed)

Over the recent holiday weekend, the British mainstream media featured a strange story of a man who had injected himself with snake venom, and that his body was now "almost immune from it", and that "he was donating his blood to science".

The story was presented with incredulity; but the homeopathic community would not have thought it at all unusual! And his blood would not have been donated to science!

A similar story was featured by the BBC earlier that week: a man whose peanut allergy nearly killed him; but now he eats them every day for breakfast.

        "But then his mum heard about a clinical trial at Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust and King's College London that would change her son's life. It would test whether adults like Chris with serious peanut allergies could be desensitised by training their bodies to tolerate the very thing that could kill it, calming down the immune system when it would usually over-react".

Yet this 'new' treatment for nut allergy is not a 'new' treatment offered by conventional (drug-based) medicine. I wrote about this same 'breakthrough' in 2014 in this blog, again based on more 'incredulous' BBC reporting.

I wrote another blog, on a similar subject, in 2015 when conventional medicine announced (through the mainstream media) that it had found a 'new' treatment - this time for dust mite allergy.

In the same year, I wrote this blog about a 'new' conventional medical treatment for superbugs, notably C-Difficile.

And yet again, in 2016, I wrote this blog about a 'new' treatment for multiple sclerosis.

So what do all these 'conventional medical treatments have in common? As I said in those earlier blogs, what conventional medicine is doing is using the primary medical principle of homeopathy.

Homeopathy is based on the ancient principle of "Like Curing Like", that small, dilute amounts of a substance that is causing illness and disease can cure that same illness and disease. It was a principle used successfully in ancient Greece, and by many people throughout the ancient and medieval world. Homeopathy uses snake venoms as remedies - but not in doses that might be harmful or lethal to the patient. The contribution of homeopathy is that the dilution of substances strengthens, rather than weakens, the medical effect of the substance used. It cures, but does so safely.

Conventional, pharmaceutical medicine is based on drugs that kill (eg., pain killers), block (eg., beta blockers), inhibit (eg., ACE inhibitors), suppress (eg., appetite suppressants, immunosuppressants), and oppose (eg., antagonist drugs. The are all 'anti-...' drugs), anti- something that is happening to the body of a sick patient. This adversarial approach to the body does not work; it has never worked; and will never work. It is this approach to medicine that causes side effects (at best), adverse reactions (at least), and epidemic levels of chronic disease and death. It is why pharmaceutical medicine is failing - so badly.

The Conventional Medical Establishment has spent the last 30 years attacking Homeopathy: they say it does not work; it cannot work; it is placebo; it is quack medicine, and the like. It is denied to patients on the British NHS. It is denied to patients around the world in which drug companies have control of state-supported medicine.

Yet when conventional medicine stumbles on a treatment that is based on the principle of homeopathy, 'like curing like', it has the audacity to crow about it, to describe it as a 'breakthrough', and without acknowledging the source and inspiration of the 'new' treatment.

This is a dishonest approach to medicine; but then why should anyone (given the history of pharmaceutical medicine, outlined here) expect honesty from the conventional medical profession. To do so would surely be a triumph of hope over experience!

Health and Politics

Our health is NOT a 'political' issue! 

I have often said this before, not least in recent years when many Americans (particularly) have begun asking on social media whether health care is better under Democratic or Republican regimes. It is not (or it should not be) a party political issue, it should be a matter solely of personal 'patient choice'.

The health treatment we are offered IS a political issue! 

Most countries have a national health system which is largely, or significantly paid for through taxation. So the health treatment we are offered depends on three important political issues, namely:

1. How healthcare is organised
2. How much is spent on it, and 
3. What the money is spent on

These three matters are certainly based on political decisions. In Britain the huge NHS organisation is wholly paid for by government, to the tune of over £200 billion annually. The NHS accounts for a very large proportion of total resources spent on health care. So the British people, and indeed the citizens of most other countries because similar considerations apply, are highly dependent on political decisions made about health care provision.

