SIDE EFFECTS

I'm sorry to go on about vaccinations. You all know by now my position on this procedure. As a Naturopath of over twenty five years of experience, I know how long it can take to restore a lowered immune system, and as a trainee homoeopath even longer ago I was shocked to be taught that there is a common symptom picture named vaccinosis. Yes, a recognisable picture of dis-ease, requiring not congratulations but repair. Not always easy, when the person has had jabs since babyhood.

Thankfully nowadays, there are so many more sensible people, you among them, who, regardless of medical or pharmaceutical claims, ask a lot of questions about standards of research and clinical trials, and want to know about "side effects" (what a silly term. There are effects you want and effects you don't want, and what this really means is the price, sometimes horrendous, that you the patient must accept, often without having it properly spelled out to you.) Many more take the simpler view that it is counter intuitive to put poisons into yourself, and that surely there are better ways to stay healthy.

SIDE EFFECTS

Just to underline these points. Remember Thalidomide? Administered without proper and thorough trials by dare I say it gullible or careless, maybe just trusting, family doctors? The company responsible resisted responsibility for decades, leaving thousands of families with sadly handicapped infants to struggle without much help until the children were grown up. Interestingly, American mothers were not given this dangerous drug, because one doctor with her instincts functioning and her professional questions not answered, fought to keep it out, despite huge pressures. The points I want to make here are; surely doctors have learned from this? There are GPs in the UK, nearing retirement now, but still scarred by the damage that was done to the babies of their pregnant patients through their treatment. Do you think they now grill the pharmaceutical reps about trials and safety in respect of new products? And do they underline the importance of this in medical school? Well it would seem they are still as trusting as ever, though in light of that experience, seared into the collective medical memory in the UK, there are stronger words than trusting which come to mind. So you will have to do the research for yourselves. DANGEROUS DRUGS STILL IN USE At that time, my own healthy boys were born, and I still have the occasional nightmare about the possible outcome, if, like some of my friends, I had been given an antidepressant, or a sleeping aid. Actually I didn't often visit my GP at that time, thankfully. A nice man, but he had the same pressures on his time, and trust in the drug companies, as his colleagues. Also in those days people trusted their doctors blindly. Not any more, sadly. Now my two small grandsons are supposed to have all kinds of jabs, and one of my beautiful grand daughters is in the age range for cervical cancer vaccination. Fortunately she is highly sceptical about this. You might also imagine that such a calamitious drug as Thalidomide would be banned worldwide. Not a bit of it. Under a different name, maybe with a slightly different formulation, it is still sold as a treatment for Aids and as a tranquillizer (with the rider not to get pregnant while you take it!) I believe it can also be bought, like so many other drugs, directly by the public in some third world countries. So more generations of children will be affected. Please don't ever take a safety assurance from a medic who hasn't "got time" to do his homework, or take at face value the label on anything which was written by the company which made it. We are all as a whole pretty discriminating about food labelling, for example nowadays, and if you are too young to remember let me tell you it took a lot of campaigning to get better food labelling in the UK, and it is still far from fully informative. So like most sensible safety measures, it's down to us again, to ask the questions and insist on the answers.