The Medicalisation of Maternity Care.

It is doctors, not midwives, who now lead in maternity care services. So how is medicalisation going?

Throughout human history, delivering babies has never been an easy or straightforward procedure. In the process of giving birth both women and their babies have died in the process. Making comparisons about numbers and trends over the centuries is not an easy task.

          “In the 19th and first half of the 20th century, everybody knew about death in childbirth, particularly those women who were about to go through the process. Although death rates from many other conditions were high, they at least were among people who had been ill beforehand. Death in relation to childbirth was mostly in fit young women who had been quite well before becoming pregnant. They died, often leaving the baby, and other children in the family from previous births, with a widowed husband.”

This general understanding probably underscored the reason for the medicalisation of maternity services over recent decades. Childbirth is no longer led by midwives. Most babies are now delivered within a hospital settings overseen by doctors.

          “Over the past two decades, the landscape of childbirth in the UK has changed beyond recognition. From campaigns promoting physiological birth to scandals, safety inquiries, and a growing midwifery crisis, the role of the doula is now more vital than ever.”

A Guardian newsletter, dated 22 October 2026, ”The crisis putting maternity units in England at risk of closure”, has highlighted some of the problems that has resulted from the medicalisation process. It outlines staff shortages that are leading to the suspension and closure of some hospital in some ‘remoter’ areas of the country. The Guardian reported that up to 20 maternity units in England could close, and that “the story sheds light on a maternity care crisis that has been rumbling on for years”.

One reason the Guardian gives for this situation is the reducing birth rate, coupled with changing birthing practices.

          “More women than ever are now getting C-sections or having births that require medical intervention from doctors, and smaller maternity units are also grappling with a widespread lack of obstetricians.”

Indeed the rise of C-section births has been dramatic.

          “The proportion of births performed by caesarean increased from 31% in 2019 to 45% in 2024, and last year was the first time in England that more babies were born via c-section than “natural” births.”

The Guardian justified placing “natural” in inverted commas as it has become “a term that many women find pretty grating because it implies there’s a hierarchy between births with medical intervention and those without”. This in itself was a fundamental change in attitude. When my children were born in the 1970’s, ‘Natural Childbirth’ was in vogue, and my wife was part of this trend.

As a mere man, I became aware of the ‘struggle’ between midwives and doctors when my children were born, some 50 years ago now. If I recall correctly most births at that time took place at home, with the mother-to-be having regular access, for several months, to a midwife, who was in charge of the process, preparing the birth alongside the mother. Most births began and ended with this simple/natural process - although midwives always had access to medical advice and intervention as and when the need was identified.

Whatever the nature of the ‘struggle’ that has taken place over the intervening years it is clear that it is doctors in hospitals, rather than he midwives in the community, who now lead the birthing process. Why did this happen? It is easy to understand the medical justification - the assumption that ‘scientific’ medicine would soon be able to resolve the problems involved in giving birth. Medicine has made similar claims in many different areas over the last 100 years. 

• Vaccines have conquered infectious illness (sic). 

• Surgery is replacing failing organs and limbs (sic). 

• Pharmaceutical drugs were winning the battle against serious illness and disease (sic). 

So doctors would be able to improve the experience, and the outcomes of women giving birth. But as one midwife says:

          “I was a midwife watching as the tide shifted, as older midwives retired and as the new midwives came in, and I knew the blanket induction policy at 41 weeks would seal the fate of birthing women and people. A fate that involved induction of labour, medicalised and traumatising births often ending in a caesarean that they did not expect or want. I don’t personally believe it’s about money or Big Pharma. It’s a patriarchal medical model of pregnancy and birth that believes we are a machine that can be split into parts to be fixed and saved. Yet no one asked the women. Or the birthing people.”

So what has been the outcome of the medicalisation of maternity care? 

In September 2025 the UK government announced that 14 NHS Maternity Trusts were under investigation. Over the previous years the plight of so many NHS Maternity Trust’s has made regular headline news - even in the usually pro-medical mainstream media. So clearly, all is not well if the Guardian newsletter describes the broader picture as follows:

          “Some women are also worried about the type of care they might receive during vaginal births. Successive reviews portray a state of crisis, with burnt-out and exhausted midwives, a growing risk of serious injuries, and women of colour experiencing persistent racism and discrimination. A national review of maternity services in England from 2022 to 2024 by the Care Quality Commission warned that serious harm in maternity care risked becoming the norm”.

