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Showing posts with label epidemics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label epidemics. Show all posts

Monday, 10 August 2020

Homeopathy and the history of treating of infectious epidemics. Why homeopathy will always outperform pharmaceutical medicine.

Mankind has always suffered from epidemics of infectious disease. Each infection has killed countless people, some killing large sections of the populations. They have always caused panic. Until the 19th century there was no treatment for them. So when people contracted the illness they either died, or they recovered - with friends and family watching on, scared and helpless.

Conventional or pharmaceutical medicine still has never had treatment for these epidemics. Medical science has been able to explain their cause for the last 100-150 years; but the coronavirus COVID-19 has demonstrated, beyond any doubt, that it still has no treatment to offer. Those who have contracted the virus have either died or recovered - with friends and family watching on, scared and helpless. The conventional medical establishment has always admitted that this is so.

Washing hand, social distancing, social and economic lockdown - these are not treatments: they are responses seeking to reduce the transmission of the infection - nothing more than this.

I have just listened to a BBC programme that discussed two flu epidemics in Tudor England. The first was in 1551, known as "The Sweat", thought to be a virulent form of influenza where people were well in the morning, and dead by the evening. It caused a huge death toll, and caused great terror. There was no explanation for it. This was time of protestant reformation when the government was involved in asset stripping the Church; so the reason for the epidemic was explained in moral terms, it was a religious judgement on the political changes of the time - one way or the other.

In 1558 there was another flu epidemic which reputedly killed at least 1/5th of the population. Edward VI and Mary were now dead; Elizabeth was Queen; and it was mainly the old Catholic ruling classes, the nobility, bishops, priests, and justices, who suffered badly. The epidemic was described as "a huge gift to protestantism". But again, other than this, there was no explanation of the cause; and there was, of course, no treatment.
 
The conventional medical establishment continued in this vein for the next 300 years. By the mid 19th century some explanation of causation was forthcoming: but a further 160 years went by without effective treatment. Even the horrors of 'Spanish Flu' in 1918 did not lead to finding conventional medical treatment. This was a vicious form of influenza that affected over 500 million people around the world, and killed over 100 million of them - mainly in the age group 20 to 40 years old. Again, conventional medicine was helpless; doctors had no treatment: nurses helped care for the victims as they died. So it was said, correctly, that nurses were more helpful to patients than doctors; and this has proven to be the case more recently with coronavirus CPVID-19.

Indeed, so great was the catastrophe of 1918, following on as it did from the World War, governments around the world began to introduce health ministries; the political pressure for better treatment began. The pharmaceutical industry, encouraged by government money, tried hard to discover effective treatment. When another serious epidemic arose there was a determination that this would not happen again. A vaccine was introduced in 1930's; but there has been little else; and when COVID-19 came, there was no treatment available - not even a vaccine.

Conventional medicine must be the only industry, and only business, that can survive for over 500 years without a viable product to offer us when we need it.

In contrast, homeopathy was only mooted in 1793. It developed quickly during the 19th century, and during this time, it consistently outperformed conventional medicine in the event of regular infectious epidemics around the world. Julian Winston researched this, and some of his finding have been written here. He made use of Thomas Lindsley Bradford, MD, book called "The Logic of Figures" in which he collected statistics that compared outcome of conventional medicine and homeopathy in the treatment of 19th century epidemics.

               "From its earliest days, homeopathy has been able to treat epidemic diseases with a substantial rate of success, when compared to conventional treatments. It was these successes that placed the practice of homeopathy so firmly in the consciousness of people world-wide."

I have outlined some of these epidemics, and the statistics about treatment, in a previous blog, Infectious Disease and Medical Treatment. A brief history arising from Coronavirus COVID-19. 19th century evidence clearly and regularly indicated that homeopathy outperformed conventional medicine; not difficult, perhaps, when we realise that, then as now, it had no treatment available to treat any of them. Conventional medicine did not like this, and soon they made their first attempt to hide their own incompetence from the public view. 
 
Cholera 1954. An epidemic of cholera in London was notable in that this was the first time the medical community was able to trace the outbreak to a source (a public water pump), and when the pump was closed, the epidemic ceased. However, it was significant for another reason. It was the first time conventional medicine sought to repress the success of homeopathy. 

                "The House of Commons asked for a report about the various methods of treating the epidemic. When the report was issued, the homeopathic figures were not included. The House of Lords asked for an explanation, and it was admitted that if the homeopathic figures were to be included in the report, it would "skew the results." 
 
Indeed they certainly did 'skew' the results!
 
                        "The suppressed report revealed that under allopathic care the mortality was 59.2% while under homeopathic care the mortality was only 9%."
 
It should be noted that, like conventional medicine, homeopathy knew nothing about the 'public water pump', but it was still able to treat the disease successfully. And homeopathy continued to develop an outstanding record of success from that time onwards, and in particular, for the deadly 1918 Spanish flu epidemic. Conventional doctors lost 28% of their influenza patients to death, whilst homeopathic doctors lost only 2%.
 
One reason for this ongoing ability to treat new epidemics, and new germs, is that whilst pharmaceutical medicine needs to know about 'the virus', 'the bacteria', 'the micro-organism', and how it operates, homeopathy doesn't. And as each new epidemic is usually based on new germs, conventional medicine has always found that it is unable to provide treatment. This has been the case with COVID-19; and the same will apply with any new infectious epidemic, however far into the future it might appear.

By contrast, homeopathy treats illness according to the principle of 'like curing like', so all the homeopath has to know, when faced with any 'new' epidemic, is the patient's symptoms so that a matching remedy can be identified. This is what homeopaths do all the time, and have been doing during the COVID panic, with great success, throughout the world, and particularly in Cuba and parts of India, where governments are favourably disposed to non-conventional treatments.
 
By contrast, conventional science once again had to panic. It has no treatment. So it is busy chasing a virus it cannot see, through non-treatments like hand washing, social distancing, and social and economic lockdown. The nonsense, and the cruelty of these 'non-treatments' are now leading to many people asking important questions.
  • why is there no treatment?
  • why can't people see their parent is residential care?
  • why are people dying in hospital with relatives unable to see them?
  • why can't I attend the wedding of good friends and relatives?
  • why, if children go to school, do pubs have to shut down?
  • why are masks necessary now when they were not a few months ago?

Non-sense inputs produce non-sense outputs. As long as out trust is place in this failed system of medicine it will continue to be so. It is time we learnt from history.



 

Friday, 15 November 2019

HOW EFFECTIVE IS CONVENTIONAL MEDICINE? Why are there no pharmaceutical drugs that can cope with chronic disease?

Chronic disease is now rife throughout the so-called 'developed' world. These diseases are all running at unprecedented levels. They have become epidemics. And conventional medicine has no effective treatment, notably pharmaceutical drugs, to deal with them. So how effective is conventional medicine?

To find the answer to this important question we do not have to look beyond the published literature of the conventional medical establishment itself.

Whilst researching and writing my 'Why Homeopathy?' E-Book I was amazed how many times, and for how many illnesses, conventional medicine had to admit that it had little or no effective treatment. I gathered my information on conventional medical treatment from the UK's NHS website, surely a reliable source, which states that the website is "Your complete guide to conditions, symptoms and treatments...". Here is a sample of statements taken from this website about the way it treats these serious illnesses, all now running at epidemic levels.

Alzheimers Disease          "There's currently no cure for Alzheimer's disease. But there is medication available that can temporarily reduce the symptoms. Support is also available to help someone with the condition, and their family, cope with everyday life'.

Vascular Dementia
          "Treatment can help prevent further damage to the brain in people with vascular dementia and may slow down its progression. But there's currently no cure for the condition or a way to reverse the damage that's already occurred.

Frontotemporal Dementia
          "There's currently no cure for frontotemporal dementia, but there are treatments that can help manage some of the symptoms."

