Female Quackbuster Aims to Protect the Vulnerable
By Lady Medea, BSc [High Hons] 3rd February, 2008.
Nutritional Therapy/Traditional Herbalism
Book Review - ‘SUCKERS: Are Health Remedies Too Good To Be True’ by Rose
Shapiro
You may be aware that a new book has appeared on the market, even though at first glance the cover will put you off. It has a vitamin bottle on the front with the word SUCKER printed large. The implication is that anyone who wants to take care of their health using alternative medicines is a fool, an idiot, in short a sucker.
Does this sound a flattering description of the millions of people who signed the petition to stop the EU Food Supplement Directive being passed into UK law? The massive public opposition was completely, callously and totally ignored by the EU. Does this sound democratic to you? Because the British people and our vitamin culture still wish to take care of their health and be responsible for their own family’s health by using these therapies, this tiresome assault against our wishes to be free to choose our own type of healthcare continues unabated. On and on drone these champions of the public good. Frankly we are tired of their boring diatribes and sick of hearing them.
These Quackbusters must be really getting desperate. In order to warn the ‘vulnerable’ public that their health is being ‘put at risk’ by alternative charlatans practising on the fringes, yet another book has been hatched.
In the last few months via the written word both in newspapers and now in books, the quackbusters have been writing furiously of the alleged dangers of these fringe-medicines. This new book out now called ‘SUCKERS: Are Health Remedies Too Good To Be True’ by a journalist called Rose Shapiro [what are her alternative health qualifications? And if she has none, why is she pontificating on these subjects?]
Ms. Shapiro points out the ‘dangers’ of these alternative medicines. The telling sentence in this pathetic little book is this: ‘We are witnessing an epidemic of alternative medicine’.
Now this is very revealing. For a very long time orthodox medicine has been in the saddle and has been smelling like a rose with the public, although the rose who wrote this book has the putrid stench of some very big vested interests swirling all around her and the smell resembles a rotting dung heap.
As people begin to turn away from allopathic medicine and look for alternative therapies the powerful medical/pharma cartels are launching a fight back. Day after day we now have to endure these constant assaults against natural medicine. The reason for this is that the EU’s Food Supplement & Herbal Directives which are now incorporated into UK law are there to ‘harmonise’ us with the repressive Continental model where only orthodox doctors can give out herbs or vitamins with a prescription.
Here in the UK we have always had a different system under Common Law. This law gave us liberation from the type of tyranny that dictators over on the Continent wielded. There are many examples of tyrants in Europe: Hitler, Mussolini, Salazar, Franco, the Greek Military Junta. Here in the UK we have always had freedoms. Over there they only have rights, given to them by a mighty State.
This in a nutshell is why we are now having to put up with these constant attacks on our health freedoms and this is why so many so-called ‘experts’ are wheeled out at every opportunity to tell us how dangerous these therapies are. Why have we not had this type of assault on our health choices before? Because before we were free and now we are shackled with this crushing EU yoke.
Many people who have been free for decades to deal with their health as they saw fit are now being shoehorned into the orthodox model and this is the reason why there is so much resentment here in the UK towards the enormous power of the European Union. We do not like to be dictated to, and especially not by people who we do not elect nor are able to remove from office and mostly do not even respect.
This champion of the vulnerable public says in her book that the alternative therapists use a lot of techno-speak. Orthodox doctors also use a lot of medical jargon so that their patients cannot understand what is being said – this makes them appear more powerful and knowledgeable, as in the past where they would only converse in Latin.
When Culpepper translated their jargon into readable English so that the masses could understand, their reaction was ferocious. The same thing is happening today.
She also states that alternative therapists are ‘eager to embrace technology’. If technology is so wonderful as the allopaths keep telling us, why can no other discipline embrace it? Does she mean that it will be restricted to ONLY medical doctors? Is it democratic to exclude other health practitioners and allow only a special medical elite the use of technology? I thought the protectors of the public good wanted ‘equality’. This has been their parrot cry as far back as I can remember.
