The practice and science of natural medicine

Integrative Health &
Applied Nutrition
magazine (IHCAN)

Since 2002, Integrative Healthcare & Applied Nutrition magazine (formerly known as CAM magazine) has kept professional practitioners in-the-loop every month with its mix of news, views and fully referenced features.

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The practice and science of natural medicine

 Integrative Health &
Applied Nutrition
magazine (IHCAN)

Since 2002, Integrative Healthcare & Applied Nutrition magazine (formerly known as CAM magazine) has kept professional practitioners in-the-loop every month with its mix of news, views and fully referenced features.

Buy a subscription and we plant a tree

We care deeply about the planet and creating a business that gives back to nature.

That’s why we’ve partnered with One Tree Planted to plant a tree on your behalf, as a thank you for subscribing.

Trees clean our air and water, create habitats for biodiversity, contribute to our health and wellbeing, and create jobs for social impact.

 Editor’s note March 2023

 

Medical researchers uncover the *** bleeping obvious

Do grown-ups really need to be told to stop eating junk food, exercise a bit and try to get a good night’s sleep if they want to be healthy?
I’m baffled by the outpouring of research, opinion and media attention being given to the latest researchers and medics to “uncover” the obvious.
As an aside, when I started out in the ‘70s we called it junk food – now it’s “ultra-processed” food. I suppose that makes it sound more scientific.
So, the latest headline to catch my eye (thank you the Daily Mail) goes: “REVEALED: Seven lifestyle habits in middle-age to slash dementia risk”.
Revealed! They’ve been hidden for hundreds of years! But fear not, thanks to intrepid doctors at Brigham and Women’s Hospital we now know what we need to do.
“The seven factors are: being active, having a healthy diet, maintaining a healthy weight, not smoking, having normal blood pressure, controlling cholesterol levels and having lower blood sugar levels”, reports the Mail.
The docs came up with these “factors” (a good sciency word) after tracking data from nearly 14,000 women in their 50s for TWENTY YEARS.
20 years of data to come up with this kindergarten conclusion!

“It can be empowering for people to know that

...Read more...

by taking steps such as exercising for half an hour a day or keeping their blood pressure under control, they can reduce their risk of dementia”, the Mail quotes Dr Pamela Rist as saying.

Ah, if only it was that simple! No one bothered to pick up a copy of Dr Dale Bredesen’s book The End of Alzheimer’s – published in 2007. If they had, they’d have seen details of a protocol designed to prevent cognitive decline – and already proven, as published (2004) in the medical literature, to reverse it. I don’t know how many factors Dr Bredesen has now identified as contributing to dementia, but the last count I saw was 37 “holes in the roof” that needed attention.

Meanwhile, I was upset to find Dr Jeff Bland pandering to this modern movement of commercial medicine “discovering” the bleeping obvious. In an otherwise riveting webinar on long COVID, he gave space to Dr Uma Naidoo, MBCHB, who claims to have invented “Nutritional Psychiatry”. In her presentation, she made no mention of any of the great pioneers of “orthomolecular psychiatry” such as Dr Abraham Hoffer, who developed vitamin treatments for schizophrenia in the 1950s – triggering a research movement that continues to this day. No, her “prescription” for dealing with mental health is to use “factors” such as food – yes, of course, the ubiquitous plant-based Mediterranean or her own Mediterrasian concept – with a bit of yoga and so on thrown in. Massachusetts General Hospital, where she is “Director of Nutritional and Lifestyle Psychiatry”, has the nerve to describe her as “a leading expert and pioneer in the field of nutritional psychiatry, a NEW area of research and clinical practice that looks at how food influences brain function” (emphasis added on “new”). This is just insulting.

I would expect Jeff, the founder of functional medicine, to know better. The context in this webinar was “the biology of hope”.

Now the reason long COVID sufferers are feeling hopelessness and despair (if they are) is not just because they now find themselves in the CFS/ME community ignored by commercial medicine, but because they, like the rest of us, have been lied to and terrorised during the pandemic. You’re not going to fix that with food, any more than you fix schizophrenia with a plant-based diet. And we’ve known that since the 1950s.

Top-selling prescription drugs in the US have low benefit

A study led by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health found that the majority – 68%, or 92 of 135 – of the top-selling prescription drugs sold in 2020 offered “low added benefit”. Yet these are the very drugs that pharmaceutical companies promote the hardest.

The US is the only country besides New Zealand that allows direct advertising of prescription drugs to consumers, and yet the US does not assess prescription drugs for comparative effectiveness like, say, France and Canada.

“The findings suggest that shifting promotional dollars to direct-to-consumer advertising potentially reflects a strategy to drive patient demand for drugs that clinicians would be less likely to prescribe”, says Bloomberg’s Michael DiStefano, PhD, commenting on the study published online in JAMA last month.

This exposé of where Big Pharma’s real interest lies – profit – follows a damning 2021 study from America’s Health Insurance Plans, that found pharma spends more on advertising than investing in research – even during COVID-19. Of ten drug manufacturers examined, seven spent more on marketing than they did on research and development. “For this group of ten companies alone, selling and marketing expenses exceeded R&D spending by $36 billion, or 37%”.

51% reduction in heart disease from brushing and flossing!

“Can this be true?” asked one astonished commentator on social media.

It appears so. Dentists followed 354 participants in Finland’s Kuopio Oral Health and Heart study for an average of 18.8 years (see report, page 41) to come up with this statistic.

So again, make sure to ask clients about their oral health – and their hygiene routine.

Dr Rosy Daniel joins our April virtual conference

Great response to my rant last month about the need to reform medicine rather than the NHS! And one of those approving, I’m delighted to say, was Dr Rosy Daniel, MBBCh. Rosy has been working on her concept of health promotion for a good 20 years – and this year, at last, is ready to launch a professional certificate course in Health Creation.

Join us for our April 22 virtual conference, where she’ll explain what it takes to build health in clients, and is joined by Alex Manos and naturopathic physician Dr Cheryl Burdette, ND. (To book, see inks on page 16.)

Your IHCAN magazine is delivered in 100% compostable “green” bags: thanks to Pure Encapsulations, whose sponsorship makes that possible.

Simon Martin, Editor

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We’re always fully referenced

We don’t put a big emphasis on being “evidence based” in the conventional sense, mainly because the bulk of the evidence used in meta analyses and systematic reviews and to produce “guidelines” is not to be trusted. As Prof Richard David Feinman puts it, the meta-analysis is the “most dangerous” activity plaguing modern medical literature. And RCTs are of no use in assessing complex conditions that we address with multiple interventions – such as Dr Dale Bredesen’s Alzheimer’s protocol. Likewise, we highly value the hard-won clinical experience of multiple practitioners accumulated over the years and handed down over generations of evolving natural medicine practice. That said, we do put a lot of effort into referencing our features. References are online to save space, available within our members area.

We’re always fully referenced

We don’t put a big emphasis on being “evidence based” in the conventional sense, mainly because the bulk of the evidence used in meta analyses and systematic reviews and to produce “guidelines” is not to be trusted. As Prof Richard David Feinman puts it, the meta-analysis is the “most dangerous” activity plaguing modern medical literature. And RCTs are of no use in assessing complex conditions that we address with multiple interventions – such as Dr Dale Bredesen’s Alzheimer’s protocol. Likewise, we highly value the hard-won clinical experience of multiple practitioners accumulated over the years and handed down over generations of evolving natural medicine practice. That said, we do put a lot of effort into referencing our features. References are online to save space, available within our members area.

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