Coronavirus COVID-19. Why is conventional medical science in such a mess? Why the political hysteria? Why the total media compliance?

The coronavirus panic has led to a shambles, the self-infliction of a ludicrous set of social rules and regulation that make no logical sense. COVID-19 is just a virus, albeit one that may have been created in a bio-laboratory somewhere that experiments with mixing animal and human viruses. Yet a more sober assessment of the virus seems to suggest that COVID-19 is no more lethal than any other 'ordinary' flu virus.

The problem that has caused the shambles is conventional medicine. We should all have been asking the question decades ago - what sort of medical system do we have...

• that kills cows, and complete herds, when they contract TB?
• that kills entire flocks of birds when there is an outbreak of bird flu?
• that kills and burns cattle that contract Foot and Mouth?
• that fells and destroys trees when they are diagnosed with a disease?

I have often wondered what would happen if a serious viral epidemic threatened humanity - and now we know! In Britain (and no doubt throughout the rest of the world dominated by pharmaceutical medicine) we have been getting blanket, wall-to-wall news coverage about coronavirus. It is panic stations.

• The mainstream media in the UK is consulting with health 'experts' - all of them from the conventional medical establishment.
• The government is consulting health 'experts', all providing (we are told, and one assumes) the best information that conventional medical science can provide. No one from outside conventional medicine is consulted. Anyone with a contrary message are not listened to, they are ignored. It is as if they did not exist.

So it is not surprising that the conventional medical message about this virus has taken a firm grip on the nation's thinking.

• Coronavirus is a serious and deadly infection.
• It is estimated that hundreds of thousands (not just thousands) will die.
• The government has a responsibility to do anything and everything to protect us.
• So we must all self isolate.
• We must undermine normal social relationships.
• We must lock down the economy.

Three months into the pandemic and still no-one really knows how long it will last. No one knows whether people will accept social lockdown for any extended length of time. No one knows whether it will lead to serious mental health problems, mass disaffection, or whether there will be rioting in the streets. No one knows what it will do to the economy, to our jobs. No one knows what it will do to our children's education. And so on.

We are on a journey into the unknown - courtesy of the conventional medical science.

Government and Media are doing what medical science tells us to do. They are the 'experts'. No-one is allowed to challenge their wisdom. What medical science says is sacrosanct, unchallengeable.

Indeed, I suspect that the current state of fear and panic is such that many people, indeed most people, will not want to read this! They will find such a contrary message hard to accept. When a message is repeated often enough, however irrational the message, people will believe it, especially when they are not 'experts' in the field. This is not surprising perhaps - it is the basis of all advertising and promotion. We tend to believe what we are told to believe.

The message we are receiving about the coronavirus epidemic, the only message we are getting, is one of fear, enough to make most people hysterical with panic. If conventional medicine wanted us to panic, to be hysterical, it has succeeded. We are doing things we would not volunteer to do in normal circumstances. There is a lack of cool, rational thinking. There is no suggestion that we should not self-isolate, that we should not close down or personal and social lives, or put our economy at serious risk. TINA rules - There Is No Alternative.

It is certainly a fact that pharmaceutical medicine has no viable response to this (or indeed any other) virus, either preventative or treatment. It has openly admitted as much. So perhaps the only thing they can do is to get us to panic. It is better to stress how awful the virus is than to admit they can do nothing about it.

And the conventional medical establishment has demonstrated that it is sufficiently powerful, and influential, to control the government, and ensure that the mainstream media does not do its job - to delve, to question, to investigate. The result is that there has been no discussion about the 'closing down' message from anyone. The mainstream media does not challenge medical 'experts' who predict imminent doom. People have accepted that they must isolate, close down their social lives, act in a way that will probably impoverish them, and make us reliant on government largesse.

Everyone should panic - and panicking we most certainly are.

Few questions are being asked about where this policy is leading. Is the personal, social and economic cost of conventional medical policy commensurate with the size of the threat we face from the virus? We are being asked to do things we have never done before, never, in human history. Stop socialising with other people; don't visit sick and elderly relatives. Don't get married. Close down every imaginable recreational pursuit.

How long will it last? How long will people be willing to comply? 3 months, 6 months, to the end of the year, perhaps sometime in 2021.

We all have to wait. The only prospect is that the pharmaceutical industry will soon come up with a vaccine. And vaccines are, of course, the answer to all health problems. This has been stated regularly, and it has gone unquestioned since the start of the pandemic!