Osteoarthritis
          "There's no cure for osteoarthritis, but the condition does not necessarily get any worse over time."

Rheumatoid Arthritis
          "Although there's no cure for rheumatoid arthritis, early treatment and support (including medicine, lifestyle changes, supportive treatments and surgery) can reduce the risk of joint damage and limit the impact of the condition."

Asthma
          "There's currently no cure for asthma, but treatment can help control the symptoms so you're able to live a normal, active life."

ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder)
          "Treatment for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) can help relieve the symptoms and make the condition much less of a problem in day-to-day life."

Autism
The NHS does not mention treatment, and refuses to accept that this condition is an illness (so therefore does not need treatment)!
          "Being autistic does not mean you have an illness or disease. It means your brain works in a different way from other people.It's something you're born with or first appears when you're very young.If you're autistic, you're autistic your whole life. Autism is not a medical condition with treatments or a "cure". But some people need support to help them with certain things.

Chronic Fatigue Syndrome / ME
          Treatments for CFS/ME aim to help relieve your symptoms...CFS/ME can last a long time, but most people's symptoms will improve with time."

COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease)
          "There's currently no cure for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), but treatment can help slow the progression of the condition and control the symptoms.

Irritable Bowel
          "It's usually a lifelong problem. It can be very frustrating to live with and can have a big impact on your everyday life.There's no cure, but diet changes and medicines can often help control the symptoms."

Crohn's Disease
          "There's currently no cure for Crohn's disease, but treatment can control or reduce the symptoms and help stop them coming back.

MS (Multiple Sclerosis)
          "There's currently no cure for multiple sclerosis (MS), but it's possible to treat the symptoms with medicines and other treatments."

And so it continues...... There are many, many more serious illnesses for which the NHS makes similar admissions on its website. Conventional medicine has no treatment for them - and this is admitted from within their own literature.

In addition, there are many other illnesses that are currently being treated with antibiotic drugs, and when resistance to these drugs becomes total this means that these too will become 'untreatable'.

And, of course, illnesses which are treatable are treated with pharmaceutical drugs that have dreadful side effects which leads to the creation of more serious illness.

So when the NHS, and other conventional health services throughout the developed world, are in constant and serious financial trouble, it is entirely predictable. Conventional medicine has no effective treatment available to them to treat the diseases that have become epidemic.
  • If the conventional medical establishment were more honest about their ineffectiveness, less arrogant about the medical claims, this might be more acceptable.
  • If the conventional medical establishment was more humble, and look beyond its myopic obsession with pharmaceutical drugs, it might be able to look towards natural medical therapies, like homeopathy, which do have effective treatments for these chronic diseases.
  • If medicine, and medical organisations like the NHS, was willing to be more co-operative, if it was able to take the best available treatments from every medical therapy, and offer them to patients, we would all benefit.
But this would seriously undermine the ascendancy, the dominance, the control and the profitability of the pharmaceutical industry. So for medical institutions like the NHS it remains a long way off.

But it is just a short distance for the individual patient!

Tuesday, 27 August 2019

Conventional Medicine & Chronic Disease - the desperate search for excuses for modern disease epidemics - and what is causing them - and to confuse patients with medical 'science'

There has been an explosion of chronic diseases, many running at epidemic levels for decades now. And year by year they still increase, with conventional medicine is apparently unable to do anything about it. Yet all these disease epidemics have three things in common.

(i) They are all, at least in part, caused by pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines.
(ii) Conventional medicine knows this - the evidence is in their medical literature.
(iii) Doctors deny they cause disease - and instead seek alternative explanations.

So when the conventional medical establishment is responsible for causing this level of medical mayhem, and is quite incapable of doing anything about it, what do they do?
  • Watch on, hopelessly, as the truth emerges? 
  • Wait until patients begin to ask searching questions? 
  • Prepare themselves for yet more failure and criticism? 
  • Or do they fight back? 
They do the latter. Lubricated and armed with massive pharmaceutical profits, and determined to maintain their monopoly in health care provision in most of the developed world, they do several things which I have regularly outlined in this blog. They ensure:
  • that politicians, governments, medical science, and the mainstream media are kept firmly in line, dependent, subservient and uncritical.
  • that all major official health organisations throughout the world (the FDA, CDC, NHS, NICE, WHO, et al), and Patient Support groups, are all under their total control.
AND THEN THEY GO ONE STEP FURTHER...

They offer alternative explanations for the parlous state of our health, silly, light-weight excuses that are designed to deflect attention from why our health is getting worse, year on year.

Recently, for example, the e-magazine 'What Doctor's Don't Tell You' has recently featured an article "Bad sleep more to do with wine than coffee", perhaps a legitimate question, perhaps a legitimate piece of research.

But a more legitimate question might have been to asked - how many pharmaceutical drugs are known to cause sleeplessness, or insomnia. The answer is clear, and can be found by reading conventional medicine's own literature. There are many such drugs, ranging from Alpha blockers, beta blockers, statins, corticosteroids, antidepressants, anti-histamines, ACE inhibitors, Angiotensin 11-receptor blockers, Cholinesterase inhibitors, and many others.

All these drugs are far more likely to cause insomnia than either wine or coffee - yet they are rarely, if ever mentioned or discussed. Do such articles seek to deflect our attention?

Epidemics of Chronic Disease
Every chronic disease you can wish to mention is now running at unprecedented levels. I have outlined some of these epidemics elsewhere, in my E-Book, "The Failure of Conventional Medicine". The Chapter on "Epidemics of Chronic Disease" covers the modern epidemics of:
  • Allergy
  • Alzheimer's (Dementia)
  • Arthritis
  • Asthma
  • ADHD
  • Autism
  • Birth Defects
  • Cancer
  • Heart disease
  • Chronic Fatigue (ME)
  • COPD (Bronchitis)
  • Diabetes
  • Irritable Bowel, Ulcerative Colitis, Crohns
  • Mental Health
  • MS
  • Osteoporosis
  • Violence
  • and many others....
For each of these I have outlined startling statistics that clearly demonstrates that these diseases are all running at unprecedented levels. Yet for many of these diseases I describe how the conventional medical establishment can provide no clear or satisfactory explanation for what is causing them. What they usually tell us is that they do not know!

Yet for all these diseases pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines are known to  be a significant cause, and this is evidenced within the literature of conventional medicine itself. In other words, doctors know that pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines have, in large measure, caused of the rise and rise of chronic disease during the last 70-100 years. It's just that they are not very keen on telling us! Conventional medicine has developed another technique for diverting attention and blame, for obfuscation - courtesy of medical science.
  • It is constantly looking to deflect the blame for these epidemics on other social and environmental factors.
This is why, most days, we are regaled with news of new 'scientific' insights into the possible links and causal factors of some disease or other. They are explanations that increasingly confuse and frighten people - should we stop drinking coffee? Or wine? Or both? So in this way disease is linked to a variety of factors - these are just a few that spring to mind:
  • genetics - the presence, or absence, of a particular gene
  • eating too much red meat: or not eating enough red meat.
  • fast food diets, containing too much fat, or too much cholesterol
  • too much sugar and salt, or not enough fresh food
  • vegetarianism, or veganism
  • environment pollution
  • lack of exercise; or to too much exercise
  • breast milk which is good for health; or alternatively it is bad for health
  • etc., etc.
It is not that these factors do not have some impact on our health. It is that for conventional medicine this kind of silly medical science achieves something else too.

They are conventional medicine's desperate attempt to explain what (to them) is inexplicable. 
It deflects attention away from the culpability of a dominant medical system that for over 70 years has contributed to making us sicker than we have ever been before.

This kind of medical science represents an attempt to persuade us that it is genuinely looking for the cause of illness and disease, but is, in fact, merely deflecting attention away from one of the most important causes of all. Pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines. For the last 70-100 years we have been persuaded that 'pill-popping' is the route to good health, but these generations of drug takers have proved just one thing - that they are actually causing enormous harm to the very patients they are supposed to be treating.