And all this with a considerable reduction in birthrates! So it has not arisen because of increased workload! 

A Medscape article, July 2026, stated that one in five women now needed emergency medical care. Discussing a Nuffield Trust report it said that more than 1 in 5 mothers (22%) needed emergency care in the year following the babies birth, the article outlining some of the salient features of emergency medical intervention in the early months following birth.

So as usual, the conventional medical establishment has failed to live up to the reputation it has routinely claimed for itself!

The National Maternity and Neonatal Investigation Report into the 14 hospital trusts was delivered in June 2026. It was a damning, describing the ‘toxic’ culture that now pervaded maternity services,. It highlighted many aspects of the problem. One key reason given for the rising rate of caesarean births is known as “defensive practice”, which arises when doctors make decisions in order to avoid blame or parental complaints, rather than doing what is necessarily in a patient’s best interests. The Health Secretary, speaking in the House of Commons, has highlighted this new “culture” that he said meant that when mistakes were made, maternity units prioritised their reputation over and above their duty of openness to families.

          “Culture is where so much of the responsibility lies. That culture is the most deep-rooted cause of the failures we have seen, and the most fundamental thing we must change”.

This is the medicalised culture that has developed over the last 50 years. It is rife throughout the NHS. The reports author, Baroness Amos, identified a host of other “shocking” failings in maternity care, including women being ignored, poor triage of mothers-to-be, putting lives at risk, and chronic understaffing of services.

The ‘old’ culture, based essentially on one mother, with one midwife, and the relationship they developed during the months of pregnancy, would perhaps have been a good antidote to all these problems but seems nowhere to be mentioned in the discussions now going on within health services.

According to the Guardian newsletter the cost of the ‘new culture to the NHS is huge, and rising. In order to settle outstanding maternity-related claims in England (alone) is estimated at £37.5bn in 2025. This is nearly two-thirds of the NHS’s £60bn clinical negligence liabilities bill, and the Guardian calculated that the bill for maternity negligence claims in England since 2019 could be more than the health service’s budget for newborns during the same period.

So I ask the question. Did these problems exist, or were they as bad in the pre-medicalised arrangements for maternity care? The old culture at least provided a structure for each woman that offered 1-1 support, friendship, and information about giving birth, including how much they wished the process to be medicalised.

When delivering any health service, my view is always that the best policy is to ‘follow the patient’, to be patient-focused, to provide as much information and support as possible to ensure that patients are making properly informed choices, and that their voice is clearly heard above the arrogant noise of the medical profession. Their science just does not deliver

Putting a huge medical bureaucracy in charge of maternity care, led by conventional doctors, is perhaps the worst possible direction that could have been taken; and it is time that we all began to realise this!

Brain Cancer and Young People. The failure of the Conventional Medical Establishment to ask the most fundamental question. Why the sudden increase?

The BBC has highlighted the issue of brain cancer and young people in the UK both on their news programmes, and this article. Its focus on it stems from an interview conducted with Archie Goodburn, aged 25, a swimmer who has this year represented his country, Scotland, in the Commonwealth Games. He was diagnosed with inoperable brain cancer two years ago (when aged 23).

Goodburn reached the final of the 50m breaststroke at the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow in July this year. He made a tearful TV appeal for more investment to be put into brain cancer research so that new treatment can be found. Later he met with the UK’s prime minister who then announced a new national brain cancer clinical lead, and promised a review of brain cancer progress, and action to get patients treated sooner.

This might appear to be a sensible approach. Brain cancer is rising rapidly, not least in younger people, not least in the UK. It is clearly a matter for concern - even for an athlete, in the prime of life, who we must assume to be physically fit, and someone who has paid close attention to diet and other fitness and health matters as part of his training in recent years. And it is quite natural that he should want ‘treatment’ to be developed for his condition.