So how is politics dealing with health services in Britain (and around other countries of the world)? Let's ask the three questions.

1. How healthcare is organised? 

Whenever there are serious problem with NHS health provision the usual political response is to come up with 'solutions' that focus on how the organisation is structured. So, for example, when a new Tory government came into power in 2010 they created a new organisation, NHS England, which took over the control and direction of health care policy. It removed the NHS from direct ministerial control in the Department of Health. Similarly, when a new Labour government took office in 2024, it decided to change the organisational structure of the NHS - this time by closing down NHS England, and returning control of health policy and implementation to Ministers in the Department of Health!

Organisational restructuring has been a regular feature, particularly during times of serious crisis. And the NHS has been in ongoing crisis now for nearly 80 years! So reorganisation, restructuring, has become a regular feature, a veritable NHS Merry-Go-Round, for all this time!

2. How much money is being spent on the NHS? 

The underfunding of the NHS has been another on-going debate throughout each and every year, and every General Election, of NHS history! It has become a symbol of political virility for political parties to claim that it would spend more on the NHS than their opponents. I have written about this ongoing phenomina in 2013, outlining how electoral success has primarily rested on the ability of political party's to convince the electorate that they would spend most on health care.

The result has been spiralling health care costs, with each new government to spend more to overcome the regular and ongoing NHS crises that have developed over the years.

3. What is the money being spent on? 

The problem is that despite regular 're-organisations', and regular (often massive) increases in spending on health care provision, the NHS in Britain (and similarly health care organisations throughout the developed western world), continues to fall into ever repeating, ever deepening crises.

The political failure of health provision has been the abject failure of politicians to ask this important third question. This constitutes the most devastating political failure of the last century. 

If re-organisation does not work; if pouring more and more money into something has little or no effect; and if the situation clearly gets worse over lengthy periods of time, the very first political instinct should be to ask the three questions:

1. What are we investing in?
2. Why are these investments not working?
3. Should we not be investing in something different?

In the 80 year history of the NHS this has not happened. Nor has it happened anywhere else in the 'developed' western world. And what every single citizen, every taxpayer, should now be asking is why are our politicians are failing in the their primary duty: to ask questions, to investigate, to interrogate, to ensure that taxpayers money is being spent wisely, and to positive advantage.

If our armies were being defeated, our military ships sunk; if increasing numbers of people became destitute, dying of starvation on the streets; if our roads were regularly becoming unusable, our railways malfunctioning; if our telephone or television systems broke down; et al; we can be assured that all three of these political questions would be asked, and answers demanded.

In particular, these questions should be asked if alternative solutions were available, but excluded. Why, we should ask, is all our money being spent on one particular health system (pharmaceutical medicine) to the exclusion of alternatives? As far as health care is concerned, natural medical therapies, like homeopathy, naturopathy, herbalism, acupuncture, et al., have been effectively excluded from the NHS. They are no longer available to patients, even for to those who would want choose them. Why does 'patient choice' have no place within our NHS? Would the re-introduction of these therapies have more success in preventing the ongoing, ever burgeoning medical crises? Can studies be devised and conducted that might demonstrate whether this is so?

Instead, each year, £billions more are poured into the NHS, and the NHS spends it on the same thing - yet more drug-based medicine. We can all see the outcome for ourselves: one crisis following another, more demands for yet more £billions! This mean more people on more pharmaceutical drugs, and suffering not only from their (clearly demonstrated) ineffectiveness, but from their serious adverse reactions. Which inevitably means increasing levels of drug-induced chronic disease.

So if politicians are refusing to raise the questions, perhaps the electorate (you and me) should start asking politicians the same three questions.