So are there alternatives? Do we have choices? Does what we are doing make any rational sense? Is the policy of medical science a commensurate response to the threat?

Yet there is a further question. Why should the conventional medical establishment want us to panic in such a way? Panic arises whenever there is a sense of helplessness, an inability to control a situation that threatens us. And this is the position conventional medicine now finds itself in, and they don't like it.

After all they always present themselves as health 'experts', a medical system that has the answers to ill-health, that is overcoming sickness and disease. Regular readers of this blog will know that the reality is different. So when faced with coronavirus, when they realise they have no effective treatment, they panic. It's a natural reaction. Their reputation is at stake. And all they can do is to get us to panic by over-emphasising the threat to our health, and appear to be doing something, anything, even if it is to wash our hands, in response to it.

So whilst pharmaceutical medicine may appear confident, it is anything but confident. It is scared stiff. And they have scared our government into abject fear. And persuaded the mainstream media not to go 'off message'. 

At no other time, in all human history, has any government, in any part of the world, been prepared to put normal social relationships, and our economy, at such risk. Yet of course we are lucky.

• If we were birds we would be culled. 
• If we were cattle we would be slaughtered. 
• If we were trees we would be felled.

Or maybe we should start looking at natural medical therapies,

 to see what they can do to save us from complete insanity.

Medical Science. The dishonesty continues - PubMed - the concealment of research data - next to useless as a scientific database and resource

The Alliance for Natural Health International (ANH) has discovered yet another strategy being used by the pharmaceutical medical establishment, with medical science, to keep the truth about health and medicine from us. Click on this link to see the full details of ANH's research into this. ANH says it has long been concerned about the concealment of research data "that prevents independent analysis and therefore scientific interpretation". They state that this means "clinical decisions and health policies are routinely made without full consideration of all relevant scientific data".

PubMed is the online National Library of Medicine database, owned and operated by the USA National Institutes for Health. It is the common starting point for evaluating biomedical literature, with PubMed claiming that its database comprises “... more than 30 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books.” 

In its article, dated 17th June 2020, AHN discovered that PubMed is involved in concealing research data which will prevent independent scientific analysis/interpretation. This is serious.

               "..... PubMed is used by ... researchers, doctors, other clinicians, health policy makers, health journalists and even some citizens, including patients with serious diseases who are looking for answers and independent views of the science around their treatment options. Major public health decisions including those made by governments during this Covid-19 pandemic are based on science that is found in PubMed. It’s been the go-to engine for biomedical scientists for years – it is in many ways the Google of the biomedical world."

The detailed research can be found, in detail in the ANH article. Its conclusion was starkly ominous - "we've demonstrated that PubMed is next to useless as a database and resource for the kind of subject areas central to our mission and vision." ANH ponders on why this situation has come about, but noted that PubMed Central, a sister index, is funded by a list of private and international partners, at the top which is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

               "We simply don't know if this Foundation or any other interests were involved in the redevelopment of PubMed or the way in which PubMed is found by the internet search engines like Google."

Most alarming to me, personally, is that search engines other than Google are also complicit in this unethical scientific conspiracy, including DuckDuckGo, which is the search engine I usually use - but perhaps not for much longer now.

ANH are being characteristically tongue-in-cheek about 'not knowing' who is behind this! Everyone should realise that the wealthy pharmaceutical medical establishment, in all its many branches and guises, has been subverting the honesty of medical science for decades.

Coronavirus COVID-19. A failure of medical science that has resulted in social and economic mayhem. "Save the NHS" or "Save Lives"?

Governments around the world have admitted they have no policy on the COVID-19 pandemic. They have made it clear that they have been guided by "the science" - conventional medical science. Initially this advice was trite - washing hands et al - but worrying because it demonstrated that 'medical science' had no effective treatment.

A contagious and lethal virus, combined with a lack of effective treatment, produced panic. Doctors had nothing to offer their patients. So in time 'the science' became more extreme; it moved to social distance, and the 'lock down'. Now, several weeks into the epidemic, we are beginning to learn about the personal, social and economic distress and mayhem that is being caused by this policy. The policy was given a mantra.

"Save the NHS. Save Lines"

Interesting that order - with 'saving the NHS' taking priority. Patients are, apparently, not the first consideration. Initially it is the NHS, and the medicine that dominates it, that must be saved. Otherwise our GP's and hospitals would be overwhelmed with sick patients and unable to cope. The whole system might disintegrate.