So let's have a closer look at some of these epidemics of chronic disease (based on my free-to-read 'Failure of Conventional Medicine' E-Book). For each disease there is (i) an unwillingness to focus on causation, and (ii) an unwillingness or failure to inform us that conventional medical literature knows that pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines are known to cause them.

Allergy
This is said to be an 'auto-immune' reaction - but with no corresponding explanation of what causes these totally inappropriate auto-immune responses, or an admission that 'auto-immune' reactions are known to be caused by many pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines

So whilst conventional medicine can describe what an allergy IS it always fails to say what CAUSES it, preferring to state that it's the body’s immune system failing to react to an allergen. The real question, of course, is not WHAT is happening - but what is CAUSING IT!

Drugs such as painkillers, antibiotics, anticonvulsant drugs, vaccines, and many other drugs that intentionally interfere with the autoimmune system, are known to cause allergy. 

For more information on the pharmaceutical drugs known to cause Allergy, visit this website.

Alzheimer's (Dementia)
Dementia is invariably blamed by conventional medicine on an 'ageing population, or to dying brain cells. This is an explanation that is completely oblivious to the fact that dementia is now affecting young children, adolescents and younger adults, often called 'early onset dementia' with little or no explanation for why younger people are now suffering from dementia.

Other excuses are that people with dementia were not diagnosed before the 20th century, so more people suffered from dementia than we realise, and anyway, people are now living longer.

The relationship between pharmaceutical drugs and dementia is now well documented! The BNF (British National Formulary) highlights many drugs associated with the side effect 'confusion', 'memory loss', and other symptoms of dementia. These include the flu vaccine, sleeping pills, anticholinergic drugs, proton pump inhibitors, antidepressant and antipsychotic drugs, statins, and many more are now known to cause the symptoms of dementia.  

For more information on the pharmaceutical drugs known to cause Alzheimer's disease and dementia, visit this website.

Arthritis
This disease has witnessed the most alarming rise in recent decades. So what does the conventional medicine believe is causing this epidemic? The NHS website says that rheumatoid arthritis "is an autoimmune condition, which means it is caused by the body's immune system attacking itself". They go on to say that what causes this is "unknown"!

Arthritis is often blamed on 'wear and tear', an explanation that ignores the increasingly sedentary lifestyle led by most arthritis sufferers. Factors such as bad diet, and increased sugar consumption, are also often implicated by medical science (quite rightly), but conventional medicine continues to blame 'ageing', although the statistics show that an increasing number of children, adolescents and younger adults now suffer from severe arthritis.

What is rarely admitted is that conventional drug treatment involves the use of painkillers, which temporarily ‘kills’ the pain of arthritis, but at the cost of increasing the toxicity within our body. So in the longer term pharmaceutical drug treatment only deepens and worsens arthritis pain. Many sufferers find that taking more painkillers progressively leads to the need to take more, and stronger drugs. So taking pharmacetucial drugs usually involves a vicious circle of increasing pain and disability. Yet there are many other drugs known to cause arthritic conditions.  

For more information on the pharmaceutical drugs that are known to cause arthritis, and related conditions, visit this website.

Asthma
When writing the first edition of "The Failure of Conventional Medicine", in 2007, it was estimated that 1 in 13 people in Britain, and throughout the world, suffered from it, that 180,000 died from asthma, and that children were suffering from it most. Eight years later, in 2015, Asthma UK provided the following facts about asthma describing how this epidemic was still increasing.

So what has caused the asthma epidemic, according to the conventional medicine? Again, the NHS gives its usual response! “It's not clear exactly what causes asthma, although it is likely to be a combination of factors.”

The most popular explanation is environmental pollution, and there is, of course, more than an element of truth in this attribution, which is leading to demands to reduce such pollution.

Yet it is also know that pharmaceutical drugs have contributed to the rise and rise of asthma! Common painkillers, like aspirin and paracetamol (acetaminophen), taken routinely for decades by so many people are known to cause asthma. The DPT, and other vaccines, are also know to cause upper respiratory track infections. And over 20 studies have found that antibiotic drugs are also implicated.
But because this link is largely ignored there is no similar reaction to do something about the drugs and vaccines that are contributing to asthma.

For more information on the pharmaceutical drugs known to cause asthma, and related conditions, visit this website.

ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder)
The first time this condition was described was in 1943 by the Austrian-American psychiatrist, Leo Kanner. In 2015, the National Autistic Society’s website said that in Britain, there are around 700,000 autistic people, more that 1:100 of the population. 

So what does the conventional medicine believe has caused this epidemic? The NHS provides its usual, unhelpful answer. “The exact cause of attention deficit hyperacivity disorder (ADHD) is not fully understood, although a combination of factors is thought to be responsible.”

So again, is conventional medicine itself a possible cause? Pesticides, sugary drinks, and artificial food colourings have been linked - but there are a large number of pharmaceutical drugs known to cause ADHD, including anaesthetic drugs, painkillers, antidepressant drugs, and common children’s medicines such as Benylin, Calpol, Tizylis and Sudafed.

Yet perhaps the main culprit are childhood vaccinations, particularly the DPT and MMR vaccines. Such a suggestion is effectively a ‘no-go’ area for conventional medicine though. They refuse to believe it, and refuse to investigate the possibility. Vaccines, they insist, are entirely safe!


Autism (ASD - Autistic Spectrum Disorder)
Autism has increased to quite staggering proportions throughout the 'developed' world (the world that uses pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines). In 2008, when the first edition of "The Failure of Conventional Medicine" was written, the Autism Society of America said it was the fastest growing developmental disability in children, with a growth rate of between 10-17% per year. It stated that during the 1990’s, whilst the population of the USA grew by 13%, disabilities increased by 16%, and Autism by a massive 172%. Eight years later, in 2015, the Autism Society of America’s website estimated that in 2015 about 1% of the world population has ASD.

So what does conventional medicine think is causing this epidemic? The NHS website again offers its usual explanation! "The exact causes of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are unknown, although it is thought that several complex genetic and environmental factors are involved.”

So conventional medicine has no explanation for Autism. Yet it adamantly refuses to hear any suggestion that childhood vaccines are to blame. So doctors say they don't know what causes Autism - but they do know, with the utmost certainty, what does NOT cause it!

So once again conventional medicine seeks to deflect our attention. For instance, we are often told that the rise of autism is due to 'increased awareness', suggesting that previous generations of parents were either too stupid to observe that their children were 'different' in the way they responded to stimuli, or so lacking in care for their children they did not bother to report it!

Birth Defects
There is an ongoing debate within conventional medical literature concerning the effect certain drugs have on causing birth defects when taken during pregnancy. Yet, when it comes to informing us it is routinely denied. It has been estimated that about 1 in 33 babies born in the USA now has a birth defect, whilst the estimate in Britain is about 1 in 40. So how is the link with pharmaceutical drugs deflected?
Often birth defects are described as ‘congenital’. Wikipedia describes explains that there are two main types, “The first is caused by genetic abnormalities, which are hereditary. The second is caused by conditions (such as infectious diseases) which a baby gets from its mother”.

Yet it can quickly be established that there are many pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines that are known to cause birth defects when mothers take them during pregnancy. The Thalidomide scandal of the 1960's could not be deflected, but conventional medicine has now become more adept at doing so! Diet, stress and environmental pollution now play an important role in such deflection.

Yet many drugs, including entire drug groups are now implicated in causing birth defects, including  new diseases, such as FACS (Foetal Anti-Convulsive Syndrome). Yet still, there is little public acceptance of the link with pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines.
Cancer
There is evidence of cancer in human populations from the very earliest times. Yet the levels cancer has now reached are unpredented, to the extent that some argue that cancer is a ‘modern’ disease. Conventional medicine does not accept this, but the prodigious growth of cancer during the 20th century is not easily repudiated. 

