Positive Health Online

When I originally started Positive Health some nine years ago, my motivation was to provide authoritative clinical and research information about complementary medicine to people who might not otherwise learn about new developments in the many natural healthcare fields.

Prior to Positive Health, I had researched and written several books regarding nutrients (germanium, vitamin C), and compiled a large database of research about nutrition and cancer and books emanating from these published studies.

Those lucky enough to have copies of these books (currently out-of-print but on our internet site and due to be reprinted in the near future), will see my lack of understanding even then about why such important health information, published and in the public domain, never seemed to get communicated either to health professionals or to the general public. Not wishing to posit some conspiracy theory about such information disappearing down black holes, I couldn't understand how doctors, researchers, oncologists and researchers didn't know about nutrients which could significantly inhibit or even reverse cancers.

Now, nine years, 80 issues of Positive Health and tens of thousands of research papers later, my incredulity and puzzlement has hardened into rage at the deliberate ignorance and incompetence of much of the medical profession, and the probably sinister, profit-motivated objectives of the pharmaceutical industry, which appears to be driving the clamp-down upon nutritional and herbal supplements within the EU and internationally.

I implore all Positive Health readers to read the latest letters in this issue regarding the EU Supplement and Traditional Herbal Medicinal Products Directives, and especially the letter by Bill Sardi regarding the insanity of CODEX. Seldom has the case for liberalizing the availability of these life-saving nutrients been better made, in my opinion. I congratulate Mr Sardi for his eloquence in highlighting the lethal absurdities in: restricting dosages of potassium to 99 mg (a banana contains 700 mg); not restricting table salt (US consumption is at 4000 mg per day) while selling millions of dollars of ineffective anti-hypertensive drugs; banning high-dose vitamin A where millions of people have low vitamin A levels, resulting in diminished night vision and compromised immune systems; and capping dosages of magnesium (80% of Americans are deficient in magnesium), resulting in some 340,000 sudden-death heart attacks annually.

As Bill Sardi continues ..."Over 14,000 Americans now die needlessly in hospitals due to mutated microbes that cannot be killed by the most potent antibiotics. Again, modern medicine's over-reliance upon prescription drugs is the problem. While it has been conclusively shown that carvacrol and allicin, the active ingredients in oregano and garlic, can kill virtually every known bacterium without inducing germ resistance, these natural remedies are ignored and are often considered nothing more than snake oil. Even needless death does not prompt public health authorities to look at natural alternatives. At a time when there is anxiety over biological terrorism, there is even some evidence that carvacrol and allicin are potent against the anthrax bacterium and the smallpox virus, yet pharmaceutical companies continue to gain the attention of the news media and funding from governmental sources for problematic vaccines that are known to result in significant mortality..."

Alas, Bill Sardi concludes on a fairly exasperated note, saying that he is re-submitting this very same letter which he wrote to the US CODEX delegation two years ago, hopes that someone will read it, and that the CODEX convention will back away from implementing dosage restrictions.

An update is also included in the letters pages regarding the EU Supplement and Herbal Products Directives, both of which could bring about dire restrictions in life-saving products. An extensive campaign to lobby scientific, political and consumer groups is currently underway by Consumers for Health Choice (E: enquiries@healthchoice.org.uk W: www.healthchoice.org.uk) who require our support in every possible way.

It is exceedingly wearisome to have to continually fight to save so many nutrients which have been extensively researched and clinically demonstrated; however, it is also continually inspiring to read about the real progress being made in so many areas, as described in this issue of Positive Health. Perhaps instead of fighting to get those in power to do their job and read the research, we should instead fund and implement a huge, international alternative to the WHO, which would promote complementary/alternative/natural as well as technological approaches to healthcare. Perhaps that will be my next task.