This was undoubtedly a reasonable assumption. Readers of this blog will know that every year since 1913 I have been publishing blog entitled "NHS in Crisis". It happens every year, each winter. And now there was this pandemic. The NHS could not be allowed to fail: too many people would be asking "Why?" If it had not been for the coronavirus panic this year, and the excuse and justification to spend additional £billions, the NHS would almost certainly have been in deep crisis, and those 'why' questions would be asked.

So, once again, money has been generously, but foolishly poured into a medical system that admits it has no treatment for the most serioius epidemic we have faced for over 100 years.

So the priority was to save the NHS; and then to save lives. Except, of course, that the NHS could not save lives - it had already admitted it had no treatment for coronavirus COVID-19. So if there was no treatment perhaps, instead, we could be asked to praise the staff, who were putting their lives at risk by caring for us. We all did so, and quite rightly so. The primary response to this pandemic has been led by nurses, other hospital staff, residential and home care staff, and (where lockdown has allowed) by the family. It has certainly not been led by the doctors, and their medicine.

• So let's praise what needs to be praised - the staff and care workers, mostly on low, often minimum wages, providing sick people and families with whatever support they could, and putting themselves at risk doing so. Let's praise their courage and commitment; but not the medicine they are obliged to practice.

• Instead, let's question the failure of those who determined that 'there is no treatment' for this virus; usually well paid and influential health 'experts' and scientists, all part of the conventional medical establishment; who have been advising our governments.

Medical scientific advice has been not only trite and crass; but wrong. It has demonstrated that conventional medical science has come a long way during the 70-100 years of its increasing influence, and now its dominance. The journey has all been done in reverse! I suggest that my mother was more knowledgeable, a better scientist ( although she would have been amused at any such suggestion) as she did know better than medical science appears to know today.

• she, along with other parents, took me to a measles party - to ensure that I picked up the infection. Like most parents of her generation she understood the importance of a strong immune system, and the natural immunity that getting an infection gives the child.
• perhaps she, and her generation, were lucky - there were no vaccines to promote then.

During this entire crisis there has been little mention of the importance of our immune system. The absurd term 'herd immunity' has been mentioned; but this concept has more to do with persuading us all that we must get ourselves vaccinated "to protect others" than any close relationship to natural immunity.

How much easier it would have been if our medical system had focused on our ability, as individuals, to withstand and overcome infection. There would have been no need to panic, in a desperate attempt to kill an invisible enemy that could attack, and potentially kill, everyone. One moments reflection would have told us - no epidemic throughout world history has ever come close to doing that!

• We needed to do was to protect the vulnerable - not everyone. 
• It was the vulnerable who needed 'social distance' and all the other protections. 
• There was no need to lock down social life, and potentially wreck the world's economy.
• We needed to test our immune systems; not the presence or absence of a virus.

Instead of panic, the NHS could more usefully have spent time and money teaching all of us how to support and strengthen our immune systems.

• the food we should be eating, the vitamins and supplements we should be taking, how we should exercise, the lifestyle habits we should be avoiding.
• the natural medical therapies that had preventative treatments, and treatments for the disease itself.
• the use of homeopathy in Cuba, India, and elsewhere, could have been examined, and indeed offered to patients who wanted to use it for themselves. 
• patient outcome studies could have been conducted which assessed the value of natural therapies, for future reference.

But, of course, none of this fits with the objectives of the conventional/pharmaceutical medical establishment. A crucial part of their strategy is to preserve their monopoly within the NHS, and other national health services. What if these alternative treatments did work? What if they saved life? People must never know. Much better for them to use their dominance of medical 'science', their control of the NHS, their unrestrained influence over government, and their financial control of the mainstream media, to ensure that no-one knows about these things. Otherwise they might have to admit there was an alternative to the knowledge and expertise of conventional medical science.

• Much better to allow people to contract COVID-19,
• better to let them die without any knowledge of effective treatment,
• better to stop the routine treatment of cancer, kidney disease, et al, patients.
• better to close down social life,
• better to wreck the national economy,
• and the economy of the world.

Medical science, and the pharmaceutical medical establishment, have failed. What has happened to medicine during the last 70-100 years may be likened to allowing 'flat earthers' to dominate and control all navigation across the world. No one would ever get anywhere.

Conventional medicine, and the financial interests that control it, has been, and is leading us in completely the wrong direction. So perhaps the most important outcome of this coronavirus COVID-19 panic will be to recognise this - and to do something about it.

