Homeopathy and Horses: more effective, less expensive, and safer too!

More people own horses now than for many decades - and the numbers are increasing. Every horse owner faces the prospect of illness and disease - and large vet fees as a direct result. Yet homeopathy has been used in the treatment of injuries and the general well-being of horses, including racehorses - and it is more effective, less expensive, and safer than conventional treatment.

In fact the idea of using homeopathy, as a treatment for animals, termed veterinary homeopathy, dates back to the inception of homeopathy when Hahnemann, the founder of Homeopathy in the late 18th century  wrote and spoke of the use of homeopathy in animals other than humans.

The owners and trainers of horses have found this natural system of medicine hugely benefits the racehorse as it treats the totality of the animal, stimulating the body’s healing process whilst having no side effects or withdrawal symptoms.

Homeopathic remedies can help horses with physical, mental, and emotional conditions and because the Horses, and their relationship with homeopathy remedies come in tiny pills or drops, they are extremely easy to administer.

There are a number of homeopathic remedies for horses but some of the most common ones available include:

Arnica helps with wound, tendon, and sprain injuries.

Aconite can help with laminitis and gastric ulcers

Arsenicum can help with colic and indigestion

Thuja helps with skin conditions such as warts, rain rot, and swelling from vaccinations

For more information on treating animals through homeopathy, please visit the Faculty of Homeopaths or the British Association of Homeopathic Veterinary Surgeons website.

This article was first published in an ARH Newsletter, "Homeopathy Healthy Medicine".

The Diabetes Epidemic. What the Media does not tell us!

Given that BBC News are reporting that the current epidemic of Diabetes threatens to bankrupt the NHS, here is what the BBC, and the rest of the mainstream media, is steadfastly refusing to tell you! Lots of Big Pharma drugs cause diabetes!

The BBC reported (28th September 2006) that the number of people diagnosed with diabetes has increased by over 100,000 in the previous year, and that its prevalence had jumped from 3.3% to 3.6%, or from 1,766,000 to over 1,890,999 in just one year. These figures were taken from the Government's Information Centre. 

In the same article, Douglas Smallwood (Diabetes UK) said that 

      "up to 750,000 people have diabetes and are not aware of it. This means that thousands of people are going about their daily lives unaware they have a condition that reduces their life expectancy".

Another BBC News report, 16th March 2007, said that the number of under-fives with diabetes had increased 5-fold, and affected one child in every 1,000 in 2004. The number of under-15's with diabetes had almost doubled during the study, which focused on 2.6 million people in the Oxford region between 1985 and 2004. The charity Diabetes UK said that the trend applied to the whole of the UK, as other studies had revealed similar rises. Professor Polly Bingley, who led the study, said the rate of childhood diabetes was increasing all over Europe , particularly in the very young. She said that these increases were too steep to be put down to genetic factors alone, and blamed 'changes in our environment', 'being exposed to something new', or 'reduced exposure to something that was previously controlling our immune responses'.

The problem is now getting so big, it is 'threatening to overwhelm the NHS' (The Independent, and other papers, 24th February 2009). This article said that the number of people newly diagnosed with diabetes has more than doubled (from 83,000 in 2006, to 167,000 in 2008, and that more than 2.2 million people in Britain now suffer from the adult-onset type of the disease.

Although diet and lifestyle factors are an important contributory factor in this epidemic, NHS-ConMed drugs are also implicated. WDDTY March 2007 (reporting the Lancet 2007; 369:201-7) said that "it's been suspected for nearly 50 years that antihypertensive drugs provoke diabetes because they lower a patient's glucose tolerance levels". But a definitive statement has been hard to come by as many patients with raised blood pressure are simply more likely to develop diabetes in any event. But it says that researchers from Rush Medical College in Chicago arrived at these conclusion after re-examining 22 clinical trials involving more than 143,000 patients who did not have diabetes when they started taking an antihypertensive drug to control their blood pressure.

In a story published in the New York Times (17 December 2006), Yahoo News (17 December 17 2006) and Consumer Affairs (18 December 2006) evidence had been obtained by an attorney representing patients in a lawsuit suggested that Eli Lilly covered up concerns about its schizophrenia drug Zyprexa. Although the company denies this, the documents suggest that the company withheld important information about the drug's links to obesity and increased blood sugar levels for the 10 years it was being marketed. The drug is implicated in causing diabetes.

