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Excellent Post Ross. Many thanks for taking the time to share your views.
You`ve made some extremely good points which certainly gives one cause for thought.
It`s certainly true that you have to be very careful of some alternative treatments, as you have correctly stated, some can do you some serious damage. However, I would class that as going down the "weido" road and with them you pays your money and takes your chance. From a personal perspective, I do believe in natural supplements and vitamins on the basis that, in general, if they don`t do you any good then it`s pretty unlikely that they will do you much harm.
I do know of trials where people have set out to disprove the effectiveness
of vitamins and on studying the "trial" it`s evident that they wouldn`t have worked anyway because a synthetic vitamin has been used and at a dose low enough to be ineffective. You then see the headline plastered all over the front pages of the newspapers declaring " Doctors say vitamins don`t work etc. "
I`m also sceptical of Pharma drugs. I`m not saying this of course about all drugs as from time to time some of them are life savers, no doubt about it.
The main problem with most prescription drugs are the side effects, which in some cases can be worse and more dangerous that the ailment that you are trying to treat. "Statins" would be a good example of medicine shoved out willy nilly by so called doctors, when in fact probably only about one person in a hundred that is on them actually needs to be.
I probably don`t think much of big pharma to be honest. Probably because of their underhanded marketing and ethics, still pushing drugs that are known to cause serious side-effects, their so called "independant research" by people who turn out to be dependant on them for grants etc., and so on and so on.
At the end of the day Ross, I think this subject/issue is a bit like the old EU question, you either believe in it or not!
Actually, this is a massive topic and in all honesty we could be writing pages for many days. Not recommended!