Coronavirus COVID-19. Will it lead to a re-assessment of a system of medical care that kills, or allows patients to die, destroys economies, and social life, as the result of an infectious disease?

Amidst the panic of coronavirus COVID-19, there is a recognition that nothing will ever be quite the same again. This infectious disease, and the way it has been dealt with by government, conventional medical health services, and the mainstream media, has certainly raised important issues - although unfortunately the most fundamental issues have not been identified, or even ascertained by any of these bodies.

A moment's reflection, the kind of reflection possible only if we are prepared to step outside conventional medical wisdom, will provide a very different picture to the one we are currently being presented with.

• the conventional medical establishment, with its monopoly position within most national health services around the world, has no effective treatment to offer. This has never been denied.
• it bemoans the fact that it has no preventative vaccine, which it sees as the only possible solution to the problem; although it seems confident it will have soon, most likely after the pandemic has run its course!
• government policy has responded to the pandemic by slavishly conforming to the best scientific advice, all of this emanating from the conventional medical establishment. Above and beyond this government appears to have no independent policy.
• the mainstream media has never seriously questioned this position, and have certainly not investigated any alternative explanation about what is happening. Meekly, it has never bothered to look outside the information government, and medical science, has told it.

The result is that there has been no independent thinking throughout the crisis, no alternative voice beyond what conventional medical science wants us to know. Medical science has dominated government thinking. It is totally dominant within mainstream medical services. And it dominates and controls the mainstream media. So everything we are being told comes from a single, unquestioned, and uninvestigated  source.

For many years I have wondered what pharmaceutical medicine would do if and when a serious infectious disease threatened humanity. I have watched what conventional medicine does when such diseases affects animals, and/or plant life.

• When cows and sheep contract Foot & Mouth the herds and flocks are slaughtered, usually in vast numbers; and this is called medical treatment!
• When a cow contracts TB it is slaughtered, along with the rest of the herd; and more recently the local badger population too. This is done in the name of medical treatment!
• When sheep contract scrapie there is no treatment available so they are usually destroyed too. Perhaps as an alternative to medical treatment!
• Avian flu outbreaks amongst domestic birds, chickens, turkeys, ducks, et al, is 'treated' by the culling entire infected flocks. This is the prescribed medical treatment!
• When a tree is diagnosed with a disease it is usually destroyed, chopped down. There is no medical treatment available!
• and so on, ad infinitum.

Conventional medicine is ruthless in its response to infectious disease, especially when it has no effective treatment - which unfortunately seems to be more often the case than not. So what would happen if an infectious disease, for which there was no conventional medical treatment, threatened humanity. How would medical science respond? Well, after COVID-19, we now know!

• Conventional medicine is prepared to spend any amount of taxpayers money to prevent the disease from spreading, to develop new vaccines, or to come up with drugs that have the smallest imaginable chance of having any impact on the disease.
• Conventional medicine is prepared to put at risk, and potentially to ruin entire national economies around the world.
• Conventional medicine is prepared to destroy people's lives and livelihoods, indeed, the very fabric of social life.
• Conventional medicine is prepared to allow people to die rather than look outside its own resources and territory for possible treatments.

More people are now prepared to speak out, still voices in the wilderness, stating that such a policy is ridiculous, senseless, and self-destructive.

And adherents of natural medicine, who espouse the importance of natural immunity, and maintaining health through strengthening our immune system, have look on incredulous at the non-sense of what is happening, the sheer absurdity of conventional medicine's fear of germs.

When considering the current state of affairs we must remember that it is the pharmaceutical medical system that claims to have defeated infectious diseases, from smallpox, to measles, mumps, rubella, and much else. Over the years it has successfully wrestled the credit for this achievement from vital public health policy, increased affluence, improved living circumstances, et al. The actual performance of conventional medicine has never matched their claims, and COVID-19, if it has done anything, has demonstrated that such claims are a lie.

Indeed, given the performance of conventional medicine in response to this epidemic it is no better, no more effective than it was 102 years ago - with the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic.

Hitherto, as regular readers will know, my main concern about pharmaceutical medicine has been about chronic diseases, such as allergy, dementia, arthritis, asthma, autism, autoimmune disease, COPD, chronic fatigue syndrome, diabetes, epilepsy, heart disease, kidney disease, liver disease, and many, many others - including mental health conditions. They have all, at least in part, been caused by the pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines that conventional medicine have been prescribing to us now for decades.