The British Heart Foundation Statistics website, in 2010 outlined the following statistics:

    * Over 4% of men, and 3% of women in England have been diagnosed with diabetes.

     *The estimate that there are just under 1.9 million adults with diagnosed diabetes in the USA.

     * It says that the Health Survey for England found that not all diabetes is diagnosed, and that 3% of men, and 0.7% of women aged 35 and over have undiagnosed diabetes. As a result, they estimate that around 2.5 million adults in the UK have diabetes.

     * In 2001, just under 7,000 deaths due to diabetes were officially recorded in the UK. This, they say, is likely to be a huge underestimate because other diseases caused by diabetes (such as cardiovascular disease) are normally given as the cause of death.

      * They say a better estimate is found in the World Health Organization's 'Global Burden of Disease Project'  (Murray CJL, Lopex A (1996) The Global Burden of Disease. WHO: Geneva) which suggests that in countries like the UK there are about five times as many deaths indirectly attributable to diabetes as directly attributable. This would mean that there are about 35,000 deaths a year in the UK attributable to diabetes - or about 1 in 20 of all deaths.

So what has caused the epidemic of diabetes? No doubt there are many factors, including diet and obesity. But Conventional Medical drugs are also implicated, including Beta Blocker drugs, and diuretics.

When will our news media begin putting the spotlight on pharmaceutical drugs? They know that they cause 'side effects'. So why do they not investigate when the 'medicines' we are being given to make us healthy are actually causing these epidemics of chronic disease?

For more information about diabetes and pharmaceutical drugs, click on this link.

People who hate Health Freedom

These are pen-pictures of the people who hate Health Freedom, who want to deny you Patient Choice, who want you to continue taking conventional pharmaceutical drugs, without asking questions, people  who don't want you to know their dangers, sometimes the lethal dangers.

These are the people who head up, or belong to, Big Pharma funded and/or supported groups. They attack alternative medical therapies, like Homeopathy, and seek to perpetuate the failing, dangerous conventional, drug-based health system that so dominates our National Health Service (NHS).

They are people who don't want an NHS dominated by Big Pharma drugs. They want an NHS in which Big Pharma drugs have a complete monopoly.

These pen pictures were first published by the magazine, "What Doctors Don't Tell You" (WDTTY). They are trying to stop its publication because it seeks to tell us the truth about conventional medicine. They are trying to stop its sale in major retail outlets.

This is not a hall of fame, it is a hall of infamy. These are people who believe that their drug-based medicine will only prevail if you and I don't get to know what it is doing to us!

• that it is making us ill
• that it is causing epidemic levels of chronic disease
• that it is bankrupting the NHS.

If you would like to know the 'quality' of their argument, and the abuse they aim at people who seek to find out the truth about conventional medicine, read these blogs. Some of the people described below are regular abusers of this blog!

http://safe-medicine.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/militant-skepticism-and-homeopathy.html

http://safe-medicine.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/militant-skepticism-and-homeopathy-what.html

http://safe-medicine.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/quack-just-another-personal-attack-from.html

"Meet the people who would dictate your health care"

As you know, we have been the target of a concerted campaign to get the store chains to stop stocking us. The architects of this campaign are the same people who spend a good deal of time attacking and harassing alternative practitioners of every variety.

Their numbers aren't large (there're only about 80 of them in total), and they aren't well followed (Alan Henness of the Nightingale Collaboration, for instance, has just 462 followers on Twitter; Simon Singh, just 44 actively following him), but they are well organized and fuelled by a good deal of self-righteous passion about their mission, which is to stamp out what they view as quackery (ie, natural medicine of every variety, particularly the likes of homeopathy).

So we thought we should shine a light on the qualifications of the most vocal proponents of a group who believe they have the right to determine what you can or can't read about your health or indeed the kinds of medical treatments you should be allowed to have access to.

Simon Singh.  
Singh is not a medical doctor; he has a Ph.D in particle physics.  As he often signs his letters 'Dr Singh' when writing to Tesco or our distributors, most stores and media naturally assume that he has medical qualifications.  He does not, nor does he have a history of studying or writing about conventional medicine. He's written books about mathematical problems and patterns, codes and code-breaking and even cosmology, but nothing to date about conventional medicine - only one co-authored book (Trick or Treatment?- the clue to the slant is in the title) largely trashing alternative medicine. Singh is the public face of Sense About Science, a charity set up by a holding company in India, whose trustees include Simon Singh and his older brother, Tom, who founded the high street chain New Look. Sense about Science reports that it is supported by donations from a variety of sources, including the Royal Pharmaceutical Society and many pharmaceutically backed charities, such as Cancer UK.

