Why you should respond to NHS Lanarkshire's short questionnaire about whether to continue referring patients to Glasgow Homeopathic Hospital

At its website http://www.nhslanarkshire.org.uk/Pages/default.aspx NHS Lanarkshire is asking for the public’s views on the following question:

Should NHS Lanarkshire refer patients to the Centre for Integrative Care (Glasgow Homeopathic Hospital)?

The answer seems to me to be a no brainer.

1. There is ample empirical evidence across the UK over the last 200 years, and across the globe, that many common ailments, and even epidemic diseases, can been cured or alleviated by homeopathic remedies. The results are often rapid for both acute issues eg colds, headaches, muscle/tendon injuries, cystitis pains, and chronic eg organ problems.
   
   
2. The cost of making up the remedies is small versus the cost of pharmaceutical drugs which has escalated rapidly in recent years and the NHS is struggling to handle this development.
3. Unlike with conventional drugs, there are no side effects (some even life threatening) as that term is understood in the pharmaceutical industry which has to ‘manage’ major problems in this regard. So, the trained homeopathic doctor’s or therapist’s prescribing approach is enormously eased in this respect, and the likelihood of successful litigation (with its attendant costs in physicians’ time wasted, lawyers’ fees etc) virtually eliminated. Additionally, the growing problem of patients being given expensive drugs, but not taking them when at home because of fear of the side effects which many don't wish to protest about to their doctor (perhaps because he/she can't offer an alternative), would be significantly reduced.
   
4. A corollary is that where homeopathics rather than pharmaceutical drugs are being prescribed the prescribing individual or organisation’s insurance costs are reduced to a miniscule amount.
   
5. Encouraging the homeopathic approach as a 'first' response rather than drugs/chemical suppressants can lead many patients in due course to a more responsible and fairly inexpensive, ‘at home’ self-medication approach for obviously trivial acutes, which over time would save doctor and nurses' time and the NHS money.
   
6. Because homeopathic remedies are essentially SAFE, storing them at home presents no real dangers to the rest of the family eg need to take elaborate precautions to keep them out of reach of children.
   
7. Disposing of unused homeopathic remedies raises no landfill contamination issues.
   
8. Finally, the public's right to choose between the natural healthcare route which includes homeopathic remedies, where locally available, or orthodox chemical drugs (which sadly currently have a virtual monopoly over much of the UK), is something in the original NHS vision which is an important principle to be cherished and preserved   - an inexact analogy would be the right to go organic as opposed to the GMO route. We generally have an instinct for what is best for our own bodies. 

Some uses of THUJA as a skin healer

It's worthwhile remembering that Thuja in tincture form applied topically is a very powerful herbal healer for warts or growths or skin lesions of many types, which homeopaths shouldn't be afraid of using, together with the internal use of potentised homeopathic Thuja.

My father in old age grew a few unsightly, hard, scaly nodules on the upper rims of his ears, a few millimeters thick and standing proud of the skin of the ear. The appearance of these nodules or growths can I understand be due to many causes - gout, chondrodermatitis, or something more serious eg a hard area or spur which may overlie skin cancer. He never did anything about them, but when I started getting the same type of thing on the edge of one ear in my late 50s, I determined immediately to do something to get rid of them. The answer I found was Thuja tincture. Put a drop of neat tincture on the tip of a finger and rub it into and just around the hard area. Then put a further drop on it and leave it to dry there. Do that two or three times a day. It isn’t necessary to put a plaster on it. It doesn't make the surrounding skin sore in my experience but the hardened area after a good few weeks (less if you are lucky!) gets to the point where a layer of the hard bit will come off when picked at. The lesion may then 'weep' a bit, but don't worry. Continue to dab the same spot with tincture daily until you feel that the hard area has completely disappeared and new skin has covered the spot.

