What Doctors Don't Tell You

The consent that is never sought

Bryan Hubbard — Wed, 02 May 2012 14:06:00 GMT

Aside from death and taxes, life’s only other certainty is that you have a body, over which you have complete sovereignty and which is protected by law, including human rights legislation. If somebody attacks you, the assailant will be prosecuted and punished – indeed, any action on your body carried out without your full consent is a criminal offence.

The only people who seem to disregard this absolute right are doctors, as our Special Report this month explores (http://www.wddty.com/the-dark-heart-of-medicine.html). They pay lip service to the legal concept of consent, especially before surgery and other interventions, but their requirement is nothing more than a signature at the end of a long document, almost never read by the patient.

However, the doctor has to negotiate two hurdles before any procedure can begin: not only must he seek consent, that consent has to be fully informed. In other words, the patient should understand why the procedure is needed, its success rate, its risks – no matter how small – and any alternatives.

Of course, true informed consent rarely happens. The doctor argues that he doesn’t have time to go into enormous detail with every patient, and some patients feel they shouldn’t bother the doctor who always seems to be too busy. Some doctors still hold to the paternalistic belief that they know best, and that talk of risks would only worry the patient unnecessarily. Unless the risk becomes an actuality, of course, but by then it’s too late.

Doctors sometimes don’t bother seeking consent of any kind, informed or not. The most routine practice by any doctor is the writing out of a prescription – but he almost never points out the drug’s risks or success rate.

Radiologists don’t even bother with any pretence of consent. As a medical screening is part of an investigative process, usually requested by another doctor, the radiologist perhaps believes that consent is not required. Yet each screening subjects the patient to some level of radiation, and, in the case of a CT (computed tomography) scan, that can be similar to levels monitored at Hiroshima when the A-bomb was dropped.

If doctors did follow their legal requirement to achieve truly informed consent, most surgical procedures would never happen, and some patients would seek out safer alternatives if they were told the real risks of prescription drugs.

Doctors know this, of course. That’s why they don’t tell.

First, do something

Bryan Hubbard — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 17:32:00 GMT

Breast cancer is one of the major ‘ladykillers’ – and so governments want to be seen to do something, not least because it affects half the electorate. For the past 24 years – and at a total cost of £2.3bn - women in the UK over the age of 50 have been invited to have a regular mammogram screening in order to detect early signs of breast cancer.

The genesis of the UK’s mass screening programme was the Forrest report of 1986, headed by Prof Sir Patrick Forrest, who had been commissioned to answer two primary questions: would a mass screening programme benefit women and, if so, which technology should be employed? Forrest’s answers to both were emphatic: mass screening for the over-50s would reduce deaths from breast cancer by a third and with “few harms”, and, to the second, the best technology was x-ray mammography.

Unfortunately, there is no connection between the two answers. Screening might reduce the rate of breast cancer deaths, but mammography isn’t the technology to achieve it.

This started to become apparent just eight years after the mass screening programme was introduced. One of the programme’s guiding lights, Prof Michael Baum, pronounced that he feared mammography was doing more harm than good, and was putting women through the trauma of a ‘false-positive’, when cancer is wrongly detected.

Since then, we have discovered why. Researchers at Southampton University recently revealed that Forrest’s recommendations had been based on limited, and false, data, and had been collated at a time when the concept of a false-positive result was alien to radiologists.

Forrest also asked all the wrong questions about mammography’s competing technology, thermography. Before Forrest, the two were often used in conjunction in order to get the ‘complete picture’: mammography sees mass, thermography sees activity.

As it is, mammography’s harm is far outweighing its benefits – it is seeing cancers that aren’t there, most notably instances of DCIS (ductal carcinoma in situ), which is invariably benign. Worse, it is unable to see fast-growing cancers that are invariably fatal.

Others since have echoed Baum’s concerns, most notably Cochrane researcher Peter Gotzsche, as our Special Report this month explains (http://www.wddty.com/the-great-mammogram-con.html).

But will our government be brave enough to act – or is it politically more expedient to be seen to be doing something, even if it is hopelessly wrong?

The science of profit

Bryan Hubbard — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 17:14:00 GMT

Imagine you’re a Venusian paying a visit to Earth, and I’m in the welcoming party. Over a bubbling Martian cola I tell you we have a major health problem on the planet – cancer. Our standard therapies kill cancer in 40 per cent of cases – if caught at the earliest stage – and around 5 per cent overall. In other words, most people die from cancer.

Even for a civilization as primitive as ours, this is very poor, you say. Don’t you have anything else?

Well, we don’t really know, because we’re not allowed to know, I respond. After much digging and investigation, I’ve discovered some excellent studies – double-blind, placebo ones – that demonstrate homeopathy is a powerful cancer fighter, far more effective than our standard treatments (as covered in our Special Report this month). Unfortunately, nobody talks about them, even though they’ve been funded by the US government, and carried out by researchers at an American university.

Why not, you ask, this is good news for all humans, no?

Yes, I say, but nobody believes it. Homeopathy isn’t a science, its detractors tell us. This is because the science behind it doesn’t make sense, so any response must be down to a placebo effect.

But a placebo effect isn’t powerful enough to defeat cancer, you say. So it must be working, which means you’ve got the science wrong – or, more kindly, your physics is incomplete.

There’s something else, too, I say. Money. Cancer care is controlled by the drugs industry, which, in turn, funds the research and the academics who proclaim that their medicine is the best, even if it doesn’t work very well. They’re always the ones who shout down homeopathy, too. The drugs industry makes a fortune from its chemotherapy drugs.

So let’s get this clear, you say. Cancer is killing most humans, you have a therapy that works against it, nobody adopts it although the science confirms it works, and that’s because it’s not scientific – rather, it’s impossible according to your limited science. Then you have people making a great deal of money from people’s deaths and sufferings, and they are paying off academics to keep the lid on things, and to keep their inadequate products as the only available choice. None of this is science – it’s prejudice, belief systems and profits before people.

Shaking your two heads in utter disbelief, you climb back into your Venusian craft. Strangely, you haven’t been back since.

In the pocket

Bryan Hubbard — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 16:00:00 GMT

Our main feature this month (http://www.wddty.com/kill-not-cure.html) highlights two disturbing statistics about Big Pharma: in 2011, it was recorded as the most fraudulent industry group in the world, while its drugs became more lethal than traffic accidents, killing one person every 14 minutes in the United States alone.

