UK: Challenge to Prince Charles over Alternative Medicine Backfires

Readers' Comments

Great cartoons

Posted by: tom on May 26, 2006 02:07 PM

 

Education does not create an open mind nor a research mentality. It does provide a filter that becomes permanent in many professionals and they see only through that filter. Then, there is the usual comfort with dogmas that exist within that filter or dogmas that construct that filter and precipitates resistance to change or rersistance to a better alternative. Even professors, who got comfortable with certain surgical procedures resisted laparoscopy and to be able to use the new method, it meant retraining.

The filter that becomes the box in which medical professionals live and work can prevent progress in good science. Such a box creates orthodoxy. Orthodoxy is not confined to religion and the clergy. It also suffocates alternative approaches in science or management.

The fact in alternative medicine is that most drugs are toxic and are immunosuppressive but the orthodox medical professionals do not disclose this fact to their patients. The fact that most disease conditions are caused by free radicals or are ROS induced or ROS-NO induced and that lipid peroxidation is asociated with disease conditions is ignored by the medical orthodoxy. The fact that lipid peroxidation is higher in persons with degenerative conditions is mainstream science but the medical professionals ignore it, simply because their toxic drugs do not address these root causes or initiating factors.

The fact is that most drugs are toxic is that they present free radical generating capacities that produce side effects and complications and many of these drugs compromise the natural antioxidant defense mechanism in the body by depleting natural anitoxidant enzymes sucg as coenzyme Q10, catalase, SOD and glutathine etc. There must be more funds to research the depletion of such enzymes when drugs are administered.

Thew fact in natural antioxidant therapies is that there must be effective free radical scavenging to improve the Krebs cycle output and improve cellular function and the bodies production of natural biomolecules that promote healthy functioning or healthy biochemical pathways and boost the functioning of the body's immune system. Drugs usually work the other way around.

Drugs are drugs but the orthodoxy wants then labeled as medicines. As science has proven, only natural antioxidants are free radical scavengers in the body that can improve cellular function, improve natural antioxidant enzyme levels and improve health or improve quality of life and the medical orthodoxy fears this fact.

Finally, there must be a proper scientific examination of all deaths related to cancer. Yes, 40% of all cancer deaths may be due to malnutrition because chemo-drugs deplete micronutrients in the body as well but many more die of oxidative stress that breaks the blood-brain barrier. This must be the subject of scientific inquiry and research.

The GROUP of Britain's leading doctors has urged every NHS trust to stop paying for alternative medicine and to use the money for conventional treatments and these doctors also ask trust chief executives to review their policies so that patients are given accurate information. Yes patients must be given accurate information, mandatory by law, on the toxicity of drugs and their side effects and how their long term use depletes natural antioxidant enzymes in the body, which at low levels are in fact predictive of cell death and death.

The link between higher suicide rates in person given drugs that act in the brain such as antidepressants etc has a scientific explaination. They generate free radicals in the brain that increase lipid peroxidation in the cell wall of brain cells and the subsequent free radical chain reactions cause more harm. This must also be the subject of scientific studies. Those drugs are not part of the brain's natural biochemistry.

Yes, we do not expect the mainstream media to carry such messages or such news to the public but who cares? The information will still spread from free radical/antioxidant studies published in science and medical journals through the internet.

For instance, orthodox medicine says there is no cure for hypertension and so, you must take drugs just like you take food to control you condition and that means your liver will have to metabolize toxic chemicals. In alternative medicine, or perhaps more accurately - in antioxidant therapy, it can be demonstrated that rapidly acting antioxifant sprays made from extracts of fruits, leaves and flowers and spices can bring down blood pressure within 30 minutes! It can go down from 130/86 in persons below 45 years to 118/78 in 30 minutes. In older persons (eg 72 years), it can go down from 140/88 to 136/78 in 30 minutes and continue to reduce to 128/78 over the next few days (without intervention) and further antioxidant therapy can have more beneficial effects.

It is a matter of time before natural antioxidants become part of standard therapy and the orthodoxy and drug companies fear that paradigm taking root as more than 30% of patients already seek alternative treatment. Hence, prominent physicians must act quickly to save their business that is based on the drug paradigm, as Britain's top 13 doctors have done.

BELDEU SINGH

Posted by: BELDEU SINGH on May 27, 2006 03:52 PM

 

Emma Holister, the artist who created the cartoons, sent along this piece by Martin Walker, author of books critical of mainstream medicine. Martin comments on the political background of this attack...

