Is conventional medicine always good for our health?

Does conventional Western medicine focus too much on treating symptoms and disease at the expense of dealing with the underlying causes of disease? If so, does that attitude lead sometimes to it doing as much – or greater – harm than the condition it is supposed to treat? That’s what I’ve been wondering after considering my personal experience of prostatitis and a strange – not to say alarming – case reported in The Sunday Telegraph recently.

Malcolm Brabant, a foreign correspondent at the BBC for thirty years, had a reaction to a standard vaccine that triggered psychosis. This was so severe that he believed he was first Jesus and then the Devil. He had to take so many drugs to suppress the symptoms of his psychotic episodes that, in his own words, “I was a one-man chemist’s shop.” His doctors told him he would have to continue taking them for the rest of his life, but he decided not to. “[S]ince then I have been gradually getting stronger and stronger”, Brabant says, and after nearly four years away he is back at work.

In my own case, I was diagnosed with prostatitis in September 2013 and prescribed antibiotics for ten days, during which time (as well as for a few weeks afterwards) I would feel better, then worse, then better and so on. A couple of months ago it recurred. According to Roger Mason, author of The Natural Prostate Cure: “[o]ften patients who receive no medical treatment recover as quickly as those who do.” Also: “these antibiotics harm the digestive system ... so the patient ends up in worse shape than ever.” Hardly a ringing endorsement of the standard treatment.

A study I read some time ago claimed that the death rate at an Israeli hospital actually reduced when the doctors went on strike! Furthermore, my mother once read a newspaper article about people who were more than a hundred years old. The one thing they had in common was that they had not been to doctors much in their lives.

I think that’s enough evidence to be thinking over. However, difficult though it may be to believe after reading the above paragraphs, I am not attacking conventional medicine – we certainly need it sometimes – but we need to be aware that there are often more effective (or less unpleasant) natural treatments. This means eating a healthier diet (consisting of more naturally produced foods), improving our environment and maybe taking supplements instead of prescribed drugs.

After all, as the saying goes: “You are what you eat.”