Articles

Laser eye surgery, the so called miracle solution to myopia, has many hidden dangers, including the possibility that it may make your eyesight worse. The advertisements are persuasive. “Do away with glasses forever”; “revolutionary treatment permanently corrects short sightedness”; “experience the life enhancing effect”. To the casual observer, laser surgery has all the hallmarks of […]

Pre-eclampsia is, according to the medical profession, an enigma. It has been known by many different names around the world. It has been called toxaemia, pre-eclamptic toxaemia (PET), pregnancy induced hypertension (PIH), hypertensive disease of pregnancy (HDP), metabolic toxaemia of late pregnancy (MTLP) and even gestosis. The overabundance of names should be enough to indicate […]

If you are a man aged between 40 and 59, you have a 50 to 60 per cent chance of having benign enlargement of the prostate gland. Prostate problems – enlargement, infection and cancer – are on the rise. And medicine has not always been able to provide either cure or prevention. There has been […]

Given perfect conditions, human beings are thought to be capable of living a healthy 125 years. Indeed, the oldest recorded human being was a French woman who lived to be 122 years of age (JAMA, 1997; 278: 1345-48). The vast majority of us, however, don’t live that long, and why? is a question which vexes […]

Animal testing doesn’t work. Its results are often inconclusive and cannot be accurately extrapolated to humans. As a result, relying on the results of animal testing can be dangerous to human health. It is a system which is long overdue for a critical review, and yet no such review is on the horizon. In his […]

Diabetes mellitus is an old and complex disease. It can strike anyone in any family at any time, though it is most common among affluent Westerners. The incidence of this autoimmune disease has tripled over the last eight years and, today, over 100 million people around the world have the condition. Nearly a third of […]

Eating disorders, whether they be the starvation regimes of anorexia and bulimia or the compulsive eating which leads to overweight and in some cases morbid obesity, are on the rise. Medical research has, frustratingly, not kept pace with the increase. For years the theory that people who suffer from these problems are mentally unstable, slothful […]

Inflammatory bowel disease affects hundreds of thousands of people around the world each year. It is, according to conventional medicine, incurable and its cause is unknown (BMJ, August 6, 1994). The number of reported cases is increasing worldwide each year (Canada Health Rep, 1990; 71: 343-59), especially among children. Generally speaking, IBD is thought to […]

Headaches are the oldest and most common complaint of mankind. The subtle and not-so-subtle levels of pain range from the dull throbbing of the tension headache to the nausea and flashing lights of the classic migraine. They can last minutes, hours or even days and can debilitate or even inspire. Today, around 20 per cent […]

Most of us think of hearing -loss as a normal and inevitable part of growing old. But in less developed societies where the problem of environmental noise is less acute, the elderly often experience little or no reduction in hearing. In our society, increasing numbers of teenagers, young adults and those in the prime of […]