Martin Walker is one of the very few investigative journalists in the Health Freedom Movement who has consistently exposed the corrupt forces behind the attacks on alternative medicine. Here is an analysis of the latest attack by Baum and Ernst. I have included my two Quackbusters cartoons - apologies to those who may already have seen them.

Emma

ARTICLES ON ATTACK ON ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE 23/5/06

From MARTIN WALKER - 
Author of Brave New World of Zero Risk and Dirty Medicine: Science, big business and the assault on natural health care

Every time there is an attack on alternative medicine people write similar letters in response, defending these therapies but always, there is a lack of analysis, historical or otherwise. This means that although the number of replies and combative responses is growing and we are 'learning' in that sense, no one seems to be describing the supporters of orthodox medicine in their context and drawing attention to conflict of interest and vested interest. Consequently it always looks as if these critics are serious people with important things to say, rather than shallow half wits guided entirely by vested interest.

Dr Michael Baum was a founder member of the Campaign Against Health Fraud (now called HealthWatch). HealthWatch, which is linked to important US lobby groups CSICOP (Committee for the Scientific Investigation into Claims of the Paranormal) and ACSH (American Council on Science and Health) has been responsible for a whole series of attacks on alternative health, CAM and especially homeopathy.

Other signatories to the Times letter also have links with HealthWatch, most particularly Ernst who over the last decade has campaigned consistently against alternative medicine (and can most accurately be described as the only Professor of alternative medicine in Britain who argues the case for pharmaceutical medicine). Ernst spoke at the 15th Annual meeting of CSICOP held in London where he delivered a quite childish but supposedly humorous deconstruction of alternative medicine to the assembled twenty odd anoraks in the audience. At that meeting amongst his own people, Ernst made no attempt to be even vaguely academic or supportive of alternatives.

Within the last two years, HealthWatch has been taken over - it has been floundering for years - by the new industry-backed lobby groups, The Science and Media Centre and Sense About Science (SAS), these groups are backed with bundles of money from the Association of British Pharmaceutical Industries (ABPI) as well as individual drug manufacturing companies. They are linked to some of the most avid de-regulating 'libertarian' US lobby groups.

The founder of the Campaign Against Health Fraud (HealthWatch) Caroline Richmond, has been writing for these lobby groups over the last couple of years and providing information for  Mike Fitzpatrick  who is both a member of SAS and makes journalistic contributions to Spiked, the online news vehicle of the ex-Revolutionary Communist Party members who are now deeply embedded in the pro-science Lobby Groups.

It was the above organisations working out of the Royal Society, which sent a letter to the Times with a list of signatories protesting about critics of GM crops. In this case however, environmental organisations and journalists like George Monbiot (the Guardian newspaper) organised with considerable effect against them. Why, oh why, can't supporters of alternative medicine do the same! Apart from my two books, Dirty Medicine and Zero Risk, no one has come forward to organise web sites with an ongoing critique of these industry-backed lobbyists.

One last point, Prince Charles is to be congratulated for his continuing and committed support for alternative medicine but if I was him I would certainly get frustrated at the lack of serious support. In the early 1980s, it was Charles who opened and became a patron of  the Bristol Cancer Help Centre. In 1990, the Centre was wrecked by a bogus scientific paper published in the Lancet, which claimed that women with breast cancer who attended the Centre died more quickly and in greater number than those who had orthodox treatment. The unfortunate response to this attack, was again, constant picky academic arguments about whether or not the paper's writers had got their statistical analysis correct.

What there should have been was a full blooded political assault on HealthWatch and its associates, the writers of the paper and the connivance of the Lancet in its publication. Fiteen years later alternative medicine is coming under increasing attack from industrial vested interests but we are unfortunately responding in the same piecemeal manner. It's time that supporters of CAM and alternative medicine, really did get their political act together. While environmentalists, greens, anti-corporate critics and pharmaceutical company critics, have all formed political fact gathering organisations and write consistently about the corporate lobbies which are managing skewed news, the practitioners of homeopathy and other valuable therapies, appear utterly unable to organise against the threat they are facing.

Anyone who wants to read in greater depth about any of the above, should obtain copies of my books Dirty Medicine and Brave New World of Zero Risk and perhaps visit the websites:

Zero Risk and www.slingshotpublications.com

If we don't make ourselves aware of the history of these attacks we will never be able to combat them and they will gradually incur increasing damage.