• Why, with all the taxpayer money politicians are spending on our behalf, are we getting progressively sicker?
• Why is almost every chronic disease you might wish to mention now at running epidemic levels, far higher than it was in 1948 when 'free drugs' were first made available on the NHS? And why does chronic disease continue to rise?
• Why is it so hard to get a doctor's appointment? And why are waiting lists, throughout the NHS, so large, and still growing?
• Are pharmaceutical drug/vaccines really as "safe and effective" as we are being told by the pharmaceutical medical establishment? Why do politician never question this claim?
• Are drug/vaccine side effects more serious than doctors admit; and are pharmaceutical drugs, in large measure, part of the cause of chronic disease rising to epidemic levels?
• Why are pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines routinely approved by national drug regulators, only to be heavily restricted, then withdrawn and/or banned because of the patient harm they cause?
• And why have patients been allowed to take drugs and vaccines for many years/decades before they have been banned?

As Shakespeare says, "Something is rotten in the state of Denmark" but we need to recognise that this 'rottenness' extends throughout Europe, Britain, Canada, the USA - indeed, to wherever pharmaceutical medicine dominates health care provision. 

Why should this be?

The pharmaceutical industry is the only one that politicians, throughout the democratic world, allow to have such a dominant, monopoly position within any of the major services they provide. 

The pharmaceutical industry has regularly faced legal convictions for deception, dishonesty and fraud (Thalidomide, Vioxx, Primodos, Sodium Valproate, Blood Contamination, Opioid scandals, et al), but politicians (plus the mainstream media) consistently fail to investigate whether this is a medical system that can be trusted with huge public funds.

The pharmaceutical industry, like all large industrial interests, lobby politicians. But none do more lobbying, more intensively, with more resources, than the pharmaceutical industry! Is this the source of their political immunity?

All these are serious political questions. So we need to ask our politicians one further question - just how much influence does the industry have on the healthcare policies they support and fund?

Ropinirole (Requip) and Gambling: why checking on drug 'side effects' is a lottery

On ITV's "Good Morning Britain" this morning they featured an item about the pharmaceutical drug Ropinirole, and its 'side effect' - creating the need to gamble. The woman interviewed explained how the drug gave her an "irresistible need to gamble", which led to her accruing debts of (I believe) £70,000.

Many people will not know this drug despite taking it! Its more commonly known by its brand name, Requip. But, as usual, the same drug goes under many other different names. It is a dopamine agonist, used mainly for Parkinson's disease and restless leg syndrome. Wikipedia says that in 2022 it was the 163rd most used prescription drug in the USA. It was first approved for use (in the USA) in 1997.

I wondered if this 'side effect' was listed by the Pharmaceutical Medical Establishment; so I went to the Drugs.com website, as I have found this often provides the most comprehensive list of known side effects. The urge to gamble was not mentioned. Many other serious 'side effects' were listed and I have listed these at the foot of this blog below. So I ask the following questions.

1. Would this patient have been warned about this possible 'side effect' before taking the drug? This seems unlikely, as it does not appear on the long list of known effects!
2. Why can a pharmaceutical drug, which was tested, approved, and marketed for 28 years, cause 'side effects' that remain 'unknown' for so long?
3. How can patients exercise 'patient choice' about whether to take pharmaceutical drugs if they are not honestly informed about all the possible 'side effects'?
4. Can patients ever be safe when they agree to take prescription drugs approved by conventional medicine as "safe and effective"?

I then went to the NHS website. To my surprise it did list the gambling 'side effect'.

            "Tell your doctor or specialist nurse if; you start binge eating, gambling or shopping uncontrollably or having an unusually high sex drive – these are signs of impulse control disorder".

So should I retract my criticism? No! This raises yet more questions about taking conventional medical drugs, not least the lottery that patients face should they seek to discover the possible harm that a particular drug can cause. I have listed the 'side effects' outlined in the Drugs.com website below. The NHS website, above, does not list many of that very long list of known 'side effects'!

Why?

Just to confirm this point, take another look at the Wikipedia entry on Ropinirole.