Yet there is a prior question, rarely asked by the Conventional Medical Establishment. It is not “WHAT can be done to treat the condition”. Rather it is “WHY has this condition emerged”. As usual we have been given the diagnosis, but no cause has been suggested. Disease causation does not appear to be something that anyone is interested in.

The failure to ask the question leads to an interesting situation, a highly profitable one for the pharmaceutical industry! There is now a national call to raise large amounts of money so that medical science that develop new treatments, new drugs, for the problem. Medical charities, and Patient Support Groups, enter the scene to organise and publicise the issue.

Yet if the “WHY?” question was asked it might prove to be a more uncomfortable situation for both the Conventional Medical Establishment, Medical Science, and the Pharmaceutical Industry.

Cancer rates, of all kinds, have increased rapidly in recent decades. Cancer was once a greatly feared but uncommon disease mainly contracted by older people. Now it is more widespread, and is affecting not just fit young adults, like Goodburn, but infants and children too.

And it is well known that cancer is caused by many factors; in our sedentary lifestyle, in our diet, in the chemicals that surround us in our daily lives, in the electro-magnetic smog that is an increasing part of modern life, and not least by the pharmaceutical drugs that we have been consuming in ever-increasing quantities for the last 70 years - not least since the inauguration of the National Health Service.

Indeed, the rise and rise of cancer has exactly mirrored in increase in vaccine and drug taking in recent decades. Moreover, it is known (but not highly publicised by the medical profession) that pharmaceutical drugs do cause cancer. This fact is routinely published in the conventional medical literature, and in the Patient Information Leaflets that accompany each pack of pills, and each vial of vaccine.

I have outlined some of the research into the pharmaceutical causes of cancer here. None of this information is ‘misinformation’. It is all part and parcel of conventional medical literature. It is just not emphasised, or mentioned as a cause of the cancer epidemic that we have been experiencing for the last 70-80 years.

Worse, since 2021, many leading doctors have said that the Covid-19 vaccines have been causing cancer; including brain cancer; and that this has affected young adults too.

Conventional medicine would not doubt claim that there is no ‘scientific’ proof that this is so. They would be correct, no least because ‘medical science’ has never seriously investigated it, or been asked to investigate it. The Pharmaceutical industry dominates the funding medical research, and whilst they are happy to fund new research into new drugs they certainly will not fund research that delves into the outcomes of their existing drugs!

So to ask the “WHY?” question is problematical. The answer might have serious implications affecting a powerful commercial concerns, not least the Pharmaceutical industry. So it is better not to ask the question at all, especially if the “WHAT can we do?” leads to yet more money being raised for medical science, the possibility of discovering new drugs, for a market remedy to be exploited.

This situation demonstrates that the Pharmaceutical Establishment has developed one of the the most brilliant business plans.

• It focuses on an illness or disease.

• It develop a drug to treat it, regardless of its safety or effectiveness.

• It sells the treatment to doctors, and to patients as “safe and effective”.

• And if patients develop serious side effects, it organises people (including medical charities, patient support organisations, mostly funded by the Pharmaceutical industry) to clamour for more drugs, more treatments.

• Then it asks Medical Science to spend the new income on developing new drugs to treat a condition they have been instrumental in creating.

• Finally, drug companies can patent and sell the new drug, and the entire process can begin again from scratch.

And all this can be done with no embarrassing questions being asked about the quality of their current pharmaceutical vaccines and drugs, or the disastrous patient outcomes they have caused!

So is the recent rise in ‘turbo’ brain cancer in younger people, at least in part, the result of pharmaceutical drugs?

Did Archie Goodburn take the Covid-19 vaccines just prior to the problems he is now experiencing? If he wanted to swim competitively in 2021 he might have been obliged to get vaccinated. This was, after all, the situation that Novak Djokovic faced when he tried to play in the Australian Open Tennis tournament.

So we don’t know. And we probably won’t know. The question I want people to ask will be dismissed. “You have not evidence”. “There has been no research”. “It is just a conspiracy theory”. So there will be no research. The pharmaceutical establishment (in control as they are of governments, and mainstream media around the world) will make sure of that!

So what to do? It is time we all began to consider more seriously the “WHY?” question when we become ill. Conventional medicine appears to believe that serious illness and disease is an unfortunate occurrence, just bad luck, a chance encounter with a germ, and that this can be controlled by a drug.