Regards, Martin Walker.

Here the two quackbuster cartoons included by Emma Holister:

... laughing stock

... barking mad?

Posted by: Sepp on May 27, 2006 07:15 PM

 

Andrew Saul comments by email:

Dear Sepp,

Have you seen this?

REPORT OF THE INDEPENDENT VITAMIN SAFETY REVIEW PANEL

Posted by: Andrew W. Saul on May 29, 2006 11:10 AM

 

A comment received by email:

When will we ever learn

As the exchange between orthodox medicine and Prince Charles UK, moves into the focus of international media, we should take a good look at what this is really all about.

There is a war going on out there between Health and Sickness and its bigger than we realize at first glance.

The orthodox medicine men are about to lose billions and not because the alternative therapists are getting smarter or more savvy in the market. Quite the opposite.

It is al because those at the top of the pharmaceutical industry became both greedy and without ethics, betraying doctors, patients and health agencies all over the world. The public made the first move without consulting anyone. They just took their cue from intuition and began avoiding harm. They needed a second opinion, but it was also and alternative opinion.

At first, they did not expect miracle cures, they were just trying to avoid harm. They found incredible benefits, far beyond what they have expected. This was too good to be true. Not only did they avoid the harm of drugs and their lingering secondary effects but they found cures that they have been told never existed.

Nothing was done to temp them by the alternative community of helpers.

It was a mass public move and a new horizon opened.

Doctors of vision and conscience recognized it for what it was and began to re-educate themselves.

Others just wanted to cash in and pretend to be knowledgeable in alternative ways.

The pharmaceutical industry rushed to congress and demanded new laws making it illegal to openly practice healing. They asked for suppression of information that educated the public and the doctors in all modalities that took business away from them. Anything that healed was bad-mouthed and that included some of their own best doctors.

The public just kept on moving further every day from the aggressive cut, burn and poison regimes af a so called scientific profession that was becoming less scientific and more commercial every passing day.

Then it started happening, as if the people were getting help from an angel the drug industry started losing its control.

More than half of doctors began referring their patients to alternative curers. Even more doctors began using these methods themselves.

People who visited non-medical health care givers could not be reimbursed by insurance or government health schemes, but this did not stop the people from moving away from drugs and secondary effects. There was a net gain when cures were permanent and visits need not be so scheduled and regular.

The orthodox industry sees it as a travesty. They lose big, the customer gains big, the customer gains big, but the new breed of alternative therapist does not get rich at all because cures mean that the disease industry begins to shrink.

The greatest travesty in the eyes of the big drug industry that lurks in the back rooms of every clinic and hospital is the loss of very big grants to test their toxic substances on animals and quite often people. Billions every year are extracted from governments via bureaucrats who arrange the resources.

Even greater the losses when the inevitable truth gets out about 150 years late that proves the ineffectiveness of vaccines.

Then the shame of being exposed as con-men who duped the public into believing that germs cause all disease when it is suddenly realized that cellular damage and neglect causes most disease.

And not the least but their greatest fear of being brought to justice for millions of deaths that were deliberately caused for the sake of greed and sheer disdain for the average persons right.

This is why they fight so hard to hide and avoid the day when we will ask the inevitable questions.

These very rich and very corrupt disease experts are quite scientific in ways that do not heal and they are not at all interested in discussing it in an open court, a second Nuremberg trials, this time to expose the guilty

R.M.R.

Posted by: RMR on May 30, 2006 12:31 PM

 

My husband was urgently admitted to hospital in Feb 2001. Immediately two drugs he had been taking for four years on a repeat prescription were withdrawn. He was eventually diagnosed with Non Hodgkins Lymphoma and died on 10 May 2001. I looked into the prescription drugs in question afterwards in depth and found that authentic clinical trials clearly showed the drugs concerned cause Non Hodgkins Lympyhoma and other cancers. I did take the matter to a solicitor and over the course of two years I gradually began to realise the solicitor was clearly in league with the negligent medical personnel and the drugs industry. The result of this two year supposed investigation was that all my husband's hospital records disappeared off the face of the earth and the solicitor brought in 'hired guns' of experts (clearly associated with the drugs industry all their working lives) and I got nowhere. Meanwhile, the 'ordinary' prescription drugs which are being given out to millions of people on a daily basis, often on a repeat prescription (like my husband) are no dout causing many, many more deaths and I can't do a thing about it. The names of the drugs concerned are available plus all the literature I obtained referring to the same drugs, including clinical trials.

