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Thursday 8 July 2010

Russian Roulette Medicine

Russian Roulette is a potentially lethal game of chance. One bullet is placed in one chamber of a revolver, the cylinder is spun, the gun placed to the head, and then fired. There is a one-in-six chance of dying.

Every time a patient begins to take a conventional drug, notionally 'for their health', they are embarking on an equally risky game of Russian Roulette. Conventional Medicine calls the 'bullets' being fired 'side-effects'.

I call them DIEs (disease, or death inducing effects) because this is a more accurate description.

As not everyone suffer all the DIEs of pharmaceutical drug, the odds are perhaps better than 1:6, but not much better. A study by the Nordic School of Public Health in Sweden, published in the British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology in 2013 (doi:10.1111/bcp 12314), found that around 12% of people have diseases and health problems that are directly due to prescription drugs they are taking for other conditions. Actually, 19% reported that they believed a new disease or health problem was caused by a Big Pharma drug but were discarded. Most people would not believe that drugs, given to us to make us better, would actually cause disease - so there is obvious under-reporting. But let's suppose that 12% of people taking conventional medical drugs contract another disease.

Well, there the good news finishes. Conventional Medicine willingly admit that their drugs are potentially dangerous to health. But in justification they say that you have to weigh the 'benefits' against the 'dangers'. So this 'cost-benefit' analysis has two seperate aspects.

1. What are the benefits? These are usually greatly over-emphasised, particularly with new drugs by the pharmaceutical companies, the NHS and the mainstream media. As time goes by, claims about the benefit of most drugs diminish. Most pharmacentical drugs only ameliorate the conditions they treat, and that just on a temporary basis. The illness itself continues, often getting worse And over the years, many drugs are withdrawn because in practice they have proven to be entirely ineffective. As far as benefits are concerned, there appears to be a rule of diminishing returns.

2. What are the dangers? The dangers of drugs have little to do with side-effects, a headache, dizziness, dry mouth, and the like. The DIEs they produce are real diseases, usually diseases far worse than the original one for which the drug was prescribed. The history of pharmaceutical drugs clearly show that patients won't be told what the DIEs are, initially because they are not known. Only when patients take them, and suffer as a result, do we begin to realise just how much harm the drug does. Unlike the 'benefits', the dangers seem to spiral out of control, although every attempt seems to be made to deny this until the facts become undeniably.

So do patients have to attempt this cost-benefit analysis, do they have to play russian roulette with their health? Homeopaths, and the patients of homeopaths, usually have a quiet, if rather sad laugh every time a  Conventional Medical spokesmen earnestly make such claims. They know that within homeopathy no such calculation is required. If the patient and the homeopath can successfully match the symptoms of illness with a remedy that has a similar symptom picture, the patient will get well, not temporarily but permanently, and nor having to take remedies for the rest of their life.

Even when the wrong remedy is prescribed it will do no harm. There is no Russian Roulette in Homeopathy, just safe, effective and inexpensive treatment of illness.

No wonder the drug companies don't want you to know!