I found furthermore that Thuja tincture assiduously applied will kill off infection and could heal a ‘suspicious looking’ skin lesion elsewhere on the body. For instance, I spotted on my shin a small area the size of the nail on my little finger which had seemingly appeared overnight. It was a small, slightly discoloured spot; the sort of thing you would go to your dermatologist to check if it was likely to be cancerous or not. The area didn't hurt when pressed but it had grown proud of the surrounding skin by a millimeter or so, and it had obviously grown fast. It may have started from a localised infection from a scratch after I had waded into some brambles while blackberry picking, but the surface of the skin wasn't visibly broken, so that may be a red herring. It looked instead as if a nail-sized mole was just starting to grow there. Neat Thuja tincture massaged in several times a day started it shrinking within 10 days and in due course the lesion shrank to a pinpoint and then disappeared leaving nothing but a tiny localised skin discolouration, but no evidence of any abnormal skin cells. Thuja tincture is well worth trying and costs just pennies.

EU censorship of all health statements for foods and nutritional supplements

Remember the old joke, which is in many respects correct, that
'in Germany everything is forbidden unless it is (expressly) allowed
In Britain everything is allowed unless it is forbidden
In Italy everything is allowed even when it is forbidden
In Russia everything is forbidden even when it is allowed' 

Well, one of the many unacceptable implications of our joining the EU that Ted Heath never pointed out before he signed the UK up was that we would slowly but surely be forced into living under a 'Brussels regime' which was pretty much committed to the German approach -  the first line of the joke. 

This has now happened in regard to health claims for anyone coming within the definition of a 'food business operator'. Basically what has happened is that the Brussels clique have nationalised all statements that suggest that a food or nutrient may have beneficial properties, regardless of the historical position, and there are now only 222 EU authorised health claims that producers of foods and food supplements may use in promoting the benefits of their products. 

Go to http://healthclaimscensored.com/blog/blog-08292013/ to read a fuller explanation. 

Under the guise of pretending it wants to stop consumers being misled, regardless of the fact that the consumer, if asked, would have said there wasn't a meaningful problem to be addressed in the first place - the usual Nanny knows best: Shut up and do as you're told - the European Food Safety Authority, not a court, will ban any product coming onto the market that has on it a statement that isn't on their incredibly restrictive 'permitted list'. And in practical terms supplements suppliers in particular don't stand a chance of getting old or new claims onto that list unless they can produce a randomized controlled trial (RCT) in support. As everyone in the natural healthcare industry knows, RCTs are very expensive to conduct, as well as being by their nature a totally inappropriate way for testing the validity of many natural healthcare products and processes. They have accordingly become the favoured "solution" which the pharmaceutical monopolists have lobbied to introduce into any regulatory mechanism knowing that the small traditional healthcare suppliers will thereby be squeezed out of the game.

Thus - as http://www4.dr-rath-foundation.org/Newsletter/archive/newsletter_20130906.html says -in its desperation to prevent European citizens from knowing the facts about nutritional therapies and foods, the Brussels EU has resorted to enacting the distinctive hallmark of all political dictatorships – a prohibition on freedom of speech.

Another good reason for UK consumers to vote with their feet when the opportunity arises!

The Real Facts about Vaccination

I expect I posted this a few years ago but .... as a reminder ..... in case you ever want to reach for some real facts to respond to those vaccine protagonists who are inclined to trot out their own (bogus) facts.
And if you are interested in the history of the disease Smallpox, and its mistreatment by conventional medicine, take the time to look at http://rense.com/general31/pox.htm

Important info to circulate. From http://www.naturalnews.com/027203_Chi_vaccination_vaccine.html and www.vaccinationdebate.net

 

(NaturalNews) Vaccines are the quackery of modern medicine. Mass vaccination programs not only fail to protect the population from infectious disease, they actually accelerate the spread of disease in many cases.

Many websites have cropped up over the last few years to counter the pro-vaccine propaganda put out by drug companies (who profit from vaccines) and health regulators (who serve the drug companies). One of those sites listed the following historical facts about vaccines:

• In the USA in 1960, two virologists discovered that both polio vaccines were contaminated with the SV 40 virus which causes cancer in animals as well as changes in human cell tissue cultures. Millions of children had been injected with these vaccines. (Med Jnl of Australia 17/3/1973 p555)

• In 1871-2, England, with 98% of the population aged between 2 and 50 vaccinated against smallpox, it experienced its worst ever smallpox outbreak with 45,000 deaths. During the same period in Germany, with a vaccination rate of 96%, there were over 125,000 deaths from smallpox. (http://www.soilandhealth.org/02/020...)
The Hadwen Documents