Certainly no one is going to tell us otherwise. Despite the patient harm it has caused we are still being offered the Covid-19 vaccines; and other cancer-causing drugs continue to be prescribed. And most people buy into this view of health and medicine because we are not told otherwise.

So it is up to all of us to develop a scepticism about pharmaceutical medicine, its safety and effectiveness. We must all learn that more drugs and more vaccines are not the path to health, and that they are often the path to ill-health. 

We must begin to ask the right question, the “WHY are we ill?” question - and be prepared to look beyond the explanations that are routinely provided to us by the pharmaceutical health establishment.

Cancer before 50: why is it rising?

The  BBC Panorama programme with this title was broadcast, on 5th October 2026. It failed to answer this question by making one very important omission.

Back in April 2026 I wrote an article on Cancer, “Why are more younger people getting this ‘old age’ disease?”. I asked why media programmes dealing with the cause of illness and diseases (not least cancer) remain seemingly blind to the fact that pharmaceutical drugs are known to cause cancer - as a ‘side effect’. After all, it is in the medical literature for everyone to see, it is in the Patient Information Leaflets (PILs) that come with every packet of drugs, every vial of vaccine.

Yesterday a BBC Panorama documentary asked the question, “Cancer before 50: why is it rising?” The programme can be seen on BBC i-Player. Please watch it (30 minutes) to confirm that I am correct - pharmaceutical drugs were not mentioned, not once, as a ‘possible’ cause of cancer.

Apparently the programme raised the question because NHS data showed that rates of bowel, breast and other cancers are rising among younger generations.

Remember that when the NHS was inaugurated in 1948, nearly 80 years ago, cancer was a dreaded disease; but not a common one. And remember too that it was then considered a disease of older age.

So why are ever younger people getting cancer?  The Panorama programme featured several patients who were facing the much-feared diagnosis, and it proceeded to investigate some of the factors that might be driving the increase. In doing so it dealt with diet, ultra-processed food, to changing diets, to chemicals that are now found in everyday products, and mentioned obesity and much else. Panorama claimed that it would:

     “… examine the latest scientific research into possible causes and asks whether regulators and government are doing enough to protect public health”.

Yet if the BBC deliberately chooses to ignore the role of pharmaceutical drugs, a known cause of cancer as a ‘side effect’, it should be asked whether they themselves are “doing enough to protect public health”?

Perhaps they, too, are failing to inform the public about an important link to the rising cancer epidemic. If I am correct, cancer was an uncommon disease before the drug-fest of the NHS was started? An it was primarily a disease of old age.

So what was the situation in 1948? There is a document on the internet, ‘Public Health in 1948: remarkable statistics’ report’ that can be seen here. It was a document published by the Ministry of Health that examined health and mortality outcomes between the inception of the NHS on 5th July 1948 and March 1949

     “The mortality rates of 1948 were compared with those of 1938 (the last full year of peace before the outbreak of the Second World War and the year which had the lowest pre-war death rates of any year before the war). The report found that there had been a significant reduction in death rates. It suggested that mortality rates had fallen by 20%.

So the UK population was healthier in 1948 than it was in 1938. But unfortunately when I tried to read further I was forbidden access to the report! (Check it out)!

So I went to a report by the Nuffield Trust entitled “Death through the decades”. This looked at, and compared the causes of death in the 70 years from 1948 to 2016. It starts positively by looking at deaths from heart disease and stroke, and (as is usual) attributes this to pharmaceutical medical care:

     “We can see positive developments particularly clearly in deaths from heart disease and strokes, both of which have fallen by 40% since 1948, even as the population has grown. This probably reflects advances at every level of medicine. Statins and other drugs have improved prevention, new immediate interventions to break down blood clots have been developed, and there is better care after people experience an attack”.

Of course, it could also be the result of a multitude of social, work-related and environmental changes too But then it moves on to deal with cancer deaths (alongside dementia death too).

     “On the other hand, cancer claimed nearly twice as many deaths in 2016 as in 1948. Dementia is somewhat difficult to classify due to the widespread practice in 1948 of simply logging “senility” as a cause of death. But even if we add together “senility” and dementia, deaths from these causes have quadrupled”.