These worrying facts beggar two obvious questions: why hasn’t the media featured them? And why aren’t our politicians jumping up and down, demanding immediate controls?

The answer lies in another statistic from the drugs industry: for every pound and dollar it spends on research and development, it spends two on ‘promotion’, which includes political lobbying and media influence.

Rupert Murdoch’s The Australian newspaper recently accepted an undisclosed sum from the drugs industry to run a series of ‘independent’ health policy articles.

Murdoch’s son, James, sits on the board of UK drug giant GlaxoSmithKline’s corporate responsibility committee to review “external issues that might have the potential for serious impact upon the group’s business and reputation”. External issues such as The Times, The Sun, The Sunday Times and Sky TV, perhaps, all a part of the News International empire, which James helps to control.

It works the other way, too. Doctors sit as ‘independent’ consultants on editorial panels that determine the broadcasts that are fit and proper for us to read, see and hear. Lynne McTaggart’s ‘regular’ column in The Sunday Times lasted all of one week before the Chief Medical Officer intervened, and the column was stopped.

Its influence extends to all areas of media, even advertising. It is contrary to the UK’s advertising standards to run any advertisement that might affect the sacred relationship between patient and doctor, even if that which is being stated is true.

The drugs industry is the biggest political lobbyist in the world, ensuring damaging legislation controlling its worst excesses are never passed into law. When the lobby system fails, it has enormous capital clout, and can threaten to close processing and manufacturing plants, as it did recently in the UK. Prime Minister Cameron quickly saw sense, and withdrew plans to slow the process for new drugs approval.

Back in 1989 when we launched WDDTY, The Times described us as a “voice in the silence” (James was a mere boy of 17 at the time). We still are – and we’re still among the few reporting on Big Pharma’s excesses, and the damage they may do to you. And now you know why.

When miracles happen

Bryan Hubbard — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 12:01:00 GMT

Praying for another’s wellbeing is problematic, even at this time of year when our thoughts might turn to miracles and healings of the sick. It’s not a problem for the sender or receiver, but it most certainly is for the scientist, the researcher, the doctor and the sceptic, especially the sceptic.

Prayer and its other distant healing cousins, such as reiki, faith healing, spiritual and remote healing, shouldn’t work – but, on balance, the evidence suggests they do.

For the sceptic, this is impossible. To suggest that prayer works also requires a new science of biology and a complete overhaul of what we think we are. And we won’t even get into the existence of a God who answers prayers.

The science already exists, of course. It’s quantum mechanics, and more specifically, non-locality, which suggests that something can affect something else even though it may be miles away. As Einstein rather unkindly put it, it’s “spooky action at a distance.”

The trouble for medicine is that its own science of measurement is hopelessly cumbersome and inappropriate to capture such elusive effects. This perhaps explains why the studies that have tried to monitor distant healing and prayer have been so contradictory. Some say prayer works, others say it doesn’t; a few even suggest that prayer has a negative effect, and the condition of the person being prayed for actually worsens, which, at least, suggests some effect, I suppose.

But when researchers carry out meta-analyses of all the ‘good’ studies, they invariably discover – possibly to their own astonishment – that prayer does work. Even arch-sceptic Edzard Ernst had to admit as much when he researched the subject.

And what are the metaphysical implications of this discovery? Does it mean God exists, or that people have remarkable self-healing powers that are released when they know they are being prayed for, or that all of us are connected by some force?

This is the stuff of our Special Report this month – Spooky Healing at a Distance – (http://www.wddty.com/spooky-healing-at-a-distance.html) - and it should give us all pause. It brings to mind Hamlet’s famous quote: “There are more things in heaven and earth than dreamt of in your philosophy.”

And if belief is a constituent part of successful prayer, perhaps including it in our philosophy increases its possibility.

Chanting for health

Bryan Hubbard — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 13:07:00 GMT

Using our voices has always been the key to healing and transformation in traditional cultures, and was a major contribution to a healthy community in our own – until we stopped. Having pioneered the rediscovery of the voice in the West, I take the notion of re-enchanting literally – to make us magical again through chant.

I now see so many community choirs starting up worldwide and in this country, and the phenomenon has even become the subject of primetime television. You only have to see the tears of love and joy in people from otherwise dysfunctional communities to realize the magic it imparts. I really feel things are beginning to change and I am wonderfully optimistic.

We have always created fields of consciousness and activated them through group chant, and my life’s work is to re-establish this through my Healing Voice and other Workshops.

A brain physiologist, who when he first started working with me said, “I see, you’re ‘vibrating the brain’, that’s what we do when we give Electric Shock Treatment – it makes people feel blissful.” As we know so little about the brain, we agreed that chanting might be a more humane, enjoyable, easier and less expensive way of making people feel ecstatic, belonging, unified, happy, cheerful and healed.

Vibrating the brain is something that is induced particularly by ‘overtone chanting’, a technique I introduced into the West from Central Asia. The sound is pushed up through the pineal and pituitary glands and into the brain itself, as well as through the point at the roof of the mouth where the Du and the Ren channels, the principal yin and yang meridians, cross over in the body. It stimulates the glands, activates the brain, harmonizing the active and receptive sides, and all the meridians of the body.

I have seen the lives of thousands of my students change dramatically through this work. It’s impossible to feel depressed when you are chanting in this way; alleviating depression is one of its most wonderful outcomes. As well as countless emotional and psychological healings, I have had many very specific healings of otherwise incurable physical conditions.

Three examples are interesting as they have had years of follow up. One of my students in her 50s had congenital nystagmus (involuntary, rapid, disturbing lateral eye movements since birth). After a weeklong intensive workshop with me, all of the symptoms disappeared and they have never reoccurred in the 14 years since. Another student had suffered from anosmia and ageusia (total loss of smell and taste) for 18 months; the doctors had told her it was post viral and permanent. Yet, after doing a single weekend workshop with me 24 years ago, she regained both senses, and the condition has never returned. Another student, who had suffered lifelong tinnitus, was completely cured after working with me. All three conditions are supposedly incurable, and yet, in each case, the symptoms disappeared and have never returned. There have been countless more! Chanting is good for mental, emotional and physical conditions – even those considered to be incurable by normal medical means.

The practice of chanting while simultaneously listening to the sound we are making is the easiest way to become present in the now. Anxiety, which is worrying about the future based on what happened in the past, is the cause of many illnesses, but it’s an impossibility if we are fully present. Simultaneous chant and integration through listening has been acclaimed by the Buddha as the fastest way to become enlightened – perhaps for this reason it is the ultimate healing.