The very large amount of evidence I accumulated entirely by myself, including GP's records, clearly shows the medical personnel treating my husband committed manslaughter and no doubt will go on to commit this to other people. For instance: in quite a few letters sent to the GP the medical personnel clearly referred to side effects relating to the drugs concerned which were happening to my husband but inexplicably they ignored them and proceeded to up the dosage of the drugs concerned.

Posted by: Barbara A Taggart on May 30, 2006 02:42 PM

 

alternative & ayurvedic therapies work 100%.these r not fake one. they r already authentic one provided back from eras ago.these days a lot of research work is going on to prove the authenticity of these therapies globally.
thanks

Posted by: vaidya pardeep gupta on May 31, 2006 07:25 PM

 

Martin Walker is right in saying that alternative medicine is coming under increasing attack from industrial vested interests but we are unfortunately responding in the same piecemeal manner. But not always...though in most instances, the key issue is funds for developers of alternative medicine and research in alternative medicine by serious scientists. For instance, in antioxidant therapies that use only natural antioxidants, there is a paucity of funds to conduct studies on the increases in serum antioxidant blood levels in patients with different conditions and in different age groups and in post-menopusal women, which said research helps to place such therapies on proper footing and help patients make choices. More research and more of such scientific information can help provide better responses that are not piecemeal responses.

Nevertheless, in the case of that particular study that attempted to show that women who attended Bristol Cancer Help Centre died more quickly and in greater number than those who had orthodox treatment requires a proper scientific response. It must not be just a "counter study", so routinely used by Big Pharma to discredit research that would harm their markets, market-share and revenue streams. Done more frequently, a new culture would be born as part of scientific temper that seriously questions "counter studies" such as the 1990 "bogus scientific paper" published in the Lancet, which claimed that women with breast cancer who attended the Centre.

There must be new legal provisions to deal with scientists who "create bogus" reports that do not serve the interest of science but serve rather the interests of pharma business at the expense of truth and public health. There are scientists today who take instructions from private funders of pharma research and they must be exposed.

We must, by now already accept the fact that any new natural therapy or any new clinic or any new centre that attempts to provide alternative approaches to allophatic treatment with drugs will come under "scientific attack" or at least a scare, especially when it is effective or effective to a large extent compared to toxic therapies by drugs. And, therefore, there must first be some research and statistics to support such alternative approaches even though, we must expect "counter studies" funded by big business or perhaps even sabotage by contamination of natural bioproducts follwed bt a "tip-off" to the regulatory authorities.

Ayurveda was well established in India before the British came to India. But, after the British established the Raj in India, they made ayurveda illegal and began to establish allophatic hospitals. After independence, the ayurvedic hospitals and clinics re-emerged in India, especially in the state of Kerala where a host of problems are treated, including chemical poisoning, coughs and colds and snake bites and degenerative changes in tissues in the body.

Recently in Malaysia, a doctor sent a Letter to Editor and his letter, stating that alternative therapies are not effective enough to form part of the primary health care system was published in the New Straits Times (NST)(signed Dr, Chris Anthony of Butterworth). I responded in substantial detail, and to see to the fact that it was not a piecemeal response, I challenged the doctor to treating patients, starting with hypertension, hole-in-heart etc and we can include colds, fibroids and headaches, rapid healing of scars and wounds and aches and pains in post-menopausal women. As expected, the NST did not publish my letter.

These letters by allophatic doctors and other pro-allophatic letters supporting chemo-therapy have begun appearing in the mainstream media after the Government announced that it intends to allow the practice of alternative medicine in Government Hospitals at three centres and it is currently preparing the guidelines.

I certainly hope that Dr, Chris Anthony of Butterworth accepts my open challenge so that we can go about organizing it under the auspices of an international panel of scientists, post-graduate doctors and professors.

BELDEU SINGH

Posted by: BELDEU SINGH on June 1, 2006 07:12 AM

 

Plse keep on exposing danger of chemical drugs.

Posted by: (Naturl in deed) bulane on June 3, 2006 09:24 PM

 

Name: Email Address: URL: Comments: Remember info? Security code: Please enter the security code displayed on the above grid Due to our anti-spamming policy the comments you are posting will show up online within few hours from the posting time.

	The Individual Is Supreme And Finds Its Way Through Intuition