 'Josephine Jones'. 
 'She' is the pseudonym for two people: Michael and Laura Thomason, who live in Warrington. Mike works as a database developer at Catalent Pharma Solutions; there is a Laura Thomason on Linkedin who works as a supervisor at an Esquire's Coffee Shop, but we can't verify if they are one and the same. If so, there can't be many people popping in and ordering cappuccinos because she and her husband seem to have the time to catalogue WDDTY's every move, which they circulate on Josephine Jones' blog as a constantly updated 'Master List'. Presently, they are carrying out a survey of stores we're in, presumably in hopes they might be able to pick us off, one store at a time. Neither professes to any medical qualifications.

Guy Chapman, who created a website called 'What What Doctors Don't Tell You Doesn't Tell You', and writes a good deal of bile-filled statements about alternative practitioners, is a software developer for Dell Computers. He's also a member of a choir.

Jo Brody works two days a week as a public engagement coordinator for a research project which runs across four sites, including UCL, Queen Mary, City University and Swansea University), studying how to make medical devices safer. Jo's job is to update the website and expand the project's online presence.  For the rest of the week she works as an information officer at Diabetes UK. Previously she worked as a secretary for Professor Stephen Wharton. As she freely admits:
'I am not medically trained.'

Alan Henness. 
He and his wife Maria MacLachlan, who live in Harrow, are effectively the Nightingale Collaboration, a tiny organization that was given seed money by Sense About Science, but that spends a prodigious amount of time reporting advertisers and practitioners of alternative medicine to The Advertising Standards Authority. Despite the name, the ASA is not a government body; it's an advertising-industry-sponsored organization with no teeth. The best it can do is place advertisers it deems out of line on the naughty step, listing them on as a 'non-compliant advertiser' on its own website. Evaluations of the advertisements of alternative medicine or practitioners through the ASA are a stacked deck; they are evaluated, as our ads were, by known skeptics like Dr. Edzard Ernst, Simon Singh's co-author of Trick or Treatment?

Henness does not report any other employment, at least on his Linkedin page; previously he was R&D manager for Honeywell Security and Customer Electronics.  Although he appears to have no background in evaluating or studying medicine or alternative medicine, as he writes, "the Nightingale Collaboration was set up to enable my wife, Maria MacLachlan, and I to share our knowledge and experience in challenging misleading claims in healthcare advertising and to encourage anyone who is concerned at protecting the public from misinformation in healthcare promotion to join us in challenging it."

Maria Maclachlan herself is the Community Services Officer of the British Humanist Society, which campaigns 'for an open society and a secular state with no religious privilege or discrimination based on religion or belief,' according to its website. (Alan was former Convenor for the Humanist Society.) On the website Think Humanism (http://www.thinkhumanism.com/humanism2.html), Maria wrote, in a short précis of what it means to be a humanist: 'Humanists embrace the moral principle known as the Golden Rule. This means we believe that people should aim to treat each other as they would like to be treated themselves - with tolerance, consideration and compassion.'

I wonder if this 'Golden Rule' also includes harassing groups, practitioners or organizations who advocate or advertise alternative medicine?

Andy Lewis. 
Set up the 'Quackometer' site, which he claims to be an experiment in 'critical thinking'. Doesn't reveal what his credentials, education or employment history are - says they 'don't matter' nor does an honest debate of the issues because the wording on websites will, through his own use of critical thinking, offer prima facie evidence of 'quackery'. 

That's who they are. WDDTY, on the other hand, has seven medical doctors on its editorial panel, plus several PhDs and highly qualified practitioners of a number of alternative disciplines. Thousands of doctors and health practitioners of every persuasion regularly read WDDTY and comment enthusiastically. The two editors of our magazine have been medical science writers for 25 years, and every word in our pages is checked by a science editor with an extensive history of writing and editing medical studies for the pharmaceutical industry. 

Do you want these eight people to be the ones to determine what you can read about your own health care?

If not, write to Tesco today and ask them to re-stock What Doctors Don't Tell You.  And tell them a bit more about the people who fire off 'complaints' -  that they are neither true customers nor people with either the training or experience to evaluate the information in our pages:
customer.service@tesco.co.uk

Diarrhoea. Best treated with Homeopathy?

