Chapter 1 : Conventional Western Medicine - The Surgeon and the Pill Fairy

As reproduced from the book, "I'm a patient ... Get me out of here..."

As a medical student I thought that if I could know everything, cure diseases and write research papers, I would be a good doctor. Wrong. Most illness after the age of thirty-five is not instantly “curable” apart from obvious shortages (low thyroid function, for example). Most of my book is about listening to the patient and offering ones own humanity and life experience, together with some relevant education and explanation.

I do not know “everything” but I know how to find out. Someone once said “you learn more and more about less and less, and when you know everything about nothing, you graduate.” Perhaps the real problem is the mental stuckness and failure of any sort of spiritual growth, that afflicts many busy doctors, lack of time being cited as the main reason.

My wise colleague, the late Dr Keith Eaton, described the process of the formation of the Medical Royal Colleges as follows:

“First a group of senior practitioners, approaching their dodderage and who all know each other, get together over dinner and award each other a certificate which they clip from the top of a cereal packet. Having thus formed themselves into a club, which will be perceived by outsiders to be authoritative and which other practitioners wish to join, they set up an obstacle course which aspiring members then have to surmount …”

Unfortunately there is more than a grain of truth in this, and many doctors do spend their early and busy years in practice completing the obstacle course in order to get as many higher degrees and paper qualifications as possible.

Another of my wiser medical teachers once said that medicine would be more compassionate if prior to practising, all doctors had to under undergo a major surgical operation on a British National Health Service “Nightingale” ward (public ward for 25 people, mixed sexes, beds divided off with curtains for death and events requiring major privacy, television on at all times.) I have found that the best doctors for any particular illness are those who have suffered from it, made a good recovery and are prepared to share the relevant facts and feelings appropriately with their patients.

The River Bank Story - A Metaphor for Wisdom

There once was a wise old priest who described the three phases of his ministry.

“I saw the people struggling with their lives, metaphorically, as people in a river, struggling to reach the river bank. At first I thought (after training) that I should stand on the riverbank and tell the people what to do and direct them by shouting instructions. Later I thought I should reach into the river, from the riverbank, and try to guide them to the edge. Much later, when I reached the age of wisdom and experience, I realised we were all in the river together, helping each other along.”

Very few doctors ever reach this stage of wisdom, far too many behave as if they think they are God.

Riverbank Story, Two

This illustrates our current obsession with fixing each problem with the latest pharmaceutical magic bullet, without ever stopping to think about causes and future prevention. (A bit like the drug addict sorting the problems from his last “fix” with the next identical “fix” and expecting a long-term improvement.)

A group of friends were picnicking on a riverbank, when someone noticed a baby floating down the river towards them. They fished it out and dried it and generally sorted things, and were just wondering what to do, when another baby was noticed floating down the river … they fished it out etc. etc. This continued to happen, and they got very skilled at saving drowning babies. After a while, one of the group said “why don’t some of us walk up-stream and see if we can prevent these babies from falling in.”

Wisdom or “Evidence Based Medicine” Can we have Both?

Our leaders insist on “Evidence-Based Medicine” to the exclusion of all else. Much of my work in the Allergy and Addiction field is based on accumulated wisdom and experience (mine and other people’s) and the results are not easily quantifiable by clinical trials. Many patients come to me in despair having had “evidence-based medicine” fail them, and even make them worse.

Years ago, as a result of the witch-craft trials, a great deal of accumulated wisdom was lost, including knowledge of the correction of adverse earth energies, and their relationship to underground water, which may affect houses and cause ill health. The purpose of stone circles may be related to this aspect of lost knowledge, and certainly water dowsing is. The latter, while always considered suspect and certainly unexplainable, survived as it was the cheapest way of finding drinking water. (And it often still is.) Old churches are usually sited and orientated on especially favourable places from the earth energy point of view, which makes worshippers feel better. These sites can only be found by dowsing, even now.

It would be a pity to throw out the baby with the bathwater, again, just because a number of huge vested interests like to tell us that, if we can’t count it or measure it, then it hasn’t happened. We can not measure either pain, misery or wellness, let alone degrees of improvement, on any scale of units, as yet.

