Conventional Medical Treatment. Why is there growing dissatisfaction amongst patients?

People have had a love affair with pharmaceutical medicine for many years. We have been led to believe it is the route to good health. The UK's NHS has been a much loved institution since it was first established in 1948, and conventional medicine continues to dominate health provision in health provision all over the world, with constant demands for more funding. 

Yet is public approval now beginning to falter?

The approval of conventional, or pharmaceutical medicine has survived despite escalating levels of chronic disease over the years, and now running at epidemic levels. It has survived despite thousands of pharmaceutical drugs/vaccines, presented initially as 'entirely safe', and 'game changers' in the treatment of this, or that illness, being 'banned' or 'withdrawn' when they were found to cause patient harm. When the drug did not make patients better, regardless of being put on these unsafe drugs for their entire lifetime, pharmaceutical medicine has continued to remain popular.

Yet will conventional medicine survive after its abject failure to deal with the Covid-19 pandemic? Will more people start to realise that our love of affair with conventional medicine has been misplaced, that pharmaceutical medicine is of limited value, and a demonstrable record of failure? 

We have been told since 2020 that government policies on Covid-19 (in most countries of the world) have been based the best 'medical science' available. Yet an increasing number of people can now see that these policies, the policies advocated by conventional medicine, have been a disaster.

• The Virus: the Covid-19 virus was probably engineered in a research laboratory in Wuhan, China, and although this was initially denied, the suggestion is now more widely accepted, and evidence is accumulating.
• Masks: there has never been any science to support the wearing of masks as a protection against Covid-19; yet despite actually being told this in the early days of the pandemic, they were subsequently made compulsory.
• Lockdown: the failure of lockdown policies is demonstrable, as are its negative outcomes - on mental health, on child development and education, on jobs and livelihoods, on the economy, on personal liberty, and much else. Now (after more than two years) these failures are now being discussed.
• The Vaccines: the vaccines have clearly not worked, in the way we were told they would work. They have neither stopped the vaccinated contracting the virus, nor prevented the transmission of the virus. Moreover, the Covid-19 vaccines have caused more serious harm, and death to patients, than any other vaccine in the history of vaccinations.
  

Throughout the Covid-19 saga we have been urged to "save the NHS", as if the pandemic was a greater threat to the institution, and to the pharmaceutical drugs to which it is committed, than to patients! Actually, it probably was! In Britain we were urged to stand on the street, night after night, to applaud NHS staff, alongside rainbow and 'thank-you' signs to illustrate the reason for the applause. 

Now, there is a growing understanding that the fear and panic over the virus was largely induced by conventional medicine (with the unstinting support of government and the mainstream media), that the harm caused by the virus was grossly exaggerated, and that the Covid-19 virus has proven to be no more of a threat to us than any other seasonal influenza outbreak.

The applause often reminded me of the Soviet-styled clapping of political leaders, the engineered worship of a powerful (but a failing and increasingly absurd) political elite.

To an extent the applause was understandable. My issue is not with NHS staff, it is with the medicine to which the NHS is now totally committed. The staff were on the front life, they were responsible for for looking after very sick and dying patients, and the manufactured panic did seem genuine enough to most people at the time.

Yet there are now signs that confidence in conventional medicine is might now be changing. Public satisfaction with the NHS has fallen to the lowest levels for over 25 years. So what has caused the change?

The King's Fund has recently published "Public satisfaction with the NHS and social care in 2021: results from the British Social Attitudes survey". This has shown that overall satisfaction with the NHS fell to 36%, which they described as "an unprecedented 17 percentage point decrease on 2020". This was the lowest level of satisfaction recorded since 1997, when satisfaction was just 34%. More people (41%) were dissatisfied with the NHS than satisfied, and this dissatisfaction was spanned all ages, income groups, sexes and supporters of different political parties.

The reason for dissatisfaction with the NHS did not identify the failure of the medical system.The main reason people gave for being dissatisfied were waiting times for seeing a doctor, and for hospital appointments (65%), staff shortages (46%) and the long-held view that government did not spend enough on the NHS (40%). I suspect that more fundamental but unvoiced concerns have emerged over recent years.

I have heard much cynicism from erstwhile supporters of the NHS about the way Covid-19 was dealt with. There has certainly been a gap between (i) what we were told and (ii) what actually happened. For instance, when the vaccines were about to be introduced, in December 2020, we were told that they would save us, and return us back to normal life by February. Remember? The first single injection would improve the situation. Then we were asked to have a second dose. Then a booster. Then a second booster. And now we are being told that we will need to have boosters every 6 months for the foreseeable future, according to one UK government health agency.

With each injection, take up rates reduced. Fewer people were prepared to take more. This was probably because people realised the the Covid-19 vaccines were causing serious harm to patients. What other reason could there be? Even one manufacturer, Pfizer, knew about the harm their vaccine might cause. The public have not been told about this, by government, by doctors, or by the mainstream media. But when someone is damaged they think twice before getting a second, a third, and a fourth vaccine.