Another aspect of my voice work is Healing the Family and Ancestors, where I work with sound and family constellations. In this work, we activate and make conscious the ancestral field of each person and reveal the patterns of breaches that have been passed down the generations. Through this amazing work, these breaches get healed and coherence is established; the person is freed from inherited patterns that have caused pain and disturbances and blocked their life and development.

My remaining workshop for this year is this weekend (December 10 and 11) and details about that and the full programme for 2012 are now online: come and join me!

<www.healingvoice.com>

It's an ill wind

Bryan Hubbard — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 10:08:00 GMT

The West is going through financial turmoil. Its governments are bankrupt, and are being forced to cut back on public expenditure. For David Cameron’s UK government, the National Health Service (NHS) presents a special challenge: not only is it the nation’s premier cash drain, costing the taxpayer £100bn a year, it is also its most sacred, and appears to be untouchable.

Prime Minister Cameron admitted as much when he pronounced he would ring-fence the NHS from the swingeing cuts being administered to all other government departments. Despite these public assurances, in 2009 he commissioned the management consultants McKinsey to look for cost savings. They identified up to £20bn of cuts that could be achieved over a five-year period by eliminating inefficiencies and treatments that are ‘relatively ineffective’.

Many medical procedures and drugs are, of course, relatively ineffective – and there are alternatives that are more effective and far less expensive, as the Department of Health is beginning to realise.

Ignoring the bully boy tactics of some doctors and academics, the politicians and NHS bureaucrats are prepared to introduce more effective alternatives. They recently ran a beauty parade, and we know that several of the therapies being reviewed have featured in WDDTY.

The UK government is not alone in its reforms. Iceland – which is even more broke than the UK – is much further down the path of introducing alternative therapies into its healthcare system, and one WDDTY panellist is acting as an advisor.

Canada has published a consultative paper about alternatives that could be introduced as complementary therapies into its own healthcare system.

Vitamin supplements – the subject of this month’s Special Report (http://www.wddty.com/why-you-need-to-take-supplements.html) - are playing a key part in the UK government’s rethinking on healthcare reform. Paradoxically, EU bureaucrats are still taking a different view, and want supplement potency and novel applications to be curbed.

Doctors are doubtlessly rolling out their standard argument that we get all the nutrition we need from the food we eat. That’s true only in theory; in reality, the food we eat is so lacking in nutrition that we need to supplement.

The fact that most of us are malnourished is one of the contributing factors to the escalating costs of healthcare systems around the world as they continue to perpetuate illness - using drugs that treat symptoms but never cure – instead of understanding the causes of disease.

Living Well from Our Mediterranean Garden

Bryan Hubbard — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 15:33:00 GMT

Early expatriate settlers in Spain could eat well from local produce. Now in many areas agricultural land has been built on or abandoned, and where foodstuffs are still grown there is evidence of forced growth for speed and size using a wide range of chemicals. Now sprays are used to combat the insects attracted by the chemicals!

Unfortunately, many expats don’t seem to search out healthy alternatives if the supermarket trolleys – packed with fast-foods - are anything to go by.

Since ***’s cancer operations 18 years ago, we have aimed to develop a Mediterranean garden in Spain that allows us to live a life that is healthy and holistic in four regards:

· Spiritual and mental wellness through a therapeutic garden environment that is inspiring, restful and a daily escape from the potential stress of 21^st century living.

· Sustained physical health through the physical and mental effort involved in designing, developing and maintaining a garden and the consumption of the ecological and chemical-free food it produces. This includes fruit, edible flowers and leaves, herbs, vegetables, meat and eggs, especially those with high vitamin and mineral contents.

· Gastronomic satisfaction from a garden that is growing a wide diversity of foods that are harvested and consumed when at their best and avoiding fast-food gluttony.

· Economic well-being from the reduced cost of living.

In achieving this, we collected information about the benefits of vitamins and minerals on the healthy growth and survival of both plants and people – and we discovered some surprising similarities. We also discovered that the healthiest produce we could grow was broccoli, garlic, red lettuces and peas. For fun, we developed a self-assessment audit to determine the extent of a person’s gluttony and true healthy gastronomy.

Since such concepts and ideas went down well at talks, *** has summarised our adventures in a new book ‘Living Well from Our Mediterranean Garden’. Discussions about the relevance of the book to participants from other Mediterranean-climate countries around the world at a recent conference suggest to us that its message is international. Indeed, one 80-year-old Australian medical doctor thought all doctors should read it!

The compact 40-page book is packed with interesting, and we are told, inspiring information including:

· What constitutes overall wellness.

· Guidelines for developing colourful productive and therapeutic gardens.

· What constitutes a Mediterranean diet and good and bad eating.

· The wellness benefits of some 180 vegetables, fruits and herbs that can be grown in the garden.

· Healthy ways to prepare food.

· A novel self-assessment of your gastronomic or gluttonous status.

As we explain at the beginning of the book, the practices described were ***’s way of recovering naturally from cancer.

The book can be obtained via the website www.gardeninginspain.com .

(c) Clodagh and *** Handscombe. Holistic gardeners and authors living in Spain for twenty five years.

The expert-free therapy

Bryan Hubbard — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 12:36:00 GMT

We live in an age of complexity. We switch on the lights in our home, but don’t really understand how the electricity works. We turn on the taps in our bathroom, without completely grasping how water can run through the pipes. We’re probably vague about how television images are transmitted to our screens. Or even how our car works.

This age of complexity has brought forth a new breed: the expert. The expert makes the complex work, even if he doesn’t make it understandable. He fixes the TV, the electrical and water systems in the home to make them function safely, and our car to run. He stands at the gates to the complex, acting as our intermediary to the unfathomable.

The complex has made our lives more comfortable, and electricity has replaced the candle, water systems the pump and bucket, the car for the cart. But the complex has also placed life at one remove. We don’t have direct access or control any longer.

This is equally as true for the way we treat our ailments. Once, we relied on self-help therapies, herbs and tinctures. Today, in our age of complexity, we have an array of drugs that we don’t understand, and so we rely on the doctor as interpreter and guide. So, it is refreshing that this month’s special report explores a new therapy that couldn’t be simpler to implement, and which already has garnered a wide array of successful case studies.

Its creator, Clint Ober, calls it ‘Earthing’—and it merely requires you to take off your shoes and socks, and put your bare feet on the grass, earth or sand, ideally for 30 or 40 minutes every day. The theory behind this simple therapy seems to make sense.