Now, following COVID-19, acute disease has been highlighted as another cause for serious concern about the validity and usefulness of conventional medicine - and the urgent need to rethink our approach to health care.

After some 70-100 years of dominating health care services around the world pharmaceutical medicine has not been improved health - it has massively increased the amount of illness and disease from which we suffer.

• all chronic disease is now running at unprecedented epidemic levels, and increasing.
• every chronic disease is known to be caused by pharmaceutical drugs and/or conventional medical treatment, not by allegation, but by reference to conventional medicine's own medical literature.
• there has been a long history of pharmaceutical drugs that have been withdrawn, or banned, following the harm they have caused to patients, often over decades.
• all currently used pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines are known to have seriously damaging side effects, again referred to in conventional medical literature
• even former 'wonder' drugs, not least antibiotics, are failing, and will soon be worthless.

The situation will not improve until we completely rethink our understanding of health, what health is, our attitude to illness and disease, what illness and disease is, and where they come from. And most important, the way we can actively improve our wellness and well-being without resorting to toxic pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines. Central to doing this will be two things.

First, there must be a new focus on natural immunity, our immune systems, and how we can best keep them functioning in order to protect us from bacterial and viral infections. This alone would lead to a different approach to staying well, as so brilliantly outlined recently in this Arnica Parents Support Network leaflet, Ideas to Avoid Viral Infections and to Support Recovery naturally. Anyone who is interested in looking at what 'natural health' is all about should read this leaflet.

• No more chasing after invisible viruses, or trying to kill 'problem' bacteria; and being scared stiff that they might randomly attack us. Just the simpler, more straightforward task of ensuring we are all taking personal responsibility for our health, and that our body is ready to face the trials and tribulations of living in the real world.

Second, that medical intervention should not seek to second-guess our immune system, not to tinker and interfere with it, or close it down. All medical treatment should support the body in its primary task of keeping itself well, to cease using drugs to 'kill' pain, or to 'block' or 'inhibit' some natural bodily process. We must move to natural therapies which believe in the body's ability to maintain its own health, and to get better when it becomes sick; and when sick to use medical therapies that do not cause us harm.

• No more thinking that good health comes from a bottle of pills, or a vaccine injected into our bloodstream. Just the understanding that we have everything within us to protect us from illness, so long as our lifestyle choices maintains it rather than undermine it.

Many people have already arrived at this brave new world. Many more people are joining us every day.

And after this epidemic those numbers will only increase.

The Quality of Medical Science. What does this BMJ campaign tell us?

The next time a doctor tell you that a pharmaceutical drug or vaccines is safe, ask them to read the British Medical Journal's (BMJ) campaign "to produce better evidence".

And the next time you are told the conventional medicine is 'evidence based', and supported by medical science, tell them about the BMJ's opinion on the quality of that science.

What follows are passages taken direcctly from the BMJ website.  It concerns the BMJ's campaign to produce "better medical evidence" for such claims. What the campaign proves, without any doubt, is that the conventional medical establishment are aware of the situation that has led to so much patient harm over the last 70 years, and demonstrates that the BMJ, at least, are trying to do something about it.

     "The BMJ believes that the design, conduct, and reporting of healthcare research should better serve the needs of patients and the public: better evidence leads to better healthcare. To produce better evidence the BMJ aims to:

     • Expand the role of patients, health professionals, and policy makers in research and healthcare
     • Increase the systematic use of existing evidence for better decision making
     • Make research evidence relevant, replicable, and accessible for healthcare professionals, patients,
  and the public
     • Take a stand on financial interests by reducing questionable research practices, bias, and conflicts 
of interests.

What are the problems with current research evidence?

Patients are being let down by serious flaws in the creation, dissemination, and implementation of 
medical research. Too many research studies are poorly designed or executed. Too much of the 
resulting research evidence is withheld or disseminated only piecemeal. As the volume of clinical 
research has grown the quality of evidence has often worsened, which has compromised medicine’s 
ability to provide affordable, effective, high value care for patients. There are many problems. 
In our editorial launching the manifesto we describe the following:

     • Results from half of all trials are never published, and positive results are twice as likely to be 
published as negative ones.

     • 85% of research spending currently goes to waste.

     • Over four fifths (86%) of a sample of Cochrane reviews did not include data on the main 
harm outcome.

     • A systematic review of 39 studies found no robust studies evaluating shared decision making 
strategies.

     • The drug industry has been fined for criminal behaviour and civil infringements, but little 
happens to prevent such problems occurring again.

