You’re not a doctor! Who the fuck do you think you are?

Big medical rant coming up. This has been brewing for a while, and I need to get it off my chest, so don’t read this if you don’t like swearing and passion. I keep getting dragged into discussions and arguments about all sorts of aspects of the medical profession, science, etc, and I often run into people who get very defensive and aggressive about my points of view, usually because they don’t understand where they came from and why I am so motivated to pass them on. This is why I felt I wanted to address some of the actual comments and questions I’ve had at one time or another:

“I’d rather listen to a proper doc than some idiot like you!”

“You are irresponsible/criminal not to vaccinate your kids.”

“There isn’t any scientific proof for any of this stuff.”

“You must be so embarrassed to have written a book – who needs another one?”

“You’re only doing all this to sell books.”

“Who the fuck do you think you are spouting off like that?”

“You have no real qualifications, so all you say is obviously crap.”

So, am I totally against modern medicine and doctors? Absolutely not. I actually think that all doctors have a genuine desire to help people, and they do their very best to do so from within the constraints of the training they have had. I think that when this young science gets rid of its youthful arrogance, it will admit to what it is and isn’t good at, embrace other wisdoms and disciplines and come together to make a truly effective, safe system of healing. I have also met some really wonderful docs recently (and even given talks with them to other docs) who look outside their medical training and really educate themselves on how to prevent illness by natural means. When doctors discover it, they are as excited as I am about it and want to spread the word to their colleagues.

My tolerant attitude to doctors might be surprising considering what I and my family have been through with them, and anyone without such an open mind and ability to forgive probably would have bombed a hospital or two by now… or at least the rheumatology department… 🙂

For example… after a catalogue of inflated doctors’ egos, delays, incompetence, misdiagnoses, and over-medication, my father died from a heart attack a month after going into hospital in 2003. There was nothing wrong with his heart when he went in. The (incorrect) meds for an unrelated condition (an easily operable brain tumour, which they refused to scan for and failed to diagnose for two weeks even though I told them my suspicions) blew his heart up and had him in a state of utter confusion and misery for his last weeks when he was barely recognisable as the intelligent, witty man I loved.

My mother was very ill and would have been dead by 81 if I hadn’t thrown her useless bunch of meds in the bin after my father died, two of which have since been found to be extremely dangerous (even by their standards). A few weeks later her health was utterly transformed, and now at 94 and med-free (despite their efforts to give her more chemicals), I sometimes wonder if she’s immortal. I’m pretty damn sure with what I know now that they also killed my favourite aunt. She didn’t last long after she went into care.

So how about me? Well, they’ve had a field day with my body. Starting with the ridiculous advice in the 60s that nature had made a mistake by giving boys a foreskin, they lopped it off with what I can only assume was a house brick judging by the mess they made of it. Then because of a couple of small infections they cut out not only my tonsils, but my adenoids too for good measure while they had the knife sharpened – clearly those are fucking useless organs as well. Nature does mess up, eh? So nice of the docs to correct it…

Then when I pulled my finger off in a door at ten years old, they kept me waiting for hours in a hospital before telling me that they couldn’t do it there, and I had to go to another one five minutes down the road, where they could have sewn it back on if they’d told me that within 30 minutes, but by then it was too late.

Then there’s my characteristic squashed nose. Was I born that way? Did I used to be a boxer? No… it was the result of two bungled attempts to correct a deviated septum where they seem to have cut out all the good cartilage and left all the bad… I remember waking up in the hospital at 15 years old , looking in the mirror and wondering who the fuck was looking back.

Oh, and I have a mesh in my groin to repair an inguinal hernia. I couldn’t avoid that, much as I tried to find a natural way around it. I’d rather not have some man made artefact in my body, but so far so good and none of the horrific infections they are known for attracting even years later. Fuck knows what they did to my right testicle in the process though. That’ll never look or feel the same again.