            In November 2012, GlaxoSmithKline was ordered by a Rennes appeals court to pay Frenchman Didier Jambart 197,000 euros ($255,824); Jambart had taken ropinirole from 2003 to 2010 and exhibited risky hypersexual behavior and gambled excessively until stopping the medication.

    So excessive gambling was known about at least 13 years ago - yet it is still not mentioned by the Drugs.com website!

    And risky hypersexual behaviour is not mentioned in either the Drugs.com, or the NHS websites!

Patient choice, and the decision about whether to take any pharmaceutical drug is impossible without full, reliable, honest and transparent information!

The Side effects of Ropinirole (Requip) according to the Drugs.com website

Confusion, dizziness, faintness, lightheadedness, drowsiness, falling, nausea, hallucinations, sleepiness, unusual drowsiness, swelling of the legs, twisting, twitching, or other unusual body movements, unusual tiredness or weakness, worsening of parkinsonism (!), bloating or swelling of the face, arms, hands, lower legs, or feet, blood in the urine, blurred vision, burning, pain, or difficulty in urinating, chest pain or tightness, chills, cold sweats, cough, double vision or other eye or vision problems, fainting, fear or nervousness, feeling of constant movement of self or surroundings, high or low blood pressure, irregular or pounding heartbeat, loss of memory, mental depression, pain in the arms or legs, pounding in the ears, rapid weight gain, sensation of spinning, slow or fast heartbeat, sore throat, stomach pain, sweating, tingling of the hands or feet, tingling, numbness, or prickly feelings, trouble in concentrating, trouble breathing, unusual weight gain or loss, vomiting.

The Myths of Conventional Medical Success: Antibiotics

Ask most people about what they believe has been the most important and successful pharmaceutical drug ever produced, and most people would say, without hesitation - Antibiotics. Yet is this popular belief just another result of successful pharmaceutical promotion?

The first myth concerning antibiotics is their origins. "Antibiotics have been used for millennia to treat infections, although until the last century or so people did not know the infections were caused by bacteria." So antibiotic substances have been used in medicine from very ancient times. In Egypt, for example, it is known that mouldy bread was applied to infected wounds. The ancient Egyptians may not have known what they were doing, or why doing it worked; but clearly they were empiricists rather than medical scientists, and this knowledge was available to them; and they used it. Modern medical 'science' is not the only source of wisdom about drugs!

Science discovered bacteria in the latter part of the 19th century. Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928. Penicillin was manufactured and used throughout the 1939-1945 World War, not least for battle injuries and infections, and thereby gained its reputation as a "wonder drug". Thereafter the progress of antibiotic treatment continued with other serious infectious diseases, like tuberculosis, for which, hitherto, there had been no conventional medical treatment. In addition antibiotics were used to control post-operative infections, making surgery less dangerous, and so more successful.

So, in less than 100 years, antibiotics drastically changed conventional medicine, and many believe that antibiotic drugs heralded "a golden age of medicine". They worked; they killed bacteria; they were a 'miracle' cure. The result is that many claims have been made for antibiotic drugs, not least have extended the average human lifespan by over 20 years. So what is the problem?

First, antibiotic drugs confirmed to conventional medicine, which had spent some 700 years looking for 'heroic' cures, that pharmaceutical drugs would be the future of modern medicine. Where there was illness there would be a chemical agent able to deal with it. Medical science would soon conquer all illness and disease. Conventional medicine has believed this ever since.

Yet the seeds of antibiotic failure had already been sown. Following the discovery of bacteria and other microbes in the late 19th century there had been an important scientific debate about how important germs generally were in causing ill-health and disease. For many scientists, led by Louis Pasteur, thought they were the central cause of illness; and they believed that illness could be overcome simply by killing the 'offending' organism. This belief was popular with the drugs industry, which would be the main agent for discovering new drugs that would do just this. The future of medicine would be pharmaceutical.

