Readers of this blog often ask me how I became interested in safe medicine, and why I have dismissed conventional medicine as too dangerous to use. Read about my 'Eureka' moment!
When I developed painful gastric ulcers, now over 40 years ago, I went to my GP. It was the normal, the routine thing to do. We all do it, still. It is what is expected of us. I was in pain, and the first drug I was given did not work at all, beyond some momentary relief. Then I saw a young doctor who gave me a new 'miracle' pharmaceutical drug which he said offered the prospect of a 'wonder' cure. Indeed, the drug did work. In fact it worked 3 times! Each time the ulcers calmed down for a few weeks, but the pain returned again within just a few weeks.
I was offered another course, indeed, it was suggested that I might have to take them on a long-term (life-time) basis. Fortunately, it was then that I discovered that this new 'miracle' drug caused serious 'adverse reactions' - to the heart. So for the first time I began to question what I was doing. All I knew, at the time, was that I did not want to swop a bad stomach for a bad heart!
My choice seemed to be between taking this 'wonder' drug, and risking its side effects, or putting up with pain which, at times, was quite unbearable. My doctor, and the NHS, gave me no advice about any other medical therapies. There was, they said (as they always say), no alternative!
So when I was in a lot of pain someone suggested that I consulted a local homeopath I told her that I did not believe in such things! I was that ignorant! But the pain just got worse, and as I was unwilling to take the drug I eventually went to see him. He questioned me for about an hour, then gave me a remedy. I took it, within a few days I felt better. Within 3 months I was pain-free. And I have remained pain free now for over 30 years, with no need to take a remedy! My stomach was cured, and remains so. And more importantly my heart is good too, I have suffered no side effects from either the remedy, or the drug!
The conventional medical establishment routinely dismiss such an experience as 'anecdotal', or 'unscientific'. Yet homeopathy has performed these cures for millions of people, safely and effectively, and throughout the world, for the last 220 years, most of whom have found homeopath to be both effective and safe in treating illness. Still, conventional doctors tell us that there is 'no evidence' that homeopathy works! It is nothing more than a placebo effect! Only pharmaceutical drugs have an 'evidence base'.
So for me, and for many others over the years, this event becomes a 'Eureka' moment - initially for two reasons.
1. Conventional medicine does not tell patients the truth
First, I realised that my doctors was not telling me the truth, or at least, not the whole truth. The NHS, and the conventional doctors who treated me, did not tell me about the side effects of their new 'wonder' drug. They allowed me to take it without informing me about the damage it might do to my heart.
Nor did they tell me the whole truth. They did not offer me alternative treatment. They did not provide me with information about alternative treatments, linked to diet and lifestyle changes. They did not mention that there were therapies, such as homeopathy, that might treat my ulcers. And they certainly did not offer me access to homeopathic treatment, or any other form of traditional therapy. I had an ulcer. They gave me a drug. I took the drug. I discovered the side effects of the drug alone. Conventional medicine had told me nothing!
From that day I could no longer accept what doctors, and the conventional medical establishment, have told me. I have always felt the need to ask questions about the safety and effectiveness of the medicine we are routinely offered.
2. Making sense of ill-health
Second, I began to study homeopathy, informally at first. It was fascinating. Suddenly I began to make sense of the world of health and disease in a way I had never done before. Disease was not something that struck people down, indiscriminately, for no reason. I had gastric ulcers because of my stress-full lifestyle, because of what I was eating, how I was eating it, and because I never took the time to allow my body to relax and recover from the stress I was putting it through.
What my homeopath said made sense. The remedy would help, the ulcers would probably heal, but in the longer-term it was important that I should help myself by changing my lifestyle.
I began to understand the concept of 'susceptibility' and 'pre-disposition' to disease. It explained much, for instance, that whilst medieval plagues killed many thousands of people, not everyone died, many survived. They were not susceptible. Yet sickness and disease was increasing to epidemic proportions all around me. Not everyone was affected, but it was not a question of good or bad luck, people became ill for a reason, just as other people remained well.
It was an amazing moment. The clarity of this new understanding, and the new insights it gave me into health, was empowering. I began to see through the 'battleground' that conventional medicine had created with its toxic drugs and vaccines, their war against the body, and the bacteria and viruses that normally live peacefully alongside us. I began to question the desperate attacks on childhood diseases, the invasive vaccinations, the aggressive drugs that 'fought' this, and 'destroyed' that.
Conventional medicine seemed to believe that it could 'balance' the human body better with its drugs and vaccines than our own internal self-healing mechanisms! What arrogance was this? Did the doctors really know best? Did their drugs and vaccines really provide us with the miraculous answer to disease? So my personal experience helped me recognise the arrogance of the conventional medical establishment.
Through homeopathy I was able to understand the body's relationship with the world in which it lived, microbes and all! I could see how, in contrast to conventional medicine, homeopathy sought to enhance the body's ability to maintain and regain good health by living peaceably alongside them. It taught me to trust the amazing ability of the human body to protect itself from harm, and to heal itself from whatever dis-ease it suffered.
I began to understand how the medical warfare that conventional medicine engaged in with the human body, to get it to comply with the 'norms' they had of it, was not only doomed to failure - it was both unnecessary and positively harmful to our health. So not only did I reject pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines, I began to understand why they were so obviously wrong, harmful, so self-evidently counter-productive to health. I began to examine what was happening to the health of people within my family, amongst my friends and work colleagues, and I did so not through the eyes of conventional medicine, but through my new understanding. Those who were taking drugs, or being vaccinated, seem to be sicker than those who did not take them.
For instance,when I managed a group of residential homes, I saw older people taking a cocktail of pharmaceutical drugs, and not getting better, but progressively more sick. Worse, older residents on some pharmaceutical drugs seemed to lose their interest and involvement in life, in the world around them. So many of them lost not only their physical health, but their mind too. They became forgetful, confused, then demented. And then they died.
Of course, doctors put all this down to old age. Conventional medicine always does when it fails to treat disease successfully. But I was convinced that the pharmaceutical drugs they were taking were playing an important part in their decline and death.
So my world changed. What had seemed normal and acceptable was no longer so. What I had been told was effective was clearly not effective. What I thought was safe was not safe. It was happening all around me. Sick people, given pharmaceutical drugs to make them better, became sicker. And my alternative ideas on health, and ill-health, seemed to fit and explain much better than conventional medicine what was happening to our health. I was beginning to make sense of the world.
So, in a nutshell, this experience is the basis of this blog. We need to ask questions of our doctors (and our homeopaths) and see who seems to be interpreting the world, and what is happening to our health, more accurately. And who had treatments that actually worked!
