Cry for Health ... connecting the dots to health

Hello there. Welcome to my blog. Welcome to a smorgasbord of jottings about health and healing from every angle…that's what connecting the dots is all about.

In coming blogs I'll be exploring what 'health' really means: how Big Pharma, and the allied, drug-wielding, medical profession and political cronies turned the word 'health' into the very opposite of what it really means—after all, not a single government in the Western world runs a 'health department'; rather, they have 'disease departments' ,and their factories for the sick and injured are called 'hospitals'. In other words, we've been fooled into thinking our societies promote health when it's blatantly clear they promote disease treatment. Furthermore, we've been conned into equating health with wellbeing.

We'll explore the state of health today—that human health, like that of planet Earth has never been worse. 

And we'll identify some of the real reasons for the epidemics of cancer, autoimmune diseases, autism, and many other 'diseases of civilisation'—and they're not the falsely flagged, perennial factors of 'the aging population', 'flawed genes', or 'deadly germs'. The things that are wrecking our health—and about which much of Big Business, together with their political cronies and our regulatory watchdogs would like to keep you ignorant—are many of our foods, the seas of electromagnetic radiation that wash over our cities and countryside, our chemically toxic homes and working environments, workplace stress, and our modern lifestyles in general. There are many dots to be connected here.

For students and practitioners of herbal medicine, I'll tackle the mischief of 'evidence-based' medicine—how the propaganda about 'evidence-based practice' is misleading students and practitioners into abandoning traditional practices and adopting the biomedical, pharmaceutical-oriented approach to illness—an approach which is clearly failing to make a dent in the current epidemics of chronic and degenerative diseases. In essence, our cultural memories and living libraries of traditional knowledge about healing are in danger of being wiped out.

Classic examples of this usurpation of traditional knowledge are herbs that traditionally were used in pregnancy to nourish the mother, such as Vervain and Liquorice, and herbs that were traditionally used to stimulate breast milk production in nursing mothers, such as Vervain and Fennel. But now 'evidence-based' medicine— from laboratory-based scientists who wouldn't know one herb in the wild from another—is claiming that they are contraindicated where traditionally they were indicated, by the very people who through the generations had collected, prepared and prescribed the remedies year in year out and observed and knew their efficacy. 

Another example of this usurpation is the herb St John's wort. Traditionally it was used as a sedative to quell pain, and was contraindicated in depression, but now it is recommended by 'evidence-based' medicine to be used, indeed like the drug Prozac, for depression.

Also we'll take a look at the double-standards applied to human safety—how Comfrey and other herbs containing pyrrolizidine alkaloids were banned for internal use in many Western countries, while much of Australian honey (where bees have supped on Salvation Jane/Patterson's curse (Echium plantagineum) contains the same alkaloids but nobody dares interfere with the apiarist industry.

The safety and efficacy of the medical profession's mounting arsenal of drugs and vaccines will also be scrutinised. Anyone who has read the first volume of my book, Cry for Health, will already know of the extensive medical literature that calls into question all the pro-vaccination propaganda. As investigators at the Cochrane Collaboration had revealed about the so-called 'evidence-based' studies on vaccines, for many vaccines the design of experiments and the reporting of safety outcomes was 'largely inadequate', 'scarce and incomplete', and indicated 'reporting bias' and 'lack of standardisation'; and for some vaccines tested, that 'no studies reported on adverse reactions'. And that not a single field study has shown the efficacy of the MMR vaccine!

And perhaps most importantly, we'll examine health and healing from traditional points of view. By exploring the differences between traditional medical philosophies and the current biochemical model we'll be able to identify the reasons for the failure of the biomedical model to understand and effectively treat people with cancer, autoimmune diseases, and other degenerative diseases.

In doing this, we'll identify how a belief system underpins every medical treatment: how Western medicine typically views the body's acute functional changes in illness, such as inflammation and fever and muscular constriction, as the body 'going wrong'. Thus, biomedicine views the broncho-constriction and viscid mucus secretions of asthma  as the body 'going wrong', yet other wholistic approaches, like the Buteyko Method of breathing, consider such physiological changes as clever defence mechanisms that are attempting to restore homoeostasis to the human body.

Similarly, we'll investigate how Western culture uses a military paradigm of battling and fighting disease (and everything else that's not to its liking and thinks of as 'going wrong'). And how Western medical science also views acute psychological changes, like anxiety or depression, and so on, as the mind 'going wrong'.

Earlier cultures, however, had far greater wisdom than our modern culture's military model of disease care could ever understand. Thus we'll begin to realise why modern medicine may well be undermining the health of patients. Plenty of dots to connect there too!

So please join the debate, and get things rolling in the direction of health.