     • Despite repeated calls to prohibit or limit conflicts of interests among authors and sponsors of 
clinical guidelines, the problem persists.

     • A third of scientists report questionable research practices, including data mining for statistically 
significant effects, selective reporting of outcomes, switching outcomes, publication bias, protocol 
deviations, and concealing conflicts of interest.

     • More than one in 10 authors and reviewers has first-hand knowledge of inappropriate adjustment, 
alteration, or fabrication of data. More than one in 20 admits having lied in authorship statements.

These flaws have been known about for many years. I wrote about them in my E-Book, 
"The Failure of Conventional Medicine".  Ben Goldacre wrote about them in his book, "Bad Pharma". 

So it remains to be seen if the BMJ campaign will make any difference on this long-standing problem.

HPV (Gardasil) Vaccine - linked to lowered probability of pregnancy

In June 2018, the Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health published an article Gayle DeLong entitled 'A lowered probability of pregnancy in females in the USA aged 25-29 who received a human papillomavirus vaccine injection'. This is an everyday event - medical science publishing research and evidence about pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines. However it is one the demonstrates the dishonesty of medical science.

Gayle DeLong told the story on the 'Children's Health Defense' website on 17th December 2019

               "Data revealed that 60% of women who had not received the HPV vaccine had been pregnant at least once, while only 35% of HPV vaccine recipients had ever conceived. The article detailed the statistical analysis as well as offered possible biological mechanisms for the results.  Three researchers peer-reviewed the article. When the article first appeared, the editors eagerly promoted it by making it free.  By early December 2019, the number of downloads reached close to 24,000."

This is how medical science is supposed to work - if it functioned honestly and openly. But, of course, it doesn't. Young girls, and their parents, who are routinely encouraged by doctors to have the vaccination, are (or at least should be) entitled to know all there is to know about the likely side effects and consequences of any medication. But pharmaceutical medicine does not work this way. It is a business that thrives on enticing patients to take drugs and vaccines, and information about side effects is not good for drug sales.

Medical journals, such as the Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health, should publish evidence about every drug and vaccine. This particular research was processed in the normal way, peer reviewed, and published. Then it was withdrawn - and withdrawn without any satisfactory reason being given.

All this is detailed in Gayle DeLong's piece in Children's Health Defense.

Yet the detail is not important. What we are dealing with is a medical system that does not want patients to know about the serious, life-changing side effects of their drugs and vaccines. If the conventional medical establishment was honest it would look at DeLong's findings, and be sufficiently concerned to look further into the findings. Indeed, on the basis of 'first do no harm', and the precautionary principle, it would suspend use of the vaccine.

None of this is done. Instead, the journal pulls the research. It is important to realise that medical journals survive only on the basis of funding from the pharmaceutical industry. So if drug companies don't like a piece of research, if it might have an effect on profits, it is easier to ensure that the research is pulled rather than to seek to make the vaccine safe, and free of side effects.

So it's not just that pharmaceutical medicine peddles dangerous drugs and vaccines. It is that the pharmaceutical industry has sufficient control over medical journals (a major source of information doctors rely on) to ensure that they don't have to worry about the dangers - neither doctors nor patients will get to know about them.

So our daughters are damaged....

...and the drug companies rake in the profits.

SCIENCE IS NOT A PANACEA. It is not always definitive. It does not resolve everything. So how can we tell when it's right or wrong?

We live in the age of SCIENCE! But we need to be able to differentiate between good and bad science, and we are not really very good at doing so. The problem is we have been taught to believe many things about science.

• It is a panacea, providing answers for all kinds of difficulties and disputes.
• That science gives us definitive answers about what is right and what is wrong. 
• That science can resolve differences of opinion that have been debated for centuries.

Often scientists can do this, indeed, scientific evidence is usually presented to us alongside an assumption that it had done just this. And, indeed, sometimes it does - when the the science does not concern matters in which there are too many variables to contend with.

• So science knows, conclusively, what will happen when we mix two chemicals together. 
• Science knows, without contradiction, how the sun and planets currently interact, and how the constellations function. 
• Science has worked out how living organisms function and live, how they survive and how they die.
• And much more.

But often science quite clearly does not do this. For instance, social science, economics, psychology, and many other areas of human activity, where science has been applied but does not resolve very much at all. One reason is that there are just too many variables. Too often, then they are presented to us on the basis that science does have definitive knowledge, that it can predict what will happen. But it doesn't do so.

