There he was on Valentine’s Day last week, Andrew Wakefield, appearing back in the UK for the first time in a decade, to present the European premiere of his movie VAXXED, which concerns all the statistical jiggery-pokery employed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the government body invested with protecting the nation against infectious diseases, to conceal any link between the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism.  (more…)

Last week I participated in a panel in London, chaired by Daniel Pinchbeck, author of  Breaking Open the Head and other bestselling books, to launch his new book How Soon is Now?
The panel focused on what failing systems in our society need to change (the economic model, globalization, energy, the media, you name it), and why we are in a unique moment in our modern history, with Donald Trump a kind of wrecking ball whose job essentially is to hurry the entire process along.
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At any moment, up to a third of us are struggling with pain in our knees. In a major US National Health Interview Survey in 2006, nearly a third of adults reported experiencing some type of joint pain, with more than a sixth reporting pain in the knee.
The situation is even worse in the UK, where major surveys in Bristol and Nottingham both estimated that up to a quarter of all adults suffer with chronic knee pain, while a Greater Manchester survey brought that figure up to nearly one-third of all men and women over the age of 45.
Even in China, knees are the most commonly reported parts that hurt and, indeed, with age the world over, the incidence of knee pain is only going in one direction.
Ask your doctor why and he’ll invariably point to age-related ‘wear and tear.’ Not much can be done for these worn-out joints, says medicine, other than to make you more comfortable with painkillers and other drugs until you’re an acceptable candidate for surgery.
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Medicine, we’re told, is feeling victorious about beating breast cancer, now that the incidence of heart disease has overtaken it as the number-one lady killer.
This victory celebration may be premature. While deaths may have decreased by 35 per cent since the early 1970s, the incidence of this form of cancer is going up—by a projected 2 per cent. Breast cancer still accounts for a third of all cancers reported in women; it affects one in eight women and kills about one in six of women diagnosed with the disease every year.
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