1 Alternative Medicine A Mind-blowing Magical Mystery Tour 2 About The Author ..................................................................... 5 The Ultimate Temptress? ......................................................... 6 No Stone Unturned .................................................................. 9 Homoeopathy: The Formative Years ...................................... 13 Death by Doctoring ................................................................. 16 Hahnemann’s ‘Secret’ Powders ............................................... 19 Like Cures Like? ...................................................................... 21 Just My Imagination Running Away With Me ...................... 25 Less is More? .......................................................................... 29 The Memory of Water And other Fancies ............................... 31 Our Wonderful Immune System ............................................ 36 A Certain Charm ..................................................................... 40 Veterinary Homoeopathy ....................................................... 43 The Dance Of Homoeopathy .................................................. 46 Gimme The Moonlight! .......................................................... 50 Hahnemann’s Latter Years ..................................................... 55 Homoeopathy Today .............................................................. 57 Bach Flower Remedies ........................................................... 60 Acupuncture ........................................................................... 66 The Feng Shui Horrorscope ................................................... 72 Kirlian Photography ............................................................... 78 Reflexology, Iridology and other Intolerances ....................... 80 Naturopathy ............................................................................ 83 There’s Clean and There’s Unhealthily Clean ........................ 86 The Medicine Business ........................................................... 92 The Visit .................................................................................. 98 Consistency! Consistency! My Kingdom for Consistency! .. 100 The Spirit of The New Age .................................................... 103 Nothing New Under The Sun .................................................111 The Age of EnBlightenment? ................................................ 114 The Most SuperHuman Act in all of Human History ........... 119 No MasterCard or Paypal Required ...................................... 124 3 “The universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.” Eden Philpotts 4 About The Author I’ve always been interested in how things work and from an early age, I was always taking things apart. Clocks, watches, scalextric motors, action man voice boxes, toy bulldozers, you name it, by the age of ten, I’d have probably dismantled it. Moving on a couple of decades and a little more orderly minded, my interest in complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) was sparked around 1990 after a discussion on how homoeopathy was supposed to work. The mechanics of the therapy just didn’t seem to add up. Here was another intriguing ‘box’ I had to take apart and from that moment, I was hooked. And so, between husbandhood, fatherhood, full time work, three house moves and two career changes (from mental health support worker for 10 years to running my own electronics business since 2004), I spent the next eighteen years on and off disassembling not only homoeopathy but also just about every other CAM therapy under the umbrella of holism. And boy! How my eyes were opened! And not just to alternative medicine but to medicine in general. Finally, in mid-2011, with teetering piles of paperwork everywhere - page upon page of case study notes, files on each of the therapies, personal correspondence, newspaper and magazine articles almost touching the ceiling, I spent another six months planning the layout of the book and started writing. After the usual additions, footnote updates, chapter rewrites and regular 4am starts so I could fit in everything else going on in my life, I finally finished the book in December 2013. Today, as I update this intro, it’s October 2018, and some readers might suggest that some of the footnotes and references could also do with updating. But I can assure you my friend, nothing has changed as far as CAM and modern conventional medicine is concerned. The principles at work across the conventional as well as the non-conventional health and wellbeing industry health are exactly the same as they’ve always been, as you’ll find out as you read. It’s been a long and fascinating journey and whether you are a devoted fan or critic of alternative medicine or yours is a passing interest only, I hope you enjoy the end result. I’m 58, married to my lovely wife for 33 years. We have three grown up children and live in good old Sussex by the sea. 5 The Ultimate Temptress? “I’m intrigued by the way physical appearance can often direct a person’s life. Things happen differently for a beautiful woman than for a plain one.” Penelope Lively Thanks largely to the internet, many more people are now aware that conventional medicine has a toxic, even lethal side to it. As a result, millions of us are spending billions of pounds, euros and dollars on all manner of complementary and alternative medicines (CAM) for our physical, mental, emotional and even spiritual dis-eases.1, 2 Chilblains, schizophrenia, sciatica, emotional trauma, rheumatism, feelings of emptiness and abandonment, sickness and headaches, stress and anxiety, coughs and colds, eczema, asthma, diabetes, you name it, even cancer, there’s a holistic treatment out there somewhere claiming remarkable healing success.3 But despite their popularity, do these therapies actually work? And at a deeper level, is holism, with its marked accent on mental and spiritual care, as wholesome for the mind and spirit as CAM literature tells us? Magical Mystery Tour looks at a number of leading therapies and at some of the more popular ‘new age’ self-help packs and shows how 21st century holism is perhaps the most bewitching health consumer swindle of the modern day. With the exception of a few over-the-counter herbal remedies, this book shows how today’s leading therapies contain no inherent healing or diagnostic powers and how instead they rely 100% upon instinctive appeal and a marked lack of consumer awareness to maintain their glowing reputations. It’s important I clarify from the start my use of the term ‘swindle’. It would be wrong, defamatory even, to describe holism as a deliberately fraudulent enterprise. That would be to imply some kind of orchestrated intent. In my experience, most people who choose CAM either as a profession or as their preferred treatment option do so for all the right reasons. There’s no visible ‘godfather’ of holistic health as such, no avaricious board of directors rejoicing at the latest worldwide homoeopathy sales figures, no devious plans behind closed doors to bring a billion fake flower remedy pills to market. Of course, as in any walk of life, there are the CAM scoundrels and we’ll meet a few in this book ‘doing very nicely thank you’. In the main though, the kindly lady managing the local health food shop is not a wolf in sheep’s clothing and your local homoeopath, acupuncturist or flower remedy practitioner will be the very opposite of ‘scheming trickster’. So, with so many millions of CAM consumers and upwards of 30,000 therapists here in the UK, can so many people really be so wrong about CAM? Here are thoughtful, intelligent people who surely wouldn’t continue to use the therapies if they didn’t think they were working? Where exactly is the swindle here? Shouldn’t it be me going back to the drawing board on this one? 1 UK spending has always been hard to estimate as no-one has yet successfully calculated the split between over-the- counter (OTC) sales, NHS-funded treatments and buying privately. A 2008 Daily Telegraph article put the total UK spend on alternative health products at approximately £4.5b. Seeking out alternatives, Daily Telegraph, 11th June, 2008 at www.telegraph.co.uk/health/alternativemedicine/3355120/Complementary-medicine-seeking-out-alternatives.html The market for homoeopathy across Europe is estimated at £1.5b per annum, according to Robert Wilson, chairman of the British Association of Homeopathic Manufacturers at www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2009/nov/24/homeopathy-science-technology-committee 2 UK spending has always been hard to estimate as no-one has yet successfully calculated the split between over-the- counter (OTC) sales, NHS-funded treatments and buying privately. A 2008 Daily Telegraph article put the total UK spend on alternative health products at approximately £4.5b. Seeking out alternatives, Daily Telegraph, 11th June, 2008 at www.telegraph.co.uk/health/alternativemedicine/3355120/Complementary-medicine-seeking-out-alternatives.html The market for homoeopathy across Europe is estimated at £1.5b per annum, according to Robert Wilson, chairman of the British Association of Homeopathic Manufacturers at www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2009/nov/24/homeopathy-science-technology-committee 3 As far back as 1987, it was reported that 160 therapies were in existence. Just under the letter A for instance, we find acupuncture and acupressure, Alaskan Flower Remedies,