Instead it argues that the cause of the cancer epidemic is about diet, or smoking, or an ageing population, and similar. The reason is clear. Cancer, the 'Big-C'  has been the highest profile disease for many decades, and massive amounts of money have been raised and spent on cancer research - without there being any safe or effective cure for cancer being found. 

Cancer was once considered to be a disease of old age, but this is no longer the case. It has been estimated that the main disease-related cause of death in USA's children, aged 1 to 14, is cancer. It is second only to accidents among all causes of childhood mortality, with leukemia and malignancies of the central nervous system now are the most common types of childhood cancers.

Future projections see the incidence of cancer continuing to rise. So what is causing this ongoing epidemic?
  • Are people smoking more?
  • Is our diet going to continue getting worse?
  • Or is there another explanation?
It is well known that many pharmaceutical drugs, tested and pronounced as being ‘entirely safe’, have subsequently been proven to be carcinogenic. The BMJ published this list of such drugs in 2005. So at least part of the explanation for the dramatic increase in cancer should be laid at the door of conventional medicine, which must be aware of this but does not tell us, preferring to deflect our attention to other factors.

Cardiovascular (Heart) Disease
Cardiovascular disease (CVD) disease has been the leading cause of death throughout the western world for both men and women for decades. This is not a new epidemic, it's an old one. But the increased availability of conventional medical drugs over the last 70 to 80 years has done little to improve the situation. Statistics from the British Heart Foundation outlined the enormity of the problem in Britain in 2015.

So does conventional medicine have any idea about what causes CVD? As usual, the NHS website states that it is caused by several factors, all them, to varying degrees, deflectory, including high cholesterol, high blood pressure, smoking, diabetes and thrombosis (a blood clot). As usual there is no mention of pharmaceutical drugs as a cause of CVD. 

For more information on the pharmaceutical drugs known to cause Heartt and Cardiovascular disease, visit this website.

Chronic Fatigue (ME)
For many years, prior to 2002, conventional medicine used quite another strategy for deflecting our attention. It was an illness that did not exist. It was dismissed as 'yuppie flu', the sufferers being lazy, faking all the symptoms. Its epidemic rise led to a 2007 NICE report that said that CFS/ME had become “a relatively common illness”.

So can conventional medicine tell us what is causing this new disease? The is what the NHS website tells us. “Exactly what causes chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) is unknown, but there are several theories.” These theories link the condition with glandular fever, with a bacterial or viral infection, a hormonal imbalance, problems with the immune system, psychiatric problems, traumatic events - or a combination of all these factors. As far as conventional medicine is concerned there is no evidence that pharmaceutical drugs are implicated in the rise of CFS/ME.

However, conventional medical literature itself suggests that this might be another autoimmune condition. But as usual it fails to tell us what is causing the body’s main defense mechanism to turn against itself, but with no mention that pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines are part of the problem.

For more information on the pharmaceutial drugs and vaccines known to cause Chronic Fatigue, or ME, visit this website.

COPD - Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (Bronchitis)

COPD has many names, including - chronic obstructive airways disease, chronic obstructive lung disease, chronic airflow limitation, and chronic airflow obstruction. COPD was once known by more familiar names, notably chronic bronchitis, emphysema, bronchiectasis, and asthma.

In the first edition my 'Failure of Conventional Medicine' book, written in 2007, it was already the 5th biggest killer in the UK, killing more people than breast, prostate or bowel cancer. It was described as "one of the commonest respiratory conditions of adults in the developed world", and one that it "poses an enormous burden to society both in terms of direct cost to healthcare services and indirect costs to society through loss of productivity". The following statistics were taken from the Priory.Com website.
  •  COPD was the fourth commonest cause of death in middle aged to elderly men in the western world.
  • It was estimated that in the UK 18% of males, 14% of females aged 40-68 years, developed features of COPD, and that 3 million people were affected, causing 30,000 deaths annually.
  • In the USA, 13.6% of males and 11.8% of females aged 65-74 years are thought to have COPD.
At the same time statistics produced by the American Lung Association showed that 15 million Americans suffer from COPD and claimed the lives of 87,000 Americans in 1992. The COPD Foundation website shows how COPD, then at epidemic levels, has continued to rise.

               "COPD affects an estimated 30 million individuals in the USA....The National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute estimates that 12 million adults have COPD and another 12 million are undiagnosed  or developing COPD. The World Health Organisation estimated 210 million individuals worldwide have COPD and total deaths were expected to increase more than 30% in the next 10 years".

So in over a decade conventional medicine has been unable to prevent these increased levels of COPD, nor do they appear to believe that it will be able to prevent in increasing further in future. It continues to do so. Yet during this time smoking, once considered a major cause of this disease, has been drastically reduced.

Pharmaceutical drugs, once again, are rarely mentioned.


Diabetes
Diabetes is a serious disease that can lead to blindness, kidney failure, heart disease, stroke and limb amputation following nerve damage, and many other diseases. In the 20th century insulin treatment was hailed as a significant breakthrough. It was instrumental in raising the profile of conventional medicine, and the belief that the application of ‘science’ to medicine would eventually make the world a healthier place.

The problem with insulin, like so many conventional medical treatments, is that it a short-term ‘mechanical’ fix. The body does not produce insulin for itself (or it is unable to use the insulin it does produce) so insulin is introduced artificially. Whilst not criticising the importance of such 'mechanical' fixes it is wrong to present them as 'cures'.

There has been an epidemic rise in diabetes in the latter half of the 20th century. Diabetes UK provided these figure in 2015. 
  • The estimated diabetes prevalence for adults aged 20 to 79 worldwide in 2014 was 387 million, and expected to affect 592 million people by 2035.
  • The International Diabetes Federation (IDF) estimated that in 2013 five countries had more than 10 million people with diabetes.It is estimated that more than one in 16 people in the UK has diabetes.
  • There are 3.9 million people living with diabetes in the USA. 
  • Around 700 people a day are diagnosed with diabetes, the equivalent of one person every two minutes.Since 1996, the number of people with diabetes in the UK has more than doubled from 1.4 million to 3.3 million.
  • There are 3.3 million people diagnosed with diabetes in the UK (2014). By 2025, this is estimated to rise to 5 million people.It is estimated that there are around 590,000 people in the UK who have diabetes but have not been diagnosed.
  • This gives a UK average prevalence of 6.2% in adults.
These statistics demonstrate that there is now a worldwide epidemic of diabetes. So what does conventional medicine think is causing it? NHS Choices says the the cause of diabetes is that the pancreas does not produce enough insulin to maintain normal blood glucose levels, or the body is unable to use the insulin it produces. Again this is a description of the illness, it is not the cause

If a causal explanation is given it is invariably linked to bad diet, and particularly to sugar, and whilst undoubtedly this strongly linked to diabetes, it is used to deflect attention away from another well-documented link - pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines.There is even a condition named after one of the offending drugs, know as ‘steroid-induced diabetes’. Steroid drug and inhalers are, of course, widely used in the treatment of asthma, especially children. Diabetes.co.uk, who describe themselves as ‘the global diabetes community’, supplies a list of five major pharmaceutical drug types known to cause diabetes. These are:

     •     Corticosteroids
     •     Thiazide diuretics
     •     Beta-blockers
     •     Antipsychotics, such as Zyprexa and Seroquel
     •     Statins

Yet antibiotics are also suspected of causing diabetes. The magazine WDDTY (December 2006) published an article by Dr Lisa Landymore-Lim, who carried out a pilot study of drug-prescribing among juvenile diabetics, and she outlined her evidence for suggesting a link between the excessive use of antibiotics and diabetes.


Irritable Bowel (IBS), Crohns Disease, Ulcerative Colitis
Serious new illnesses are developing that affect our stomach. Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) is a painful and distressing condition that is becoming increasingly common. It is estimated that it now affects about one-third of the population in some way, at some time, depending on how it is defined or measured. The symptoms of IBS may include abdominal pain and spasm, diarrhoea, constipation, and can take more serious forms, such as Crohns Disease and Ulcerative Colitis.