The report says that these are not merely increases in the proportion, but in the total number of deaths.

So whilst Nuffield claims responsibility for improvements in health for conventional medicine , the report does not explain responsibility for failures. This trend continues to this day, right up to yesterday’s Panorama programme.

The question I raise is an important one. Why is a vital question is being ignored, not just by the BBC but by all mainstream media; not just by the media but by most of the conventional medical profession; and by Government too?

Moreover, where are the public to find someone prepared to ask the question, “have pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines played a role in the rise and rise of cancer, as well as the creeping involvement of younger people in its devastating consequences?”

If the question is not asked there will never be an answer. What is more, failing to ask the question (in a programme that tasked itself to “examines the latest scientific research into possible causes and ask whether regulators and government are doing enough to protect public health”) was not an unintentional omission. It is always a deliberate and regular omission, a intentional failure to ask questions pointed questions about the role of pharmaceutical medicine in the creation of modern illness and disease.

Medical science provides us with important clues to this link in its admission that pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines cause ‘side effects’. Side effects - what an innocuous phrase! Yet there appears to be a unwritten, unspoken societal decision to ignore this association between pharmaceutical drugs and serious illness and disease.

Why? Just how powerful are the drug companies? Does anyone dare challenge them? Will we ever know if the question is never asked?

So are we patients supposed just to go on taking the pills, and the shots, without being aware of what the consequences might be? Are we instead destined to believe that we should blame illness and disease entirely as the consequences of other, non-medical things?

 

Is Alzheimer's Disease, and Dementia generally, Iatrogenic - caused by Doctors?

I have been suggesting that Dementia is linked to increased drug taking in the last 80+ years for nearly twenty years. This is my blog from 2013. As with all iatrogenic (doctor-induced) disease, the conventional medical establishment has always vehemently denied and discounted it. Their drugs and vaccines are (of course) “safe and effective”, and medicine is committed to “first, do no harm”. And it’s very survival depends on people believing this.

This is a difficult position for conventional medicine to maintain, given that the ‘side effects’ (adverse reactions) to their drugs and vaccines have to be published - although this is limited to the ‘side effects’ that are proven and admitted by the pharmaceutical industry.

Yet some honesty seems to be creeping into what conventional medicine is prepared to accept about the patient harm that it causes. I recently read this Medscape article, “Is Alzheimer’s Disease transmissable. Inside the evidence for ‘Iatrogenic’ AD”. Medscape is, of course, very much part of the conventional medical establishment, which does not normally admit such as thing.

          “But a small and growing body of evidence suggests that, in rare circumstances, amyloid-beta pathology associated with AD - and possible AD itself - may be transmitted from one person to another through certain medical procedures including childhood injections of cadaver-derived growth hormone (c-hGH), dura mater grafts, and renewed neurosurgical instruments”

And the article goes on to ask “what evidence supports the existence of iatrogenic AD” and details the evidence that supports the link with cadaver-derived growth hormone (c-hGH), dura mater grafts, renewed neurosurgical instruments, and also blood transfusions. Two questions emerge from this. 

• First, this article was published a couple of weeks ago, and refers to information that has been known for much longer. Why is such information not made available publicly (short of subscribing to small specialist journals like Medscape)? 

• And secondly, more importantly, why does the Conventional Medical Establishment not look into their published evidence that clearly shows that most pharmaceutical drugs, including many of the most widely prescribed, are known to cause the symptoms of dementia?

I have listed many of these prescription drugs that can be linked with Alzheimer’s Disease and Dementia my e-book, here, “Iatrogenic Disease. The “Disease Inducing Effects” (DIE’s) of Pharmaceutical Drugs and Vaccines”.

The evidence, their own evidence, links pharma drugs with dementia is far more convincing way - the only way that goes close to explaining the 80 year old dementia epidemic. Yet link between pharmaceutical ‘side effects’ and all serious illnesses and diseases, including dementia - but is rarely discussed in conventional medical literature - perhaps for obvious reasons.