However this belief was strongly challenged by another group of scientists, led by Antoine Bechamp, who said that it was the host (the person, the individual, and his/her immune system) that was important, not the germ. If the host was healthy, if his/her immune system was strong, the germ was immaterial; it would not cause illness. The scientific world was divided over the issue, but eventually the germ theory of disease 'won' the argument. This led to the rise of the pharmaceutical industry, which had hitherto been small, and relatively insignificant. Drug companies spent the next century pursuing more and more elaborate ways of killing germs.

It was natural health therapies, like homeopathy, herbalism, naturopathy, acupuncture, et al, that continued to focus on 'the host', who believed, like Bechamp, that looking after the body, and notably its immune system, was the safest and most effective route to good health. But this approach was sidelined, marginalised, overtaken, by the new, burgeoning pharmaceutical industry, and its search for, and the promotion of 'wonder drugs' and 'magic bullets'.

There has been two results of the use, and over-use, of antibiotic drugs over the years that are sufficiently well known, recognised by most people, and even the drug industry. These are (i) antimicrobial resistance, and (ii) the rise of new 'superbugs'. Fewer people are aware that (iii) antibiotics can, and do, kill 'good' as well as 'bad' bacteria, thus causing serious illness, and that (iv) antibiotic drugs have always been known to cause serious (but rarely mentioned) adverse effects.

1. Antimicrobial Resistance

There is no life-form that does not seek to protect itself when it comes under attack. The natural world in its entirety, always seeks to defend itself against attack. Survival is an important instinct, not only for humanity, but for plants, and other animals. Indeed, each life-form have adopted mechanisms, deeply embedded within them, for protection; and bacteria and 'germs' are part and parcel of this natural process. 

So it should be no surprise that when bacteria come into contact with antibiotic drugs they resist. It is what they are supposed to do!

The only surprise, perhaps, is that conventional medical science has never appeared to recognise that this universal response might happen as a result of their drugs - perhaps they have been too busy with their adulation of 'wonder drug'. Nor did conventional medical practitioners help themselves by selling antibiotics to patients, in ever-increasing quantities, including many who did neither needed them, or benefitted from them. Doctors have regularly prescribed antibiotics for "non-bacterial" illnesses for which they could not an effective!

Nor should it have been a surprise that patients increasingly demanded antibiotic drugs from their doctor. Over the decades antibiotics were sold as 'wonder drugs', 'miracle cures', and patients soon began to believe this constant drug promotion, reinforced as it was by government, conventional medicine, and the mainstream media - without question. Sick patients wanted to get better; and they insisted that they should be given antibiotics - regardless!

So resistance means that antibiotic drugs, that once had seemed helpful in overcoming the 'germs' associated with ill-health, have become increasingly ineffective, that no longer had even the most transitory beneficial effect of killing bacteria. Diseases once thought to be 'conquered' by them, are beginning to return. For instance, the return of tuberculosis (TB) after decades of medical claims that antibiotics had eradicated it, is now a reality. The return of this, and other diseases, confirms that any success antibiotic drugs may have had were little more than a (rather long-lasting but nonetheless) temporary illusion.

Even the conventional medical establishment began to realise that in time there would be no effective antibiotics left that would kill the germs they believed caused disease.

2. The Rise of Superbugs

A 'superbug' is a term for organisms that have developed the ability to resist commonly prescribed drugs, and have arisen entirely as the result of antibiotic drug treatment. The bugs were not just resistant, they have transformed themselves into germs that now causes serious illness. Many people will know about MRSA, Candida, and C-Difficile. But as this Healthline article reports, the USA's CDC now lists 18 bacteria that endangers human health. 