Our bodies are electrical systems, and are subject to the same ‘interference’ as electrical products in our homes. That’s why all electrical items are grounded—in other words, they are in constant and immediate contact to the ‘zero ground’, rich in electrons and negative ions. Without this grounding, electrical equipment would suffer interference. And, claims Ober, the same happens to us—but because of our modern lifestyle, we are insulated from our ground, and so are more likely to suffer from interference, which manifests as disease, such as inflammation and heart problems.

A simple therapy that all of us can do—and we don’t need the expert, whether he is the doctor or, indeed, the electrician.

Read the full article, The Body Electric: Is Earthing the missing link to beat disease? :http://www.wddty.com/the-body-electric.html

Zen and dementia

Joanna Evans — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 10:04:00 GMT

This is the 22nd year that we’ve been producing a monthly issue of What Doctors Don’t Tell You, and people always seem to ask: Don’t you ever run out of things to write about? Thus far, we don’t seem to have any problems, but thanks for asking.

It’s never a question I ask myself. But here’s one that I do ask myself: After writing about this stuff for 22 years, how come I still get angry about it every time? And it’s true, I do. I get angry about the number of people who die while taking a drug they believed was safe; I get angry that nobody ever gets called to account; I get angry that nobody seems to care.

But anger’s counterproductive. So I developed for myself a Zen-like mantra to soothe my raging heart: Medicine is a delivery mechanism for drugs.

Doesn’t sound like much, but it works. Because when you get that, everything else falls into place. Why don’t doctors take alternative treatments more seriously? Because medicine is a delivery mechanism for drugs. Why don’t they take a more holistic view of the patient and his or her illness? Because medicine . . .

I had to repeat the mantra several times over while researching our latest Special Report on dementia, one of the diseases that most of us fear over anything else. Now, the drugs don’t work for dementia. You might choose to point out that they don’t work for most everything, but they really don’t work for dementia and its main manifestation, Alzheimer’s.

But that doesn’t matter to medicine, because medicine is a delivery mechanism . . . And, because it is just that, it isn’t very interested in other therapies. Tragically, when it comes to dementia, there are many alternatives that work so much better.

In the Special Report, we champion one in particular: SPECAL. It’s had enormous success in helping patients and carers, so much so, in fact, that the disease usually doesn’t worsen, even though medicine has codified it as progressive and incurable.

My Zen mantra explains why doctors have utterly ignored it, but it does not help us to understand the peculiar attitude of the Alzheimer’s Society towards it. The society—which purports to exist for the benefit of the dementia patient and carer—has vilified the therapy on its website, successfully starving the SPECAL charity of cash.

Mantras for supposed ‘patient groups’ are welcome.

We also start a new column this month on pet health. As the veterinary profession in the UK is run along the lines of America’s healthcare system—aggressively interventionist and funded by insurance companies—we will have a rich field of material to mine.

Chemical-free gardens and terraces

Bryan Hubbard — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 08:42:00 GMT

The August issue of What Doctors Don’t Tell You just arrived at our home in the wilds of Spain – and I wanted to add some further thoughts to the main story about chemicals in pesticides and the damage they can do to our health (http://www.wddty.com/scary-scary-how-does-your-garden-grow.html).

First off, sensible garden design and plantings can eliminate the need to use any type of spray. Any spraying we’ve had to do has been on pests that have been introduced into our garden. The geranium moth arrived in the mid 1990s with imported geraniums, the airborne honey fungus spores came from nearby abandoned and now rotting fruit trees, and the tomato Tuti fly came from Majorca in a batch of tomatoes about four years ago.

Luckily, garlic infusions and Neem oil deal with the insects, and propolis - a by-product of bee hives - tackles the honey dew fungus. Each of these is a natural pesticide that have been used for thousands of years.

We don’t have a lawn as grass is not a natural feature of the Mediterranean region. Having a lawn is a chore, as it needs to be constantly watered, and you’ll be forever removing weeds and moss.

If you do use pesticides, you can carry the chemicals into your home on your choe and clothes, as the WDDTY article suggests. For us, we are more likely to bring them in on our bare feet – and into the swimming pool, too.

In our latest book, out next month, Living Well from Our Mediterranean Garden, we listed ’Fresh air - full of oxygen and the aroma of nearby native herbs, without chemical pollutants, especially from agricultural sprays’ as an often forgotten but essential ingredient of the original Mediterranean Diet. Also we emphasise that if one becomes aware of the vitamin and mineral contents of fruit and vegetables and the wellness benefits of herbs and edible flowers there is no need , or at least less in crisis situations, for having more pills than peas with your lunch. Do email us if you would like information about the book.

Incidentally the pest control chapters in our previous quartet of books Gardening in Spain, Apartment Gardening Mediterranean Style, Growing Healthy Fruit in Spain and Growing Healthy Vegetables in Spain all give ecological solutions to pests.

The MMR believers

Bryan Hubbard — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 09:35:00 GMT

Pity the poor parents who want to do the right thing when

it comes to vaccinating their child. Even suggesting that

they have concerns about side-effects can be likened

to questioning the existence of God to a 12th-century

pope—such is the doctor’s belief in vaccinations.

Vaccines are medicine’s greatest success story, or so

doctors are told almost from their first day at medical school.

With just a jab, children are protected from diseases that once

would have killed.

Apparently, vaccinations are just one of life’s ‘good things’,

along with water and the Harlem Globetrotters. Any wavering

from the true path is met with the modern-day equivalent of

the stake—the General Medical Council—as Andrew Wakefield

found to his cost after merely suggesting that there may be a

link between the MMR vaccine and autism.

Even the burning of the occasional heretic doesn’t dissolve

that flicker of doubt that many a thinking parent still has. And

this is the heart of the matter: can we trust our doctors to

always tell us the truth when they are vaccine zealots?

Flippant as it may sound, that is precisely the attitude of

the drug-company scientists and ‘health guardians’ who

attended a secret meeting to discuss the troubling findings

that vaccines were causing neurological problems in infants.

As one attendee said, vaccines are fundamentally good, so

anything and everything must be done to hide any hint that

they harm.

And hide it they did. Within three years, data were

massaged, some children were eliminated from the study and,

hey presto!, a major problem became a statistical blip when

the data were finally published.

As our Special report this month amply demonstrates, when

zealotry replaces rationality, no amount of proof will sway you.