Often an early alert to things going wrong is given by a number of sufferers from some new syndrome or disease trying to inform the media and the medical profession. Their reports are initially dismissed as “only anecdotal” and therefore not “scientific” so they didn’t happen … (but they did). The first few cases of the plague were anecdotal, at what statistical level does something become “real”?

Recent examples of this include the MMR Vaccine and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder Controversy (Chapter 8), illnesses occurring near TETRA and other mobile phone masts (Chapter 7 and Appendix 4), clusters of cancer and leukaemia near high tension power lines, Gulf War Syndrome (Chapter 8) and much else.

The standard bleat from the big industries concerned is that “there is no evidence that … (our expensive little wonder) … has caused any health problems.” Leaving aside that it is unlikely that they did any valid tests, it is not possible to prove a negative (that something doesn’t happen) only that something does happen.

Modern Medicine is “drug firm” driven, always seeking chemical solutions to human problems. For example, there are many complex and expensively researched pills for raised blood pressure, which effectively lower it (with or without unfortunate side effects for a condition in which, originally, the patient did not feel ill). But this begs the question of why the blood pressure was raised in the first place (alcohol, tobacco, stress, weight, lifestyle, mineral and vitamin deficiencies and house problems are all possibilities) and really fails to cure anything. Good medicine tackles causes rather than offers quick fixes.

There are many health foods, supplements, vitamins and herbs which are useful in the sort of Environmental Medicine that I practise. Some are ancient knowledge (Hawthorn for raised Blood Pressure) and others are more recent discoveries. They rarely have side effects. Politically this approach is unpopular with the vested interests because these products are cheap and usually can not be patented. Some are closer to foods than to drugs.

Next we are told that because no clinical trials were done, they can not be proved to work (so they don’t work … but they do). However there is little profit in these relatively cheap products, so no-one will fund a clinical trial. In the European Union this is being used as the lever to ban herbs and nutritional supplements, by insisting on eliminating all those which have not undergone such trials, and most of them haven’t. One is more likely to be struck by lightning than suffer ill-health from taking food supplements. (This avoids discussion of the hundreds of thousands of people, who, every year suffer ill-health and death from pharmaceutical preparations, which the drug companies would like to promote once they have rendered the herbs and supplements unavailable or illegal (Chapter 17 and 18).)

I am unhappy about the validity of double blind “independent” clinical trials so beloved of the drug firms and academics. These have to be funded. How can he who pays the piper not call the tune? We will never know how many results from clinical trials were not published because they failed to produce the “right” results. Very little human endeavour is truly unbiased. Behind every statistic there’s a vested interest.

Recently there was a move to insist on publication of unsuccessful drug trials to redress this balance. I can’t see this happening other than as a discrete list at the back of some obscure publication that is unavailable to the general public.

Clinical trials only compare a group (“cohort” is the in-word) taking one thing or pill, with an unmedicated control group. There must, however be a multitude of other variables which are not considered, not the least of which are the expectations of those involved in financing the trial.

Since writing this, I have read a book called Seeds of Deception by Jeffrey M. Smith. The lengths to which the big battalions will go to get untried foods and inadequately tested drugs onto the market is breathtaking and can only be described, in some cases, as fraudulent.

Drug manufacturers often do not deliberately produce drugs to fill an identified need or gap in the health market, rather they employ people to produce novel molecules and then try to find something the new molecule will “cure” (Alice in Blunderland). So we have several hundred similar arthritis drugs, with similar side effects, and still nothing effective against the common cold. They also try desperately to find new uses for “orphan drugs” (drugs which have been costly to develop and failed in their original purpose, perhaps through unwanted effects). Thalidomide and AZT are examples, the latter was eventually used as an anti-Aids drug in those with symptom-free HIV, many people are still trying to avoid it. The former was for morning sickness which produced major birth defects in babies when taken by pregnant mothers, efforts have been made to sell it for other purposes.

Almost all illness acquired in life has a major environmental and lifestyle component, and unless we deal with this aspect, neither genetic manipulation nor chemical annihilation will be curative.

The major health improvements which have occurred during the last hundred years or so have been largely due to improvements in sanitation and public health including the invention of drains and an understanding of the connection between epidemics and drinking water contaminated by sewage. In 1851, Dr John Snow stopped a cholera epidemic in London by using local knowledge and sensible observation (which would today be denigrated as unscientific and anecdotal). He removed the pump handle from the pump at Broad Street, the water from which was contaminated and there were no further related cases of cholera.