• In Germany, compulsory mass vaccination against diphtheria commenced in 1940 and by 1945 diphtheria cases were up from 40,000 to 250,000. (Don't Get Stuck, Hannah Allen)

• In 1967, Ghana was declared measles free by the World Health Organisation after 96% of its population was vaccinated. In 1972, Ghana experienced one of its worst measles outbreaks with its highest ever mortality rate. (Dr H Albonico, MMR Vaccine Campaign in Switzerland, March 1990)

• In 1977, Dr Jonas Salk who developed the first polio vaccine, testified along with other scientists, that mass inoculation against polio was the cause of most polio cases throughout the USA since 1961. (Science 4/4/77 "Abstracts" )

• In the UK between 1970 and 1990, over 200,000 cases of whooping cough occurred in fully vaccinated children. (Community Disease Surveillance Centre, UK)

• In the 1970's a tuberculosis vaccine trial in India involving 260,000 people revealed that more cases of TB occurred in the vaccinated than the unvaccinated. (The Lancet 12/1/80 p73)

• In 1978, a survey of 30 States in the US revealed that more than half of the children who contracted measles had been adequately vaccinated. (The People's Doctor, Dr R Mendelsohn)

• The February 1981 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association found that 90% of obstetricians and 66% of pediatricians refused to take the rubella vaccine.

• In 1979, Sweden abandoned the whooping cough vaccine due to its ineffectiveness. Out of 5,140 cases in 1978, it was found that 84% had been vaccinated three times! (BMJ 283:696-697, 1981)

• In the USA, the cost of a single DPT shot had risen from 11 cents in 1982 to $11.40 in 1987. The manufacturers of the vaccine were putting aside $8 per shot to cover legal costs and damages they were paying out to parents of brain damaged children and children who died after vaccination. (The Vine, Issue 7, January 1994, Nambour, Qld)

• In Oman between 1988 and 1989, a polio outbreak occurred amongst thousands of fully vaccinated children. The region with the highest attack rate had the highest vaccine coverage. The region with the lowest attack rate had the lowest vaccine coverage. (The Lancet, 21/9/91)

• In 1990, a UK survey involving 598 doctors revealed that over 50% of them refused to have the Hepatitis B vaccine despite belonging to the high risk group urged to be vaccinated. (British Med Jnl, 27/1/1990)

• In the USA, from July 1990 to November 1993, the US Food and Drug Administration counted a total of 54,072 adverse reactions following vaccination. The FDA admitted that this number represented only 10% of the real total, because most doctors were refusing to report vaccine injuries. In other words, adverse reactions for this period exceeded half a million! (National Vaccine Information Centre, March 2, 1994)

• In 1990, the Journal of the American Medical Association had an article on measles which stated " Although more than 95% of school-aged children in the US are vaccinated against measles, large measles outbreaks continue to occur in schools and most cases in this setting occur among previously vaccinated children." (JAMA, 21/11/90)

• In the New England Journal of Medicine July 1994 issue a study found that over 80% of children under 5 years of age who had contracted whooping cough had been fully vaccinated.

• On November 2nd, 2000, the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) announced that its members voted at their 57th annual meeting in St Louis to pass a resolution calling for an end to mandatory childhood vaccines. The resolution passed without a single "no" vote.

They Love GMOs - Your chance to decide if you want to buy these companies products any longer

They Don’t Want You to Know What You’re Eating

This is the amount these companies donated to defeat California Proposition 37, which would have required labeling GMO’s.

Monsanto $7,100,500.00

Hains Celestial – $500,000.00 (Hains is actually owned by Phillip Morris, Monsanto, Citigroup, Exxon-Mobil, Wal-Mart and Lockheed Martin)

Campbell’s – $250,000.00, 

Coca Cola – $1,164,400.00,

Nestle – $1,169,400.00, 

Kellogg’s – $632,500.00,

Kraft – $551,148.25, 

PepsiCo $2,249,661.61,

Con-Agra – $1,076,700.00, 

Dean Foods – $253,950.00,

General Mills – $908,200.00, 

Cargill, Inc – $202,229.36

From Occupy Monsanto – http://occupy-monsanto.com/

A HUMAN RIGHTS CONSTITUTION FOR EUROPE - long overdue

Why do we need one? I recommend readers have a look at this website

http://www.eu-referendum.org/english/petitions/europe_for_the_people_info.html

and consider signing the petition there, and also reading the article

http://www.eu-referendum.org/english/articles/20080710_joiningthedots.html

EUROPEAN REFERENDUM INITIATIVE

Petition for a Europe for the People – by the People

What does the "Europe for the People, by the People" constitution call for?