Anything on the plus side? Yes! They saved my sight four times when the autoimmunity went into my eyes causing iritis, and once, very nastily, macular edema. I used their steroid drops to kill the initial inflammation, and I will always be massively grateful for that, as well as the big kidney stone they lasered out of my ureter after I got it stuck from trying to shift it with my own methods. That was a true relief. I did have to fend off a barrage of “precautionary” antibiotics though, and they did tell me that I’d always get stones if I ate a diet heavy in protein. Well, no sign yet, lads – it was the crap you told me to eat before!

So, am I bitter? No. Actually I find it quite amusing that I’m missing so many bits. I’m still here, and what happened has made me who I am. No worries. They are all battle scars to be proud of, and my Jyotish (Vedic astrology chart) does specify that the body will be very scarred… but we can ignore that, because astrology isn’t scientific, is it?

Still I haven’t mentioned the torrent of absolute madness and dreadful advice that I received from the NHS when I got really sick with crippling inflammatory arthritis after they failed to read the blatantly obvious warnings in blood results in the years that led up to it. To get the full fiasco you would have to read my book, but in short I was told I had hiatus hernia, which was incurable, so I had to take proton pump inhibitors. This was the last straw, along with my awful diet, also stemming from misinformation, and the prescription NSAIDs for my back pain that finally ruined my gut flora and sent my body into full-blown autoimmunity.

From that point I was in their hands and very scared. I was in agony. I could hardly walk, and I was terrified into taking their drugs for a few weeks. They made the situation immeasurably worse, so I dumped them… I knew I had to go it alone, but where to start? By this point, emaciated from extended fasting, as it was the only thing that brought any small relief, but still in crippling agony and with brain fog that made it hard to focus on anything, I set about educating myself.

Fortunately, back in 2010/11 I had some money stashed, and I could afford to do ten hours of research or more every day for at least two years (and often several hours a day since) while I couldn’t move from the sofa without tremendous pain. Looking back to those days, they were dreadful, and without my wonderful supportive family I might even have ended it. I cannot even describe what it’s like to have full-blown autoimmunity. The symptoms can hit any system in the body, and they do, making it a terrifying living hell. It’s not just the joints.

My biggest challenge wasn’t healing the disease, but losing all the fear and conditioning that the doctors instilled in me (even though I now realise that their intentions were very kind). When I did manage to shake the fear and make progress, I realised that many people are massively threatened by change and by challenges to the conventional wisdom. I even lost friends at that time, making it even more hellish. As one fucking idiot (who I thought was a very special friend but who turned his back on me during that time) and his mindless missus said to me, “You faked the whole illness. You just had a bad knee and now you’ve set yourself up as a messiah on the Internet after you’ve Googled for five minutes.”

All these things are blessings in disguise though. Everything about illness is, and you come out the other side better than you went in… and knowing who your true friends are.

But I digress… I didn’t Google for five minutes; I studied harder and longer than I ever would have done for any standard course. I was already more knowledgeable than most, as health had been a lifelong interest and I even wrote my first book and articles in the 90s, but I still devoured every slightly relevant publication and website I could find, and I was able to take fabulous knowledge from many different disciplines too. I had to; I needed to save my own mobility, if not my life, and ensure the future health of my kids who might have the same genetic traits. I wasn’t going to be defeated.

Few of the things I present now were anywhere near the first, second, tenth or even hundredth thing I learned and experimented on myself with. You would not believe some of the things I’ve risked to get well again, and I failed again and again and picked myself up again and again. Now I see that it’s about subtraction of the things that cause the body to be confused rather than any pill or potion, chemical or herbal. In the end it’s actually quite simple… but it often takes a roundabout route to come to that realisation. Humans love complicating things, and I am no different.

I could not have got this knowledge from any one course or discipline. I took all the best from many different sources, a true holistic approach, and I had the advantage of a real life “incurable” ailment or seven to try them out on, so that put me ahead of the game in developing my bullshit detector. And in the end I healed everything that the docs told me was incurable.