So if the Conventional Medical Establishment feels unable openly and transparently to investigate the link between pharmaceutical drugs and dementia, we ‘ordinary’ folk should certainly be doing so. After all, if the medical profession is failing to do so, it is in our own interests to protect ourselves from the dreadful outcome of prescription drug taking.

 

Paraquat. When something is found to be harmful and banned Big Industry continues to sell it.

Does profit speak louder than our personal safety, or the environment we live in?

The USA state of Vermont has banned the use of the pesticide, paraquat. In America this has been announced as a triumph - apparently it is the first state to do so. But reading the article here in England I wondered - surely paraquat has been banned for some time?

It was! Paraquat has been banned in England since 2007 over concerns about neurotoxicity and health risks - particularly the association with Parkinson’s disease. However, more research informed me that although banned for use in England, it is still produced in the UK for export to other countries where it remains legal.

Am I surprised? No, and no-one should be surprised. It is common practice in most industries, not least the chemical and pharmaceutical industries. 

• Discovering and demonstrating that a chemical, or a drug, is harmful is one thing - and to do so takes a lot of time, effort and expense. 

• Convincing the government, or the mainstream media, leave alone the industry, is quite another - it can (and often does) take many decades to do so. 

• And then getting the industry to stop producing the banned product adds another level to the problem - profit invariably takes precedence over public and environmental safety.

So paraquat has been produced in the UK since 2007, by Syngenta, and this production is only being stopped this month - June 2026 - 19 years later. Moreover, the decision was not taken because of government regulation but “reflects competitive pressures and ongoing legal challenges related to health risks associated with paraquat, particularly its links to Parkinson’s disease”.

However, my AI source was able to reassure me that paraquat would continue to be produced elsewhere, indeed “that over 750 companies produce paraquat worldwide”. 

So what price that Parkinson’s Disease will continue to be a scourge to the world’s population?

“The cessation of production in the UK does not eliminate paraquat from the market, as it remains legal and widely used in other countries, including the United States”.

Similarly many thousands of pharmaceutical drugs have been quietly withdrawn or banned over the last 80+ years plus. I have listed just some of them here. But this does not mean that these dangerous drugs are banned everywhere as a result. If they can be sold anywhere, in sufficient quantity to make a profit, the pharmaceutical industry will sell them. Companies will protest - “the safety of our products is our primary concern” - but time after time this is proven to be untrue.

Surely the most infamous of all banned pharmaceutical drugs, Thalidomide, is not being sold now?

“Yes, thalidomide is still prescribed to patients, particularly for treating certain cancers like multiple myeloma and some skin disorders. However, it is strictly regulated due to its history of causing severe birth defects”.

Is anyone reassured?

Weight Loss Drugs: start taking one drug and end up taking many, many more!

Pharmaceutical medicine has a wonderfully sophisticated and successful policy of ensuring their drugs don't work effectively so we need more drugs to deal with their ineffectiveness

Many millions of patients, throughout the world, have been encouraged recently to start taking GLP-1 weight loss drugs (Ozempic, Wgovy, Mounjaro, et al). The promotion of these drugs has, as usual, been superb. So the drug companies who make them have made fortunes. The problem for patients, as always, is that they were largely unaware of their possible adverse reactions.

When GLP-1 weight-loss drugs were introduced it was already known that they caused serious side effects, so much so that they were recommended to be taken under strict supervision for no more than two years. The main problem with these restrictions was that even if people did stop taking them, they were known, quickly, to put the weight back on.

So now patients will be glad to know (sic) that the drug companies have come up with a solution. This Medscape article informs us that there is now a new ‘follow-up’ drug, Orforglipron.

          “Patients who lost significant weight … were able to maintain much of that loss after switching to once daily oral orforglipron”.

And, ever eager to help the pharmaceutical industry, the mainstream media has been quick to popularise the message. The BBC’s response can be seen here: “Daily pill to help keep weight off after stopping obesity jabs”. It is not untypical of many other similar articles.

          “Trials found that patients given the tablet, called orforglipron, every day for a year avoided regaining much of the weight they had lost - a known risk when coming off GLP-1 injections …. More research is needed to find out how long someone might need to stay on treatment - it might even be life-long, say experts”. (My emphasis).