To read the full text of the constitution, click here.The focus of this unique document is the protection of the health and lives of European citizens from corporate interests whose multi-billion dollar profits derive from turning the human body into a marketplace. The common denominators of these interests, which primarily include the pharmaceutical industry and the GM (genetically modified) food industry, are patented products that serve the interests of giant investment groups at the expense of the health and lives of millions of people. The constitution therefore calls for the right to health; the right to life; the right to natural food; the right to a healthy environment; respect for human dignity and the protection of social values.

Why is there a need for this initiative?

Europe was supposed to be built on the memory of the past and on the fundamental principle of a Europe for the people, by the people. As things stand, however, this principle is ever more regularly being violated and the world has become increasingly resistant to the Auschwitz survivors' testimony about hunger and misery, about annihilating slave labor, about war and hatred, and other Nazi crimes.The debate over the Lisbon Treaty occurs at a time when the Auschwitz survivors are still giving their testimony as to the consequences of the disregard for human lives and the needs of people.

As is now documented on the Profit-Over-Life website, hundreds of thousands of men and women from across Europe imprisoned in concentration camps lost their lives as slave laborers during WWII in the name of corporate greed. Even more, tens of thousands of them lost their lives in pseudo-medical experiments conducted on prisoners in order to obtain patents for various drugs on behalf of the chemical cartel IG Farben, composed of Bayer, BASF, Hoechst and other companies. However, the historical successors to the IG Farben cartel continue to threaten the lives of millions today – yet by more subtle means.

The political stakeholders of the financial interest groups supporting the pharmaceutical industry, for example, such as George Bush and Nicolas Sarkozy, are now telling us to prepare for war and are openly discussingWWIII.

As such, if there was ever a time for European citizens to demand the right to health; the right to life; the right to natural food; the right to a healthy environment; respect for human dignity and the protection of social values – that time is now.

The organisers of this website have a simple Constitution to suggest, to serve as a blueprint defining fundamental human rights across Europe:

THE CONSTITUTION OF THE CITIZENS OF EUROPE
The most fundamental human rights are the rights to health and life. These rights are not only threatened by military conflicts, but also by corporate interests and their increasing attempts to exploit the
human body and knowledge of it as their exclusive property and source of profits.

WE THEREFORE PROCLAIM AS INALIENABLE RIGHTS FOR EVERY EUROPEAN:
THE RIGHT TO HEALTH
Our health and our bodies are the most valuable goods we have. They must not be exploited as a marketplace for patented drugs or any other form of commercialization. The expansion of diseases as markets for drugs is unconstitutional.
Any healthcare system based on these principles and promoting them should be outlawed.

THE RIGHT TO LIFE
The genome of humans as the blueprint of life and the biological basis of our existence, belongs to all
mankind. Efforts to own this genetic code with the goal to re-build, sell and manipulate the human body
or parts of it for corporate gain is unconstitutional and therefore prohibited.

THE RIGHT TO NATURAL FOOD
The genetic information of all plants and the food that has been growing in our fields and gardens for
millennia belongs to all mankind. Manipulation and alteration of the genetic code of plants with the goal
of patenting them and creating global market monopolies bears the danger that our food supplies are
controlled by corporate interests. As with health and life, the monopolization of food leads to the control of entire societies.

SUCH ACTIVITY IS UNCONSTITUTIONAL
The reason why these fundamental human rights are not yet universally accepted and applied is the principle of patenting. Patents are the economic instrument of inflating returns on investments for entire
industries including those industries that directly affect human health and life.

