Most people are under the mistaken impression that I’m a scientist.  In actual fact, I am a strange hybrid of a writer, with an interest in science and spirituality, but the heart and soul of an investigator reporter.
As a teenager, what clinched the deal for me about becoming a journalist was witnessing the fall of Richard Nixon.  Here were Woodward and Bernstein, two young and inexperienced Washington Post journalists, who nevertheless were able to bring down a corrupt presidency through old-style, tireless, gumshoe-leather reporting.
That experience imbued in me an appreciation of the power of the so-called Fourth Estate.  It seemed to me that every journalist – indeed, every publication – carried a weighty responsibility to provide a check on the the twin monoliths of politics and commerce. 
Nevertheless, it’s a state of mind fast disappearing from the job spec these days.
America’s low ranking
Reporters Without Borders, a worldwide organization devoted to press freedom, publishes an annual Press Freedom Index, which rates the comparative levels of free expression in countries around the globe.
The other day, I was stunned to learn where America ranks on that chart, having tumbled badly during the last presidential regime, when it became unpatriotic for the press to question or even to look into anything the administration was up to.
In 2006, America sat at 53th place, well beaten by the likes of Bosnia, El Salvador and Panama. 
In the latest report, the US has recovered a bit domestically, but is still in 36th place — behind Costa Rica and Ghana. Outside its own borders, the US ranks at 119th place for protecting its press freedom and even its own journalists.
The UK’s press, at 23, sits well below most former satellite states of the Soviet Union, sharing pride of place with Namibia.
The ranking of Western democracies for press freedom is fast being overtaken by that of new countries. While Europe has an excellent showing, France and Japan have made a notable tumble down the charts, and now fare worse than many small Caribbean countries. 
Of the European countries, Scandinavia emerges as the freest press, with Norway sharing first places with Iceland, and Finland and the Netherlands close behind, at 2 and 3 respectively.
New scientific story
I bring this up because I’m part of an Evolutionary Leaders Council – a group started by Deepak Chopra – the purpose of which is to gather together a large number of so-called thought leaders, who can work collectively and in small groups to shift the consciousness of the planet.  Since our first retreat this summer, we’ve been meeting regularly by phone — with another, longer retreat planned this summer.
New biologist Bruce Lipton and I have recently been given the job of leading a group to discuss ways to promote education of the new scientific story and what it means to our health. We want to widely circulate many of the new ideas about physics and biology, which show that our bodies are far more than a collection of linear processes and chemical reactions. 
We’d like to publicize the evidence that the body is a holistic system, in which reactions largely occur globally, as this new scientific story will have a major impact on which health-care systems are actually effective. 
It’s now clear even to most doctors that our current medical model, with its reliance on drugs and surgery, is not working.  According to the Journal for the American Medical Association, correctly prescribed drugs are now the third leading cause of death in America, only a whisker behind heart attacks and stroke.
Dynamic web of connection
German physicist Fritz Albert Popp, who first discovered that living things a tiny current of light (biophoton emissions), has discovered evidence showing that when medication is placed on the one part of the body, a large change in the number of light emissions occurs not only from where the ointment has been applied, but also from distant parts of the body. 
Furthermore, the size of the changes correlate all over the body: even those places where no ointment had been applied record the same increase in light emissions as from the spot where the medicine has been rubbed in.  
This is one tiny bit of the vast amount of evidence suggesting that our body is a dynamical system that operates within a web of connection. It also tells us why the tools of modern medicine often have such blunderbuss effects.  Even if a therapy is intended for a specific location, this communications channel will cause it to affect the body globally.
But how to get this information out to the general public?
Bombarded by Big Pharma
Every time I return to America, what hits me in the face is the sheer number of pharmaceutical ads allowed to be promoted on television. Ads for drugs to treat virtually every manner of condition on the morning news. Direct-to-teenage-consumer ads, attempting to convince 12 years olds to pester their parents to get the Gardisal vaccine – lest they face the risk of dying of cancer. There are even ads now for pet drugs, designed to prey upon the emotional ties of dog owners. 
Those ads and the overriding financial considerations they represent may have something to do with the fact that important stories about health and science often don’t see the light of day.
By way of example, my husband Bryan, also a journalist, was recently stunned to discover evidence that a large consignment of Baxter International’s seasonal flu vaccine, due to be circulated to 18 European countries, had been infected with the deadly live avian flu virus. 
Had this contamination not been detected, the vaccines may have set off an avian flu pandemic, with hundreds of thousands of casualties. (see our news pages, on our website WDDTY).
A headline grabber – in Czechoslovakia
This only came to light when a Czech researcher, who’d made the discovery by accident, fed the story to the Czech papers, which promptly published it (Czechoslovakia is way up there, at number 5 now).
At that point, the story should have been picked up and splashed across the front pages of the world’s newspapers.  In fact, almost no paper carried it – other than the Toronto Star in Canada (now number 13). 
America’s and the UK’s press stayed conspicuously silent.
For us to get out the new scientific story and the important ways that this impacts on your health care, it may be that we will have to bypass the giant corporate conglomerates who now own the media.
We may have to tell this story directly to each other. 
Pass this blog on to everyone you know. Tell them what you know about the new science and the fundamental problems of our current medical solutions. Complain to the newspapers about the poor state of Western reporting on new science and health care, and demand something more than celebrity spotting. 
Woodward and Bernstein – where are you?