Diarrhoea is passing loose or looser, or more frequent stools, than normal. It is not normally a serious condition, but can be an annoying and embarrassing one. Acute periods of diarrhoea usually last no more than a few days, and can be accompanied by fever, vomiting and stomach cramps. Longer-term, chronic diarrhoea can be more serious, and more difficult to treat.

Note that diarrhoea, like most ailments, can be brought on my a variety of conventional medical drugs.

CONVENTIONAL MEDICAL TREATMENT

NHS Choices states, quite rightly, that “diarrhoea will usually clear up without treatment after a few days because the immune system fights off the infection”. The advantage of Homeopathy over conventional medicine, however, is that waiting for the body to recover on its own is not necessary, and remedies can be used immediately, and have been proven to shorten the period of recovery.

NHS Choices then goes on to give sensible advice about drinking fluids, including oral rehydration solutions, to avoid dehydration. It also gives some advice about what to eat.

NHS Choices then goes on to describe Antidiarrhoeal medicines, like Loperamide and Racecadotril, 

which “may help reduce your diarrhoea and shorten how long it lasts by around 24 hours”. It says that these should not be given to children, or if there is blood or mucous in the stool. This is presumably because of the side-effects of these drugs. These side-effects, some of them serious, can be found on this link.

Painkillers are the next suggestion. As NHS Choices says, these do not cure your diarrhoea, but can relieve any accompanying fever or headache. However, as is now well known, these ‘benefits’ come at a considerable potential cost, and the dangers of painkillers are now becoming so serious that doctors are increasingly reluctant to prescribe them. To read about the dangers of painkilling drugs, see this link.

NHS Choices then introduces Antibiotic drugs as a possible treatment. However, it says that “treatment with antibiotics is not recommended for diarrhoea if the cause is unknown”. The reasons given is that they will not work if the diarrhoea is caused by a virus, and antibiotics “can cause unpleasant side effects”. And, of course, there is the whole issue of antibiotic resistance too! Apparently, however, they will be prescribed if there is severe diarrhoea.

Finally, NHS Choices talks about hospital treatment “if you or your child is seriously dehydrated due to diarrhoea”. Treatment will involve administering fluids and nutrients directly into a vein (intravenously).

THE HOMEOPATHIC TREATMENT OF DIARRHOEA

Please click here to see the evidence basis for Homeopathy

Important Note

Homeopathy does not treat illness or diseases. It treats the individual who has been diagnosed with a particular illness or disease. The distinction is important, and if you wish to read more about this, click on the chapter “Illness Diagnosis” above.

These remedy descriptions come from the Hpathy website. They are likely to help if the patients’ symptoms match with these general remedy symptoms.

Aesculus hip

Chronic diarrhoea, stool first hard and black, later becomes yellow, thin, watery associated with severe lumber and sacral pains, weakness, weariness, and sleepiness.

Aconite

Diarrhoea from checked perspiration, during heat of summer, from fight or anger, in cold nights, corrosive slimy stools, frequent and involuntary.

Aethusa cynapium 

Green, thin, bilious discharges, with violent tenesmus, stools of partly digested food, just after meal or at night. Stool loose with cutting in abdomen.

Agaricus 

Excellent remedy for diarrhea in wet weather.

Aloes 

Remarkable remedy for diarrhoea, profuse watery diarrhoea; wants of confidence in sphincter ani, early morning diarrhoea, driving out of bed in the morning;  urging of stool continuously worse immediately after eating; feeling of fullness and weight in the pelvis, with passage of urine, only hot flatus passes, giving relief but burning in anus afterwards; stool difficult to retain; even a well formed stool passes unnoticed; aggravation hot damp weather, overheating, after cold in a damp room, after chagrin; urging with intense gripping, pinching pain across the lower part of abdomen.

Nux Vomica 

Diarrhoea due to over eating and diet errors and indigestible foods; pain in abdomen before stools; stools contain undigested particles of food; diarrhoea after debauch.

Podophyllum 

Diarrhoea green watery, fetid, profuse, and gushing; Worse during teething and in the morning, while bathing or washing and in hot weather; Camp diarrhoea; Diarrhoea alternating with constipation; Prolapse of rectum, before or with stool.

Pulsatilla 

Diarrhoea after measles; stool contains undigested food particles; diarrhoea due to food poisoning.