And in recent years many non-stomach diseases have been linked to a poorly function gut. So why is the modern gut suffering from these diseases, and contributing to other diseases? It has been estimated that 9 million people suffer from IBS in the UK, and that 64,061 people died of the disease in 2002. But reliable figures for IBS, and related conditions such as Crohns Disease and ulcerative colitis are difficult to ascertain

IBS, and related conditions, are yet another disease for which the conventional medical establishment struggles to identify causation. NHS Choices says that “the exact cause of irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) is unknown, but most experts think that it's related to problems with digestion and increased sensitivity of the gut".

There is little doubt that the cause of the IBS epidemic has much to do with the food that we eat, depleted as it is from over-farmed and over-fertilised soils, contaminated by herbicides and pesticides, and heavily processed by big food companies. 

Yet conventional, drug-based medicine cannot deflect all the blame  Most pharmaceutical drugs are taken by mouth, so pass immediately to the stomach. The gut, therefore, is the most likely organ of the body to be subjected to adverse drug reactions. And the purpose of antibiotic drugs is to indiscriminately kill the bacteria of the stomach. They unbalance and destroy the gut microbiiolme - quite deliberately.

So perhaps it is not too much of a surprise that we face epidemic levels of these stomach ailments. The Right Diagnosis website provides a very long list of over 1,000 pharmaceutical drugs that are known to cause stomach upsets! Many are the most common, frequently taken drugs, with painkillers such as aspirin and antibiotics.


Mental Health
When pharmaceutical drugs seek to ‘force’ the body into compliance, the body will resists, and consequently a new dis-ease is created. One of the body's principle organs, the brain, might be expected to suffer most. It is, after all, the most sensitive, and in many ways, the most vulnerable of all human organs. And this is, indeed, what we find. 

The statistics for depression, suicide, and related mental health conditions, have risen alarmingly in recent years, particularly in the later half of the 20th, and early 21st century. And it continues to rise, particularly with younger people, alongside corresponding demands for more medical treatment.

Mental health illnesses are all ill-defined, and so difficult to diagnose with any certainty. And causation is equally difficult to ascertain, such if the complexities and stresses of modern life. Yet the claim that life today is more stressful that in previous decades, or that it gets more stressful as time goes on, is difficult to argue.

So have pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines played a part in the increase in mental health issues? The UK’s BNF provides evidence that many conventional medical drugs can cause depression, which underlies most mental health conditions. The magazine WDDTY (October 2005) listed the pharmaceutical drugs with the strongest links to depression, and as usual, these include some of the most used drugs of the last 70 years.

     •     Ritalin (a drug increasingly used for ADHD in children).
     •     Aromatase Inhibitor drugs.
     •     Statin drugs.
     •     SSRI Inhibitor drugs.
     •     Beta Blocker drugs.
     •     Steroid drugs.
     •     Tranquillizer drugs.
     •     Birth Control pill.
     •     Aspirin and other salicylate drugs.
     •     Accutane (a drug used for acne in young people)


And in terms of the link between depression and suicide there is now a 'scientifically proven' connection with pharmaceutical drugs such as Vioxx and Seroxat, and many others.

Multiple Sclerosis (MS)
Multiple sclerosis is an autoimmune disease that affects the central nervous system, the brain and the spinal cord. MS causes many neurological symptoms, including  vision loss, vertigo, weakness, numbness, fatigue, muscle stiffness or spasticity, and bladder or bowel dysfunction.MS is a relatively new disease. According to the Multiple Sclerosis Trust it was first recognised as a condition in the middle of the 19th century.

               “Prior to this time, there are reports of a few instances of what may have been MS, although the variety of symptoms, the range of other possible causes and the incompleteness of records make these impossible to confirm.”

The National Multiple Sclerosis Society states that more than 2.3 million people are affected by MS worldwide. But as the USA's Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) does not require physicians to report new cases, and because symptoms can be completely invisible, the prevalence of MS in the USA can only be estimated. However, in 2008 they said that there are approximately 400,000 people with MS, and that about 200 people were diagnosed with the condition every week.

Each of these MS organisations states that the cause of MS is unknown, but might be linked to environmental factors. Conventional medicine itself offers no cause, but confirms that it is an autoimmune disease, that the body fails to protect itself from the damage witnessed to the myelin sheaths around nerves that send messages to and from the brain.

Any autoimmune disease is likely to be caused, at least in part, by pharmaceutical drugs, although few studies have looked into this possibility. However, some drugs have already been identified as potential causes.There are many drugs known to produce symptoms that are distinctly similar to MS itself. Anticholinergic drugs, used to treat bladder irritability, and antidepressant drugs like amitriptyline, are known to cause visual blurring and urinary retention. And painkillers, particularly tricyclic antidepressants, and anti-anxiety drugs are known to cause fatigue. So all these drugs, and perhaps many more, may well be linked to the creation of the MS epidemic.  

Osteoporosis
Osteoporosis is a disease of the skeletal system when the bones lose density, become brittle and become prone to fracture. It is the major cause of bone fractures in older people, particularly post-menopausal women. It is a new and real epidemic. The International Osteoporosis Foundation has provided the following facts about the incidence and impact of this disease.
  • Osteoporosis affects an estimated 75 million people in Europe, USA and Japan, with
    30-50% of women and 15-30% of men now expected to suffer a fracture related to osteoporosis in their lifetime. 
  • Nearly 75% of hip, spine and distal forearm fractures occur among patients 65 years old or over.
  • By 2050, the worldwide incidence of hip fracture in men is projected to increase by 310% and 240% in women.
  •  In white women, the lifetime risk of hip fracture is 1 in 6, compared with a 1 in 9 risk of a diagnosis of breast cancer.
  • Approximately 1.6 million hip fractures occur worldwide each year, by 2050 this number could reach between 4.5 million and 6.3 million.
So what is causing this epidemic rise osteoporosis, at least according to the conventional medical establishment? NHS Choices again gives us a description of the disease when it purports to be describing the cause.  It says that “Osteoporosis causes bones to become less dense and more fragile” and so unsurprisingly goes on to implicate ageing as one of the main reasons for the disease.

So again conventional medicine is not providing an entirely honest answer. There is no shortage of pharmaceutical drugs known to cause this condition bone density to decreasei including proton pump inhibitors, corticosteroid drugs, hormone replacement therapy (HRT), antidepressant drugs, and even the drugs given to patients for the treatment of osteoporosis! Indeed, it is likely that the main cause of the epidemic of osteoporosis being experienced throughout the world may well be the consumption of pharmaceutical drugs.

For more information on the pharmaceutical drugs known to cause Osteoporosis, visit this website.

Friday, 24 May 2019

MEDICAL HORROR. Is the end of the world nigh? THE DREADED MUMPS RETURNS! Or are there more serious illnesses to be concerned about?


Public Health England have announced "a significant increase in mumps cases" and allied to "continuing outbreaks of measles in England" they have called for people to ensure they are immunised. Even one person missing their vaccinations was "too many" we are told. So how serious is this medical horror story?

               "There were 795 cases of mumps in the first three months of 2019, compared with 1,031 in the whole of 2018."

Something to panic about indeed! I was going to work out the percentage of the population 795 cases represents - but really I can't be bothered. Divide 745 by the population of England and multiply by 100 and you will have it. Infinitesimal.

I have written before about how serious mumps is, as a disease. The blog compares what the NHS said about it in 1982, and then again in 1995. In 15 years the seriousness of mumps had increased. Why? Could it be that people will vaccinate - if they can be sufficiently scared into believing how serious the illness is?

So why is Public Health England panicking about 795 cases of mumps? Clearly, as always, it wants to sell us more vaccines, and the mainstream media is the best place for free,subliminal advertising.