Scientists—if medicine was ever a science to begin with—

become brothers of a faith. And when that happens, children

can suffer permanent harm—or, as our article suggests, even

die—and it won’t shake their fundamental belief. They have

been unfortunate collateral in a process that, ultimately, is

benefiting the majority, so sweep it under the carpet and keep

on reassuring parents who, anyway, just can’t see the ‘big

picture’.

When you are a true believer, there is never a moment when

good ceases to be so.

Support independent journalism

Bryan Hubbard — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 15:08:00 GMT

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The fact you read What Doctors Don’t Tell You (WDDTY) or its website suggests you support independent journalism – whether you realise it or not.
Journalism is itself enduring some bad press right now with the fall-out from the phone hacking scandal engulfing Rupert Murdoch’s News International.

I became a journalist many years ago because I believed it mattered. Journalism, as I saw it, is supposed to be for the people and against the wrongdoings, cover-ups and corruption among multinationals, powerful groups and politicians.

Events in recent days within News International empire might suggest otherwise. Stories have slowly emerged about the hacking of mobile phones of murder victims, of those killed in the London terror attack of 7/7 and even possibly of those slaughtered in the 9/11 attack in New York.

Suddenly the media is against the people.

This doesn’t mean that journalism should be sidelined. It still has an essential role to play in helping shape a fairer society – and WDDTY is one such voice.

For years we have uncovered scandals in the drugs industry and, with our next issue, the chemicals industry, too. These industries regularly put profits before people, and your health – even your life – is an acceptable price to ensure the shareholders get their dividends.

So we tell you about it – and that means WDDTY matters.

If you value independent journalism, please support WDDTY. It makes us strong and helps us continue fighting on your behalf.

Please follow this link:
www.wddty.com/upgrade

to ensure independent journalism is around tomorrow.

Fat profits

Joanna Evans — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 12:03:00 GMT

The cancer at the heart of medicine is its need to serve two masters: the patient and the pharmaceutical company’s shareholders. In an ideal capitalist system, this does not necessarily present a problem. The very best drugs will become the most popular because they are the most beneficial, and so the company and its shareholders are rewarded.

Unfortunately, medicine does not operate as a free market. The patient—or consumer, to use market-speak—does not have a choice. Instead, the doctor, as the expert, makes the purchasing decision—often based on the flimsiest evidence or none at all.

And because this expert channel to the market exists, the drug company exploits it. It funds ‘research’ that is little more than PR, it arranges ‘conferences’ in exotic locales, it ‘sponsors’ the doctor’s surgery with free PCs and other gadgetry. It also pays the doctor to participate in ‘early-stage marketing trials’—a good way to get a new drug launched.

Truth and the scientific method become distorted. Ultimately, they are harnessed to enhance a drug’s sales and so reward the shareholders. Truth plays second fiddle to profits in a market that is controlled. The best product doesn’t always win, but the one that is best supported just might.

When you have billions of pounds and dollars of drug company revenues at stake, you have a problem. When you have two powerful industry groups involved, you have a black hole from which truth cannot escape—so great is the pull for profit.

This has happened with the cholesterol theory, the subject of our cover story this month. It claims that if you eat a diet that is high in fats, you will increase the level of LDL or ‘bad’ cholesterol in your system. This ‘bad’ cholesterol will stick to your artery walls until they become clogged, thus causing a heart attack.

This theory has created two massive markets: statin drugs, the most profitable drug sector in the world; and the low-fat industry, which also generates billions of pounds and dollars every year.

The cholesterol theory is not true; it has been disproven many times by the scant amount of independent research that is allowed to see the light of day. Worse, new research is demonstrating that ‘bad’ cholesterol isn’t bad at all—it plays a key role in healing inflammation and, ironically, in preventing heart attacks.

As we age, cholesterol becomes even more important. It helps to build muscle and keeps our brains sharp. The attack on ‘bad’ cholesterol could be behind the rise in dementia in the elderly, and may be causing the very thing it is supposed to protect us from.

But when it comes to profits or people, guess which comes first.

The perfect breakfast for healthy ageing

Bryan Hubbard — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 12:30:00 GMT

Earlier this month, What Doctors Don’t Tell You reported on the importance of selenium and vitamin K to healthy ageing. It prompted us to check on what we ate with useful amounts of these two substances. Naturally, we started with the first meal of the day: breakfast.

First we found that a useful source of vitamin K is fresh leafy green vegetables. Second, we found that selenium is found in eggs.

So we saw no need to change from our most regularly-eaten breakfast of:

1. Omelet filled with steamed freshly-harvested Swiss chard.

2. An accompanying freshly harvested leafy salad. Today it comprised of leaves of red lettuce , parsley, golden oregano, purslane, rocket, mint, nasturtium, garlic onion, chives, red perella, pineapple sage, kalanchoe plus chopped onion. Our home-produced cold pressed extra virgin olive oil was poured over the top.

Beverages were a glass of diluted home-produced kombucha and a Moroccan-style mint infusion with the mug filled with leaves of mint and a leaf of stevia ,as the sweetener, before pouring in the hot water.

Naturally all the items were produced ecologically in our garden just a few meters from the kitchen door. If any reader thinks we could improve on this, please let us know.

Clodagh and *** Handscombe. Practical holistic gardeners and authors living in Spain.

See their website www.gardeninginspain for more information and details of their books.

Tangerines – perhaps the next power fruit

Bryan Hubbard — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 09:52:00 GMT

A recent WDDTY e-news bulletin reported on research into the potential benefits of tangerines and the possibility that they will be marketed as a new power fruit. It reminded us that the first two plantings in our then rather bare and embryonic garden in Spain were a lemon and tangerine tree.

A Lunar lemon tree was sought out, which was not that easy in the 1980s as there were few garden centres. It flowers and fruits all year round, and so we always have ripening lemons to harvest for cooling drinks in the summer and warming ones for the winter.

The tangerine tree was selected from the various early, mid-season and late season types of mandarin crosses because it would be ready to harvest for Christmas, it was not as acidic as many other varieties and, having thin skins, the tangerines are easy to peel or eat whole from November to January when frosts can damage them.

We dry slices to add to other home dried fruit snacks we eat when walking the Spanish mountain ranges. Some were in the mix *** took on a 150 km walk last week to give energy to his 74-year-old body.

We also juice some to freeze. One thing we notice about juice frozen in small plastic beakers is that the surface of the ice is always covered with a layer of tangerine oil, which has an especially delicious taste if spooned off before the juice melts – we suspect that this is high in some of the more beneficial constituents of the fruit.

