Articles

In this section there are copies of articles that have been written for various e-magazines one of which probably brought you to this site.

• Medical Miracles – Do they still happen today?
  
  Doctors are very wary about the idea of medical miracles but the idea of miraculous healing has been around for thousands of years. For those people who are facing terminal or severe chronic illness the desire for a miracle healing can be immense. Is this a legitimate hope or a false hope?
• Liver metastases and lived 20 years – how is that possible?
  
  Old Bill was a real character. He had been diagnosed with cancer of the colon and liver metastases, given a maximum life expectancy of eight weeks and yet he lived life to the full for a further 20 years. This is very, very unusual, so what made the difference?
• Spontaneous Remission – how do we do it?
  
  Spontaneous remission and the placebo effect are the often used explanations to explain medically unexpected recovery. However those who wish to explain away such totally unlikely recoveries as spontaneous remission completely miss the point. If just one person lives a good quality of life despite a terminal diagnosis then we should be learning from those people, not sticking another label on them as a pretend way of explaining what happened.
• Osteosarcoma with lung secondaries and lived more than another 40 years
  
  What can we learn from people who, medically speaking, should have died but didn’t? June is one of these. She was not expected to survive the cancer in her hip at 21, and certainly wasn’t expected to survive for decades after her first lung metastases occurred. She had less than one chance in 100, or even less than one chance in 1000 of surviving with an excellent quality of life. So how could that happen?
• Positive thinking for survival?
  
  People who are seriously or terminally ill are frequently exhorted to “stay positive”. Positive thinking has become a new creed for some. Is it necessary to be positive all the time for the best outcome?
• Natural healing: use the sun
  
  For years now we have been exhorted to avoid the sun, to cover up and to use sun screen so we can avoid getting skin cancer. However unfortunately it looks as though we have thrown the baby out with the bathwater. We desperately need some sun on our skin to make vitamin D, and a lot more of it than the doctors and health people have been recommending for a long time.
• Drug efficacy
  
  Doctors talk amongst themselves about patients’ unrealistic expectations about the effectiveness of drugs. Quite often this conversation is done with shaking of heads and often sarcasm in their voices. However it is time that we ask the question: Just who is being unrealistic? Why should the patient (or the country where socialized medicine pays or subsidizes the cost) pay for a drug that has a very low level of effectiveness?
• Effectiveness of drugs
  
  The words in the title about statistics are well known, usually in a slightly different version, but I feel it is a little unfair on statistics. However it is true that most of us don’t know how to interpret statistics and even if someone does know it might take a few minutes to sit down and decode what the figures are actually saying.
• Natural Health: Selenium, should we take it?
  
  Selenium is one of the minerals that is essential to health and it is a problem for those of us where our soils are deficient. There is much in the complementary health literature that says that selenium can prevent cancer, but is that the case? What does the research really say and what could that mean for each one of us?