Natrum Sulph 

Stools involuntary while passing flatus; early morning diarrhoea; great size of fecal masses.

Veratrum album 

Painful diarrhoea; watery, copious, and forcefully evacuated followed by great weakness.

Arsenic album 

Useful in cases where there is marked restlessness; anguish and intolerance of pain; quantity of stool passed is small and prostration and weakness is out of all proportion to the quantity passed; great thirst for small quantities of water at short intervals.

Croton Tig 

Stool yellow, watery, expelled suddenly, gunshot diarrhoea; aggravated by drink or food; diarrhoea associated with nausea and vomiting; every movement causes discharge.

Graphites 

Stool of brown fluid mixed with undigested substances and an intolerable fetid odour.

Sulphur 

Morning diarrhoea ordinarily at the time when the patient begins to think about rising; between midnight and morning

Antim crud 

Alternate diarrhoea and constipation in old people; diarrhoea after overheating; after nursing, after cold bathing, at night and early morning; diarrhoea with nausea and vomiting, colic and loss of appetite; diarrhoea from acid, vinegar; stool profuse, watery, with little hard lumps. Diarrhoea on alternate days, rectum inactive, even a soft, thin stool requires great straining, patient cannot pass until there is large accumulation; diarrhea when she urinates.

Argentum Nitricum 

Remarkable remedy for nervous diarrhoea, diarrhea from anticipation or apprehension; when ready to go to church, opera, theatre, etc. diarrhoea from taking sweets, from drinking; diarrhoea during dentition; stool green, flaky, like spinach, mucus, with much flatulence.

Bryonia Alba 

Diarrhoea due to suddenly checked perspiration in hot weather, from getting overheated in summers; from drinking milk; desire from cold drinks and acids, for large quantities at long intervals; bilious diarrhoea with lancinating pain.

Calcaria phos 

Diarrhoea with much flatulency, caused by juicy fruits; after vexations, in school going girls with headaches; diarrhoea during dentition.

Camphora 

Diarrhoea with great prostration and collapse; Dark brown r black stool with cutting pain in abdomen; rice watery stools

Cuprum met 

Violent diarrhoea, with cramps in the stomach and chest; frequent watery diarrhoea, with flakes; cold sweat; weak and small pulse; excellent remedy for cholera.

Dulcamara 

Diarrhoea alternating with rheumatism; stool slimy, alternately yellow or greenish, whitish, watery; frequent; scanty; corrosive, with floculli, aggravation at night and in wet weather.

Iodum 

Diarrhoea from pancreatic affections; chronic diarrhoea of an exhausting character

Ipecaucuanha 

Autumnal diarrhoea; chronic diarrhoea, continuous nausea, stool as green as grass, putrid; frequent vomiting of jelly like green mucus.

Lycopodium 

Diarrhoea after suppression of skin eruptions; stool thin brown or pale; excessive accumulation of flatulence.

Mag carb 

Stool like scum of frog pound; green or frothy white masses, floating on the green, watery stool; aggravate in hot weather, during dentition, from artificial food.

Phosphorous 

Watery diarrhoea; with lumps of white mucus; morning diarrhoea , exhausting stools; chronic diarrhoea with gradual loss of strength.

Children’s symptoms. Another good source of remedy symptoms are on the Dana Ullman website, particularly highlighting the symptoms of children.

This blog was first published on the "Why Homeopathy? website.

Atrial Fibrillation. The dangers of blood-thinning drugs

Recently, the mainstream media, including the BBC, reported that NICE were instructing doctors to stop using Aspirin in the treatment of Atrial Fibrillation, and to use blood-thinning drugs (like Warfarin, Pradaxa and Multaq) instead. In my blog, "The NHS Overspends again" I said the following about this change of advice.

The NICE guidance on aspirin overturns conventional medical practice that has been in place for decades. What does this mean? It means that the NHS has now recognised that people have been taking a drug is not very effective.

Yet the main problem with aspirin is not just that it is ineffective. There is a growing recognition that aspirin is positively dangerous to our health, especially when taken on a long-term basis. This, of course, was not mentioned by NICE, or by the BBC, but it could well be the primary reason for the change in advice.

Indeed, there is evidence, reported in the BMJ some years ago that the use of aspirin can actually triple the risk of stroke - the very condition it has been given to prevent!.