Long ago, we were told that the pith of tangerines and other citrus fruits have cancer-fighting properties. Now that the tangerine may soon be seen as a power fruit, we hope we will start seeing more tangerine trees for sale.

Clodagh and Richard Handscombe. Holistic gardeners in Spain for 25years. Authors of a number of books on gardening in Spain.

www.gardeninginspain.com.

My back phages

Joanna Evans — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 15:18:00 GMT

Pity the poor general practitioner. He doesn’t have the tools for the heroic gesture, unlike his counterpart in emergency medicine who saves lives, patches people up and generally performs miracles on a daily basis. The general practitioner deals with the chronic problems, those persistent health issues that never get better. All he can offer are drugs to make the patient comfortable, less aware of his symptoms perhaps—but the underlying problem doesn’t go away. No heroics there.

That’s all true—except for one class of drugs that’s been available to the doctor for the past 60 years. The antibiotics have made a hero of the general practitioner. With these wonder drugs, the doctor has made health problems go away, and with a scribble on his prescription pad, he’s been able to write off disease.

No wonder, then, that he has just kept on writing out those prescriptions. Got a sore throat? Try an antibiotic. Your child has an ear infection? Take some penicillin. Got a cold, a fever, or a cough? Well, have some methicillin, just in case.

This overuse, or abuse, of medicine’s greatest triumph has its consequences—the superbug, which is resistant to antibiotics. As our cover story reveals, we have developed, through our own stupidity, the ultimate superbug—one that creates superbugs out of any bug, and is resistant to even the most powerful antibiotics.

Alexander Fleming, who discovered penicillin by accident in 1928, predicted this day would come. He knew that his discovery was a frozen moment in time of an evolutionary process that had been waged for billions of years. When he looked down his microscope, a fungus had the upper hand over the bugs. Had he left it for 50 years, the bugs might have demolished the fungus.

At around the same time—in Russia—a scientist had also made an accidental discovery, and one that showed similar promise. George Eliava discovered that certain viruses could kill bacteria. As he delved deeper, he found that each deadly bug has its unique viral nemesis. The virus closes in on that bug alone and destroys it.

These viruses are called ‘bacteriophages’ (literally, ‘bacteria killers’), and they form the basis of phage therapy, which has been neglected for the past 30 years. It has a number of advantages over antibiotics, but the major one is that it harnesses natural processes. The virus is alive and adapts as quickly as its bacterial prey, so—in phage therapy—there can never be a superbug or, at least, not for long.

Man, or the general practitioner, may be smart. But Nature is smarter.

Because they say so

Joanna Evans — Wed, 04 May 2011 15:37:00 GMT

Before the discoveries of Copernicus and Galileo, the Sun orbited the Earth. It didn’t, of course, but everyone accepted that it did because the popes and the Roman Catholic Church told them so.

Medicine operates in a similar fashion. Its governing bodies determine the measure and tempo of disease, which we all go along with, and the pharmaceutical industry pockets the profits.

One good example of medicinal decree is the definition of high blood pressure, or hypertension, the subject of our main story this month. This autumn, America’s National Institutes of Health will meet to discuss whether the determinants for hypertension need to be changed once again. Right now, a ‘healthy’ blood pressure reading is 120/80 mmHg. In 2003, a normal reading was 128/80 mmHg and, before that, common sense prevailed.

Much pivots on the decision. The pharmaceutical industry is pushing for an even more conservative definition because profits improve when a new band of people is suddenly classified as ‘ill’ and so in need of their products. But there’s a minority band of researchers who are calling for the re-introduction of common sense. They are suggesting that medicine has had blood pressure seriously wrong for all these years. They argue that only the systolic level matters in the over-50s, the major target group for antihypertensive drugs.

Others argue that it’s almost impossible to get an accurate blood pressure reading as levels fluctuate wildly during the day, and even from arm to arm. Many also suffer from ‘white-coat hypertension’—their blood pressure races up just from being in the doctor’s surgery. In short, blood pressure levels are not a constant, so hypertension is not necessarily a disease in the sense in which we understand the term.

What is very clear is that many millions of people are taking a powerful antihypertensive drug—such as an ACE inhibitor—unnecessarily. Around 45 million Americans were suddenly caught up in the hypertension net when the readings were changed in 2003, and many millions more are taking the drugs needlessly if the systolic theory is correct. A new report suggests that up to 40 per cent of people diagnosed with hypertension don’t have the problem at all, but are merely victims of ‘whitecoat hypertension’.

This is potentially bad news for the drugs industry, which is currently selling around $26 billion of antihypertensives every year. Of course, nothing is likely to change. The Sun will continue to go around the Earth, and millions of ‘patients’ with high blood pressure will still have the problem after the National Institutes of Health meets.

Back to natural solutions

Bryan Hubbard — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 16:45:00 GMT

I’m old enough to remember a time when the pharmaceutical industry was concerned about social responsibility. During the 1970s and early 80s, middle managers and executives were attending regular workshops on the subject. While market domination was the underlying goal, the managers were supposedly being taught to achieve it through quality products that would benefit the individual, and presumably society as a whole.

Judging by the recent news in WDDTY and elsewhere, it would appear that social responsibility has become a dirty word. In its place is a constant assault on natural products and, through powerful lobby groups in the European Parliament, the complete destruction of herbal and natural remedies that have been with us for many generations. I fear for all our grandchildren and the health choices they will be offered.

For myself, now 74 and a survivor of several cancer operations, these attacks just trigger a desire to learn as much as possible about what our forebears used to do, especially in rural areas when many could not afford to pay for a doctor in the days before the advent of the National Health Service.

To give one example of good natural cures and preventatives, for some years we have grown and eaten globe artichokes and steamed them for dinner and drunk some of the juices. These and horse tail (a useful weed in many gardens) infusions are useful ways of giving the liver a cleanup. Likewise, spring nettle soups and infusions from dried leaves, mixed with wild and cultivated dandelion leaves for salads, are part of our own efforts to keep our kidneys healthy. Last Sunday night, the day before we received the latest WDDTY magazine with the report on the draconian attack on health supplements, we read in our gardening lunar calendar that the best days for treating the liver are those before a Virgo sign, and the kidneys benefit most if treated a few days before Libra. These occur in the week before full moons.

We have no proof this works – other than the knowledge that they have been tried and tested by our ancestors for thousands of years before us. And that’s good enough for us.

Just off to water our cultivated plot of nettles transplanted from the countryside before modern man has the chance to kill off the patch with a chemical herbicide!