    Carbapenem-resistant Acinetobacter

    Candida auris

    Clostridioides difficile

    Carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae

    Drug-resistant Neisseria gonorrhoeae

    Drug-resistant Campylobacter

    Drug-resistant Candida

    ESBL-producing Enterobacteriaceae

    Vancomycin-resistant Enterococci (VRE)

    Multidrug-resistant Pseudomonas aeruginosa

    Drug-resistant nontyphoidal Salmonella

    Drug-resistant Salmonella serotype Typhi

    Drug-resistant Shigella

    Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA)

    Drug-resistant Streptococcus pneumoniae

    Drug-resistant Tuberculosis

So in recent years conventional medicine has realised that it can no longer develop new antibiotic drugs, in part because the pharmaceutical industry now understands it cannot produce drugs that kill germs but do not lead to resistance; but mainly because doctors are now under pressure not to prescribe antibiotics, which reduces demand for them, and undermines the profitability of developing new antibiotic drugs.

3. Antibiotic drugs kill 'good' bacteria

Antibiotics are indiscriminate killers. They do no target the bacteria doctors want to destroy, they cause collateral damage which devastates the bacterial balance that exists normally within the body. Our bodies are made up of a multitude of so-called 'germs'; so when someone takes a course of antibiotics no-one (including drug companies and medical doctors) can be entirely sure which germs will be killed, which will survive, and how the bacterial balance will be compromised.

For instance, most antibiotics are taken by mouth, which means they pass quickly through to our stomach, and the digestive system. This immediately threatens the gut microbiome, which is a highly complex system of bacteria and other organisms that digests our food. So antibiotics interfere with the digestion of food, with serious implications for our health.

Recent research has linked the compromised microbiome with some of the most serious diseases. Notably, all these diseases have reached epidemic levels during the antibiotic 'bonanza' of the last 80 plus years, yet they have never before been associated with antibiotic drugs. This 2022 paper, "Impact of antibiotics on the human microbiome and consequences for host health" has investigated the long term effects of antibiotics on "the healthy state microbial composition problem" in some detail.

        "More recently, scientists have uncovered the detrimental impact of broad‐spectrum antibiotics on the gut microbiota. Home to bacteria, archaea, microeukaryotes, and viruses, the gut microbiota plays a fundamental role in human health. It prevents pathogen colonization, regulates gut immunity, provides essential nutrients and bioactive metabolites, and is involved in energy homeostasis (Mills et al., 2019). In infants, the gut microbiota is acquired during birth and thereafter plays an essential role in the development of infant gut immunity. Evidence to date strongly suggests that balanced microbiota composition and rich species diversity are essential to its optimal functioning (Heiman & Greenway, 2016), which can be compromised in disease states (Mosca et al., 2016). Likewise, reduced diversity and imbalanced microbiota composition in the infant's gut are associated with intestinal illnesses and a predisposition to certain diseases later in life (Milani et al., 2017; Volkova et al., 2021)

This seems to be one of those honest scientific papers that rarely (if ever) finds itself discussed, outside a small scientific medical elite within the conventional medical establishment. So the vast majority of people are not aware of what they describe, namely "the detrimental impact of broad-spectrum antibiotics on the gut microbiota". The usual wall of denial has greeted the paper: governments fails to inform us, the conventional medical establishment (as usual) continues to insist that antibiotics are "safe and effective"; and the mainstream media does not bother to investigate!

Chapter 5 of the paper outlines a multitude of studies that have linked antibiotic use with conditions such as obesity, diabetes, asthma, diarrhoea, allergy, atopic dermatitis and more. It outlines other studies which show how antibiotics, during pregnancy and infancy, can affect a child's immune system, and lead to "disease in later life, both directly and indirectly". Most serious, perhaps, is the section on 'Changes in the Immune System" which outlines several studies that "demonstrate the complex relationship between the microbiota and the host immune response, and the impact of antibiotics on this interaction which needs to be further studied. It can also impact the effectiveness of vaccines used postantibiotic treatment." 

The paper has this conclusion:

        "Antibiotics disrupt the microbial balance and hence the networking within the bacterial community, and that with the host. The resulting resistant bacteria make clinical treatment difficult. Due to this complex link between the host and microbiota, the current usage of antibiotics requires careful stewardship, with an emphasis on the application of antibiotic alternatives, while limiting collateral damage".