So there is little wonder that people are having increasing doubts about how 'scientific' conventional medicine is, and whether doctors and the NHS can be trusted. A rash of recent articles has outlined the new scepticism. The BMJ recently published an article entitled "The illusion of evidence-based medicine". The Daily Expose published an article entitled "Modern Medicine - a castle built on sand". CHD has published at article entitled "How politics corruption evidence-based medicine". And the Vaccine Reaction has published an article entitled "Trust in CDC waning".

Even the Spectator is moving into these more critical areas. The 'inescapable' conclusion of their article "The NHS is failing" is that when you compare the NHS to other similar health services in similar countries around the world the it does not merit our devotion.

            "While MPs compete to shout the loudest in their support of the UK’s health services (‘save our NHS!’), the British public has fallen out of love with it. More people are now dissatisfied with the NHS than are happy with it. This is true across all ages, income groups, sexes and voters of different political parties. Support for the NHS is now at the lowest level for a quarter of a century."

The Spectator article is written by Tim Knox, former director of the Centre for Policy Studies. He compared the NHS with the health provision in 19 other countries so it is basically a comparison of health service outcomes in other wealthy countries, all of which have a health service which is dominated by conventional/pharmaceutical medicine. It indicates that the NHS compares badly. So, for example, life expectancy in the UK is 17th out of these 19 comparable nations. 

            "Our cancer survival rates are shockingly low. We are the worst for strokes and heart attacks. We are one from bottom for preventing treatable diseases. We are third from bottom for infant mortality."

The article concludes that our health system is less successful than that of other nations, that in all comparisons used, the UK comes bottom of the league tables four times (more than any other country) and is in the bottom 3 nations for 8 out of the 16 measures.

Knox's article also makes the another important point, that the amount of money spent on conventional medicine makes little difference to patient outcomes. He looked at the American insurance based model as a possible alternative for the NHS, but found that although the USA spends considerably more money on conventional medicine than any other nation, patient outcomes were even worse.

            "If there is one country that clearly has a worse system than the UK, it is America. Extraordinarily low life expectancy, vast costs and often poor treatment means that it would be a crazy model to imitate. But that doesn’t mean we should discount an insurance model altogether. Plenty of European and western countries are able to effectively use such a model without the massive health failures we see in the US."

So criticism and dissatisfaction of conventional medical provision may be growing, but not to the point that the underlying cause of the failure of NHS medicine has been identified. 

The NHS is NOT failing because it is failing to use its resources as well as other comparable countries. Or because the insurance system, or some other type of organisational structure might be better that a tax-payer funded NHS service. There is a continued reluctance to identify what really underlies patient dissatisfaction - that the failure is the result of the pharmaceutical medical system that dominates the health service provided by the NHS, and health provision in most other countries.

Yet if patient dissatisfaction is increasing so rapidly it is difficult to see how the NHS can recover from a growing cynicism. Chronic disease, of all types, is on a steep rising trajectory. We are getting sicker, and conventional medicine is not making us better. Indeed, adverse drug reactions are making us more sick year by year. And for several decades now conventional medicine has failed to come up with any new treatments that are likely to overcome the ever-increasing levels of sickness and disease.

With waiting lists now at their highest ever levels, over 6 million people; and with projections that this could get far worse (as many as 14 million people suggested here) the cynicism is unlikely to improve.

Even the mainstream media is feeling obliged to publish details of this growing dissatisfaction with the NHS. What this means is that it will not be long before more and more people realise that it is conventional or pharmaceutical medicine that is failing. It is not funding, or the organisational structure, or the efficient use of resources. Then the rising dissatisfaction will be redirected, and is likely to increase even more. 

In the next few years we are heading rapidly towards medical chaos and breakdown.

 

Postscript May 2022. 

Patient satisfactions with doctors hits record low as face-to-face consultations become the exception.

Pharmaceutical Medicine - a Faustian Deal?

Is Conventional (or Pharmaceutical medicine) a Faustian bargain? The legend of Doctor Faustus arises from German folk law, Faust making an agreement to surrender his soul to an evil spirit (The Devil, Satan or Mephistopheles) in exchange for otherwise unattainable knowledge, and magical powers, that provided him with access to all the world’s pleasures. In the bargain Faust recognises the evil of the bargainer but goes along with the deal anyway. Faustian bargains always end in tragedy because what is surrendered (the soul, or good health and well-being) is ultimately far more valuable than what has been obtained (worldly pleasures, or short-term health benefits).

Pharmaceutical drug treatment provides minor, short-term health benefits; but the cumulative adverse drug reactions usually leads to the patient having to take more and more, or stronger (more toxic) drugs in order to cope with the side effects of previous treatments. I have written about two such patient who entered, unknowingly, into such a deal.

