Articles

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 […]

Menstruation was among the Victorian’s greatest obsessions. The term gynecology was coined early in the Victorian era to define the medical speciality of female disorders. Although we like to think that today’s medicine is a million miles from those days, in fact we have not progressed at all. Although we no longer diagnose “moon madness”, […]

Depression is one of the least well understood and least well tolerated (by others) emotional states in our culture. Broadly speaking, there are two types: unipolar, characterised by low moods only; and bipolar, characterised by extreme highs and lows, sometimes called manic-depression. Within these two broad categories are varying levels of severity and regularity. For […]

Half of all heart attack victims die after their first attack. The other half, more often than not, wander the earth in an imitation of life, popping pills and practising self denial. Heart attacks are scary, and the average victim doesn’t want a repeat. On this basis, many feel grateful for the bewildering array of […]

If you are suffering from what medicine calls ‘arthritis’, you could have any one of a hundred different kinds of illness, including everything from the most common – osteoarthritis and the crippling rheumatoid arthritis – to gout and fibromyalgia. While organisations such as the Arthritis Foundation pooh-pooh all but the most widely used conventional treatments, […]

This is a transcript of a talk given at the Royal Society of Medicine, Spring 1997 When I was first asked to speak tonight I was deeply flattered. I was also intrigued and challenged. I went first to my own library of books and research papers.  But couldn’t find what I was looking for.  I pillaged the files […]