Obviously the paper is written by medical scientists who continue to believe that antibiotics, in some shape or form, will still have a part to play in conventional medical treatment. This is an honest position; but it is not one on which I can agree. Antibiotic drugs have been prescribed by conventional medical doctors for 80 years. They are still routinely described to patients as "safe and effective", and prescribed in ever-increasing quantities. And conventional medicine has continued to do so without any apparent awareness that antibiotic drugs could cause an increase in the diseases mentioned in the study. This makes drug-based medicine (not just antibiotics, but especially antibiotics) a inherently dangerous medical system, unaware of the dangers to which it is exposing patients. It is a medical system that can experiment with patient, giving them drugs whose 'side effects' can remain unknown 80 years!

This situation is getting worse. In a study published in October 2024, a link has been found between antibiotic drugs, the microbiome, and Parkinson's disease. Parkinson's has, to my knowledge, never been linked with antibiotic drugs before, and like most revelations about adverse drug reactions it is still being played down. 

        "In a large UK-representative population, the risk of PD was modestly lower among adults who had previously received multiple courses of penicillins in the last 15 years and modestly higher among those exposed to antifungal medicines in recent years".

I suspect the significance of this link between antibiotic drugs and serious illness and disease will only develop over time, and require many more studies. It is not possible to interfere with the human body, not least by compromising the gut microbiome which digests our food, and not cause serious damage to our health. And it is becoming clear that this is what antibiotics have been doing - for many decades.

This is probably one of the reasons that pharmaceutical companies are now talking about the development of more 'targeted' antibiotics - but again, this seems more to do with drug promotion than reality. Medical science has always proved itself to be less clever than its propaganda! And 'targeted antibiotics' would still be based upon the same failed understanding of health - that in order to be healthy we have to kill germs!

4. The other 'side effects' of antibiotic drugs

Conventional medicine still refuses to accept that antibiotic drugs have serious adverse reactions which are just as harmful as any other pharmaceutical drugs. But they do. For instance, the Drugs.com website outlines that they can commonly cause skin rash, allergic reactions, soft or watery stools, short-term diarrhoea, upset stomach, nausea, loss of appetite, Fungal (yeast) vaginal infections, oral thrush; and more seriously severe allergic reaction that results in difficulty breathing, facial swelling, severe watery or bloody diarrhoea; Clostridium difficile infection, stomach cramps, and yeast infections in the mouth or vagina. These 'side effects' have been known for decades, but they are routinely discounted.

The British NHS website says that "these side effects are usually mild and should pass once you finish your course of treatment". And even the Drugs.com website fails to list the side effects discussed in this blog. So even now the conventional medical establishment shows itself to be reluctant to disclose about weight gain, diabetes, et al, which they must know about, but clearly are not sufficiently honest to disclose. Informed patient choice is impossible within such secrecy, and lack of transparency.

So if we look at antibiotics from outside the closed walls of pharmaceutical propaganda, they cannot be described as a success. And as conventional medicine continues to describe them as "safe and effective" it is difficult for them to admit that their most acclaimed 'wonder drug' has failed. In the fullness of time, antibiotic drugs will be seen as a failure, not just because of resistance, or the development of superbugs, or serious adverse effects, but because most of the diseases they were supposed to have eradicated are now returning.

If we are to regain our health we need to revisit the Pasteur-Bechamp debate, and recognise that what is most important is the host, and its immune system; and that the body is not made well by attacking the bacteria that, far from being a threat, are an important part of staying healthy. 

Pharmaceutical medicine will refuse to do so; its enormous wealth, power and influence is based on pursuing the failed 'germ theory' of disease, and its belief in the need to control and kill the very things that keep us healthy.

This blog is one of a series of blogs that examines the myths of conventional medical success. Others in the series include:

    Eradicating Smallpox.

    Conquering Polio.

    Conquering Measles.