• Ronald, a patient getting to the end of a long journey through pain and painkilling drugs, ending up in chronic pain, and Tramadol.
  

• Janet, a patient getting to the end of the long journey through pain and painkilling drugs, ending up in chronic pain, Amitriptyline - and dementia. 

Both Ronald and Janet can be seen to have traded their long-term health and well-being in exchange for some temporary relief from pain, leading to chronic health outcomes. One drug leads to another drug which leads to another. They all cause 'side effects' more serious than the original condition. The Faustian deal was not a good, long-term deal for either of them. There are so many other similar examples. Any one of us can find them amongst our own family, friends, and acquaintances.

Conventional medicine offers these Faustian packages all the time. When anyone enters a doctor's surgery, or a hospital, and accepts a pharmaceutical drug the deal is made. 

• The patient is usually told that the drug, or drugs, are 'safe', and he/she is too often feeling too ill to check; or they implicitly trust their doctor. 
• For his/her part the doctor is usually less than transparent. They are aware of the limited, short-term benefits of the drugs they prescribe, as well as the serious longer-term adverse reactions they can cause; but this knowledge is usually not shared.

In all these Faustian medical deals, the doctors are fully aware of the nature and possible consequences of the deal, but the patient is not, and rarely associates their declining health with the drugs they are taking.

There have been two main outcomes:

1. It is the reason for the staggering increase in chronic disease, particularly since the 1950's, when we began our love affair (our Faustian deal) with pharmaceutical drugs, and began to believe without question the propaganda of the drug companies, whose message to us continues to be that their drugs were winning the war against illness and disease. Any cursory examination into our health, and the rise and rise of chronic disease during the last 70 years, demonstrates clearly that this is not so. 
2. Faustian health packages are also the fundamental reason for the ongoing crisis in national health services around the world, including the UK's NHS. The last 70 years has seen an astronomical increase in pharmaceutical drug taking, Faustian deals that ensured that patients like Ronald and Janet got sicker, in need of increasing amounts of medical intervention. The current NHS crisis, both in funding, waiting lists and staff morale, is being blamed on the Covid-19 pandemic. My blog, during the last 12 years, has clearly shown that the current crisis is an ongoing crisis that has been worsening over the years.

Indeed, the Covid-19 pandemic can be seen as yet another Faustian deal - a manufactured virus, an exaggerated crisis, the adoption of panic public health measure (masks, lockdown, et al) - responses that not only failed but actually made matters worse. Then, of course, there was the long wait for vaccines that were supposed to save us, but did not work - they neither prevented the virus, or stopped its transmission. And their side effects have yet to be recognised by the conventional medical establishment, for obvious reasons.

The devil, once again, refused to reveal what the Covid-19 package was doing to Doctor Faustus! And Satan continues to do his best to ensure that he does not find out!

So when you are offered a Faustian medical deal, please make sure you refuse it! 

Instead, discover what good diet, exercise, and safe natural medical therapies can do for you instead.

Sodium Valproate. The demise of another pharmaceutical drug. 20,000 damaged children? A tragedy worse than Thalidomide?

Pharmaceutical drugs are known to be dangerous. Sometimes even doctors are forced to admit this. There are even times when even the mighty Conventional Medical Establishment can no longer defend the harm their drugs and vaccines do to patients. For the antiepileptic drug, sodium valpoate, this  time appears to be rapidly happening.

Please Note: sodium valproate comes to patients under many different names - rarely sodium valproate. It is vaariously called Absenor, Convulex, Depakene, Depakine, Depalept, Deprakine, Dyzantil, Encorate, Epilim, Epivil, Episenta, Stavzor, Valcote, Valpakine, Orgiril, and no doubt many more (just to confuse us patients! What on earth do these names mean? Why do pharmaceutical companies need so many?)

On Sunday 17th April 2022, the Sunday Times headline blew a whistle (a whistle they use so rarely) on this drug (I will ask "Why?" later). Its front page headline stated "Drug Scandal that damaged 20,000 babies: epilepsy pills are still being given to pregnant women in a travesty that recalls thalidomide". Its editorial announced that "20,000 babies damaged - and still the scandal continues". The main article began:

            " Health experts knew in 1973 that the epilepsy medication sodium valproate posed a risk to unborn children - but mothers-to-be were not told. Almost 50 years and 20,000 disabled children later, it is still being prescribed to pregnant women. Now some are saying 'this scandal is worse than Thalidomide".

Worse than Thalidomide? I have written about the Thalidomide scandal before, briefly outlining the events on this link. It was a tragedy that led to the introduction of our current system of pharmaceutical drug regulation, now used around the world, and intended to ensure that such event would "never happen again". Clearly it has failed. Moreover, as this story shows, the new system of regulation was already failing at the very time it was being set up!

