Why doesn't conventional medicine work? The failure to understand the most fundamental principle of cure

• If something needs fixing we need to have someone look at it who knows how it works.
• Moreover, whatever is wrong, we have to willing to recognise and accept what is wrong.

Is this too trite?

• Surely we would never ask someone to service our central heating, or a car or washing machine, who did not understand how they worked? 
• Would we be confident if someone who did a repair that made the situation worse than it was before, and then denied that the repair could possibly be the problem.

Yet this is exactly what we do with our health.

• When we are ill we go to a doctor, an expert, and we ask him/her to diagnose what is wrong, and make us better.
• If we don't get better, or if we get worse, we go back to the same doctor for yet more treatment.

We do this as individuals; and we do it as a nation too. And we do it, time after time.

• we rarely ask questions about the quality or safety of the repair.
• We never question whether the repair has made the original situation worse.

The first assumption we make is to assume that the doctor is the right person, and indeed the only person to ask. We have been led to believe that conventional medicine is scientific medicine, that doctors know what they are doing, and that all their treatments have been scientifically tested, and are both safe and effective. 

None of these assumptions are correct, but we believe them to be correct. And in any case, our national health system, our politicians, and our mainstream media all tell us that this is true - and that there are no alternatives.

This leads to a second assumption. The monopoly of conventional medicine within our health services must mean something. Surely the dominant consensus about health cannot be wrong. It is just that there is not enough money for more of the same treatment. The problem with health services is that there are insufficiently resources. It is not a medical matter.

A third assumption soon follows. If our health was poor, and then got worse after medical treatment, it must be the body that is breaking down. Things were worse than we thought. It is not the treatment, we just need more help, more treatment of the same kind. And if, after more treatment, our health again fails to improve, and gets worse, it just confirms that our ailing body is to blame!

So let's examine these assumptions

1. There are many alternatives to conventional medical treatment, I call them natural therapies. These treatments all seek to work alongside the body. They are widely dismissed (if not condemned) by conventional medicine, by national health services, by politicians, and by the mainstream media.

2. The monopoly of conventional medicine (within most national health services around the world) reflects powerful and influential business interests, principally the interests of the pharmaceutical industry. Its dominance within health services around the world is more about commercial power and political interests than health.

3. No central heating boiler, no car or washing machine, is unfixable. As they get older they may not function quite as well but an expert will be able to diagnose the fault, and can usually repair it so that it works reasonably well.

So what is so different about health? Why are so many chronic diseases (arthritis, autism, dementia, diabetes, et al) running at epidemic levels? Why are young and middle-aged people getting ill with conditions once believed to be an illnesses of old age? Why can't conventional medicine fix these trends? There are two main problems.

HOW TO FIX AN AILING BODY?

Conventional medicine knows, in the very minutest detail, about the functioning of the human body, both in its normal or healthy state, and in its sick or diseased state. Conventional doctors will always be able to tell you, often in great detail, what is going wrong when you are sick. Diagnosis is their forte, and they have a plethora or instruments and tests that can determine what is wrong with us. Doctors know when things are right, and when they are wrong.

Yet putting matters right is quite another matter. This is where the problem of conventional medicine, dominated by pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines, starts. What they try to do is to stop something happening in the body that, in their view, should not be happening. So they kill pain. They bring down a fever. They stop inflammation. This is their view of healing. The body is not functioning 'normally', so it must be stopped. It must be forced to function properly.

Natural medicine does not do this. Homeopathy, for instance, uses remedies based on substances which, in their normal state, produce pain, or fever, or inflammation. Why? Because homeopaths know that this is the way to return the body back to its normal functioning. Counter-intuitive? No. It is a recognition that only the body can heal, and pain, fever, inflammation are the body's natural response to illness. To undermine them is counter-productive. So the remedy supports what the body wants to do, it triggers and augments natural healing processes. 

In contrast to this conventional medicine seeks to stop, to block, to inhibit the body's healing mechanism. It is this battle between the body and pharmaceutical drugs that causes so-called 'side effects', or 'adverse drug reactions'. I prefer to call them, 'disease-inducing effects'. This link takes you to my website that outlines how disease is caused by pharmaceutical drugs, and which of these drugs cause which diseases.

So for the patient there is a choice to be made. Conventional medicine and natural therapies have distinctly different ideas about the treatment of illness. These ideas of diametrically opposed. They cannot both be right. If one is right, the other is wrong. 

The important point here is that knowing about how the body functions in illness is not the same as being able to return it to good health. To do this another skill is necessary, a proper understanding of the healing process.

RECOGNISING ALL THE CAUSES OF ILL-HEALTH?

This is a major problem for conventional medicine, one that is rarely talked about. Conventional medicine has a problem with the side affects (the disease-inducing-effects) of their drugs and vaccines. They cannot entirely deny them as they are written up formally in medical texts such as the British National Formulary, and MIMS.

• But they can discount them. For instance, doctors will acknowledge that many pharmaceutical drugs can cause 'confusion' and 'memory loss' but they cannot admit that these same drugs can cause dementia, or Alzheimer's disease.
• And they can deny them entirely, for instance, when doctors insist that vaccines are "entirely safe", or that diseases like autism are not caused by childhood vaccines.

Although occasionally this discounting and denial can be heard - by anyone prepared to listen hard enough, but conventional medicine does not want to discuss them. Nor do politicians, or our docile mainstream media.

But denial about the side effects of pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines has another vitally important consequence. It means that conventional medicine is unable, quite unwilling in fact, to look at one of the real causes of the increased levels of illness and disease we are experiencing.

It is as if the car mechanic has analysed the problem with the car, but decides that as it was he who changed the carburettor it cannot be a carburettor problem. After all, that would open up questions about his past work. So his response is to claim that problem "has no known cause". 

Conventional medicine often makes this claim, even when doctors who read MIMS and the BNF must be fully aware that pharmaceutical drugs do cause the illness that has been diagnosed. What this means is that conventional medical, in denying a important cause of illness, is unable to cure chronic disease, or to stop it growing to unprecedented levels. Doctors are too busy looking for excuses for illness in the wrong area, instead looking at an ageing population, environmental pollution, bad diet - all important factors, but rarely the whole story.

Only when a problem is properly and fully analysed can a solution be found. If doctors deny an important cause of illness because it is their own work that will be criticised, there will never be a cure. Either you look openly and honestly at what is causing a disease, or you defend the drugs and vaccines that have been used to treat illness, and deny their role in creating disease.

• So, for example, what is the cause of Autism? Doctors say that it cannot be the MMR vaccine. This means that the route to a solution of this particular epidemic is barred to conventional medicine. For them, the cause remains 'unknown'!
• So what is the cause of Dementia? Doctors do not recognise that pharmaceutical drugs, which can cause confusion, and memory loss, can cause dementia. So the route to a cure is blocked to them. The cause remains 'unknown'!

And so, for conventional medicine, there is no route through to treatment, to healing, to cure. Conventional medicine is running blind, as it always has done. It is thrashing around in a desperate search for self justification, and effective treatment for conditions it has itself, in part, caused. But it is quite unwilling to consider the dangers of its own methodology. Medical science is running, quickly, up a blind alleyway leading nowhere. 

And all because it does not understand the basic principle of cure

- that they body must be allowed to heal itself.