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Friday 13 May 2016

Curing Alzheimer's

BBC 2's  Horizon programme, "Curing Alzheimer's", broadcast on 11th May 2016 ,is typical of the kind of propaganda our 'public broadcaster' is prepared to put out on behalf of the Pharmaceutical industry, and the conventional medical establishment. Goodness knows how much the advertisement would have cost had the BBC charged the going rates!

Broadly, the news was that conventional medicine was on the verge of overcoming 'the scourge of Alzheimer's disease! These are some of the comments made in the programme.
  • The latest generation of research has unleashed a new front in the war against this devastating disease.
  • There is a new window of opportunity opening up.
  • New technology allows us to see the signs of Alzheimer’s earlier than we ever could before.
  • A series of drug trials have been launched across the world, drugs that are targeting the disease in its early stage. 
  • We believe that this (drug) trial works the dawn of a new era in early Alzheimer’s prevention research.
  • The initial results (of the drugs trials) are exciting. They reveal that there are drugs that are reducing signs of the disease.
  • Scientists are confident that a cure is tantalisingly close.
  • If we treat early enough we may stave off Alzheimer’s disease completely, and we may never have to worry about it again
So Horizon asked the question "can we end the curse of Alzheimer’s forever?", and never seriously questioned what the medical scientists were telling them. However, the programme did give some accurate information about Alzheimer's disease itself.
  • About every 4 minutes someone new is told they have the disease. 
  • The panic grows, as the epidemic sweeps across the globe.
  • Alzheimer’s is now one of the most feared medical conditions.
The programme achieved two things. One, already mentioned in the programme itself, is that the share price of the drug companies involved have increased enormously. This programme will probably ensure that there is another such increase. The prospect of pharmaceutical profits always does that, not least when the BBC promotes it, unquestioningly, for an hour!

The other is that it will raise the hopes and expectations of millions of sufferers of the disease, and those who believe that they might suffer from the disease in future. There is a prospect of cure! The new drugs will be available in 4 years time! In 10 years time the disease might be under control! We might never have to worry about Alzheimer's disease again!

Indeed, the programme featured a number of people and families who were thinking just that, it might benefit them, and this added a human element to 'the good news' story. Conventional medicine, we were told, was coming to the aid of these unfortunate dementia sufferers, and many like them.

So let's stand back and examine this 'good news'.

Pharmaceutical drugs are firmly implicated in the creations of the dementia epidemic that is now sweeping the world. I have written about this in my website, DIEs, where the long list of drugs that are now known to cause dementia are listed. Even the BBC published the evidence that anticholinergic drugs caused Alzheimers on 27th January 2015! I wrote about it in my blog, "Big Pharma drugs cause Dementia, Alzheimers". So it is, perhaps, another case of the poacher turning gamekeeper, not an unfamiliar situation for the pharmaceutical industry, who base much of their profitability on their ability to offer drugs for disease they have, in large measure, caused!

Yet this Horizon programme does not even mention pharmaceutical drugs as a causative factor of Alzheimer's disease. The only reason given for the dementia epidemic is genetics - people from families with a genetic disposition are more likely to develop Alzheimer's disease. This may be so, but if it is the only cause, in order to account for the worldwide epidemic it must mean that a small proportion of people have given rise to a disproportionate increase in the incidence of dementia!

Other factors, both in regards of prevention and treatment, were mentioned.
  • The role of deep sleep.
  • Diet and nutrition, and it’s affect on the brain.
  • Brain training, through cognitive exercises
Yet, according Horizon, it was pharmaceutical drugs that were going to be the saviour of mankind from this dreadful disease! It was to be more miracle drugs that are going to transform our lives - of course!

We have been here so often before. I remember so many similar programmes, on the BBC and other channels, and in medical journals, promising wonder drugs, miracle cures, magic bullets, that were going to transform our lives. How long have we been promised cures for a whole range of conditions, ranging from pain to cancer, from depression to , epilepsy, from diabetes to the common cold; indeed, for any disease you might want to mention!

They have, of course, never materialised! Indeed, through their side effects they have made matters worse. Indeed, it is the pharmaceutical drugs used for other conditions that has led to the dramatic increase we have witnessed in dementia over the last 50 years or so.

The programme did, eventually mention that one of the drugs caused a serious side effect, that whilst getting rid of certain signs of dementia in the brain, it caused the brain to swell! We must, I suppose, be thankful for this modicum of honesty from the BBC! Yet, if past drugs are anything to go by, the real side effects of the new drugs will not be known about until many patients have been damaged by them, and the Big Pharma companies have made their enormous, multi-billion pound profit!

This BBC programme is part of the strategic plan of the conventional medical establishment, and in particular, the pharmaceutical industry. No matter how ineffective or dangerous their drugs and vaccines might be, it is important for them to continue selling the myth - that disease is being overcome, that medical science is triumphantly winning its fight with disease, and will ultimately overcome the human misery it causes.

So all pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines are introduced in this same way, not least by the BBC. Go back, and re-read the comments made in the programme, stated at the start of this blog. Do you believe they are likely to come true? Are the claims credible? The BBC obviously thinks so, which is perhaps the triumph of hope over experience!

Can I know, for certain, that these new drugs will not do exactly what is being claimed for them? No, of course not. But the best predictor of the future is past performance. And pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines, all the magic bullets and wonder cures we have been promised in the past, have a record of abject failure. None of them have done what they were supposed to do. Most of them have caused side effects, or DIEs (disease inducing effects), worse than the condition for which they were originally prescribed.

That is why we now face epidemic levels of a whole series of disease, Alzheimer's disease being one of the most prominent.

Therefore, I rest my case, and will allow the next 10 years to determine whether the BBC, the Horizon programme, and medical science are right. Or not right. But for those people now living in the hope of a conventional medical cure, think hard. There has never been one before! There are solutions to the dementia epidemic, the most important of which is probably to avoid taking the pharmaceutical drugs that are known to cause it. And, for anyone suffering from dementia, homeopathy might be helpful too.

The BBCs coverage of health issues cannot be relied upon. For whatever reason, best known to themselves, our 'public broadcaster' is totally subservient to the conventional medical establishment, and to the pharmaceutical industry. They only tell the public what conventional medicine wants us to hear. And they attack anyone with a different view.