And the problem is almost certainly bigger than the Sunday Times says. If it is thought that 20,000 babies have been damaged that number could be multiplied by 10, even perhaps 100 times, given that regulatory reporting systems are notoriously bad at picking up cases. And, as the Sunday Times outlines, the harm caused by sodium valproate has been going on now for nearly 50 years now - and yet the drug is still being prescribed by doctors, and little of no action has been taken to protect patients from it.

WHAT THE SUNDAY TIMES ARTICLE TELLS US

Very few people read the Sunday Times. Its articles are not openly available on the internet, and few people now buy newspapers. So here are some quotations from the article.

        "Sodium valproate, which was given to women with epilepsy for decades without proper warning, has caused autism, learning difficulties, and physical deformities in up to 20,000 babies in Britain".

        "... despite... a 2020 report that criticised the failure over four decades to tell women of the dangers, doctors are still not properly warning women of the risks......."

        "An investigation by the Sunday Times has found that the drug is being handed out to women in plain packets with the information leaflets missing, or with stickers over the warning". (My emphasis).

The article tells us that the problem of birth defects caused by the drug was discussed as early as 1972 and 1973, when "the manufacturers, Sanofi, told the committee that there were signs in animal tests that valproate could potentially be teratogenic - harmful to foetuses" but the committee "concluded that the use of anti-seizure drugs ... was indeed liable to produce abnormalities" but that "the risk appears to be low, and not sufficient to justify stopping the use" of the drug.

        "They specified that warnings should be provided to doctors, but not on package inserts, so that there would be no danger of patients themselves seeing it". (My emphasis).

The Sunday Times article goes on to outline the subsequent history of the harm caused by the drug over the last 50 years, and the regular warnings that have arisen over time. These range from reports in the Journal of Paediatrics in 1980, the British Medical journal in 1983, debates in the House of Commons, reviews in the Lancet, et al.  

Each time, little or nothing was done to warn or protect patients - indeed the opposite.

            "The CSM (Committee on the Safety of Medicine) finally acted on the concerns, asking Sanofi to write to all GPs and hospital doctors with a new warning sheet, setting out the sodium valproate could lead to birth defects. However, the committee still stopped short of requiring doctors to tell women about the risks, with the danger of spina bifida not being including on patient safety leaflets until 1994. And still no detailed research into the effects of the drug was commissioned".

Warning after warning followed. A study in 2009 confirmed that the use of the drug in pregnancy could damage children's IQ. Yet it was only in 2010 that patient information sheets referred to the risk to cognitive development, including autism.  

So it is quite impossible that the dangers of Sodium valproate could have remained unknown to any doctor, or anyone connected with the conventional medical establishment. 

But nothing has ever been done, pregnants women are still being prescribed the drug. The thalidomide scandal was supposed to lead to new drug regulation procedures whose primary objective was to protect patients. Yet no action was taken to protect patients from sodium valproate at the time, and for the next 50 years! Drug regulation does not work to protect patients. The system has been taken over, consumed by the drug companies it is supposed to be regulating.

After many years, during which time government, the conventional medical establishment, the NHS, and doctors did not act, patients tried to take action themselves. A lawsuit was brought up against Sanofi; but this collapsed before the trial when legal aid was withdrawn. The government has a vested interest in not wanting such a trial to go forward, so they took action that ensured that patients could not obtain redress!

There comes a time when the CSM realises that it can no longer protect a dangerous pharmaceutical drug, even when this has been its priority for many decades. 

In 2018, Jeremy Hunt, UK's Health Secretary, although refusing to set up a compensation scheme for the families, set up another enquiry. The Cumberlege Report was published two years later, in July 2020. It concluded that the government had an ethical responsibility to provide financial help to families harmed by sodium valproate, to cover the costs of care, and detailed how a 'disjointed, siloed, unresponsive and defensive healthcare system had, for over two decades, failed to fully appreciate or act on the harmful effects of sodium valproate; but (as the Sunday Times article said) the government continue to refuse to compensate the families.

So still nothing has happened. Patients are still not being told of the dangers by doctors; they are still not getting information leaflets with their drugs; and it would seem that even the warnings given on drug boxes are being obscured (intentionally?) by pharmacists. Clearly, we are not supposed to know!

WHAT THE SUNDAY TIMES ARTICLE DOES NOT TELL US

So why has the Sunday Times suddenly decided to publish this information on sodium valproate? The mainstream media does not usually criticise its main source of income - the advertising budgets of the pharmaceutical companies! Perhaps they did so for the same reason Jeremy Hunt agreed to set up the 2018 enquiry - the evidence of patient harm has become so serious it could no longer be ignored!

1. Is Sodium Valproate safe?

The Sunday Times have not been entirely disloyal to its paymasters! Several times the article tells us that sodium valproate is a safe drug, other than for pregnant women, of course.

