Time pressures are growing on me again after the Easter holidays but I will stick with this as long as I can.
The jury is not out. In the case of medical doctors the jury is the General Medical Council. The GMC finds those charges to be very much substantiated.
The GMC also readily ousts people who do not strictly play by their rules. I have been ill for 5 1/2 years and mainstream doctors have failed me utterly. Before this I was like you and many others here, I knew little to nothing about alternative medicine and was happy to take whatever my doctor felt necessary to prescribe for me. Now is not the place to go into this but maybe it will help you see where I am coming from. I have experienced various kinds of alt med firsthand and educating myself has helped me more than my doctors did. Though I have also had the valued help of a naturopathic physician in his 70s who was struck off by the GMC about 8 years ago for reasons that many people, including me, feel outraged about. I cannot simply sit back and blindly trust every decision they make. Agreed that Melanie Phillips, now that I have found out who she is, is the last person I'd actually want to be listening to; but the jury is still out with me about Dr. Wakefield. You can guffaw all you want about that, doesn't matter to me. I prefer not to close my mind one way or the other for now.
I certainly feel that it tarnishes his reputation and effectively discredits him as a source.
That's certainly your prerogative. I have been reading Dr. Mercola's website and books for some years now and while I like to think I am critical about anything I read, my own research has chimed with much of what he says time and time again. He advocates the way I eat, though I chose my diet before I knew about that. I approve of the supplements I've seen him selling. I'm glad he has the popularity and power that he does because he is a good advocate for alt med, though that is enough for people in some circles to go after him from any angle they can. I daresay you're reading websites affiliated with them.
Also, how much are you paying for that coconut oil? $17.45 a pint it says on Mercola's site. Jebus! You know that you can get it from local Indian and Pakistani grocers for about a couple of quid, right?
I don't know what kind of product you'd be buying from those shops. There are big differences in sourcing and processing. Virgin coconut oils I've looked at buying in this country are of comparable prices, which is unfortunate because it means I have to use it sparingly. At the moment I buy cold-pressed chemical-free virgin coconut oil from a country that sources from independent growers in the Philippines, and they charge 13.99 for 500ml. I do wish the overall prices would come down.
Cheap trick that. Mercola's page is full of references to the supposed curative powers of baking soda. He specifically mentions flu, again and again. He goes on to eulogise the use of baking soda as a treatment against cancer of all things! Ask yourself what Mercola is trying to tell us with this "historical" analysis. The page ends with a link to his "Top 12 all-natural cancer prevention strategies", which include an awful lot of the things that he sells... It's all just advertising, mixed in with grotesque pseudo-science.
You can make of that what you want. I've seen him mention all sorts of natural things that one can try using. Notice that he never says "use this certified cure" about anything (nor does he say, for that matter, "do not vaccinate your children"); he's offering possibilities for people like me who have found out the hard way that conventional "cures" aren't always all they are cracked up to be either. I haven't tried baking soda for any of the things he recommends but I'm not beyond doing so. Why are you so certain that it's useless for anything other than raising cakes or scrubbing the kitchen counter -- is it just because your "common sense" tells you it's nonsense? How do you
know?
By the way, what Dr. Mercola
does advocate time and time again, which you will see listed at the bottom of many of his web pages, is a healthy lifestyle that includes diet, exercise, proper sleep, relaxation, and so forth. Are you going to argue about that too?
About "cancer is a fungus" . . . again, I've studied candida overgrowth and its alleged effects. I've looked into ways of clearing it. I've even gone on a regimen for myself in case that was part of my health problem. I didn't watch the video but I read the article, which says that cancer may be the body's
response to candida. Could that be the case at least some of the time? IMO very possibly so. Note that the article also lists the abysmal failure rates of mainstream cancer treatments. Chemotherapy is often the cure that kills the patient. I am very much in favour of finding alternative treatments that work
with the body and boost the immune system, and there are very many of these to choose from.
Be serious. If you are overweight, eating fat is far less healthy than reducing fat intake. this is not complicated. Coconut fat may be a very in healthy fat in comparison to other fats but if you are seriously obese, no fat can truly be considered healthy, certainly not in the naive sense that you suggested.
I see, this is now a semantic argument. Would it help if I simply said, "Overweight people should eat less food generally"? Though there are some foods they should eat less of than others. High fructose corn syrup should be eliminated as completely as possible, for example, because it is readily metabolised into fat.
Parents are urged to ensure their children get the MMR jab. Measles cases in England and Wales rose by 36% in 2008, figures show. Confirmed cases increased from 990 in 2007 to 1,348 last year - the highest figure since the monitoring scheme was introduced in 1995.
Vaccination could have prevented those cases.
This is still a miniscule portion of the population. And how many of these cases resulted in complications -- do you have statistics for that? Vaccination has become such an ingrained part of our culture, it is now considered horrific if someone catches one of these diseases, even though a generation ago they were seen as a normal part of childhood. Why do we now need a chicken pox vaccine? It is harmless in almost all cases, unless the person's immune system is already compromised. I do not believe that vaccines are purely harmless and I am concerned about the growing numbers of them that are given to young children nowadays, especially in the US.