LIFE MUST NOT BE PATENTED
In order to enforce this principle and protect the health and lives of this and future generations of
Europeans, patents in the fields of health, life and food are declared unconstitutional.
We call upon the CITIZENS of Europe who will read this proposed

CONSTITUTION OF THE CITIZENS OF EUROPE
to support it with their signatures.

THE IDEA OF EUROPE FOR THE PEOPLE AND BY THE PEOPLE
This proposed constitution serves as a blueprint defining fundamental human rights across Europe including the right to healthy environment, respect for human dignity and protection of social values.
We, are passing this call to the citizens of Europe. They have been the true guardians of remembrance preserving the historic memory across generations and will continue the relay of remembrance and relay of life.

Signed
SURVIVORS Together with THE GUARDIANS OF REMEMBRANCE
People and organisations across Europe are called upon to support this proposed Constitution:

'Homeopathy is nonsense' - If our new Chief Scientific Advisor can't stop talking nonsense, boot him out

The Letter below has been sent by Oliver Dowding to Sir Mark Walport - the new Chief Scientific Advisor to our Coalition Government. Chief Scientific Advisor? What a joke! But as presumably he gets a fee for that title (which we taxpayers pay) and is expected by the public to offer sound advice and not just follow arguments peddled by the pharmaceutical and pesticides industry, it is a bad joke. 

He follows a long line of those such as Dame Sally Davies, the Chief Medical Officer, and his predecessor, Sir John Beddington, who publicly displayed their ignorance about homeopathy’s benefits. 

Sir Mark, who took up his post three weeks ago, was formerly head of the Wellcome Trust, the biomedical research charity, and a professor of medicine at Imperial College London. Surprise surprise! Another example of the ‘revolving door’ relationship between government and organisations whose handouts benefit the pharmaceutical industry.

The Wellcome Trust was set up by a pharmaceutical magnate, Sir Henry Wellcome, so you can imagine for whose ultimate benefit its billions are disbursed. It comes number two in size behind the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation which spends millions pushing the use of vaccines with nasty side effects. Why is that deplorable? Start by looking at http://www.activistpost.com/2013/01/bill-gates-says-global-vaccination.html

Will Sir Mark with his Wellcome Trust background march to the pharmaceutical and pesticide industry’s drum? No doubt about that. See his Twitter at twitdoc.com/1ZV2  . It implicitly or explicitly supports

1. Use of MMR, a vaccine with dangerous side effects, against the disease of measles, which disease in my childhood everyone at school was encouraged to get in order to achieve a lifelong natural immunisation, which is impossible with any vaccine
2. Use of pesticides and herbicides, including neonicotinoids which have been shown to have been killing bees. See eg http://www.beecharmers.org/Pollination2.html
3. Ignoring the “precautionary principle” by the device of delaying tactics eg “where there is uncertainty about neonicotinoids we must reduce this by further fieldwork” - even though many would say the research has already been done.  

All of this is couched in what I call ‘legal language’ to cover the author. 

What we badly need is a long long rest from the ‘advice’ of all those influenced by BigPharma, and a government with the balls to divert the bulk of the public’s ‘Health Revenues’ into the gentle, effective natural remedies, such as homeopathy, herbalism, naturopathy, osteopathy etc which have been shown when responsibly practised to achieve public satisfaction levels way above those that use of suppressive chemicals by allopathy achieves.  Our own health and the health of our environment demands that.

--------------

To Sir Mark Walport

Government Office for Science

1 Victoria Street 

London 

SW1H 0ET

Dear Sir Mark

I'm writing to you with regard to an article in which you were recently quoted. This was in the Daily Telegraph, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/10003680/Homeopathy-is-nonsense-says-new-chief-scientist.html but also went out in many other media channels. 

Naturally I'm well aware that homoeopathy is a divisive subject, particularly amongst "health professionals". However, it seems to me that there are many who dismiss its efficacy potential purely on the basis of a lack of understanding of either its mode of action, or ignorance of the huge range of cases where it has demonstrated a great deal of success. Just because we don't understand things and how they work doesn't mean that they don't or that we are right.

I'm aware that coming across examples of a positive outcome can prove challenging when one's mind is already made up. Yours appears to be most definitely made up.

