During these past tumultuous weeks, where angry messages have been flying back and forth between two very polarized camps about alternative medicine and WDDTY, one contributor wrote that it was like watching two soccer teams whacking the ball back and forth.

During these past tumultuous weeks, where angry messages have been flying back and forth between two very polarized camps about alternative medicine and WDDTY, one contributor wrote that it was like watching two soccer teams whacking the ball back and forth.

The problem with that analogy is that, in this instance, team A isn’t interested in a fair game.  Team A wants to outlaw team B, and will stop at nothing – installing a biased umpire, beating up the opposition, calling foul on perfectly good passes – in pursuit of that objective.

Make no mistake. This is not a fair debate, a reasonable discussion of the issues. This is a blatant attempt to deny you one of your basic human rights: the right to effective health care.

At the moment, as I have written earlier on these pages, conventional modern medicine kills thousands more people than it cures. Despite all the disingenuous attempts by ‘new’ visitors to these pages to cast doubt about the quality of our research, there is no argument about the fact that modern medicine remains the third deadliest killer in the West. No one in Establishment medicine disputes this.

 Cochrane Collaboration co-founder and esteemed medical researcher Peter Goetzsche refers to the statistics in Deadly Medicine and Organized Crime, and it was first cited more than a decade ago by the Journal of the American Medical Association. At that time, said JAMA, medicine was ranked the fourth leading cause of death – since that time it’s moved up in the league tables of things most likely to kill you.

That stat was first put forward by doctors and is now accepted as fact by doctors.

So we have a system of medicine that, by its own admission, kills more people than anything other than heart disease and cancer every year, and yet is carrying out a systematized attack on anything else that might actually work and work safely.

What this means is that modern medicine, infiltrated and now run by the pharmaceutical industry, is attempting to deny you access to safe and effective health care. That, to my mind, is a violation of your basic human rights.  In fact it is essentially a form of persecution – no less than it was to deny a black in the pre-1960 American South a seat on the bus.

What are we to do about this in a positive way? We can take the lead from Iceland, where a group of 500 concerned citizens launched Heilsufrelsi (Health Freedom), a new health freedom association, to ensure that natural medicine is safeguarded and Icelanders have access to natural ways of maintaining their health. 

The new organization (http://www.heilsufrelsi.is), which was embraced by numerous doctors as well as patients, has pledged to start a dialogue with the island’s medical establishment in order to ensure a ‘mature’ and ‘rational’ exchange and the shift toward, as speaker Dr Gunnar Rafn put it, ‘empathic, patient-centred, integrative medicine’.

Instead of acting like a oppressed minority or continuing to play a game with loaded dice, it is now time for all of us interested in natural health care to unabashedly stand up for natural health freedom, organize together and insist on that mature dialogue.

Stay tuned for our plans to do so.