This is a day we never expected to reach, much less celebrate.
In January 1990 – some 36 years ago – we both had a crazy idea: to launch our own health newsletter. Bryan was working as the editor of a Financial Times newsletter and had become intrigued by the idea of newsletters as a highly affordable way to produce your own publication.
I had become increasingly interested in alternative health, after a pioneering nutritional doctor healed me of what would now be regarded as a faulty microbiome. Years before, as managing editor of the Chicago Tribute-New York News Syndicate, I’d helped to launch a column called People’s Doctor. I’d been hugely inspired by its author, Dr Robert Mendelsohn, a genial elder stateman of a doctor, who despite a sterling mainstream pedigree, was savaging many of modern medicine’s most sacred cows.
I say crazy because at the time of our launch, we had very little money, I’d just given birth to our first daughter three months before and we had no childcare other than ourselves.
We persevered and, against all odds, got What Doctors Don’t Tell You off the ground. We’d chosen a deliberately provocative name and a bright red logo to reflect the take-no-prisoners approach we intended to follow in revealing what actually worked in both conventional and alternative medicine.
As two investigative reporters, we knew how to dig deep into research. I would head to the British Medical Library every month, baby Caitlin in a sling, pore through the major medical journals, and photocopy important studies, continuously astonished by just how many revealed standard treatments that were either dangerous or unproven.
The newsletter went through a number of iterations and sizes, from 8 to 32 pages until, in 2012, we launched it as a magazine, complete with advertising, which would be sold not only by subscription, but also on the newsstands, and licensed to many countries around the world.
Through the years, the attitude toward our publication by the press reflected the changing nature of mainstream reporting on medicine and health. In those early years we were applauded by all the major UK broadsheets as what the London Times called a ‘voice in the silence’ and often wheeled out on TV to present ‘the other side’ of the story.
By 2012, once our magazine appeared, and investigative reportage about medicine had been replaced by what is essentially PR for the official party line, there was no longer any other side. We endured rounds of cyberattacks by a small but vocal band of skeptics; sustained attempts to get us banned from supermarkets and newsagents; smear campaigns in the press; and even Covid, when newsstands and supermarkets were forced to stop selling magazines for months on end.
But here we still are. And next month, we’re blowing the horn to celebrate our 150th issue. But that’s just the number of magazines we’ve put out since 2012. The candles we’re blowing out actually number 414, the total number of issues of WDDTY since our launch all those years ago.
Every month, since 1990, we’ve sought to warn against unsafe or unproven medical practices and offer our readers effective holistic or integrative alternatives. And through the years, we’ve punched above our weight in terms of influence.
Last month, a naturopathic doctor flew all night to Crete just to attend a conference at which I was speaking because, as she put it, we had ‘saved her life.’ She’d suffered strokes and numerous illnesses, but something in what we’d once said and written had given her the strength to take control of her own health, and, as a naturopathic doctor, the health of her patients.
Others have told us over the years that our pages have given them hope, when standard medicine had nothing to offer, or helped them to overcome a disease, save a limb or a loved one, or generally transform their health.
Many of our subscribers have been with us since the beginning and often tell us they have all 414 issues piled up, still heavily thumbed through, still keeping them healthy.
We’re just putting the finishing touches on our January/February issue, which has assembled 150 of our top health ways to live to 100. We included highly specific suggestions on the right diets to follow, the right supplements to take, the best ways to keep moving, the most efficacious alternative treatments and which drugs and household products to avoid.
But to stay healthy what you ingest (or not) is only the beginning. In her book Radical Remission, when Kelly Turner included the nine key practices most frequently adopted by the end-stage cancer patients who’d defied their poor prognoses and reversed their cancers, what most struck me is that only three of the nine had to do with something physical, like diet, supplements, herbs or exercise.
The rest were far less tangible: embracing strong social support, deepening your spiritual belief, letting go of suppressed emotions, increasing positivity, following your intuition and taking control of your own health.
Taking control of your own health is what we’ve always aimed to help people to do.
But, in my experience with group intention like the Power of Eight®, community and a spiritual belief are the most important medicines of all.
May you take control – but most of all – may you stay connected.
The ‘150 Ways to Live to 100’ story will be available in late December. I’ll keep you posted.