The study was published in the journal Nature Medicine, external. It was funded by the drug manufacturer Eli Lilly, who also make the GLP-1 jab, Mounjaro (the one used by the UK’s NHS). And as with all pharma funded research it should not be too surprising that it came out in favour of the product, and to the drug industry generally.

So people who may have thought that they only had to take one drug for a maximum of two years have now discovered that they should take another one - for the rest of their lives.

Nowhere in the mainstream media’s promotion of Orforglipron were its side effects adequately mentioned, certainly not to the extent that it enables patients, and potential patients, to make an ‘informed’ choice about whether they should take them. Neither the BBC or Medscape article mentions more than “nausea, vomiting, and diarrhoea” as potential side effects.

Yet the side effect of Orforglipron are already well known, and published in conventional medical literature, outlined here in this Drugs.com webpage.

• Common side effects of orforglipron are given as nausea, stomach (abdominal) pain, heartburn, constipation, headache, gas, diarrhoea, bloating, hair loss, vomiting, tiredness, indigestion, and belching.

• Serious side effects are given as inflammation of the pancreas (pancreatitis), severe stomach problems, dehydration leading to kidney problems, low blood sugar (hypoglycemia), dizziness or light-headedness, blurred vision, anxiety, irritability, mood changes, sweating, slurred speech, hunger, confusion or drowsiness, shakiness, weakness, headache, fast heartbeat, feeling jittery, serious allergic reactions, changes in vision, gall-bladder problems,

In addition there is also a Box Warning (that is, the strongest safety-related warning that is issued by the FDA) for “the increased risk of thyroid C-Cell tumors”.

So this is quite a long list of serious side effects that have been ignored by both Medscape, the BBC, the mainstream media generally. And, of course, by the entire conventional medical establishment. And conventional medicine are now promoting a drug that has to be taken for life - plus further drugs to ‘treat’ any of the side effects that develop during the course of their lives.

Patients are being badly (dishonestly?) misinformed!

Where do we get health advice from? Our doctor, or from AI?

Or will it make any significant difference?

New UK research says 1 in 7 people already using AI for health advice instead of contacting their doctor, or mainstream NHS services. The research is reported by Kings Health Partners.

          “AI is creating a significant shift in how people access healthcare, yet public attitudes to the technology remain deeply divided, according to a major new study by King’s Health Partners, Responsible AI UK, and the Policy Institute at King’s College London. The research finds that one in seven (15%) of the public have used AI chatbots for health advice instead of contacting a GP or other NHS service, and one in ten (10%) say they have used AI for mental health therapy or wellbeing support instead of seeing a trained professional.”

Kings Health Partners considers this to be an issue, largely because the AI platform did not recommend consulting a medical professional, and recent evidence has shown that AI misdiagnose up to 80% of cases. I suspect that most of the Conventional Medical Establishment will agree that it represents a problem, not least as the government is planning to accelerate the adoption of AI across the NHS.

Yet is this really a problem? Over recent decades doctors have been increasingly ‘programmed’ by the medical establishment about how to diagnose, and how to prescribe. There is little doubt that AI platforms will be similarly ‘guided’ in due course. They will not be programmed to do anything beyond a diagnosis, and a prescription for drugs.

Can you imagine any patient reporting that they are unwell, and AI telling them they should support their immune system with good diet, sensible exercise, and relaxation? Or an AI system will be programmed to suggest homeopathic treatment, or herbal remedies, or acupuncture?

The pharmaceutical medical monopoly is too strong, too powerful. There is not much doubt that conventional medicine will continue to control the guidance patients receive, regardless of where that advice is sought. The pharmaceutical medical establishment tells doctors what to do now. And no doubt they will soon control what AI platforms recommend to us.

So neither doctors or AI platforms are likely to be given much leeway! It is almost inevitable that whoever is consulted, the same or similar advice will be given! Conventional medicine demands conformity, so society will continue to be faced with the consequences of drug-based treatment - increasing levels of epidemic chronic disease.

All of us will need to realise that in order to escape from the clutches of Pharmaceutical Medicine we will all have to discover for ourselves safer, more effective natural medical therapies.