This may be bad enough - doctors giving us ineffective but harmful medicines. Yet what has not been reported is new evidence about the dangers of blood-thinning drugs, notably Pradaxa (a new drug, used as an alternative to Warfarin, which for many years has been considered to be a dangerous treatment). 

Pradaxa was approved in 2010, and is used to treat irregular heartbeat (atrial fibrillation, or AF). It is supposed to prevent strokes. As usual Big Pharma (supported by the mainstream media) heralded this as a 'breakthrough' drug, being safer, and causing less haemorrhaging than Warfarin). However, the dangers of Pradaxa soon became known to the medical establishment, even if they were not publicised, and even if patients have not been told.

When the FDA approved Pradaxa in the USA, they said that it's bleeding rates were not higher than Warfarin's. Yet, in a straight contraction to this, it also stated that the risk of bleeding was 6 times higher than with Warfarin!

What has happened since suggests that the latter statement was correct. The manufacturer of Pradaxa, Boehringer Ingelheim, has settled about 4,000 injury lawsuits, and have been reported to have paid over $650 million to those injured by the drug. (Investigation update: Manufacturer settles approximately 4,000 Pradaxa lawsuits for $650 million, published online 04.06.14, newsnet5.com).

Yet the drug is still being prescribed! Of course! Did it suggest to drug regulators throughout the world that Pradaxa was a dangerous drug? Of course not!

It has been estimated that Pradaxa caused 542 deaths, from bleeding, in 2011, that is, the year after its approval. (FDA-Approved Drug Linked to 542 Deaths and 2,367 Hemorrhages, but FDA Refuses to Pull It, published online, healthimpactnews.com).

Most of the complaints about Pradaxa were that the drug company failed to warn patients about the risk of internal bleeding. Yet did the FDA do anything about these complaints. Of course not! One piece of research indicates that Pradaxa can be blamed for a total of 1,158 deaths, and 12,494 serious injuries - just in the USA!

And yet nothing is done. The drug is still being marketed throughout the world, with sales rising year by year. People are still taking it, and most of them will be unaware of the potential consequences - because no-one in the mainstream media, no-one in the conventional health establishment, not even our own doctors, bother to tell us!

So, in the NICE guidance, and the BBC article referring to the treatment of AF, doctors are advised not to give Aspirin - but to give blood-thinning drugs instead.

AND NOTE, THERE IS NOT A WORD OF WARNING ABOUT THE DANGERS OF THESE BIG PHARMA DRUGS - AS USUAL! 

So what NICE is suggesting for the treatment of AF is interesting. Aspirin is not effective. So move to taking a blood-thinning drug. However, they are not informing us that Aspirin is dangerous. Or that Warfarin, Pradaxa, and other blood-thinning drugs are more dangerous.

Homeopathy anyone?

PS 

Can any blood thinning drug be taken safely? The answer is "No". If you are in any doubt about this, please see my blog on Multaq, another dangerous blood-thinning drug!

NHS Overspend - again!

The mainstream media is reporting yet another NHS overspend this morning (18th June 2014). 

Of course, this is not new news - such overspends have been a regular feature of NHS health news for the last 60+ years and more. The usual reasons given (including by the BBC Today programme) is that the NHS is underfunded (currently the spending freeze is highlighted), and there is an ageing population. Yet the BBC Today programme featured two other health-related features.

• One concerns new NICE guidance to doctors regarding the treatment of Atrial Fibrillation - stop using Aspirin - and start using blood-thinning drugs like Warfarin.

• The other feature concerned Crohn's Disease, which it said had increased by over 300% over the last 10 years, and that one of the reasons for this was the prescription of antibiotic drugs to young children.

These news features were not linked by the BBC, of course, although there is a very clear link, as I have pointed out, in considerable detail, in my e-book, "The Failure of Conventional Medicine" (click here to read this). Conventional, drug-based medicine has always been expensive. Some drugs can cost £30,000 per annum per patient, and a few much more than this. 

Yet whilst the cost of conventional drugs is an issue it is NOT the fundamental reason the NHS is constantly found to be overspending. Indeed, the reason for NHS overspends are contained within the BBC's own reports today on Aspirin, and on Crohn's disease.

The NICE guidance on aspirin overturns conventional medical practice that has been in place for decades. What does this mean? It means that the NHS has now recognised that people have been taking a drug is not very effective.

"Aspirin has been used for years to help protect patients from strokes, but mounting evidence suggests the drug's benefits are too small compared with other treatments".