Science is often too optimistic about its ability to make sense of the world, and the problem we should all face is how we can different between the two.

This blog deals with two areas of scientific endeavour where the failure to resolve critical issues have been most notably absent, not just because there are too many variables that complicate what is happening, but because the 'science' has been taken over by powerful corporate interests.

• Climate change

Climate change and global warming is perhaps something that science should be able to come up with something decisive and conclusive about what is happening. And, in fact, it does! The bulk of the scientific community investigating climate change are clear - it is be caused by the impact that we (humanity) are having on our planet. The science is well known, and its conclusions have been getting clearer over the last 40-50 years.

Unfortunately the science of climate change was not coming up with answers that powerful corporate interests wanted or liked.

Quite the opposite, science was coming to conclusions that had massive implications for the petro-chemical industry, the coal and steel industries, the aviation industry, motor manufacturers, et al. So instead of accepting the science they began to fund and finance a kind of 'counter' science, one that denies that it is their industrial activity (the basis of their profitability) that was damaging our planet.

So for all us 'non-scientists' uncertainty and confusion was introduced.

• Pharmaceutical medicine

Conventional medicine, and its use of toxic drugs, has been with us since the 12th century. But it was at the start of the 20th century that the idea that 'science' would eventually be able to overcome illness and disease. After all, we could now travel without horses, communicate by telegram and then by telephone, we could fly - and all of this thanks to science.

So medical science was born. New 'scientific' drugs began to be lauded as miracle cures. Painkillers did seem to work. And antibiotics were able to revolutionise health care, enabling amazing new surgical operations.The result was that the pharmaceutical industry grew in size, wealth and power. They funded the new medical science, which gratefully came up with new and exciting drugs and vaccines. The industry now dominates national health provision around the world.

Yet, as with climate change, there are small voices raising questions about whether medical science is correct, that we are better, healthier because of it. Not least because the 'wonder' drugs proved to be less than wonderful, and caused the most dreadful 'side effects' that harmed patients. Many of them had to be withdrawn, or banned, because they were just too dangerous to give patients.

However, this has not caused too much uncertainty or confusion as the pharmaceutical industry had, by this time, become so powerful it could ensure these dissident voices were not heard. It could control governments, national health services, drug regulation, and the mainstream media.

So for many people there still is no scientific debate about medicine. Pharmaceutical medicine is what keeps us alive and healthy - just as we are told.

So there is an important question that needs to be asked - how can we tell when science is right or wrong? There are two criteria that we have to apply.

• 1. Who is funding the science?

The paymaster, he who pays the piper, can have an undue influence over science. It should not have such an influence, but it almost inevitably does.

Scientists funded by industries that contribute to climate change will tend to deny that climate change is caused by human activity. This kind of science, bought and paid for by industry, has become the preserve of the far, or ultra-right of politics. The USA President, Donald Trump, represents (and is part of) the interests of these polluting industries, and for them climate change just does not exist. Mainstream science is wrong, and it suits Trump, and like-minded people, to believe this.

Likewise, medical science is almost exclusively funded by the pharmaceutical industry, which now controls drug testing, drug regulation, the huge conventional medical establishment, and the mainstream media, through which we get most of our information about pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines.

So to make sense of what science is telling us, in whatever field, we need to know more about the scientists, and who is funding them. Mainstream climate science is not funded, and so does not speak for powerful corporations. It is essentially independent, its conclusions do not make money for anyone, quite the reverse, it does not speak for vested interests.

Medical science is funded by, and speaks for the pharmaceutical industry. The drug testing industry, many university medical departments, prestigious medical journals - none of them would be able to exist without the largesse of drug companies. Those small voices who are questioning, or speaking against the 'science' of the pharmaceutical industry come mainly from the tiny world of natural medicine. There is little or no profit in doing so.

•  2. Does the science explain what is happening in the world?

Yet there is a more important, and perhaps simpler way of determining the validity of the message that science is giving us:

Does it help us understand what we can see to be happening in the world?

So we should ask - is climate change happening? Are the polar ice caps and the glaciers melting? Is sea level rising? Are there more hurricanes and typhoons than there have ever been? Are there more severe weather events? Is there more flooding? Are there more droughts? Is global temperature rising? Is desertification happening in some parts of the world?

If so, who has the best explanation? Climate scientists? Or climate deniers?

And is pharmaceutical medicine working, as we are told? Is it overcoming illness and disease? Are doctors able to cope with the medical needs of their patients? Are people getting ill, and then getting better? Are the medical outcomes of pharmaceutical drug treatment positive ones? Are people, and governments, able to afford the costs of pharmaceutical medical treatment?