She states that these therapies can shorten the lives of people with serious illness. So can conventional medicine. Perhaps she would care to look at the statistics of how many thousands die from iatrogenic diseases – side effects of drugs, MRSA, Clostridium difficile, wrong diagnoses, botched up or unnecessary surgeries, vaccines that cause massive reactions and even deaths. The bias against alternative medicine in this book is quite nauseating. I think I will drink some ginger tea in order to quell the nausea!
Another point she raises is that these therapies are ‘unregulated’. Only last week a TV presenter appeared in a national newspaper. She had been burned with a laser and had severe facial swelling. This procedure was carried out by an orthodox doctor who had absolutely NO, and I repeat NO qualifications in cosmetic surgery, plastic surgery, aesthetics or beauty therapy.
This area is also unregulated and anyone - a GP, a rectal surgeon, who operate on a different part of the anatomy, a gynaecologist who performs abortions, every one of them can jump on this lucrative bandwagon and perform cosmetic procedures for which they are both unregulated and unqualified. Will this champion of the vulnerable, Ms. Shapiro, for the sake of fairness and balance, write a book on these issues too? Come on Ms.Shapiro let’s have a book on the medical botch ups that take place every day, although I warn you it may take you years to write!
In the book she complains of natural health colleges that are ‘unaccredited’. This is the bleat of the snobbish elite, where only the State can accredit any type of course. These colleges teach different philosophies and disciplines and do not want to be accredited because if they were, the State would then lay down the curriculum and all the college would become is yet another college that teaches State-registered dogma.
The alternative therapies have been the visionaries. This is why today orthodox doctors have stolen their ideas, plagiarised their theories and are writing the same type of books on nutrition, herbal medicines, etc. that were written years ago, yet at the time the natural health therapists were labelled the lunatic fringe.
Why are these allopaths now stealing the alternative practitioners clothes and marginalising the lay practitioners? I’ll tell you why, because the public still want these therapies, and they have annexed them to orthodox medicine so that they can be in control and make the money. These therapies are not available on the NHS. Ms. Shapiro states that the NHS wastes money on these therapies. They are not available free to the public except homeopathy and this particular discipline is singled out for particular attacks because they want to get rid of it once and for all from the NHS.
The Homeopathic Hospital in London is situated on some prime real estate. Given that this government has been selling off everything imaginable, the land price of this hospital would not be a consideration would it? Or perhaps Great Ormond Street Hospital round the corner want to expand their facilities?
Shapiro then goes on to attack herbal medicine. Why if this type of medicine is so harmful are herbal remedies prescribed by conventional doctors over in the EU? Why no outcry? St.John’s Wort is one of the most prescribed herbs in Europe and so is Pumpkin Seed for bladder problems. Homeopathic medicines are also prescribed and Pharmacists dispense the prescriptions.
I will enlighten you as to why. We here in the UK have had the freedom to walk into a health store and buy what we want, using our own judgement. Over in the EU where the populace are quite happy to have a despotic nanny State which decides what ‘rights’ they can and cannot have, they are happy with this regime. Here in the UK the typical Bulldog spirit of the British people resent the Eurofederalist authoritarians telling them what to do, especially in matters of health and personal choice.
Ms.Shapiro’s foray into the assault on natural medicine is yet another feeble attempt by the forces of orthodoxy to wean the British public away from therapies that work to keep them well, in order to get them onto the drugs of Big Pharma with all their attendant side effects.
Keep writing books and media articles in the vain effort that you will be able to get people to give up their alternative therapies madam. People are flocking to alternative therapies in their droves because they feel better with their use and they know they work. Go and join your other dictator friends in the media who do not credit the British people with any common sense but constantly patronise them.
It is not the alternative ‘quacks’ who are the frauds. It is the likes of Ms. Shapiro, her medical friends and the media jackals who intentionally pervert the truth through misleading and biased books such as this one full of false and dubious allegations. Perhaps Shapiro hopes to make a profit by selling lots of copies of this book? Promoting such a book for financial gain is to me the ultimate in chicanery.