SODIUM VALPROATE IS MOST CERTAINLY NOT A SAFE DRUG!

The horrendous adverse drug reactions caused by sodium valporate are well known to the CME, and is part of their medical literature that everyone can see for themselves. So if anyone believes that this is a safe drug they should go to, for example, the Drugs.com website to read for themselves just how serious its so-called 'side effects' can be - even for people who are not pregnant! This is a very, very long list of very serious adverse drug reactions.

2. Is this really a one-off medical scandal?

Yet there are other issues that have not been tackled by the Sunday Times article, questions that should have been, but were not asked. Sodium valproate is the tip of a very deep iceberg. The mainstream media always likes to present these problems as 'isolated', one-off indiscretions, that are not being repeated anywhere else within pharmaceutical medicine.

Sodium valproate is not an isolated case, there many other drugs in the same situation as sodium valproate. These are drugs that are usually described by doctors as being "entirely safe", but in effect they are drugs waiting to be banned because of the patient harm they are already known to cause. And just as it has taken 50 years to ascertain that sodium valproate is dangerous, the same applies to almost any pharmaceutical drug anyone would like to mention.

And the conventional medical profession has been dishonest, for so long, about this drug, how many other drugs are being 'protected' by doctors, and the CME generally?

3. Patient Choice and Informed Consent.

The experience of women who have taken sodium valproate, as described in the Sunday Times article, clearly shows that a decision was taken NOT to inform them about possible adverse drug reactions. It might alarm them, and the paternalist CME wanted to protect them from such fear! Or perhaps they wanted to use this drug, however dangerous it was known to be, because it was all that they had to offer.

Doctors know best. All patients are expected to do is what they are told to do by the medical experts. Take the 'safe' pills - and take your chances. The danger of being given complete information is that patients might decide for themselves, they might make an"informed choice" and say "No". Patient choice is not good for the business of selling drugs. And it patients refuse, they will then discover that conventional medicine has nothing else to offer.

4. The CME, NHS, honesty and transparency

The NHS is not a transparent organisation, it is not even an honest one! It has sold out totally to pharmaceutical medicine, and conventional medicine has much to hide. We saw it recently over maternity care. Sodium valproate has demonstrated, yet again, that the NHS has clearly been involved in deliberate obfuscation, cover-up, and lies. It is clear that the CME has made a number of calculated decisions over the last 50 years:

• not to tell women about the dangers of the drug;
• doctors asked to tell pregnant women about the dangers, have failed to do so; 
• drugs packaged in plain boxes, without information leaflets;
• and if there are warnings on a box they have been (intentionally/deliberately ??) covered up with labels.

5. Bankrupting the NHS
It is the use of dangerous, patient harming drugs that is leading to the bankrupting of the NHS, and the growing awareness of the failure of conventional, or pharmaceutical medicine around the world. Sodium valproate demonstrates this as well as any other pharmaceutical drug.

• There is an illness, in this case epilepsy.
• Patients are given a drug to treat for the illness.
• There are serious adverse drug reactions (in this case, at least 20,000 children are damaged, with most requiring medical, social and economic support for the rest of their lives).

This is not a one-off problem affecting just one drug. Most illnesses/diseases can be, and often are caused by pharmaceutical drugs.

Epilepsy itself can be caused by amphetamines and other stimulant drugs, by antipsychotic and antidepressant drugs, by antibiotics and painkillers, by many vaccines, and many other pharmaceutical drugs.

This is why we are sicker now, as a nation, then we have ever been before, why chronic disease, in all its many forms, is now a unprecedented epidemic levels, and rising. 

AND THIS IS THE REAL LESSON OF SODIUM VALPROATE!

Gender Dysphoria, Sexual Orientation and Pharmaceutical Drugs

Gender dysphoria can be an extremely distressing condition for those affected. It can lead to low self-esteem, becoming withdrawn or socially isolated, to depression and anxiety, and personal neglect. It is described by the UK's National Health Service as"

            ".... is a term that describes a sense of unease that a person may have because of a mismatch between their biological sex and their gender identity. This sense of unease or dissatisfaction may be so intense it can lead to depression and anxiety and have a harmful impact on daily life."

It is certainly a relatively new condition. According to Wikipedia, it once had the diagnostic label of "gender identity disorder (GID), but was renamed in 2013 in order to remove the stigma associated with the term 'disorder'.

            "Gender identity disorder first appeared as a diagnosis in 1980, where it appeared under "psychosexual disorders" but the term was used only for the childhood diagnosis. Adolescents and adults received a diagnosis of transsexualism (homosexual, heterosexual, or asexual type)."

 

The controversial debate now happening around the condition makes the situation far worse. It is usually concerned with how trans people should be treated. Should their condition be recognised? Should children be treated for the condition, either to reverse or to confirm or support it? And should trans women be allowed to complete with women in sport? 