© Clodagh and Richard Handscombe, www.gardeninginspain.com, authors of fourteen books including ‘Strategic Leadership – The missing links’, ‘Growing Healthy Vegetables in Spain’ and ‘Growing Healthy Fruit in Spain’.

The superficial science

Bryan Hubbard — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 14:47:00 GMT

Philosophy is the art of asking the difficult question, and it is the engine room of most of the sciences. Physicists, astrophysicists and biologists, for instance, are driven by the quest to understand the complexity of life and how it began.
Medicine, on the other hand, doesn’t ask the fundamental questions. It’s down to the patient to be the philosopher in the relationship with his or her doctor. Told that you have a life-threatening condition, the first – and most obvious – questions are: why do I have the disease, and how did it start?

The doctor isn’t interested in the whys and wherefores. Instead, he is trained to examine the presenting symptoms and come to a diagnosis as quickly as possible so that treatment can begin.

As a result, medicine will always be a superficial science, if it can even be considered a science. It treats symptoms – it makes life bearable and comfortable for the patient – but it rarely cures. It is only when medicine looks beyond the immediate symptoms that a cure becomes possible.
One example is multiple sclerosis (MS), a disease that seems to affect a tiny minority of people, and the subject of our special report this month (WDDTY, April 2011 - for subscriptions, see: http://www.mcssl.com/SecureCart/ViewCart.aspx?mid=1C466A3E-932D-4B3E-87E7-F916476CE7B7&sctoken=1247346512c44cdda4f48b4a8154a546&bhcp=1

Medicine doesn’t understand the cause of MS beyond suggesting it is an autoimmune inflammatory disease, possibly due to genetic factors but more likely the result of stress or infection.

When his wife developed the condition, Paolo Zamboni, a professor of vascular disease, wasn’t prepared to accept the prognosis of inevitable decline. When he investigated, he discovered that 90 per cent of MS sufferers had blocked cerebral veins, which caused blood to flow back and leave iron deposits in the brain. This, he conjectured, could be a cause of inflammation.

Hundreds of MS sufferers have undergone the Zamboni therapy of cerebral vein angioplasty, often with startling results. Despite these successes, researchers have been unable to find any link between blocked veins and MS, and Zamboni’s work is now being discredited.

Nonetheless, Zamboni asked the question, and he has taken the MS debate to a new level. Thanks to his investigations, we do know there is some association between the functioning of the venous system and diseases of the central nervous system. This suggests that several neurodegenerative diseases have a common genesis – and that MS, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and dementia are related, and the result of degeneration and inflammation.

We are beginning to understand that the neurodegenerative conditions are not autoimmune diseases, but autoimmune responses. MS, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s are not progressive and incurable, but diseases that can be controlled and reversed once the response trigger has been identified.

It’s amazing what you learn when you start asking the basic questions.

Fixing the fat police

Joanna Evans — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 09:42:00 GMT

We are fat and getting fatter by the day.Several years ago, Johns Hopkins University did a study showing that, if obesity trends continue, in four years, an astonishing three-quarters of all Americans will be overweight. In Britain, according to an Oxford University epidemiologist, who wrote a government report on the subject, in less than 15 years, 86 per cent of UK men will be overweight and, in 20 years, 70 per centof UK women will reach the same level of obesity.

As fatness becomes the norm, increasing thinness becomes the ideal. Two decades ago, the average model weighed 8-per-cent less than the average woman; today’s models weigh 23-per-cent less than today’s average woman. With such a dysmorphic body ideal, it’s small wonder that we’re addicted to dieting.

Nevertheless, as a corrective measure, dieting is, by any standard, an absolute disaster: 90–95 per cent of dieters regain the weight they lost, and continue on a yo-yo cycle of dieting and weight gain that wreaks havoc with their hormones, setting up a hormonal imbalance with parallels to type 2 diabetes.

In our special report this month, we examine new evidence showing that, far from a failure of willpower, failed dieting often results from a broken fat thermostat. Two recently discovered hormones, leptin and ghrelin, carefully police current fuel and fuel supply, or stored fat, and constantly signal the brain when more food is required. When levels of leptin are high, and levels of ghrelin low, the brain knows you’ve had enough food and creates a feeling of satiety. The reverse hormonal situation tells the brain that you need more food and it gets to work, making you feel hungry.

In the overweight, this complex signaling system is often scrambled. The brain is deaf to any messages about energy supplies and consequently creates a situation in which the individual is literally hungry all the time. Likewise, when people undergo a crash diet and leptin levels fall, your brain thinks you’re starving and stimulates great hunger to restore your leptin levels to normal.

Bad lifestyle habits—from eating too much sugar and processed food to living under constant stress—cause the brain to stop responding to this hormonal signalling. As our cover story notes, one highly overlooked factor in obesity is chronic sleep deprivation.

The complex interrelationship between the two ‘fat hormones’ and the rest of the body, what you eat, and how well you rest, exercise and cope with the challenges all around you suggests that dieting is far too narrow a solution for obesity.

As with other aspects of health, your weight is a holistic issue, a snapshot of how well you live your life, and correcting weight, like correcting much disease, can never be viewed in isolation.

The stevia revolution

Bryan Hubbard — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 09:51:00 GMT

Twice in previous blogs we have referred to the plant Stevia rebaudiana. It is among the sweetest plants in the world and is widely used in some countries as a substitute for sugar, honey and artificial sweeteners in both home cooking and manufactured food products, and by diabetics to reduce their dependence on medications.

Interestingly, the president of Dolca Revolucio, the charity that has spearheaded the distribution of stevia plants in Spain, commented on return from a recent visit to Japan that he had never before visited a country where one saw only slim people and no obesity - except amongst tourists. Cakes and ice creams were not as sugary sweet as in Europe and he noted that stevia was widely used by food and drink manufacturers.

We immediately thought: ‘Why not in Europe? Then, surprise surprise, the next day we received by email Suttons Seeds’s special offer of Stevia Seeds and plants and a special stevia mug for making daily infusions.

We hope that this is the start of a revolution in the way we cook and drink in our homes, and one that will eventually lead to a change in European food formulations.

Authors of Your Garden in Spain, Apartment Gardening Mediterranean Style,

Growing Healthy Fruit in Spain’ and ‘Growing Healthy Vegetable in Spain’.

