Who Owns The Rights To Natural Medicine?

In this day and age natural medicine, the once forgotten stepchild of healing is now being fought over by various groups. The MDs are teaming with corporate America to lay claim to the notion that they have a miner's claim on any kind of healing by virtue of their superior training. The Chiropractors lay claim to acupuncture inan attempt to get an invasive procedure to solidify their status as real doctors, The massage therapists are adding electrostim (acupuncture point stimulation) and laser to their arsenal and the Acupuncturists are trying to make themselves doctors. Add to all this the body of uneducated lay practitioners hawking everything from electoranalysis machines to low (and ineffective sham)-level laser and you have a keystone cops type comedy. Natural medicine belongs to the people of this planet. It is their right to be able to take care of themselves and their families. It is not right for a government to tell someone that they cannot make a choice for themselves on how to attain health. How can we ban a supplement like tryptophan for 20 years while we let people smoke millions of cigarettes each day?
The answer is money, greed and corporate influence. Now I am not trying to be a socialist. I just feel that when it comes to healthcare let us be able to take care of ourselves without corporate inteference.

The Cochrane Collaboration-A Wolf in Sheeps Clothing?

The Cochrane Collaboration is a philanthropically funded group of scientists that reviews existing literature to provide "The reliable source of evidence in health care". Now these are generally well intended people, but there is a flaw in their approach that actually ends up creating obstacles to the advancement of medicine. Because they do not do any new research themselves; they just review existing research, the studies product they turn out is only as good as the materials they have to work with. By this I mean that if they are reviewing poorly done studies, or biased studies then their work is going to reflect that. Take alternative medicine for example, prior to the 90's there was very little funding for alternative medicine because there was no potential profit for large corporations in alternative medicine. Most of our university medical research is private sector funded. This means that most alternative medicine research is poor in quality due to a lack of funding and most pharmaceutical research is of a gold standard because there was adequate funding. In some cases there is a convincing research p-value for a pharmaceutical application that is preposterous like Prozac for Menopause or PMS that will take years to be unwound and even longer for the Cochrane Collaboration to correct because it will have to wait for studies that refute the original work. A great example of this is Hormone Replacement Therapy for women. For years there was a huge preponderance of medical research evidence supporting the use of high does estradiol. Then almost 25 years later we finally have the real story. I like the Cochrane Collaboration but they need to rethink their mission to help science and the advancement of medicine. People who have a vested interest in Big corporate medicine frequently use the Cochrane Collaboration's findings to control their financial interests.

Cancer-is it the canary in the coal mine?

I'm Back!!!!!! The recession hit me hard and hit me early and I had to struggle to make my daily bread but there is a life out there for all of us as long as we do not suffer excessively and change the path God has for us with our free will. The point is to never give up. What was he thinking when he gave us free will as a gift? Huh...I'll have to ask him when I get there.



Cancer lives with us all. Some of us will have it become a part of our lives and others will only watch from the sidelines but eventually it will affect us all. I never wanted to get involved with cancer when I was studying medicine. It was too serious and big-time for me, but medicine has a way of drawing you in where it needs you and so I now work with cancer all the time and I love it. It makes me wish I had gone to school to be an MD and oncologist because with my out of the box way of thinking I would have been one cool onco man.

I am going to be posting a lot of the articles I write up here on my little blog which I love.