 

All these issues should be discussed, but if this is all we discuss the debate about gender dysphoria is both insufficient and inadequate - because it leaves out one crucially important question.

What is the cause? 

The NHS cannot answer this question, stating that "the exact cause of gender dysphoria is unclear". This is the general position of conventional medicine; and as regular readers of this blog, and my "Iatrogenic Disease" E-Book, will know that this statement always makes me suspicious that pharmaceutical drugs might be playing an important causative role.

Wikipedia confirms conventional medicine's 'non-explanation' saying that, "the specific causes of gender dysphoria remain unknown" but then suggests that "genetic factors play a role", and that gender identity "is thought to likely reflect a complex interplay of biological, environmental, and cultural factors". This suggestion succeeds only in making me even more suspicious of the role of drugs!

Gender dysphoria is a new condition and so cannot be genetic! A similar explanation is frequently used for the Autism epidemic, a condition unheard of until the 1940's. So where did these genes come from? Why have they suddenly appeared? Why does conventional medicine not explain?

There may, of course, be other factors at play that has brought trans issues to the fore, such as pollution, radiation, electro-smog, and much else. But what do we know about pharmaceutical drugs to suggest they might play a role? Actually, we know much more than we might imagine!

First, I have written on this subject before, in "Transgender. Sexual Identity. What role are pharmaceutical drugs playing in this? in January 2017 - over 5 years ago. It referenced three articles from the Rxisk website that raised the issue, and spoke specifically about SSRI antidepressants.

            "Given what we know about enduring sexual problems caused by SSRIs, it is reasonable to wonder how a prenatal or childhood exposure would affect a person’s long-term development and functioning. No studies have ever been done to investigate whether children exposed to psychotropic drugs either directly, or during pregnancy, grow up to have an unaffected sexuality."

The information in this blog, and the three references, are worth reading again. What follows is additional information that supports possible links.

For instance, one of my homeopathic colleagues has made a clinical observation that gender dysmorphia can be caused by Risperidone (an antipsychotic drug).

            "It came to my attention that Risperidone can cause gender dysmorphia in some boys. I have several of these cases under my care and I’d never thought to do a Risperidone detox on them up until now. Honestly, our children are being assaulted from so many angles right now that it’s hard to keep up with all the potential threats."

This clinical experience can be certainly be confirmed elsewhere. The drug company Johnson & Johnson was sued in 2012, and settled "out of court", after their antipsychotic drug, Risperidal caused young boys to grow breasts, "some as large as 'D' cup". Five years later, in 2017, the company was sued by over 1,000 men who claimed their antipsychotic drug caused them to grow breasts. These articles demonstrate that Risperidone/Risperidal (it's the same drug) has been promoted for many years, with young boys being specifically targeted.

The Rxisk link with painkillers has also been supported. In 2018, the Daily Mail ran an article in which a man claimed that painkilling drugs "turned him gay". He claimed that he was "a hot-blooded heterosexual and enjoyed dating women before he started taking Pregabalin (Lyrica), but that "he quickly lost his sexual attraction to women and broke up with his girlfriend of six months when prescribed the drug earlier this year." He said that it was only after he started taking Pregabalin, the painkiller highlighted, that his sexual preferences began to change.

The adverse reactions caused by Pregabalin or Lyrica is outlined in the Drugs.com website, and include both the loss of libido, and breast enlargement. In their advice, doctors are warned that the drug causes 'genitouinary issues', such as urinary incontinence, erectile dysfunction, impotence, sexual dysfunction, dysmenorrhoea, breast pain, anorgasmia, albuminuria, dysuria, leukorrhoea, menorrhagia, metrorrhagia, amenorrhoea, dysmenorrhea, menorrhagia, metrorrhagia, and much else. 

We do not need to know all the intimate details of these complicated-sounding conditions to reach the conclusion that this painkilling drug can do something to upset our sexual functioning.

There is also some medical studies that link pharmaceutical drugs with sexual orientation. This USA longitudinal study has demonstrated the association, finding that adolescents with a 'minority sexual orientation' (eg., lesbian, gay and bisexual) are more likely to use more substances (including both 'recreational' and prescription drug use) than their heterosexual peers. The study suggested further research they described as 'essential' - for developing interventions that were critically needed to reduce drug use in this population.

This research is dated May 2010, and there has, to my knowledge, been no such research undertaken in the intervening years.

This is typical of the strategy so often adopted by the conventional medical establishment. Whenever there appears to be a problem with pharmaceutical drugs, it is ignored, there is no further investigation, presumably on the basis of not rocking a profitable boat! Even if there are honest medical scientists out there who might want to look further into this they are unlikely to get the funding to do so. 

Denial is an important element of pharmaceutical medicine!