Healing thoughts

Joanna Evans — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 10:40:00 GMT

The biggest headache for any drug-company executive is the placebo, or ‘sugar pill’, used in controlled trials to show that a drug in question works. Patients are divided into two groups, one of which is given the active drug, while the other takes the placebo, but no one knows who got what, not even those giving the pills. The idea is that far more patients will improve with the drug than with the placebo. Upon this assumption is built the entire edifice of modern medicine.

In practice, so many patients receive the same relief and even the same side-effects with a placebo as with the drug itself that a placebo is not a true control. Indeed, placebo power was best illustrated in patients with Parkinson’s disease, where the body’s system for releasing the brain chemical dopamine is faulty. The standard treatment for Parkinson’s is a synthetic form of dopamine. Yet, in one study, doctors at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver showed on PET scans that, when patients given inert placebos were told they had received dopamine, their brains substantially increased the release of their own stores of the chemical (Science, 2001: 293: 1164–6).

The placebo problem—the subject of this month’s News Focus—was raised to another degree of complexity when Harvard’s professor of medicine Ted Kaptchuk ran a double-blind trial in which patients with irritable bowel syndrome were given a placebo, but told that they were taking a sugar pill, while the other patients were given nothing at all (PLoS ONE, 2010; 5: e15591). The placebo group were also told that placebos have been shown to create powerful mind–body self-healing.

Kaptchuk found that nearly two-thirds of his placebo group reported symptom improvement—even more than had improved with the powerful IBS drug alosetron in a recent trial (Clin Ther, 2008; 30: 884–901).

This raises the very basic question I’ve been wrestling with for some time: do pharmaceutical drugs ever work? Is it ever the drug itself that heals, or is the mental expectation of healing enough to marshal the body’s healing mechanisms?

Other research bolsters the idea that the ‘healer’ may be more powerful than any agent. A recent study of 83 rheumatoid arthritis patients attended by a homeopath concluded that the consultation with a sympathetic practitioner—rather than the remedy itself—was the cause of the physical improvements reported by the patients (Rheumatology, 2010; doi: 10.1093/rheumatology/keq234).

There’s also the power of healing rituals—the idea of ‘taking some-thing’, even when that something is known to be fake. Of 46,000 heart patients, those taking a placebo fared as well as those using the heart drug. The only survival factor appeared to be the belief that the therapy would work and a willingness to follow it religiously. Those who tended not to survive were those who had been lax with the regimen—whether active drug or placebo (BMJ, 2003; 326: 841–4).

Such studies suggest that what we take doesn’t matter; the connection with the healer, the healing words and practices, the expectation of healing—in other words, our thoughts about healing—are always what turns out to be the true healer.

Only connect

Joanna Evans — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 12:42:00 GMT

Nearly a year ago, Hollywood was shocked when actress Brittany Murphy, just 32, died from pneumonia, which she contracted after taking over-the-counter drugs. Within five months, her doting husband, British screenwriter Simon Monjack, aged 40, was also dead from a cardiac arrest—his heart had literally broken.

This phenomenon, called ‘stress cardiomyopathy’, is extraordinarily common; an emotional upset, such as the loss of a loved one, causes heart dysfunction and failure in people without previous heart disease.

As with Monjack, the heart muscle weakens, causing it to literally break. Those left behind die of a broken heart—largely due to loneliness.

Of all the potential risk factors, our cover story this month shows that loneliness is the greatest of all. Heart expert Dr Dean Ornish has discovered that every so-called lifestyle risk factor laid at the door of cardiovascular disease by the medical community has less to do with having a heart attack than simple loneliness. All the usual risk factors—smoking, obesity, a sedentary lifestyle and high-fat diet—only account for half of all heart disease.

No single environmental or dietary risk factor appears to be more important than isolation—from other people, from our own feelings and from a higher source. In that sense, heart disease—like a goodly number of other illnesses—can be viewed as a disease of being on our own.

Researchers at Brigham Young University were so intrigued by such statistics that they pooled and analyzed data from 148 studies comparing human interaction with health outcomes over an average of seven years. Their stark conclusion: relationships of any sort—good or bad—improve your odds of survival by 50 per cent.

Isolation was equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day or being an alcoholic, and twice as harmful as obesity. And the survival advantage may be an underestimation of the benefits of healthy relationships.

Social psychologists at the UK’s University of Exeter have shown that the most important predictor of health—even more than diet and exercise—is the number of groups to which you belong, particularly if you have strong relationships within them. The greater your group membership in voluntary social organizations such as religious groups or unions, the lower your risk of death from all causes.

“As a rough rule of thumb,” wrote Harvard political scientist Robert D. Putnam in his book Bowling Alone (Simon & Schuster, 2002), “if you belong to no groups but decide to join one, you cut your risk of dying over the next year in half.”

This research demonstrates something fundamental about the human experience—or, indeed, the experience of all living beings. The need to move beyond the boundaries of our individual selves is more vital than any diet or exercise programme; it protects against the worst toxins and greatest adversity. This connection is the most fundamental need we have because it generates our most authentic state of being.

Despite our propensity for one-upsmanship and competition, our most basic urge always is to connect. May your year be full of joy and health for you—primarily through connection.

Olive days of yore

Bryan Hubbard — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 12:01:00 GMT

I have just finished hand-harvesting our olives and those of our friends - some 800 kilos in all were gathered up. It was four long days of satisfying exercise on sunny wintery days for four 60- and 70-year-olds. There were no motorized tree shakers to reduce our labours, and no help from the sons of our Spanish friends.

Lunch was cooked over a wood fire with an exchange of views about what has been lost in traditional ways and farming in the past ten years. We were surrounded by abandoned olive, almond, and orange groves. Ten years ago we would have been surrounded by large family groups, with grandparents, parents and children enjoying and benefiting from the exercise, the sense of community and the health-giving qualities of the extra virgin, cold-pressed olive oil produced on the village or family olive mill and press. Most presses have now disappeared and those villagers that do still harvest olives have to travel to large factory mills up to 50 kilometres away where their olives are mixed with those of others. Luckily, our friends have invested in a small home mill and press so our own olives are producing olive oil as pure as you can get.

Our olive trees have been fertilized only with sheep manure and sprayed against insects and fungi with natural ecological sprays. We don’t use chemical products as do most commercial olive farms.

Perhaps we spend a full day a week growing and processing our ecological products, but we don’t need to visit supermarkets and we spend less money. One thing not on our shopping list is the typical medications for the over-50s.

© Clodagh and Richard Handscombe
Holistic gardeners and authors living in Spain for 25 years. Details of their books etc will be found on
www.gardeninginspain.com. December 2010.