Recently I had cause to reply to the predictable “You’re not a doctor” comment from a vegan troll on THIS VIDEO on my YouTube channel. It went like this… “Ignore for a moment that I have been studying diet since the early 80s, wrote my first book on it in 1996 and many published articles etc after that. Even ignore how I worked with people for a decade after that too (with frustratingly little success as I was spouting vegetarianism). Yes, ignore all that, and the 12 hours a day I studied it after I got really sick in 2010 until I finally got on the right track in 2012. Let’s just count my hours from there. That’s probably about five hours a day for six years. That’s 10,950 hours. Put that up against a doctor’s maybe six hours all told, presuming they didn’t cut class that day, and I think you will realise why I wrote the blog post below (this one) in response to that ridiculous comment that I get from every manic vegan who crosses my path…”

So, do I know everything? Absolutely not! And nothing I tell people is my own invention. In fact, for those obsessed with science who tell me there’s no science, most of the individual things I tell people have a very good basis in science, but I don’t even care. It’s in the way they are combined as a whole that the magic lies, and that is beyond the scope of randomised controlled trials or experiments on rats.

Actually, the more I learn, the more I realise I don’t know, and every day I look to fill in more holes in my knowledge. It’s my absolute passion now… but I am aware that even my humble knowledge on this is probably ahead of 99.9% of the population, including most docs, so it’s utterly irresistible and deeply rewarding… my duty even… to pass it on. The feeling when somebody comes back to me and says they have lost 100lbs while stuffing themselves with delicious rich food, or reversed their diabetes, or come off all their pain meds is indescribably satisfying. This is why I do it. I don’t do it to sell books or as some ego trip. I do it because against all hopes and planning, I was forced into having a lot of knowledge on this, and now it’s my clear path in life. I’d love to earn a living from it, but in this world that likes letters after your name, I’m not holding my breath, so I will carry on doing it if it bankrupts me, and I will carry on doing it if I win the lottery. I have no ulterior motive.

My message is that we need to learn discrimination. Any single discipline anyone studies is probably somewhere between 30 and 50% bullshit. Among the many things that doctors are amazing at such as diagnostics, mending bones, emergency surgery and saving people in anaphylactic shock, basically the acute stuff, they are utterly useless at treating chronic disease. I don’t care what scientific studies people throw at me – I KNOW that if you have cancer or autoimmunity and you get in the conventional medical system you are fucked. It’s all based on utter bullshit, as are PPIs, statins and the whole damn cholesterol theory… not to mention their disgusting, unsatisfying and dangerous low fat diet advice.

So, to vaccines. Do I know about them? No. I have looked at reams of info on both sides, but cannot make up my mind because I only go by personal experience. However, the clued-up docs who gave me the real deal on how to heal my autoimmunity are all, to a greater or lesser extent, suspicious of them, so I am too. In short, I haven’t pinpointed the rat like I have the one in rheumatology, but I sure as hell smell one.

Maybe you need vaccines if you still feed your kids on cereal, toast, pizza, McDonald’s, Haribo and fizzy drinks, sit them in front of a WiFi enabled tablet, slather them in sunscreen and then fill them full of antibiotics every time they fart. Maybe such a devastated immune system needs them… maybe… I don’t know… although I do suspect that in cases like that, they might just be the last ingredient in a perfect storm, triggering possible devastating immune disruption even years/decades later, so the connection is hard to prove.

But I do know that there is another way. I do know that we understand very little of the immune system except the few who know how to support it, but modern medicine has only just started talking about the microbiome when it’s actually the fucking BASIS of the immune system, so since vaccinations are messing with that, I’m out. Instead I will use the knowledge I gained in resetting my own trashed immune system to strengthen my kids’ natural immunity.

