Friday 1 February 2019

Talking Therapy & Social Prescribing. What they have in common is an admission that pharmaceutical drugs just don't work

NHS England have announced that they will be employing 1,000 "social prescribing workers" within the next year. It says that these "workers are being recruited to help patients find suitable activities that are a better alternative to medication". The drugs and the vaccines have been handed out like confetti by the NHS for the last 70 years, they have not worked, and now they are looking for something that might be more effective.

Social prescribing enables doctors and other health care professionals to refer people to a range of local, non-clinical, social, recreational and sporting services. They include volunteering, educational groups, arts activities, gardening, befriending, cookery, healthy eating advice, and a variety of sports.

It is the second non-drug initiative that conventional medicine is looking towards to improve their dreadful record treating illness and disease. Antidepressant and antipsychotic drugs have proved to be little better than useless in dealing with the burgeoning mental health crisis, and have such serious side effects, they are being replaced, whenever possible, by 'talking therapies'.

They are two good initiatives. Many patients are already benefitting from talking therapies, and many more could benefit social prescribing schemes, including, it is thought, people with mild or long-term mental health problems, socially vulnerable groups, the lonely and socially isolated, and patients who regularly visit doctors with minor, and/or ongoing health issues.

Avoiding pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines is an equally important benefit!

It is good to see conventional medicine looking elsewhere - at last. It has become blindingly obvious over the last 70 years that good health does not come from a bottle or pills, or a syringe. But these initiatives will be insufficient to address the epidemics of serious chronic disease we are witnessing. For this, effective (and safe) medical therapies will be necessary.

And conventional medicine continues purposely to ignore natural medical therapies, like homeopathy, naturopathy, acupuncture, chiropractor, osteopathy and many others.

As pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines continue to fail, become increasingly expensive, and cause serious illness and disease through their 'side effects', it is to these alternatives that the NHS, and other national health services, are going to have to turn.