Positive Health Online

I have a serious issue around trusting health experts. Your life and heath, and mine, may depend upon not trusting the received wisdom of conventional experts.

There are a number of salutary features in this issue providing ample food for thought regarding the risks of obeying the so-called experts.

The communiqué Cholesterol Skeptics: The Bad News About Statin Drugs (see page 55) demonstrates the darker side of statins, and exposes the shaky foundation of the high cholesterol = heart disease mantra espoused by the medical establishment. Physicians (and pharmaceutical companies) would have it that statins be available to everyone, including children.

Ruth Whalen recounts her personal horrific 15-year saga of suffering from caffeine allergy (see page 44), which presented as anaphylaxis, a masked cerebral allergy and progressed to toxic dementia. Over this lengthy time span, doctors diagnosed a menagerie of disorders, including PMS, sleep apnea, anxiety and hysteria, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. Once diagnosed as suffering from caffeine allergy/toxicity, she recovered and returned to her natural mental state without any medication.

In Martin J Walker's interview with Louise Mclean (see page 28), he discusses the disgraceful dirty tricks of the medical establishment – "the character assassination of alternative practitioners and researchers, the commissioning and planting of press stories; the linking up with more formal agencies like the FDA and the MCA; raiding premises; striking people off professional registers; bringing people before disciplinary board hearings; conducting bogus scientific trials, the undeclared work with large corporations…" as well as other thoroughly nefarious practices. "For instance in the case of this particular naturopath, somebody in the Ministry of Health set the police on him. It's difficult to understand the consciousness of police officers trying to track down and bring to trial an alternative medical practitioner. We can understand the police arresting a criminal doing obvious harm to property or to a person but we are not quite sure how to describe the social environment of a police officer involved in a campaign on behalf of the State against an alternative medical practitioner…"

Martin Walker's latest book Skewed, reviewed by Dr Derek Pheby (see page 59) recounts how complex syndromes, including ME, Gulf War Syndrome and Organophosphate Poisoning became psychiatric illnesses in the minds of many medical experts, and the medical establishment became embroiled in people's personal lives with horrendous consequences "very large numbers of families in the UK have been traumatized by the witch hunts that have followed the enthusiastic promotion of Munchausen Sydrome by Proxy (MSP) by its protagonists from the late 1970s onwards… with its unscientific psychiatric labelling, denial of natural justice (because public authorities were, for the most part, able to exercise arbitrary powers, for example to take children into care and even to have them adopted, without going anywhere near a court and without the parents having party status in legal proceedings), and abuse of process."

Perhaps one of the most distressing failures of medical experts is their total disregard of natural alternatives to pharmaceutical antibiotic drugs. As Suzanne Laurie recounts (see page 34) "Antibiotics revolutionized Western medicine with doctors believing they had found a drug capable of eradicating all infectious disease. However, less than half a century on, the bubble looks set to burst on the golden era of cure-all medicine, with the disturbing news that the drugs designed to save mankind may instead spawn an epidemic that could destroy it. This is not a surprise to many alternative practitioners who for years have warned of the potential consequences of antibiotic overuse, but what does perplex many of us is how our safe, effective and abundant alternatives have been disregarded and rejected for so long..." With antibiotic resistance reaching alarming proportions, threatening all of us with death from infectious diseases, it is surely negligence of the highest order that the so-called experts in the medical establishment remain oblivious to the many and varied natural antibiotics – herbs, nutrients, foods and essential oils – which have been effectively and therapeutically validated many decades ago.

If you were diagnosed with a serious condition – heart disease, cancer, kidney failure – would you trust your physician to know all the treatment options available to you, including safe and side-effect-free approaches? I certainly wouldn't. I might trust physicians as far as the diagnosis, but as for treatment approaches, I would have to research that myself and make my own decision.

This situation, of course, is not unique to healthcare; the very same issues have been blazing headlines across the media during the past decades with regard to believing political leaders about their policies and actions regarding weapons of mass destruction, epidemics such as foot and mouth disease and waging war.

We all owe it to ourselves and the wider community to ask searching questions, think for ourselves and make our own decisions, particularly when it comes to the health of ourselves and our families.