But is it also to deflect our attention from many more serious epidemics of disease?
Chronic diseases for which they have little or no effective treatment?
Diseases that are known to be caused by pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines?

I have taken the following information from my E-Book, "The Failure of Conventional Medicine", and specifically from chapter 9, 'Epidemics of Chronic Disease'. (Why we are sicker now than we ever have been). Each section describes a disease now running at epidemic levels, and provides statistics about each epidemic.

Although the information is removed from this blog, in the book I described how (i) conventional medicine says that the cause of both the disease and the epidemic is 'unknown' or 'uncertain' (more of this can be found on my "Why Homeopathy? website, and (ii) how both the disease and the epidemic are known to be caused by pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines (more this this can be found on my "DIE's, the disease-inducing-effects of pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines" website.

The statistics show just why this recent 'epidemic' of mumps is laughable, but perhaps explains what the conventional medical establishment is trying to do - distracting attention from
  • diseases that are more important
  • diseases for which conventional medicine has no explanation
  • and diseases that are known to be caused by pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines
Epidemics of Chronic Disease
Just as homeopathy, and other traditional medical therapies would have predicted, there are now many chronic diseases that have reached epidemic proportions. The rise has been particularly obvious during the last 70-80 years, running in exact parallel to the increased use of pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines. This is happening throughout the world, particularly in countries where conventional medicine is dominant. Yet the conventional medical establishment has no adequate or reasonable explanation for this, and invariably deny that they are responsible for the epidemics, even when pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines are known to cause the disease!

Allergy
Allergy UK says on its website that the rates of allergy are increasing throughout the world “affecting up to 30-35% of people at some stage in their lives”. It says that this increase was initially seen in countries such as the UK, Europe and USA, but can now be found in all countries undergoing industrial development. It goes on to state that the pattern of allergy is also changing, that initially the increase was in asthma and hay fever, but more recent studies have confirmed a significant increase in the incidence of food allergies, particular amongst children. In the UK they estimated that up to 50% of children are diagnosed with an allergic condition.

Allergy UK said that 1 in 4 people in Britain has suffered from an allergy at some time in their life, that this figure is increasing by about 5% a year, and that almost half of allergy sufferers are children. They referred to a study conducted for the National Asthma Campaign that found asthma and wheezing in children under 5 years had almost doubled since 1990.

Alzheimer's Disease (Dementia)      
It is almost exactly 100 years ago that neurologist, Alois Alzheimer, first described this disease. His patient was a woman who developed dementia in her 50s and she died in 1906. Now Alzheimer's disease is the most common form of dementia, and it is estimated that 24 million people around the world suffer it. By 2040 it has been projected that there will affect some 81 million, with much of the incidence being in the 'developed' world (that is, the part of the world that consumes most pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines)!


By 2015 there will be 850,000 people with dementia in the UK (note, in the first edition of this book, published in 2008, the estimate was 750,000).
There are 40,000 younger people with dementia in the UK.
There are 25,000 people with dementia from black and minority ethnic groups.
There will be 1 million people with dementia in the UK by 2025.
Two thirds of people with dementia are women.
The proportion of people with dementia doubles for every five-year age group.
One in six people aged 80 and over have dementia.
60,000 deaths a year are directly attributable to dementia.
The financial cost of dementia to the UK is £26 billion per annum.
80% of people living in care homes have a form of dementia or severe memory problems.
Only 44% of people with dementia in England, Wales and Northern Ireland receive a diagnosis

Arthritis
When writing the first edition of this book in 2008, the Arthritis Research Campaign were trying to find out how big the problem was as there was “a paucity of specific and accurate data on the different types of arthritis.” So they commissioned two studies, one from MORI, and one from their Epidemiology Unit in Manchester, They concluded that
          “….. arthritis represents a much more serious, significant and widespread problem than was previously thought. It also showed that almost twice as many people believe they have arthritis than report their condition to their GP. In our MORI poll,13 million people say they are currently affected by arthritis and joint pain. Yet according to the report by the Epidemiology Unit, this figure is nearer 7 million.”

The Arthritis Research Campaign were talking about huge numbers at this time, and charted how the numbers were increasing. They said that the number of people visiting their doctors for arthritis and related conditions rose by about 13% between 1981 and 1991. They said nearly 9 million visit their doctor every year for arthritis and related conditions. At the heavier end of the problem, 3,242 deaths in the UK were directly attributed to arthritis and related conditions (Office for National Statistics. Review of the Registrar General on deaths by cause, sex and age, in England and Wales, 2000).

Yet in 2015 these figures were even bigger. They now estimate that more than 10 million adults in the UK visit their doctor with arthritis or a related condition. This is a 10% increase in 7 years! And it is now thought that more than a third of the UK population aged 50 and above suffers from arthritis related pain.

Asthma
When writing the first edition of this book, it was estimated that 1 in 13 people in Britain, and throughout the world, suffered from it, that 180,000 die from asthma, and that children were suffering from it most. In 2015, Asthma UK provided the following facts about asthma.

          Three people die every single day because of asthma.
          5.4 million people in the UK are currently receiving treatment for asthma: 1.1 million children (1 in 11) and 4.3 million adults (1 in 12).
          Asthma prevalence is thought to have plateaued since the late 1990s, although the UK still has some of the highest rates in Europe.
          There were 1,167 deaths from asthma in the UK in 2011 (18 of these were children aged 14 and under).
          One in 11 children now has asthma and it is the most common long-term medical condition.
          There were 25,073 emergency hospital admissions for children in the UK in 2011-2012 - an average of 69 per day.
          The NHS spends around £1 billion a year treating and caring for people with asthma.

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) 
The first time this condition was described was in 1943 by the Austrian-American psychiatrist, Leo Kanner. In 2015, the National Autistic Society’s website said that in Britain, there are around 700,000 autistic people, more that 1:100 of the population.

In the USA the epidemic of ADHD appears to be worse. The CDC website suggests that there 5.9 million children, aged between 3-17 years, diagnosed, that is, 9.5% of this population. In boys alone that percentage rises to 13.5%. The number of children with ADHD have been increasing alarmingly since 1943. ADHD children are highly impulsive, they can speak and act without thinking what they are saying or doing. They often talk excessively, find it difficult to listen, or to conduct meaningful two-way conversations. They are restless, continually over-active, gaining their attention is difficult, and concentration can seem impossible. This behaviour is not the same as children behaving 'badly'. It has many distinctive features.

          It is more extreme, more challenging than normal. 
          The children are less responsive to normal parenting discipline. 
          They behave the same at home, at school, and in other people's houses. 
          They are usually untidy, disorganised and forgetful. 
          With age their restlessness can lead to feelings of frustration, making their problems worse.

Autism (ASD)
Autism is a disability that affects the way that the child communicates and relates to other people. Autistic children have impaired social interactions, communication and imagination. Autism is not a single disease but a 'spectrum' of conditions, referred to as Autistic Spectrum Disorder, or ASD. As well as describing classical, or low-functioning autism, it also includes 'high-functioning' conditions such as Asperger's Syndrome.

Autism has seen a staggering increase throughout the 'developed' world in recent decades. In 2008, when the first edition of this book was written, the Autism Society of America said it was the fastest growing developmental disability in children, with a growth rate of between 10-17% per year. It stated that during the 1990’s, whilst the population of the USA grew by 13%, disabilities increased by 16%, and Autism by a massive 172%. 

Vaccine Impact has calculated that in 2016 1 in 36 (2.76%) children aged 3-17 were diagnosed with ASD, compared to 1 in 10,000 children in the 1970's.