We feed our kids a grain-free diet. They eat lots of natural fats, fish, meat, eggs and some high fat dairy. They seldom get their hands on rubbish, and if they do, it’s doled out at parties or school, and the effects are immediate and obvious. They get a lot of sun in the summer with no sunscreen. They don’t have mobile phones. We use candles in the evening instead of artificial light. If they drop some food on the grass, they are encouraged to pick it up and eat it. They might eat a little too much fruit for my liking, but that’s a small problem compared to the diets of most of the rest of the kids I see.

Take Amelia, eight years old at the time of writing. She is lean, muscular, fit, supple, funny, unbelievably intelligent, deliciously rebellious and heartbreakingly loving. She gets ill, sure… about every three times the other kids do, and then only for an evening or at most a day when the others are off school for ages. She even got a chicken “pock” once. Yes, just the one, and she didn’t even feel bad when loads of the school came down with chickenpox proper and were pretty ill. Is she immune from everything and some sort of super kid? No. I just think she’s closer to normal than most, because we have forgotten what normal is, and I wouldn’t upset that balance with any meds unless her life depended on it. This is far from an uneducated hippy choice, but even I, after all I’ve been through, sometimes doubt this decision to support her immune system rather than invade it… but only for a couple of minutes a month nowadays. The brainwashing runs very deep.

When I think of somebody recently diagnosed with autoimmunity, having been told that they will need meds all their life and it’s incurable, my heart breaks for them and the mire of information they will have to sort through, presuming they even bother. I still shout at diet programmes on TV too (the rare times I can bring myself to watch them), even the “good” ones, which usually bury two or three nuggets of truth among loads of outdated crap. How is that sick person, fresh from the terror of the doctor’s office, ever going to be able to tell what’s rubbish and what isn’t when there is so much conflicting advice even in the same programme? There’s always some fucking NHS dietitian or doctor going on about how dangerous it is to cut grains from the diet or how saturated fat is a killer, and you can forgive anyone for being fooled and saying they will go with what is “scientifically proven” without realising that the phrase is pretty much meaningless when it comes to diet. And if they’ve got IBS or Crohn’s (same thing really – silly diagnoses) that decision could eventually cost them a section of their bowel.

Look closely next time you watch a diet programme though – it’s very often the case that the ones still preaching about the dangers of high fat diets are pretty obese with spectacular bingo wings and dreadful skin, whereas the ones who have discovered low carb are usually lean and muscular and younger looking than their actual age. Results speak louder than words…

I have to keep banging this message because this isn’t theory to me, and I don’t need to wait for the science (although oddly the science is already there, even on Pub Med – it’s just buried under the dogma in general practice and docs don’t usually have time to dig it out). I went through so many wrong turns in healing my body, and I know how demoralising it can be, so I’d like to help others, who might have less access to time than I did, to avoid those mistakes. In the end, I found the magic, but I’m still learning all the time. It’s not just me either; I have seen it work countless times in others too, and their doctors often never see them again, so they don’t get feedback and carry on giving the same dreadful advice to their next patients. It’s through these brave people’s self-experimentation and then coming together to share that sheer force of numbers speaking up about their results will get the attention of those who can make real changes.

So, that’s why I do what I do and make the choices I do. I apologise if you’re one of the ones I’ve annoyed with my rants and unsolicited advice, but as you can see, there are many reasons. When the mainstream does cotton on to this, I can breathe a sigh of relief and go back to drumming, fishing, riding motorbikes and talking about willies and bottoms like any other normal chap, but until then, I will carry on writing books and blogs, Skyping suffering people and holding regular Ancestral Health Awareness meetings. Sometimes we don’t choose our path. It chooses us. To those who have supported me, I thank you so much. For the few friends I’ve lost, I have gained many more and deepened my relationships with existing ones.

The blessings of illness, once understood and conquered, far outweigh the downsides. If I can do my little part in stopping the fear and panic that our modern medical system brings to the chronically ill and give them some real hope while the doctors catch up, which they are slowly doing, it will be a life well spent, and I’ll be very satisfied.

Thanks for reading. 🙂

Originally posted 2017-02-21 13:49:08.