It's odd how people rail on against "dangerous" supplements sold by health food stores, and people dying from diseases for which there are vaccines. Strangely, the rates of iatrogenic illnesses and the death toll from FDA-approved prescription drugs never make the headlines. Why is that?
Because the media is made up of shallow, scientifically illiterate fuckwits? Or perhaps it's not actually true, given the number of stories about hospital-acquired infections such as MRSA.
You're dodging the question. I want to know why you think people like Steven Barrett are so hell-bent on discrediting people who sell nutritional supplements when prescription medications given and taken correctly are killing thousands of people every year and leaving others with horrific side effects. I mentioned Zyprexa; do you know what
akathisia is? If it were herbs causing these effects you'd be up in arms. But it's different with prescription meds somehow. And yet, strangely, there were
no deaths caused by nutritional supplements in 2008. None. How does that fit in with your arguments here about these dangerous unregulated substances?
Are you ever going to provide evidence that MMR is linked to autism?
I don't know for sure that it is. I never said I was sure that it was. I believe it may be a possibility.
Or cite those monkey studies?
If that's what you want. It's another mystery that I think you will love; the study was withdrawn from the Journal of Neurotoxicology but no one seems to know the reason. Here is what Wakefield said in the transcript of the video on Mercola's site (apologies for the length but it explains the background well):
it's a study that should have been done years ago. When you do vaccine safety studies, they are very often done in primates, non-human primates before they go into children. The rhesus macaque, an old world monkey is one of those primates and so we decided some years ago, eight or so years ago, to do the study that had never been done.
To take the vaccine schedule, what happens in the real world if we expose these infant primates to what kids get between the age of day one and preschool boosters, the vaccine schedule in the 1990s with thimerosal in it. What's the outcome? What's the outcome in terms of their development, in terms of their cognition, in terms of their intestinal function, in terms of their immune function, brain imaging, all those kinds of things a very, very detailed study.
It should have been done. It was never done. It had never been done, extraordinary.
Parents might expect that the total vaccine schedule that their children are going to get has been looked at for safety in total, it has not. The individual vaccines are looked at but the schedule is not.
So we decided we do the study.
I would wholeheartedly support such a study. I would
expect such studies to be done before I subjected my child to a US-style vaccination schedule. Why is this not happening?
The first paper just looked at the effect of the thimerosal, the mercury containing hepatitis B vaccine on day one and looking at the acquisition of essential reflexes like feeding reflexes. And we compared with unvaccinated animals; animals that have been given saline as a control.
And what we found is there was a significant delay in the acquisition of these basic life saving reflexes in the recipients of the vaccine. As early as the first few days of life, very, very worrying.
We published that paper, it went through rigorous peer review. It was published online in Neurotoxicolgy and then lo and behold, after the GMC decision, they decided not to proceed to publication in the paper itself.
The paper was withdrawn. Not based upon its clinical and scientific merits, they have been through the process of peer review that you and I talked about, a process that we recognize as absolutely essential to the conduct of science. It had been through that. It had been published and then it was withdrawn.
We all have our own opinions but the fact is that when a colleague of mine contacted the journal's editor to say why has this happened? the journal editor directed that person to Elsevier.
This is extraordinary.
Had it been withdrawn for a scientific reason, the editor would have been able to deal with it but it was not withdrawn for a scientific reason. The contact was directed by the editor to Elsevier itself; the publishing house. Well, the publishing house shouldn't be telling the journal what they should and shouldn't publish.
DM: The owner of the journal.
DW: That's right. It's absolutely an extraordinary situation. So this was a decision that had come from the top, from the publishers.
And as I've said before, we not know that Elsevier and Glaxo SmithKline have this common denominator this link and the chairman of Elsevier. So one can speculate about whether that is involved or not, I don't know.
Huge potential for conflict of interest. It should be disclosed and something which shouldn't and one hopes it didn't influence the decision to withdraw that paper. But the important factor is that it was a decision taken by the publishing company and not by the editor, the scientific editor of the journal itself.
DM: And this is the drug company that actually manufactured the vaccine that was removed from the UK after four years of causing these increased incidences of meningitis as a result of the contamination.
DW: That's correct.
Was the paper withdrawn due to the influence of a drug company that manufactures vaccines? Who knows. (Elsevier also owns The Lancet, which withdrew the original paper on MMR and autism. The chairman of Elsevier has a board position at Glaxo SmithKline.) I would like to see more studies of this nature conducted and published. That is the crux of Wakefield's claims about the MMR: studies will claim that each vaccine is OK individually, but the effects when all 3 are given together are not known. This is also the case in polypharmacy, where doctors will prescribe "safe" drugs even though their effects when taken together are not known. How many people are really aware that they have turned into walking lab experiments?
Or show that coconut oil fights cancer?
As part of a healthy diet, you bet it does.
you're not actually debating...
We seem to be actively disagreeing with each other. It might just be nice to keep the topic from continually expanding because having to write very lengthy posts puts me off posting anything at all.
Edited by Kitsune, : No reason given.
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