They say that any publicity is good publicity. I found this was as far as google is concerned. I made the mistake of commenting on a so-called science blog and got a flogging in response. But really, what happened was that I challenged the new religion of Medicine – a capital letter because it is SOOOO IMPORTANT and thou shalt not challenge their new GOD. What was interesting is that there are so many people who have the time to try to take down people who disagree with them.

The writer castigated me for using epidemiological studies (amongst other things) for supporting food in the diet (onions in particular) but then wanted to use similarly designed studies for the use of surgery in cancer.  But the good side of it all is that his ranting and his readers ranting doubled the sales of my book Beat the Medical Odds and brought me up in the Google rankings from 230 to 10-12 or so. I really had to laugh at it.

I have mixed feelings about it all as I used to believe that medicine worked till I had the time and expertise to read the research itself and found that much of it just didn’t stack up. A great proportion of the medical journal articles (and probably science) can  be criticised for some aspect of their assumptions, method and conclusions drawn from the data. What happens is then that the person looking at the paper lets through those papers they agree with and castigates those they don’t agree with. It is possible for two people to both read a paper and both have their preconceptions confirmed and go away knowing they are right, even though they take diametrically opposed views.

One of my issues is that I really believed that medicine and pharmaceutical interventions worked until I had my head down in the medical literature. Then the dissonance between the claims and the data became too strong – it just wasn’t there.

As I searched I came across a different model – one based on a better set of assumptions than was used in most of medicine. This was a model which said that the body was always attempting to stay in good health and that if one provided the essential support (diet, and the whole bio-spycho-social-spiritual stuff) then the body had the physiological capacity to heal. The other component is that any absorption of something that was not a food or bioidentical to the body then that something would be treated as a toxin and lead to the body’s attempt to expel it. This includes all drugs. This was to me a commonsense model – and very far reaching because it precludes the use of most drugs. This is not to say that I would never take drugs, just that I would be very selective.