Even more concerning is that you, with your stature and official position to uphold, chose to refer to homoeopaths as "nonsense". Maybe you'd care to explain what you mean? You also suggested it held "absolutely no medical benefit".

I'm not going to get into the debate about the use of homoeopathy for treating such diseases as malaria. That's beyond my level of understanding and competence. That doesn't mean to say I don't understand a little of how it might work. But I don't understand the totality of how it works, and it's possible that nobody does, yet. That doesn't mean that it doesn't work.

You can argue all you like about homoeopathy being no different to a placebo, but I can tell you if that is your view, then you are assuredly wrong. I appreciate you are referred to as Britain's Chief Scientist, but it doesn't mean that you are right in making such an assertion. You would be right to say that the £4 million which the NHS spends on homoeopathy isn't a lot, given the overall cost of the NHS. In my experience and understanding, homoeopathy delivers phenomenal results from this very small outlay. The cost of homoeopathic remedies is minimal by comparison to conventional pharmaceutical "drugs".

Perhaps you aren't aware about how homoeopathy is delivered by the NHS? 

Perhaps you think that all the doctors offering homoeopathy are only trained in and dealing in this one area? 

Maybe you don't appreciate that many of these doctors have been trained in both conventional allopathic treatments, at the start of their career, and later have added homoeopathic training and qualifications?

Maybe you don't appreciate that this is also the case for veterinary surgeons, the area with which I have much greater understanding due to my being a farmer. 

Perhaps you aren't aware that many of the cases that these dual trained doctors end up treating are those which reached the end of the road and the NHS had given up on? Often the people in this category are those who have been effectively consigned to death, and often these people are rescued. How do you price that?

How did I come to be so passionately supportive of homoeopathy? My experience is with the animal kingdom. Not as a homoeopathic vet, but as a farmer. I've explained my experiences on this is in many different places, as I'm determined to defend what I know is highly efficacious in treating a massive range of ailments. On my farm this was over a long period in a large dairy herd. We also used homoeopathy to treat the same herd's young stock (offspring). 

Please be assured that these animals didn't fake either their illness or their recovery. They were genuinely ill, often with mastitis, and their recovery was frequently quicker than under the normal antibiotic regime. This was all overseen by conventionally minded veterinary surgeons, who were always impressed with our animal welfare, even if they didn't understand how it was that homoeopathy was resolving the problems. 

I also participated in various trials, including one with Bristol University. I'm pleased to be able to tell you that our results stood us in the top half of the performance table. 

For the 15 years in which homoeopathy was the mainstay of our healthcare policy, treating 300 dairy cows and 200 of their offspring, and administered by at least 12 people over that period of time, we saw an effective outcome in well over 90% of all the animals we treated. Furthermore, the results were often achieved much quicker than would be the case using allopathic medication, without antibiotics, and therefore no residues ever found their way into the bulk milk sample. Would you not consider this alone to be a good thing, not least given the worrying upsurge in antibiotic resistance being detected in the general population?

Sometimes the veterinary surgeons were perplexed as to how homoeopathy was achieving these positive results, but sadly they never let their scientific background bring themselves to ask deep questions and to learn why that might be. That always seemed a significant failing to me, as I thought a scientist would want to know why and to explore deeper, rather than dismiss reality of the situation based on their lack of understanding. Furthermore, they were denying their other clients the potential that would and still does exist for their animals to benefit from utilising homoeopathy. 

So, may I suggest that you could, in preference to dismissing something of which it appears that you do not know very much, turn your attention to areas where allopathic medicine is falling short, is overpriced, is causing complications, and also has doctorswho aren't reporting failures or side effects, etc. 

You were quick to dismiss homoeopathy, I hope you will not be similarly quick to ignore the points I make. This is a polarised area of debate, but it is not made any the better for having one side or the other being totally dismissing each other. For the record, I'm am also an ardent fan of conventional allopathic medication, but in the right place, and at the right time.

Should you seek to investigate, rather than dismiss, then I would happily arrange for you to spend time with Homoeopathy at Wellie Level http://www.hawl.co.uk/ who were placed 3rd in the Farmers Weekly Livestock Advisor of the Year awards in 2010. HAWL are run by veterinary surgeons, and homoeopaths.

Oliver Dowding