Yet the main problem with aspirin is not just that it is ineffective. There is a growing recognition that aspirin is positively dangerous to our health, especially when taken on a long-term basis. This, of course, was not mentioned by NICE, or by the BBC, but it could well be the primary reason for the change in advice.

Indeed, there is evidence, reported in the BMJ some years ago that the use of aspirin can actually triple the risk of stroke - the very condition it has been given to prevent!.

In terms of cost, this means is that the NHS has been using a largely ineffectual (and harmful) drug on the basis that it was doing us some good. This is not a one-off situation. It has been repeated regularly over the years - we are given a drug because it is supposed to be effective, only later for us to be told it is not effective! 

We are, however, not usually told that the drug we have taken for years is also dangerous.

However, this is not the case with the BBC's feature on Crohn's disease. The cause of this particular epidemic was actually mentioned. Antibiotic drugs. And particularly antibiotics given to young children. The dangers of antibiotics drugs have rarely been discussed by the mainstream media. The conventional medical establishment have, said for over 60 years, that these drugs were "very safe", and it has been on this understanding that most parents have allowed their children to take them over the years. 

The admission that Antibiotic drugs meddle with our gut flora, disrupt our digestive system, and can ultimately cause Crohn's disease, was mentioned in this BBC feature - but the issue was not pursued. The mainstream media, including the BBC, has rarely, if ever, discussed the issues of medical drugs causing such epidemics of chronic disease. There are many examples of this but they appear to be 'no-go' areas for our media!

Incidentally, there is also evidence that aspirin can also cause Crohn's disease!

So what are we facing in this situation? What are we missing? Basically, we are missing a vicious circulatory in the way we are delivering health services to sick people, and the outcomes.

• Start with an overspending NHS......
• Then consider the use of drugs, over decades, that are eventually found to be ineffective (and also harmful to our health).....
• Then consider the epidemics of chronic diseases, like Crohn's, often new diseases, caused by conventional drug treatment, which add to the levels of illness the NHS is having to cope with.....
• Then consider the additional demands this places on NHS services......
• And then ask the question - why does the NHS overspend its huge budget......

I wonder when the Media is going to be allowed to do some 'joined-up' thinking on the issue of health, and the domination of conventional drugs within the NHS?

BBC News highlights its own inadequacies in health reporting. Statin Drugs.

The mainstream media does not report the dangers of pharmaceutical drugs, and this includes BBC News, a public service broadcaster that has repeatedly refuses to inform its viewers and listeners of the harm Big Pharma drugs can cause.

It was therefore a surprise to hear this morning (11th June 2014) that the Today programme reported that certain senior doctors have asked NICE to re-look at its advice to prescribe Statin drugs to healthy people. Perhaps they did not realise that they were giving an opportunity for these doctors to state that Statin drugs cause serious adverse reactions, including kidney and liver damage, muscle damage, and diabetes (dementia was not mentioned).

The BBC, and most of the mainstream media, have never reported these disease-causing-effects of Statin drugs before - and the question needs to be asked - Why not?

(Incidentally, the 'epidemic' rise of diabetes was featured by the Today programme the previous day, 10th June 2014. No connection was made to this, or the fact that many conventional drugs are known to cause diabetes).

What astute listeners would  have realised is that BBC News have never announced these adverse reactions, and have always been happy to parrot the conventional medical establishment's view that these drugs were 'entirely safe', and that 'everyone should take them'.

The report also demonstrated that NICE make their recommendations without access to all the evidence known to Big Pharma companies about the adverse reactions of drugs. 

John Humphries seemed genuinely surprised about this 'revelation'. Perhaps we should ask where he has been during the last ten years and more!

It also seemed to come as a surprise that NICE was dominated by people who had close links with Big Pharma companies.

For a moment I thought that the BBC had changed their policy on health issues - a sudden conversion to open and honest and impartial reporting. However, it is more likely that they stumbled on this evidence. Whether they pursue such concerns in future remains to be seen. But by past performance, they will continue to believe everything the conventional medical establishment tells them, and assume that the only people who know anything about health are conventionally trained doctors.

Patients are badly served by the BBC, and by the mainstream media generally. This is one of the main reasons for this, and similar blogs - to inform people about the dangers of conventional medicine - to inform people that the NHS, NICE, the MHRC, et al, are part of a monopoly that is causing harm to our health.