Re: For those who can get UK Radio 4

It is my belief that more and more people are using alternative medicine because more and more examples of success are becoming evident through using natural medicine.

You believe that more and more doctors are turning to alternative medicine. And the evidence for this assumption, according to you, is that 50% of doctors would refer their patients to alternative specialists. What does that statement mean? I think you need to examine that more. Be careful that you are not projecting your own desires into that statement on "50%" that you heard on the radio. That wouldn't be scientific. And I believe in one of your posts you were interested in things that were scientific like getting scientific information.

You need to let everyone here in on what was meant by "alternative specialists" in the context of that UK radio program you listened to and wanted to share. By "alternative specialists" the speaker could have meant that he would refer this patient to another colleague who uses conventional methods rather than alternative methods. The specialist is being offered to the patient as an alternative to himself, not that the specialist uses alternative medicine.

Also, you need to let everyone here know at what point in a particular disease would the doctor refer one of his patients to the "alternative specialist" you took to mean practitioner of alternative medicine. Did they give any examples on the radio of specific conditions or diseases that the doctors thought were amenable to such referral? I would think you'd be interested in this answer since you want to use the best of both worlds, that of the conventional and the alternative.

In addition, you need to remember from that interview, or the next interview, how much advice is the doctor going to accept from the doctor who is praticing alternative medicine. Because if you refer a patient to someone else, you are saying to the patient "I can't do any more for you on this particular point and the doctor in alternative medicine may be able to help you." If that help from the alternative field is restricted to a vitamin tablet taken once or twice a day and nothing more, because more will conflict with the conventional therapy, how effective will this vitamin be? Especially if more remedies from the alternative field are needed for this particular point (of illness) from the experienced, alternative doctor's point of view? If the doctor using conventional therapy is only going to
allow his patient to accept a few crumbs of advice from a practitioner of alternative medicine, it shows how little he knows about it(alternative medicine). Cooking shredded pieces of a mushroom or taking some mineral supplements for a condition is not all there is to understanding the field of alternative medicine.

Now you have to start to ask yourself after a medical student spends 6-10 years more (after graduating from a 4 year college) studying how to pratice medicine, how open minded is he going to be, psychologically, to new ideas? New ideas would be any ideas not taught to him in medical school. And how are you going to find out? Are you going to find out how arrogant or non-arrogant he is when you become sick and go to your doctor for advice, or are you going to do some reading before that? What's to keep your particular doctor from dismissing any suggestions you have to bring up that use some part of alternative medicine? Don't you need to know this BEFORE you get sick? What questions would you ask?

As you start reading more and more in the alternative field you will find more and more doctors who pratice it. This will lead you to psychologically believe there actually are more and more.
When actually the number was the same as it was before you started reading. I think you realize this yourself as I think you said it in another forum. How many conventional doctors per year does "more and more" actually mean?

If the "more and more" statement and the "50%" statement actually came from a survey, why were the other questions in that survey left out? Usually such surveys have additional questions pertaining to percent of advice accepted from those in the alternative field. As you can see that "50%" by itself means very little. Someone could have made that up without even doing a survey. Fifty percent of anything can be acheived by chance alone. It does not show improvement.

Perhaps the results were like what you are suggesting that more and more doctors want to use alternative medicine, but then someone didn't want that supporting data to be published. Because you can't get that meaning from "50%." What are you comparing it to, a previous survey? And who or what institutions would be motivated not have such data published?

If you respect that by applying facts of Science you can make the food cleaner and better to eat, the world a safer place, then you also have to study the facts on how POLITICS has trampled on and tarnished science. There are buckets and barrelfulls of politics mixed in with science. There is politics in science. And the books written on Political Science should have been written on this topic instead of on government.

Read both sides of the story on vaccinations unless you want to be closed minded. You haven't done this. If you are close minded you won't learn anything and others will. Your statement about polio and vaccination helping is a mere statistical correlation used to fool the ignorant. Read the breakdown of that stastistic and what it actually means. There are plenty of such places on the internet like probably vaccination.com
That taking the polio vaccine helps is a great over-generalization made because you are not aware of all of the material on it.

Is Hulda Clark 's the first system in the alternative field that you have come across and seriously considered? You mainly agree with the other systems and their protocols for health recovery but not this one, right? Or wrong?

Perhaps people print long tracts of definitions for you because you understand so little of what you are condeming, and you do not find something in that tract that you can point out as false, backed up by your evidence.

The PURE FOOD AND DRUG ACT of 1906 passed by Congress created the FDA to make sure labelled bottles actually contained what was supposed to be in them, in the proper strength, and nothing more.
But politics entered into this picture making the FDA the behemoth it is from running clinical trials for drug companies to
freely passing judgement on certain supplements (like laetrile-B17) as illegal and freely smearing the lifetime work of an individual(s). Was the FDA set up to test what they thought were poisons and pass judgement on it? Or only to test the contents as to what was present or not? I believe it was the latter. If this is wrong, let someone explain how here. If you carefully keep yourself psychologically blind to the politics in science, you won't ever see the Science in the Alternative field of Medicine.

Around a hundred years later from 1906, the public believes alternative treatment of a condition or disease is dangerous (because supplements, vegetables, or zappers are poison?). Who infused politics into the FDA Act so that science and the scientific testing of something would generate what has become astronomical amounts of $$$$$$$$$$$$?


HERE IS WHAT WAS IN THE PURE FOOD AND DRUG ACT OF 1906
"The Theodore Roosevelt Administration
Pure Food and Drug Act
1906
The muckrakers had successfully heightened public awareness of safety issues stemming from careless food preparation procedures and the increasing incidence of drug addiction from patent medicines, both accidental and conscious. Scientific support came from Dr. Harvey W. Wiley, the Department of Agriculture's chief chemist, who published his findings on the widespread use of harmful preservatives in the meat-packing industry. The experience of American soldiers with so-called “embalmed beef” during the Spanish-American War added impetus to the movement.

Public pressure forced a reluctant Congress to consider a Pure Food and Drug bill in 1906. Provisions of the measure included the following:


Creation of the Food and Drug Administration, which was entrusted with the responsibility of testing all foods and drugs destined for human consumption
The requirement for prescriptions from licensed physicians before a patient could purchase certain drugs
The requirement of label warnings on habit-forming drugs.
Passage of the measure in Congress was not assured. The lobbying association representing the medicine makers was vocal and well-funded, as were representatives of the “beef trust” and other food producers. Some members of Congress, especially a number of Southern senators, opposed the bill as constitutionally unsound.

The active involvement of Theodore Roosevelt, who was repulsed by slaughterhouse practices described in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, successfully overcame the lawmakers’ reluctance.

The first casualty of this legislation was the patent medicine industry; few of the nostrums gained certification from the FDA. The law was strengthened in 1911 when additional provisions were added to combat fraudulent labeling.

Companion legislation was directed squarely at the meat-packing industry in the Meat Inspection Act of 1906."

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