Another study was published two years earlier, April 2008, "Sexual Orientation and Adolescent Substance Use: a meta-analysis and methodological review". The study found that the odds of Lesbian, Gay and Bi-Sexual youth using substances were, on average, 190% higher than for heterosexual youth.

Another study, published in December 2016, "The Connection between Sexual Orientation and Substance Abuse" made similar findings. The substances that were abused included:

• the misuse of prescription opioids,
• the misuse of prescription tranquillisers,
• the misuse of prescription stimulants,
• the misuse of prescription sedatives.

There are many people, aware of changes to their sexual orientation, who have made the link with pharmaceutical drugs. There is even a website, "The Asexual and Visibility and Education Network", a discussion forum, devoted to the sharing of these experiences. It is interesting to read some of the discussion, and the experience so many have had with pharmaceutical drugs, without being entirely confident about making the association.

So to what extent is conventional medical literature aware that pharmaceutical drugs may play a role in our sexuality, including sexual orientation, and perhaps even gender dysphoria? 

It is limited. The UK's NHS website concurs that "certain medicines can sometimes reduce libido", these including:

• medicine for high blood pressure,
• many types of antidepressants,
• medicine for seizures (fits),
• medicines called antipsychotics,
• medicine for prostate cancer,
• hormonal contraception.

Conventional medical literature shows that the evidence is available. It is well know that many pharmaceutical drugs cause erectile problems, with this Medline Plus website providing a very long list of drugs that do so. And there are a plethora of websites that provide similar warnings, for example, "Drugs that affect sexual pleasure and desire", and  "Seven drugs that can wreck your sex life", and a web search will bring up many, many more.

So conventional medicine is aware of the association between pharmaceutical drugs and our sexuality, but uninterested is making any broader, more fundamental connections. It is not willing to admit the possibility that the drugs they use may be the cause of changes in sexual orientation, and gender dysphoria? We may well ask, though, armed with this knowledge, they are still able to claim that their cause is 'unknown'.

Any link could easily be researched. But I suspect that it won't be. The pharmaceutical industry, and their captive organisations (WHO, national drug regulators, conventional medical science, and national health providers around the world) should be telling us, but they don't as it would be against their vested business interests to do so!

So the cause of sexual orientation and gender dysphoria will remain 'unknown' for many years to come. And if we are not prepared to recognise the cause, we will have to watch as society continues to tear itself apart with the consequences.

So allow me to remind you of the conclusion to my blog, published over 5 years ago. It remains germane!

            ".... as the evidence of a link between pharmaceutical drugs and sexual identity issues is becoming compelling, the pharmaceutical industry is engaged in a massive cover-up, alongside its friends and allies. (We) are, however, pushing up against very powerful and influential forces, whose power and influence depends upon their continuing and ongoing ability to sell drugs, regardless of the harm they cause to patients, or, as it would seem, even the future of the human race!

 

Post Script May 2024

Sexual orientation, gender identity/dysphoria

* are they caused by vaccination as this survey suggests?

"80% of deviations from traditional norms can be ascribed to vaccination?"

This comes from clinical evidence (25 years/5,000 kids).

Is this true? Please take part in survey.

https://kirschsubstack.com/p/survey-indicates-sexual-orientation?publication_id=548354&post_id=144253484&isFreemail=true&r=130nv6&triedRedirect=true

Covid-19. What any competent medical system would have done to avoid social distancing, face masks, lockdowns, and all the damage associated with these policies

We have suffered two awful years with the Covid-19 pandemic - and still it continues. The awfulness has not been so much about the infection, or the illness, or the grossly exaggerated death toll: it has been the dreadful policies that government has pursued in order to combat it. Governments around the world pursued these policies at the behest of medical science, and the pharmaceutical industry that controls them both. 

Social distancing, face masks, lockdown, all of which have led to so much damage to our personal, social, and economic lives. And this is not to mention the vaccines, which government data now shows to have caused so much patient harm. This is now a matter of record, even though most people still don't realise just how damaging they have been - they have not been told.

• So was there a better policy to pursue, one which would have done less harm? 
• Perhaps Natural Medicine would have come up with different ideas.... 

1.    Do not chase the virus. The virus is not really the problem. It only affects people who are vulnerable or susceptible to the virus, the potential host. Social distancing, face masks, and lockdowns are all policies that seek to chase, or more accurately to run away from the invisible enemy. We cannot see the virus; we do not know where it is; so we were told that we have seek it everywhere, to avoid everything in order to make sure we don't come into contact with it, or to pass it on to others. This was wasted effort. For most people it was not necessary.

2. Look after the host. For some people the Covid-19 virus was nasty, and caused them serious problems. Many died from the virus - although nowhere near the 160,000+ that conventional medicine claims. The fact is that most people, most potential hosts, had little or no problem with the virus. They were able to cope with it, without any need for the 'protection' these policies allegedly provided.