What Doctors are Good At

In general, acute infections are best treated conventionally with antibiotics (but see below), as are hormonal shortages such as an under-active thyroid (but see also chapters 11 and 18 on the menopause and natural hormone replacement therapy). Hip and some other joint replacements are a very successful way of curing arthritis pain, but they do not last for ever and may have to be redone. Also there are people who have wound up with multiple (different) joint replacements, which suggests palliation and that there is an underlying process destroying joints (perhaps mould or food allergy) which is not being tackled.

Conventional medicine is good at accidents and emergencies, fractures and repairing things mechanical, removing tumours and sorting out obstructions and blockages, hernia repairs, etc. Most of these are acute conditions and require surgery.

I have to admit that alternative approaches do not always work with raised blood pressure. In view of its tendency to cause various arterial and organ damage, it does seem sensible to reduce blood pressure with the smallest possible dose of a pharmacological drug, and monitor it at home using a self-take blood pressure machine, while seeking the cause and improving lifestyle. I do not think pharmaceuticals are wisely used as a substitute for lifestyle changes. A small dose of a beta blocker fits the bill. The more sophisticated drugs sometimes have very sophisticated side effects. Minerals (in liquid form) and vitamins, especially the B group, should be tried for a minimum of two weeks, if possible, before resorting to medication.

What Doctors are Not Good At

Most chronic physical illness, especially occurring over forty years of age, is better looked at through the kaleidoscope of Environmental Medicine in an effort to remedy the causes, and there is usually more than one cause. Chronic or recurrent infections are usually treated with multiple courses of antibiotics without any thought for their effect on the normal bacterial inhabitants (good bugs) of the large intestine which are instrumental in digestion and well-being. These latter are killed off indiscriminately and the resulting imbalance is caused by the increase in numbers of yeasts, which take up the space vacated by the “good bugs” killed by the antibiotics. They may cause major ill health, often years later. The connection is missed because of the time delay, and the fact that most doctors are totally unaware of the problem, which is difficult to “prove.” (Chapters 3 and 4.)

If, dear reader, you only take one thing from this book, let it be this: never take antibiotics without taking an Acidophilus (lactobacillus or similar) food supplement simultaneously, and for a further week or two after the antibiotics are finished. They will replenish the “good guys” the antibiotic is going to kill off, and prevent further ill health in the future.

If multiple courses of antibiotics are required, the cause is probably not bacterial, and is an infection of a kind that does not respond to antibiotics, usually a yeast (candida) or virus infection.

Doctors are not good at allergies other than the acute life threatening kind (from say, insect stings or nut allergy requiring emergency treatment) and treat asthma with steroid (hydrocortisone derived) drugs which damp down but do not cure the problem. They routinely avoid inquiring into what is causing the allergic reaction. Most other allergies (chronic food, mould and chemical sensitivities) are entirely missed, or worse, treated with tranquilisers as the symptoms may include anxiety.

Doctors are also poor at treating addiction, which they either miss or band-aid inappropriately, usually with tranquilisers or antidepressants. When this does not work, they refer the unfortunate person to a psychiatrist, who changes the pills to no good effect. Giving pills to an alcoholic changes nothing, it will only make him smell better. And this, dear reader is the second thing I hope you will take from this book: Insist that the alcoholic (person with a drink problem, if you prefer) goes to Alcoholics Anonymous. Tell your GP of this apparently well-kept secret; AA is by far the most effective resource for treating alcoholism (AA headquarters has even done surveys to show this statistically, although obviously anonymously and without a control group). This subject is discussed in detail in chapter 10.

Intervention is usually possible for any chronic life problem, if the causes are tackled at a time of crisis. This requires skill and consultation time, and the wisdom not to “band-aid” with pills or temporary solutions, such as persuading Social Services to pay off the electricity bill which just frees up other money for buying more booze, gambling or whatever is the problem. It is vital to provide support for the patient to enable him/her to work out a lasting solution involving real change.