The Autism Society of America’s website now estimates that in 2015 about 1% of the world population has ASD. But the situation in the USA has worsened considerably.
          The prevalence in the USA is estimated at 1 in 68 births.
          More than 3.5 million Americans live with an autism spectrum disorder.
          The prevalence of autism in USA children increased by 119.4% from 2000 (1 in 150) to 2010 (1 in 68), and that autism was now is the fastest-growing developmental disability.
          The prevalence has increased by 6-15% each year from 2002 to 2010.
          It outlines the costs to society of this disease epidemic, and they are considerable.

In Britain there has been a similar rise in autism. The National Autistic Society in 2008 stated that ASD had more than doubled during the previous 10 years. It estimated that about 588,000 people had autism, with boys being four times more likely to develop autism than girls. In 2015 the National Autistic Society’s website calculated that around 700,000 people have ASD in Britain. This is an increase of 112,000 in 8 years!

Cancer
There is evidence of cancer in human populations from the very earliest times, including Egyptian papyri that described breast cancer dating back to 3000-1500BC. It has been studied during every period of history. There is an ongoing debate about how cancer rates have grown. Many people have looked for evidence from ancient times, found little evidence, and argued that cancer is a ‘modern’ disease. Conventional medicine does not accept this, but the prodigious growth of cancer during the 20th century is far less easily repudiated. So instead it argues that the cause of the cancer epidemic is concerned with diet, smoking, an ageing population, and similar.

All forms of cancer are now at epidemic proportions. It was estimated (Cancer Research UK) that in 2012, worldwide, there were about 14.1 million new cases of cancer recorded, that the most common cancers, accounting for about 4 in 10 of all cancers, were lung, female breast, bowel and prostate cancer, that an estimated 8.2 million people died from cancer, and that nearly half these deaths were caused by lung, liver, stomach and bowel cancer.

Cancer was once considered to be a disease of old age, but this is no longer the case. It has been estimated that the main disease-related cause of death in USA children aged between 1 and 14 years old is cancer, second only to accidents amongst all causes of childhood mortality. Leukemia and malignancies of the central nervous system are the most common types of childhood cancers.

Cardiovascular (Heart) Disease
Cardiovascular disease (CVD) disease has been the leading cause of death throughout the western world for both men and women for decades. This is not a new epidemic, it is an old one. And it wold appear that the increased availability of conventional medical drugs over the last 70 to 80 years has done little to improve the situation. CVD is a term that includes heart disease, stroke, heart failure, cardiomyopathy, atrial fibrillation, and other conditions. 

Figures from the British Heart Foundation outlined the enormity of the problem in Britain in 2015.

          * CVD causes more than a quarter of all deaths in the UK, about 155,000 per year - an average of 425 people each day, or one every three minutes.
          * Around 41,000 people under the age of 75 in the UK die from CVD each year.
          * There are an estimated 7 million people living with cardiovascular disease in the UK. 
          * The UK cost of premature death, lost productivity, hospital treatment and prescriptions relating to CVD is estimated at £19 billion each year.
          * BNF state that coronary heart disease (CHD) is the single biggest killer in Britain, and the leading cause of death throughout the world. They go on to say that in the UK more than 1 in 7 men and nearly 1 in 10 women die from CHD, that CHD is responsible for nearly 70,000 deaths in the UK each year, an average of 190 people each day, or one death every eight minutes, most by a heart attack (myocardial infarction), that over 22,000 people under the age of 75 in the UK die from CHD each year, that CHD kills more than twice as many women as breast cancer, and that 2.3 million people are living with CHD in the UK - over 1.4 million men and 850,000 women.

Heart Failure. BHF say that there is an estimated 550,000 people in Britain are living with heart failure.

Stroke. BHF says that stroke causes nearly 40,000 deaths in the UK each year, and that an estimated 1.3 million people living in Britain have survived a stroke, almost half of them under the age of 75.

Atrial Fibrillation. Over 1 million people in the UK have been diagnosed with atrial fibrillation, and there are “hundreds of thousands more living with undiagnosed AF”.

Congenital Heart Defects. It is estimated that 1 in 180 babies are now diagnosed with a congenital heart defect, that’s an average of 12 per day in Britain.

Chronic Fatigue (CFS) or Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME) 
Chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) or myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) is a disease characterised by persistent and extreme fatigue, muscle and joint pain, headaches, flu-like symptoms, sore throat, swollen glands, concentration and short-term memory problems, sleep difficulties, digestive disturbances, dizziness, poor temperature control, and increased sensitivity to light and sound. CFS/ME is a 'new' disease.

Before 2002, when the the condition was eventually recognised by the conventional medical establishment, the condition was dismissed by conventional doctors as 'Yuppie' flu. Many sufferers had a hard time convincing doctors that there was anything wrong with them! 

Such has been its epidemic rise, by 2007, NICE reported that CFS/ME was “a relatively common illness”! Indeed, the number of people now suffering from the condition has grown enormously. ‘Action for ME’, a British charity that provides support for sufferers, says that CFS/ME now effects over 240,000 people in Britain, including 25,000 children in England alone. It says that the illness can last for years, that the exact cause is unknown, and that 25% of people with CFS/ME are either house-bound, or bed-bound, and unable to look after themselves. 

Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD)
COPD has many names, including; Chronic Obstructive Airways Disease, Chronic Obstructive Lung Disease, Chronic Airflow Limitation, and Chronic Airflow Obstruction. COPD was once known by more familiar names, notably chronic bronchitis, emphysema, bronchiectasis, and asthma  COPD is defined as "a disorder that is characterised by reduced maximal expiratory flow and slow forced emptying of the lungs; features that do not change markedly over several months".

In the first edition of this book, written in 2006, it was already the 5th biggest killer in the UK, and killed more people than breast, prostate or bowel cancer. It was described as "one of the commonest respiratory conditions of adults in the developed world", and one that it "poses an enormous burden to society both in terms of direct cost to healthcare services and indirect costs to society through loss of productivity". The following statistics were taken from the Priory.Com website.

          * COPD was the fourth commonest cause of death in middle aged to elderly men in the western world.
          * It was estimated that in the UK 18% of males, 14% of females aged 40-68 years, developed features of COPD, and that 3 million people were affected, causing 30,000 deaths annually.
          * In the USA, 13.6% of males and 11.8% of females aged 65-74 years are thought to have COPD.

At the same time statistics produced by the American Lung Association showed that 15 million Americans suffer from COPD and it claimed the lives of 87,000 Americans in 1992. The COPD Foundation website shows how COPD, then at epidemic levels, has continued to rise. 

               "COPD affects an estimated 30 million individuals in the USA....The National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute estimates that 12 million adults have COPD and another 12 million are undiagnosed  or developing COPD. The World Health Organisation estimated 210 million individuals worldwide have COPD and total deaths were expected to increase more than 30% in the next 10 years".

Diabetes
Diabetes is a serious disease that can lead to blindness, kidney failure, heart disease, stroke and limb amputation following nerve damage, and many other diseases. In the early 20th century, the discovery of insulin treatment was hailed as a significant breakthrough, one that was instrumental in raising the positive profile of conventional medicine, and the belief that the application of ‘science’ to medicine would eventually make the world a healthier place.

The problem with insulin, like so many conventional medical treatments, is that it a short-term ‘mechanical’ fix. The body does not produce insulin for itself (or it is unable to use the insulin it does produce) so insulin is introduced artificially. Whilst not criticising the importance of such 'mechanical' fixes in medicine it is wrong to present them as 'cures'. Insulin does not cure diabetes, just as it does not deal with the cause of the disease - the body's failure to produce insulin, or to use the insulin that it produces.

Moreover there has been an epidemic of diabetes in the latter half of the 20th century. Diabetes UK provided these figure in 2015.