3. Protect the potential host via the host's immune system. We live with bacteria and viruses all the time. Our bodies are riddled with them! And, most of the time, our immune system protects us from serious harm.

What we needed, when the 'pandemic' began, was a reliable test able to gauge the strength of our individual's immune system. The New Scientists informed us in September 2021 that there was a cheap Covid-19 antibody test shows that would have informed us about the strength of our personal immunity, and done so within 5 minutes! It was never used because we were too busy "chasing the virus", and protecting people who did not need to be protected!

The NHS website told us that there was a test to check whether someone had already had Covid-19 (and so had a natural immunity to the virus). Go to that website now and you will see that the service was closed down in March 2022 - presumably because the vaccine had been so successful in stopping the spread, and re-spread of the virus!

4.    A Public Campaign to support and strengthen the immune system. The public health campaign we suffered seemed more designed to spread panic about the dangers of the virus than to help anyone protect themselves. We could only flee from the virus, whilst we were waiting for the vaccine - only the vaccine could save us!

This is palpably untrue, and medicine has known this to be untrue for a very long time now. Conventional medicine clearly wanted to re-educate us. Only the vaccine could save us. It was almost as if the immune system no longer existed!

So there was no public campaign to tell everyone what we could all do, in terms of diet, exercise, etc., easily, routinely and cheaply, for ourselves, to protect us from the virus. This is something that I blogged about in March 2021, and was advising from the very start of the pandemic. Conventional medicine ignored our personal responsibility for our own health, to support and strengthen our immunity - we all had to wait, patiently, in fear and isolation, for the vaccine.

5.    Protecting those who need to be protected. In the early stages of the pandemic there was some recognition that there were people with weakened immune systems (not least those patients who were taking immunosuppressant drugs) who had to be protected. This was soon lost behind the new 'understanding' - that we all had to be protected, regardless of the state of our immune system. We all had to lockdown, to wear masks. It was the only way to protect ourselves!

In doing so, in agreeing to the 'solutions' of conventional medical science, we set about destroying our emotional, social and economic lives. In concurring with shutting down normal life in fear of the the virus we mistook two things. It was not the virus that threatened our lives, it was the policies pursued by conventional medicine that did so. We did not have to do it, we should not have done it! There was a more sensible route to protecting ourselves, our society and economy, from the virus.

6.     Keep society running. Keep hospitals, residential homes, schools and workplaces open. Those people who had confidence in their natural immunity should have been allowed to continue living their lives as normal, except perhaps when, and if, they came into contact with vulnerable people who need special protection. That was when we all had a responsibility to keep them safe.

Yet even here, in such situations, some kind of sensible and rational judgement should have been permitted. Was it really necessary for people to die alone, lonely and abandoned? Or to allow them to enter deeper into dementia, never knowing why they had been deserted by loved ones? Or to allow young children to live in a world where they had limited access to education, and where they could not see people's faces?

7.    Prevention. It is important to point out that during the pandemic natural medical therapists, like homeopaths, naturopaths, et al, continued to treat their patients. Indeed, it was a busy, busy time when they had to respond to their patients who were being scared out of their wits by the public campaign of hysteria and fear. The use of natural medical therapies is anathema to the conventional medical establishment, even when the CME had no means of preventing or treating Covid-19. They preferred that everyone waited for the development of the vaccines. They were the only thing that could save us! 

Those of us who knew this was nonsense were able to ignore such self-interested myopia. Most people believed what they were told by the 'experts', the conventional medical establishment, the 'medical science', politicians, governments, conventional medical 'authorities', and the mainstream media - all united together to convey to us the official Covid-19 narrative.

We do no have a medical system that believes in anything other than pharmaceutical medicine. There was no interest in comparing medical therapies, to see which worked best, which had the best outcomes. So the experience and expertise that could have been offered by natural medical therapies were sidelined, locked down alongside everyone else, and ignored.

8.    Treatment. Conventional medicine had no treatment. Once some had contracted the virus it was a matter of 'waiting to see', 'time would tell'. And it was not just the use of natural medical therapies that could have been called upon. Conventional medicine, and medical science knew that only the vaccine would save us. They had not other treatment, so we all had to wait.

Yet even that was untrue! Some conventional medical doctors said that some of their old drugs, like Ivermectin and the cheap steriod drug, dexamethasone were effective treatments. So, as thousands died, waiting for the vaccine, were these drugs used? They were not! At least not outside a small section of the conventional  medical fraternity who did not buy into the official narrative.

So there were alternatives. The government selected the policies, and imposed them on everyone. Anyone with a different view were expected to conform, threatened with legal penalties if they didn't, and not only were given no voice, but were completely censored in the mainstream media, and on social media too.

We are now paying the price of misguided policies.

In so many different ways.