Howl at the Moon HOME ON EARTH FOR
JOURNALIST, AUTHOR AND CAMPAIGNER 

Pat Thomas

Articles (Natural Health News)

This archive of investigations, reports and interviews below spans from my work with What Doctors Don’t Tell you through my ‘Ecologist years’ to some of my more recent work (see also my Blogs page) with other publications and from the NYR Natural News website, which I edit and Beyond GM campaign and its associated websites.

It does not include the large body of feature work which I did as a music journalist – work I am equally proud of but which came before the internet made archiving easier!

What Doctors Don’t Tell you re-wrote the book on how journalists should approach health. Instead of rewriting press releases, blindly following the latest fads or relying on rent-a-quote experts, the team immersed itself in the medical journalist that Doctors were – or should have been  – reading. These often tell a very different story to the PR that filters through to the media about modern pharmaceuticals.  I was a contributing editor at WDDTY for nearly a decade and editor of Proof! – the consumer magazine that grew out of the work we did there.

The Ecologist magazine, founded in 1970, was the world’s oldest and most widely read environment magazine. It was a driving force in major environmental campaigns against climate change, toxic chemicals in household products, rainforest destruction, food additives, genetic modification and much more. Its courageous, in-depth journalism provided early-warning signs for all the environmental challenges we face now and was, for decades, hugely influential in setting the environmental and green political agendas in the UK and elsewhere. The New York Review of Magazines called it “A magazine that changes people’s lives”. I was privileged to be its Health Editor and then Editor for several years before it ceased printing in 2009 and have continued to contribute ad hoc to it’s website.

My interest in a less interventionist, more natural approach to health continues to this day. NYR Natural News is the only alternative health website based in the UK. It has a growing UK and international audience of people who want good information on health alternatives and who want to understand the connections between environment and health. It is also an increasingly powerful voice in environment and GM campaigning, exposing the toxic connections between multinational corporations and political policy and their impact on human well-being.



23 Jan 2019

Can We Eat to Save the World?

2019 has begun with questions about food. How will we eat in the future? What is the healthiest diet for people and planet? And who do we trust to decide this for us? These questions took centre stage over the last week as a new report, Food in the Anthropocene, was published. The report, compiled […]

Read full article

16 Aug 2018

Glyphosate and The Shocking Disdain for Public Opinion

Last week a San Francisco jury supported a school groundskeeper’s claim that his terminal non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma was caused by regular exposure to the weedkiller Roundup (the active ingredient of which is glyphosate). Dewayne Johnson was awarded $289 (£225) million in damages, which was an extraordinary sum and not something anybody could have predicted. More predictable […]

Read full article

03 May 2018

Three Pesticides Down – Many to Go

Last week EU Member States have backed a proposal from the European Commission to ban all outdoor uses of three neonicotinoid insecticides. As we have written extensively over the years, neonicotinoids, or neonics, have been implicated in the widespread death of bees around the world, including the UK’s population of wild bees. The ban has not come […]

Read full article

04 Apr 2018

A New Human Organ…Hidden in Plain Sight

We inhabit these bodies of ours for seven or more decades. We drag them around – or they drag us around. We take care of them, or not. We think we know them; and even if we don’t, we think others – like doctors and scientists – know them. But the truth is that the […]

Read full article

08 Mar 2018

The People Versus Glyphosate

This week a federal judge in San Francisco has been reviewing claims that glyphosate, the active ingredient in the popular weed killer Roundup, poses a cancer risk. In week-long hearings, US District Judge Vince Chhabria has been listening to experts on both sides about whether there is scientific evidence to support the claims of more […]

Read full article

26 Jan 2018

2018 and the Science of the Small

We are now well and truly into the New Year and it feels like there has barely been a break between the craziness of 2017 and what looks to be the wild ride of 2018. At the turn of the year I try to determine which health issues will be the most prominent over the coming […]

Read full article

05 Dec 2017

Our Website is Changing

Six years ago Neal’s Yard Remedies Natural News launched with a simple premise: to help visitors feel more confident in managing their own health naturally. The website debuted quietly but has grown quickly to become an impressive archive of more than 2000 news stories, articles and campaigns. Over the years millions of people have visited […]

Read full article