    Whooping Cough (Pertussin)

    The Covid-19 Pandemic

Has Medical Science Rediscovered the Immune System?

 "Scientists discover new part of the immune system"

These were the headlines of several British mainstream media outlets on 6 March 2025. The Israeli researchers said that what they had discovered "transforms our understanding of how we are protected against infection".

Of course, we have known that it is our immune system is what keeps us healthy for a very long time, although pharmaceutical medicine in recent years have been telling us that only their drugs and vaccines can keep us safe. But followers of natural medical therapies have always known about the importance of the immune system. This is how the BBC article on the discovery explains the new discovery.

        "A new part of the immune system has been discovered and it is a goldmine of potential antibiotics. (Scientists have) shown a part of the body known to recycle proteins has a secret mode that can spew out an arsenal of bacteria-killing chemicals. The researchers in Israel say it transforms our understanding of how we are protected against infection".

Well, this is brilliant! Isn't it? Perhaps we should all have known how special our immune system is in protecting us from illness and disease: but this discovery demonstrates just how clever the body is in achieving this remarkable feat, unaided, undirected. 

Apparently the discovery centres on the proteasome, described as "a tiny structure found in every cell of the body". Its main role is to "chop up old proteins into smaller chunks so they can be recycled to make new ones".  But now a series of scientific experiments (detailed in the Journal 'Nature') shows the proteasome detects when a cell has been infected by bacteria, and can then change its structure and role. "It begins to transform old proteins into weapons that can rip open the outer layer of bacteria to kill them".

The brilliance of our immune system is the reason why most people who follow natural medicine are content to rely on it to keep us fit and healthy. We certainly need to support and strengthen our immune system all the time but if we do this the secret of staying healthy, and recovering from sickness, is to rely upon it.

But this is not what conventional, drug-based medicine does. So the Guardian's article on the research adds to the headline: ... "and it could help solve our antibiotics crisis".

The antibiotic crisis to which they refer is, of course, that the pharmaceutical industry have been producing antibiotic drugs for nearly 100 years; and each one of them, in turn, has led to (i) resistance, and (ii) the development of superbugs. So pharmaceutical medicine has effectively stopped trying to replace the antibiotics as they no longer work. So an "Antibiotic Apocalypse" has been widely predicted within conventional medicine - the drugs on which they have relied for so long are no longer working, and are not going to be replaced.

So apparently medical 'science' sees this new scientific understanding of how the immune system works to be an opportunity to produce new and different antibiotic drugs! Prompted and assisted, of course, by this new knowledge about our immune system. Presumably the new drugs that might emerge can be patented by pharmaceutical companies (in order to ensure and boost profits), and to market them to an increasingly sick population.

But wait? Isn't the body already producing these 'new' antibiotics? Is it not doing so on the basis of the actual bacterial 'threat' to the health of each one of us as individuals? The research suggests that the proteasome, present in each cell, can detect a new 'problem', and reacts to it accordingly by producing a new and appropriately antibiotic? So if our body is capable of doing this for itself, why does conventional medicine need to intervene and produce its own?

This question represents the difference between pharmaceutical medicine and natural medical therapies (homeopathy, naturopathy, herbalism, acupuncture, et al). The latter seek, each in their different ways, to support and strengthen the functioning of the immune system. By contrast, conventional medicine seeks to interfere with the immune system with drugs - on the basis that 'it' knows best what our body needs.

And, in fact, this is the choice that we all have, as patients. 

    When we are fit and healthy do we have confidence in our immune system to keep us so? 

    When we are sick do we have confidence that our immune system is working to make us better? And that it needs to be supported, and left alone in order to do so?

If, as this research seems to demonstrate, that our body is capable of recognising a problem, and then can produce an 'antibiotic' capable of responding to it, why would we want a conventional doctor to 'second-guess' this natural process. 

Do we really believe that a doctor can do it better? 

Or should we not just leave well alone?