Or, alternatively, are chronic diseases now running at unprecedented epidemic levels - arthritis, asthma, autism, COPD, dementia, heart disease, kidney disease, liver disease, mental health, et al? And are there a plethora of new, previously never-heard-of-before diseases, especially those that are affecting our children?

Scientists are like everyone else, every other profession. Some are honest, seeking only the truth, trying to explain what is happening in the world. Some are dishonest, willing to do and say anything as long as they are well rewarded for doing so.

And each and every one of us has to make a judgement about science - what science is telling us the truth - and what science is speaking to conform to the wishes of their paymasters.

 

The First Australian Report on Homeopathy. Lies, damned lies, and medical science

• In July 2012 the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) published its first report on homeopathy. This report was withdrawn, and its existence and its contents were first denied, and never disclosed to the public.

• In March 2015 the NHMRC published its second report on homeopathy, and this concluded that “…there are no health conditions for which there is reliable evidence that homeopathy is effective”.

I wrote about this situation in my blog, "The Australian Report. The credibility of medical science" in April 2017, and again in "The Australian Report on Homeopathy. A travesty of evidence and science" in August 2017.

Homeopathy is used to being regularly attacked by the conventional medical establishment. We normally just get on with what we do best - making sick people fit and well! But this report seemed particularly dodgy, and I outlined the reasons for this in my second blog. In the main they were the same reasons as in any other report by medical science that states that homeopathy is ineffective.

But with the Australian report there was a further mystery. Why was the first report withdrawn? What were the findings of the first report? For several years a number of 'freedom of information' requests were made, but each time, they were turned down. No-one was allowed to see it.

Now, after considerable pressure from the homeopathic community, led by the Homeopathic Research Institute (HRI), the first NHMRC paper has been published. It can be read, in full here. It turns out that the author of this earlier report concluded that for at least five medical condition there was
               "encouraging evidence for the effectiveness of homeopathy"
 This is a different conclusion to the second report, which has been used homeopathy skeptics (supporters of conventional medicine and the pharmaceutical industry) to attack homeopathy ever since. This is the conclusion reached by Rachel Roberts, Chief Executive of HRI.

               “For over three years NHMRC have refused to release their 2012 draft report on homeopathy, despite Freedom of Information requests and even requests by members of the Australian Senate. To see this document finally seeing the light of day is a major win for transparency and public accountability in research.”


The HRI will now carefully review the first (positive) report and compare it with the second (negative) report in terms of the science, or more accurately the misuse of science, that this whole episode has made clear. It is important that this is done.

This blog, however, raises important questions about the political power of the pharmaceutical industry, how influential the conventional medical establishment has become, how it now dominates public health services, and the health information and misinformation that patients are being subjected to by so-called medical 'science'.

In brief, the situation demonstrates that the conventional medical establishment....

1. ... has the power to overturn a government sponsored report which found homeopathy to be an effective medical therapy, and insist on the writing of another report that would come to the opposite conclusion,
2.  ...has sufficient influence over medical science to insist that the new report deviates from what is generally considered to be 'good scientific practice' in order to come to the conclusion that the evidence for homeopathy does not warrant,
3. ... has sufficient control over the mainstream media to ensure that it does not investigate what has happened, and censors any information that comes from homeopathy, and the natural health community generally,
4. ... has sufficient influence and power over the Australian government to ensure that the findings of the 1st report remain unknown for several years, whilst the misinformation and lies contained in the 2nd report are taken up through its health policy, and acted upon.

Now that the first report has been published, belatedly, new questions come to mind. For instance, I am now wondering whether the conventional medical establishment has the power to ensure that the publication of the 1st report, favourable as it is to homeopathy, will still not mentioned, leave alone discussed, by the mainstream media?

And I wonder whether the Australian government's health policies will continue to exclude homeopathy, and other natural therapies, on the basis of the now discredited 2nd report?


Another, more general question, is this. Can the conventional medical establishment, that peddles such misinformation, ever be believed again, about anything? And can patients trust that conventional medicine is really interested in delivering good health?

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!

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

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.

For more information on the pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines known to cause Cancer, visit this website.

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.

So for more information on the pharmaceutical drugs known to cause Bronchitis, visit this website.

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.

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

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.

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

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.  

For more information about the pharmaceutical drugs known to cause MS, go to this website.

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.