Positive Health Online

Like many others, I used some of the so-called holiday period as an opportunity to catch up with big projects that I had been putting off due to the manic load of everyday work tasks.

Thus it was that I read the exceptional book Destructive Emotions and How We Can Overcome Them – A Dialogue with The Dalai Lama (reviewed on page 56), which offers an extraordinary juxtaposition of neurobiology, brain function and meditation techniques. If there is ever going to be hope for our fractured, violent world, it surely in the end will be down to becoming aware of and eventually mastering our eruptive, destructive emotions.

I also updated my book Nutrition and Cancer: State of the Art, which is out-of-print. Some 10,000 words later, having encapsulated research highlights of the past 4-5 years, I marvelled at the volume of published research pertaining to Nutrition and Cancer – Molecular Studies, Research regarding Antioxidants, Essential Fatty Acids, Dietary Studies, Nutritional Treatment Studies, Mind/Attitude and Guidelines and Advice. Also, Pat Pilkington MBE, one of the founders of the renowned Bristol Cancer Help Centre has agreed to write the Preface for the third printed edition for which I am extremely grateful.

While each of us individually busily beavers away with our lives, juggling the personal needs of our family with the professional demands of our patients or customers, it is easy to feel alone, isolated, even alienated, not connected to the wider outer world. The more I speak with and listen to practitioners, authors and people running their businesses, the more I realize the profound sense of fragmentation most of us feel, that we are battling the world to take care of ourselves.

This is true to a certain extent. Most people in complementary medicine are running their practice or small business, with little gratitude from the wider community or the medical profession for the services they are performing. Gratitude is an emotional attribute that is deficient within our general society, and which requires cultivation.

This is why it is vital for each of us to develop and retain a sense of who we are within the greater scheme, not only in our professional lives but also regarding the wider meaning of our lives. Although working alone on our own can be isolating, solitude and peace and quiet can also give us the tranquillity to discover our own inner voice and direction.

This is a time of imminent portent and change for Complementary Medicine, where important traditions, techniques and products valued within the Alternative and Complementary communities are at risk from supranational, indeed global forces such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the European Union (EU). As Positive Health readers will have read on the letters pages, these organizations have been taking explicit steps to severely curtail the sale and ingestion of many cherished vitamins, minerals and herbal medicinal products.

In order to retain these potentially live-saving products, we are going to be required to come together as a united community and fight these retrograde moves to limit our freedom of choice regarding the types of foods and supplements we are entitled to buy.

Complementary Medicine has been disparaged, sidelined and ignored for all too long, whereas the pharmaceutically driven, conventional driven healthcare system, responsible for some 40,000 deaths each year in the UK, from drug reactions and medical mistakes, continues to be espoused, funded and used as the preferred model by the Government, the Media and the Medical Profession. Complementary Medicine is like the little child, told by his parents not to be naughty and to play nicely on his own and is ignored by the grownups.

We must all try to work together to put Complementary Medicine or Integrated Medicine, which uses the best of all traditions, at the heart of our Society's Agenda, not at the sidelines.

This won't be an easy struggle. In the battle against the pharmaceutical industry are huge multinational fortunes, which will need to be matched and challenged. Surely, prior to taking on the multinational corporate giants we will need to win the hearts and minds of the Medical Profession and the Government, no mean feat either.

I don't know how this struggle will play out; however, I feel that we are in a crucial period where we need to gather our strength, sense our resolve and start to come together. Watch this space.