         The estimated diabetes prevalence for adults aged 20 to 79 worldwide in 2014 was 387 million, and expected to affect 592 million people by 2035. 
         The International Diabetes Federation (IDF) estimated that in 2013 five countries had more than 10 million people with diabetes.
         It is estimated that more than one in 16 people in the UK has diabetes.
         There are 3.9 million people living with diabetes in the UK.
         Around 700 people a day are diagnosed with diabetes, the equivalent of one person every two minutes.
         Since 1996, the number of people with diabetes in the UK has more than doubled from 1.4 million to 3.3 million.
         There are 3.3 million people diagnosed with diabetes in the UK (2014). By 2025, this is estimated to rise to 5 million people.
         It is estimated that there are around 590,000 people in the UK who have diabetes but have not been diagnosed.
         This gives a UK average prevalence of 6.2% in adults.

As for the future, researchers from the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the USA) have estimated that 1 in 3 men in the USA will develop diabetes, and the risk is only slightly lower for women. They took a random population born in the year 2000 and predicted that 32.8% of men and 38.3% of women would develop diabetes in their lifetimes (Prevalence of diabetes: Journal of the American Medical Association, 2003; 290: 1884-90).

Irritable Bowel (IBS), Crohns Disease, Ulcerative Colitis
Serious new illnesses are developing that affect our stomach. Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) is a painful and distressing condition that is becoming increasingly common. It is estimated that it now affects about one-third of the population in some way, at some time, depending on how it is defined or measured. The symptoms of IBS may include abdominal pain and spasm, diarrhoea, constipation, and can take more serious forms, such as Crohns Disease and Ulcerative Colitis.

It has been estimated that 9 million people suffer from IBS in the UK, and that 64,061 people died of the disease in 2002. But reliable figures for IBS, and related conditions such as Crohns Disease and ulcerative colitis are difficult to ascertain. The Right Diagnosis website seeks to provide estimated numbers, country by country, but much depends on diagnosis, and reporting of the disease.

Mental Health
If pharmaceutical drugs seek to ‘force’ the body into compliance, and if the body resists in such a way that new disease is created, then one of the body's principle organs, the brain, might be expected to suffer most. It is, after all, the most sensitive, and in many ways, the most vulnerable of human organs. And this is, indeed, what we find. The statistics for depression, suicide, and related mental health conditions, have risen alarmingly, and in particular, there has been a marked rise during the later half of the 20th, and early 21st century. And it is rising, particularly with younger people, with corresponding demands for more medical treatment.

Mental health illnesses are all ill-defined, and so difficult to diagnose with any certainty. And causation is equally difficult to ascertain, such if the complexities and stresses of life. Yet the claim that life today is more stressful that in previous decades, or that it gets more stressful as time goes on, is difficult a argue.

Malaria
The World Health Organisation estimates (WHO) that about 3.2 billion people, nearly half  the world's population, are at risk of malaria. In 2015, they say that there was about 214 million malaria cases, and an estimated 438 000 malaria deaths.

Multiple Sclerosis (MS)
Multiple sclerosis is an autoimmune disease that affects the central nervous system, the brain and the spinal cord. MS causes many neurological symptoms, including  vision loss, vertigo, weakness, numbness, fatigue, muscle stiffness or spasticity, and bladder or bowel dysfunction. Onset may be sudden, or a gradual decline in function. 

MS is a relatively new disease. According to the Multiple Sclerosis Trust it was first recognised as a condition in the middle of the 19th century. 

“Prior to this time, there are reports of a few instances of what may have been MS, although the variety of symptoms, the range of other possible causes and the incompleteness of records make these impossible to confirm.”

According to the Multiple Sclerosis Society MS is now the most common disabling neurological condition affecting young adults, with around 100,000 people in Britain suffering from the condition. When I wrote the first edition of this book, in 2008, they said that 85,000 people in the UK had MS. So it continues to grow rapidly.

The National Multiple Sclerosis Society states that more than 2.3 million people are affected by MS worldwide. But as the USA's Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) does not require physicians to report new cases, and because symptoms can be completely invisible, the prevalence of MS in the USA can only be estimated. However, in 2008 they said that there are approximately 400,000 people with MS, and that about 200 people were diagnosed with the condition every week.

Osteoporosis
Osteoporosis is a disease of the skeletal system when the bones lose density, become brittle and become prone to fracture. It is the major cause of bone fractures in older people, particularly post-menopausal women. It is a real epidemic. The International Osteoporosis Foundation has provided the following facts about the incidence and impact of this disease.

Osteoporosis affects an estimated 75 million people in Europe, USA and Japan
30-50% of women and 15-30% of men will suffer a fracture related to osteoporosis in their lifetime.
Nearly 75% of hip, spine and distal forearm fractures occur among patients 65 years old or over.
By 2050, the worldwide incidence of hip fracture in men is projected to increase by 310% and 240% in women.
In white women, the lifetime risk of hip fracture is 1 in 6, compared with a 1 in 9 risk of a diagnosis of breast cancer.
Approximately 1.6 million hip fractures occur worldwide each year, by 2050 this number could reach between 4.5 million and 6.3 million.

Superbugs and Superviruses
A superbug is described as a strain of bacteria that has become resistant to antibiotic treatment. Actually this is just half the story. Superbugs have emerged because of, as a result of antibiotic treatment. Bacteria have become resistant to the use of antibiotics because of the use and overuse of this drug. They are the most obvious, and an undeniable creation of conventional medicine!

Superbugs come in several forms. Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (or MRSA) is probably the most well known, but there is also Clostridium Difficile (CDIFF or C. difficile), Carbapenem-Resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE), Neisseria gonorrhoeae, Drug-Resistant Streptococcus Pneumoniae, Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis, Drug-Resistant Non-Typhoidal Salmonella.

According to a BBC article (December 2014), these superbugs are currently implicated in killing 700,000 people each year, but that by 2050 drug resistant infections will kill an extra 10 million people a year worldwide, more than currently die from cancer.

Syphilis
Syphilis, a sexually transmitted disease, has been a major killer disease throughout Europe since the earliest times, and particular from medieval times. By the middle of the 20th century, conventional medicine was claiming that the disease had been 'conquered', and the disease continues to be touted as one of its great medical triumphs. 

However, in recent years, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of syphilis cases throughout the world, whilst the antibiotic drugs that were claimed to be the 'cure' for syphilis are no longer able to cope with the disease adequately. Yet whilst conventional medicine’s apparent ‘success’ in eradicating Syphilis was loudly heralded, its more recent return has met with a deafening silence! Certainly there has been little explanation about why pharmaceutical drugs are no longer effective, and no apology has been forthcoming for making inflated and unfounded claims about their effectiveness.

Tuberculosis (TB) 
Tuberculosis is one of the most deadly infectious diseases. TB is caused by a bacterial infection, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, that is spread through the air when infected people cough or sneeze. The disease affects mainly the lungs although it can infect any part of the body, including the bones and the nervous system. Again, conventional medical treatment of TB was supposed to be another of its greatest achievements. Certainly by the 1960's it was loudly proclaimed that the disease had been 'conquered' by antibiotic drugs, their greatest 'weapon' against such infectious diseases. 

Yet it is becoming clear that the war waged on bacteria by antibiotic drugs is being lost, decisively. Bacteria is now resisting the assault, and new 'drug-resistant' strains of TB, and other diseases, have now being discovered. Antibiotics are becoming almost entirely ineffective. The belief that TB had been eradicated began to disappear when these new drug-resistant strains began to emerge in the 1980's. But it is more recent events, largely since 2006, that have indicated that conventional pharmaceutical drugs no longer work. These statistics from the TB Facts organise demonstrate this.

In 2014 1.5 million people died of TB.
TB now annually causes more deaths worldwide than HIV.
However, people who have both TB and HIV when they die, are internationally classified as having died from HIV.
There were an estimated 9.6 million new cases of TB in 2014.
There were an estimated 3.2 million cases and 480,000 TB deaths among women.
There were also an estimated 1.0 million cases of TB in children and 140,000 deaths.


SO WE SHOULD ALL TO BE AFRAID, 
VERY AFRAID INDEED
OF THESE OUTBREAKS OF MUMPS!