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John, thanks for you thoughts and articles.
I like all of us rely to an extent on the output of big pharma, even if it is only headache, indigestion and cold medicines. Lets be honest most of dont have ready access to willow twigs to chew to get salicylic acid derivatives into our system to deal with pain etc.
Whilst there is some truth in the assertion that big pharma would not wish a cheap natural remedy to be discovered or developed for many ailments as it would clearly, at least short term threaten their profit base; until of course they bought out the producers of the natural cure, or packaged their own version. I struggle to give any semblance of credence to the plethora of conspiracy theories littering the interwebs that big pharma have these cures locked away, or that they fix trials of natural remedies to make them fail, or that they bribe doctors and medical authorities to only use and prescribe "conventional" treatments. I also struggle, as an atheist, to give credence to sites that are littered with bible references and "praise the lord" type commentary, even when the "testimonials" themselves tell an interesting tale. As someone with a background and training in science I want to see these cures stand up to proper double blinded trials and rigorous academic peer review of the results and any associated research, currently something the British Homoeopathy Association refuses to do, in fact they were recently damned by 4 research scientists for misrepresenting their findings. Equally it seems the response of the majority of nutritionists and nutritional therapists is to sue those who criticise them (all the cases I can track down show the plaintiff lost) or they just publicly call them liars as Gillian McKeith has done on a number of occasions.
Of course none of the foregoing means that there are not things that we do not understand, or are the result of a large set of complex interactions that make it difficult to prove exactly what the causitive element of "the cure" was. It also does not mean that eating a sensible nutritionally balanced diet that avoids heavily processed foods, taking moderate exercise, not smoking or giving it up, reducing alcohol consumption to at least the current guideline limits is not going to make a huge difference to our well being and general health - it will.
But honestly some of the alternative treatments suggested out there on the interwebs are downright dangerous, for example the one that recommends cancer sufferers consume a powdered mineral that is very closely related to asbestos, this self same mineral is present in the soil of an area in Turkey that has a huge spike in the incident rates of lung cancers. Or the one that recommend daily high colonic enemas, a process that in virtually all cases leads to hugely increased incidence of colon infections, bowel disorders etc. exactly the thing it is mean to prevent. By all means try alternative and/or complimentary therapies, but make sure that the cure is not worse or will not lead to worse than what it is trying to fix. I do agree that conventional medicine does not know all the answers and along with medical researchers and big pharma has often missed the bleedingly obvious because they were not looking for it, or it does not fit their mindset.