by Phillip Day

 

When you write a book and entitle it Health Wars, you’re probably out to make trouble. Apart from images of starving people, cancer apocalypses, AIDS-ravaged nations and chicken shock-and-awe, the language itself confronts you. What wars? And what has health got to do with them? And why make the doctor on the front so big and scary? And who are you, Phillip Day, I’ve never even heard of you.

 

Health Wars was first published in 2000 and created a storm. How dare a member of the public assault the hallowed halls of government, industry and science. Of course, I was by no means the first to level accusations of quackery and ineptitude against Big Medicine. Doctors themselves have told me that Health Wars managed to achieve the requisite level of public outrage to galvanise the citizen into doing their own research.

 

By dividing the book up into different wars — for instance, medical incompetence over vaccinations; death by doctoring in cancer and heart disease — the reader quickly identifies the common threads, not only with what is going wrong with corporate healthcare, but also in what the individual can do to protect themselves and fix most of the problems at home. An ounce of prevention, as they say, is worth a pound of cure, but we got lazy.

 

Like millions of others I am someone who loves life and wants to live it for as long as possible with all my ducks in a row. Statistically, though, I’m not going to make it, at least to that golf course scene. The chances are I’ll have a heart attack, get cancer, have a stroke. Why? These diseases were all but unknown just 150 years ago.

 

One in four of us will get a mental problem, one in six diabetes, one in three asthma. Eight out of ten are physically inactive, have high blood pressure and are overweight. I suppose that’s why there are ‘health plans’, though the moniker’s deceptive. No-one seems to plan for their health, only sickness, it’s not something we want to dwell on. In an age where the majority don’t even put away for their pension, the mission for most of us is simply to have a good life, raise kids, love thy neighbour, grow old gracefully and make it to the bathroom on time.

 

The reality for many, however, will be broken marriages, broken homes, broken health, broken finances, the first surgery at fifty, addictions, pills and potions, and then you lose your mind, the family wants to put you somewhere, and you end up in a home eating Nobby’s Nuts, staring at the X-Factor. We’ve come to accept our lot, that bad things happen and people die. After all, everyone dies of something, right? But we’re not supposed to be killed by our doctor or government!

 

Twenty-five years ago as an ordinary citizen I became interested in health. Aside from being in pretty poor shape myself (heavily overweight, a smoker, on two different anti-depressants prescribed to me by my doctor for a hamstring injury), some of my family had lost their lives to the medical establishment and I wanted to know why. The industry I started researching was understandably cagey over any deaths it caused. There’s a trust between doctor and patient, one vital to the proper discharge of a physician’s duties. To hint for even an instant that medicine itself could be the problem – that doctors might be up there with cancer and heart attack as one of civilization’s most lethal scourges – is to say something about our society that is so ghastly, most don’t even want to go there. Until it happens to them.

 

I found good men and women in medicine to be sure, and got to know more and more in many parts of the world as time went by. Doctors go into medicine to make a difference, to save lives, to give hope, not to find that most medicines don’t do what they say on the tin. Instead of ‘doing no harm to the patient’ (Hippocratic Oath), many doctors are bothered that their training teaches them from the outset to harm the patient from babyhood with vaccinations, drugs, bacteria, fungi and viruses, not to mention surgeries and the neglect of food and lifestyle causations.

 

I found that I was not against medicine. On the contrary, I believe to this day that the coming century will see tremendous breakthroughs once common sense and vested interests are connected to the oxygen. It’s a precarious balance after all, for science cannot survive without money. The inventions we enjoy today should be roundly applauded – life would be quite impossible without them. On the other hand, as the Saxons said, ‘Where the battle is, there shall the eagles be gathered together’. Or in today’s vernacular, ‘Where the sickness is, there shall the corporations be gathered together’.

 

I found encroaching greed was placing profits over patients with unintended consequences. Syndromes were being invented. Most drugs were proving an unqualified failure with disease and worse, there were side-effects, the cost and potential for litigation. Curing the symptoms was not the same thing as curing the disease. So as the years passed, we got more cancer, more strokes and more heart attacks in spite of the ‘wars’ being declared; in spite of the brightest and best wandering the corridors of our leading medical institutions with unlimited budgets. The newspapers tout ‘breakthroughs’. Sometimes the cure is worse than the disease. Sometimes the cure is the disease. The unwanted conclusion is, that we have given our trust to a system which routinely abuses it. In the realm of our ‘healthcare system’, I cannot see any system at all that is working for a meaningful longevity in any of its patients. Harsh words? NOT HARSH ENOUGH.

 

On 25^th January 2009, the Herald Sun in Melbourne, Australia, reported: ‘Children younger than 4 who are considered mentally disturbed are being treated with controversial electric shock treatment.’ Are we OK with electric-shocking our toddlers? In the US state of Maryland, state and county officials have announced that they will send parents to jail if they don’t submit their children to vaccination.

 

Today in many countries, if you refuse certain drugs for your family, child protection services can be unleashed. If you refuse chemotherapy for your child on the grounds that it’s poison, your child can be removed and forcefully poisoned to death to preserve their human rights. Such irony becomes all the more poignant when one realises it’s all being done with the best possible intentions. As I’m oft fond of saying, you can be sincere, and you can be sincerely wrong.

 

Truth is only any good if you act upon it. Both orthodox and complementary paradigms have much to bring to the table. We have made some great advances in medicine: infant survivability at birth, A & E trauma medicine, surgical techniques, pain management, prosthesis. Yet two realms remain unqualified failures: disease and mental health. And while Health Wars may outrage and shock, and while one may form the conclusion at the final page that the measures described in the book ‘make all the sense in the world’, how many will actually act to improve their own circumstances?

 

In the end it’s up to us. While we’ve been short-changed on ‘healthcare’, the odds of living to a grand old age with all our own marbles is squarely in our purview. If I can convince you that you’re worth working on, will you do a few simple things to add years to your life? What would another fifteen years really be worth to you, to your children, friends and family? Would you teach them how to qualify for the extra mileage also?

 

In the UK you receive a telegram from the Queen on your hundredth birthday. In 2000, we saw Her Majesty sending the telegram to her own mum, the late but ever-mobile Elizabeth the Queen Mother, who tipped the century to the delight of all. A nice sight and all fine for royalty, I say, but what about the great unwashed? What are the chances of my getting that telegram for myself? Can humans routinely survive to be a healthy hundred in the rap, neon and jet exhaust of the 21^st century? If so, how do you do it? And why wasn’t I told?

 

In the age of the Internet, we now have the sum total of all human knowledge at our fingertips, warts ‘n all, the first time this has become possible. The purpose of Health Wars is to assist you in getting properly researched and easy-to-understand information upon which to base your own conclusions and informed decisions. It’s currently an embarrassing time for the ‘powers that be’ now the veil of information secrecy has been whisked aside. It’s tempting to believe that the coming years will usher in an era of greater transparency, love, friendship, light, rainbows, etc, for all, though if you’ve come to know human nature as I have, you will learn this stuff for yourself without the slightest delay and advise those you love to do likewise.

 

It’s a warzone out there.

Take nothing for granted. Prove all things.

Phillip Day.

http://www.credence.org/newbooktours/HealthWars/ for the book…..