Finally I have concerns about treating cancer with drugs or radiation that are designed further to depress the immune system, when we need the latter to be in the best possible fettle to fight cancer and other environmental assaults. In spite of the huge sums of money spent on research; treatment of most cancers has not improved very much in my medical lifetime, and I am not sure that the pharmaceutical vested interests are barking up the right tree.

In 50 years we may well look back with horror at our present brutal methods (possibly muttering such words as “crimes against humanity”), much as we now wonder how purging, cupping and leeching can ever have had any beneficial effect, other than to the income of the medical profession and the suppliers of leeches. Unofficial rumours suggest that when cancer specialists themselves get cancer, they do not usually go for the rays and poisons approach that they enthusiastically embrace for their patients.

There are alternative approaches, but it takes courage to say “no” to the rays and poisons, and go elsewhere. Having seen friends who have had multiple courses of the radiation and chemicals, I have been struck by the feeling that there was “no-one at home” and that these people have somehow been deprived of all their positive energy and humanity. (One could say they would have been dead without the treatment, so I leave the reader, as ever, to form their own conclusions.)

How to Use Your Scientifically Trained Doctor to Your Advantage

Doctors can be very useful, provided you keep the control. So:

1. Decide, ahead of time, what you want from your doctor (tests to exclude cancer, or a serious blood problem, etc.) always ask for a thyroid function test when having other bloodwork.
   
   
2. If you know the diagnosis, learn all you can about your illness, (Internet, self-help groups, public library, see Reference Section at the end of this book)
   
   
3. Make a list of relevant questions, learn them but do not take the list into the consultation which will make the doctor despair if he is timedriven. (No, he shouldn’t be, but British Medicine is.)
   
   
4. Review question 1 in the light of the knowledge you have gained from the research you have done, decide what you want, or want to know, ask how long it will take, what it will cost etc. (Remember the plumber at the beginning?)

Go for it (politely and with humour,) but you keep the control and make the decisions. Remember your GP is “not Daddy.” If you are over fifty, forget that childhood scenario when the house used to be purified, and soap and clean towels were ceremonially laid out prior to a doctor’s home visit. He is not God.

If referral to a specialist is being considered, choose a young consultant if you want cutting edge technical expertise and science, and an older more experienced one if you want humanity and empathy. Never undergo treatment by someone you instinctively do not like or trust or who seems to be depressed.

Avoid having medical tests or investigations unless the results will be of use in deciding future action. For example if there is no practical cure, the only purpose of doing tests might be organisational (of future life) rather than medical. Where tests are being paid for, question their necessity by asking “what will this tell us and what will we able to do about it when we have the result?”

Finally never have medical procedures that are not absolutely necessary for health, and ask the specialist “what will happen if I don’t have this done?” Unlike television soaps, real doctors are not gods, things can go wrong or the results may not be as good as expected. To give an example: varicose vein operations are not always a total success, one might sensibly have surgery if the condition is painful, causing leg ulcers or swelling, but not, in my view, for cosmetic reasons alone.

Differences between the British NHS and American Systems

There is not a lot, but basically, the British system is rationed by time (delay and waiting list system) and the American System by money (complicated insurance set-up). The philosophy is similar but seems more drug-firm and financially driven in the USA, where there is direct advertising of drugs to the public on TV (“ask your doctor to prescribe our expensive little cure-all for you …”), and a heavier accent on physical check-ups for early detection of illness. Also there is a direct link between the doctor’s salary and the number of operations or treatments he carries out. The American public seems to have an even greater misplaced reverence for doctors and faith in their utterances than does the British, as exemplified by the many TV advertisements for dubious products from drugs to household rubber gloves, which are given the endorsement “as used by doctors.”

The main difference is that in Britain you are under the care of a family doctor (GP) and in the past he would have treated several generations of the family and practised a more rounded form of Medicine than is usual today, when little can be accomplished in a five minute appointment. My mentor in General Practice once said that the GP is analogous to the conductor of a symphony orchestra, who may not play any of the instruments but he knows what they all can do and how to use them to good effect. He likened this to his detailed personal knowledge of the local specialists, and their skills.

In America people seem able to walk into any specialist’s office without much guidance, and family practitioners (GPs) are not universal. However, in both countries there is an expanding market in Holistic Therapies of various kinds, and in Environmental and non-drug approaches to treating illness successfully.

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