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