The Health Detectives

If you’re on medication from your GP or hospital and you experience any side-effects, please go onto this website to register your side-effects and to warn others. This includes side-effects from vaccines.
http://yellowcard.mhra.gov.uk

Other people need to know in case they are thinking of going onto a certain drug. If they’re checking it out online, it’s because they’re in doubt and are looking to find anybody else’s experiences and any risk factors.

We place great trust in our GP’s skills, and nevertheless they often miss the proper diagnosis. Remember to challenge your GP’s findings or should we say assessment because often they’re only based on a quick look or palpation and your GP’s general knowledge. They often don’t do in-depth tests.

With just 10 minutes to spend with each patient, GPs have come to rely on educated guesswork. This is primarily due to the NHS system where the GP is only allocated 10 minutes per patient.

Remember going to the doctor is not the same as it used to be. Don’t take all that is said without challenging it. You know your body and you know how you feel. It is up to you to get the GP to understand what’s going on in your body and sometimes you may need to insist on a referral or further investigation to get anywhere. Get to feel and know your body so that you can take responsibility for your own health and thus be better armed to insist on the right treatment for you. This can sometimes be life-saving!

Inspired once again by some of our long suffering (literally) clients at the clinic – here are some thoughts I would like to share, and I am wondering what your experiences are out there. It seems there is a well trodden route or well established routine for getting people ON TO medication… with good intent etc….. but it seems there is a lack of system when it comes to taking people OFF their medication.

Many people tell us that they just have repeat prescriptions for months at a time , and then those are simply repeated, often without the patient even being checked by the prescribing doctors to see if the medications are still needed or even whether they have improved things.  For example recently, a woman in our clinic was on a medication for blood pressure, and had been on it repeatedly. It was only when the pharmacist told her that lots of people were having side effects on it and she should come off it, that she did go back to ask the doctor, who then put her onto something different. It seems as if the pharmacists are a safety check – so do go and talk to them if you can’t get to see your doctor.

We had asked if she got her blood pressure checked regularly because in our testing the medication didn’t appear to be doing anything, and we had found a natural remedy that according to the kinesiology testing seemed to sort out the blood pressure by correcting one of the causes of it. That was when she told us she hadn’t had her blood pressure checked for a long time.

This is consistent with what we hear about medication generally. Dead easy to get ON TO them and no one seems concerned about getting people OFF them.

So we find ourselves  suggesting to our patients that – as there is not much of a system it seems – for limiting the duration of many medications – that you actively challenge your GP with some basic questions… such as:

What am I on this for? (Many people are not sure though a lot of you manage to keep track of a LOT of medications – impressively I think).

How long would it be necessary to be on this to know if it is effective?

If this is not sorting the problem out in a reasonable time scale, what is the process for coming off it and what would I experience when doing so? A lot of people know the pills are not helping and yet are afraid to come off them. It seems there is an implicit message going on unconsciously from many GPs (not all) that says: it’s not making you better but don’t stop taking xyz or you WILL get worse!  Hmmm where could that lead?

If this medication is just controlling the symptoms, what have you in your plan for finding out and correcting the cause of the problem?  (Often it seems – reaching for the symptom control pills is as far as the thinking goes. It IS important to help people with the awful symptoms that can make day to day living a huge struggle… but at the same time, having a plan to get PAST that problem is surely much more sustainable than an open ended prescription (and hang the side effects)…

As my friend would say, dogs are for life, not pills … in most cases. To leave someone on something indefinately is like saying… there is no cure. I think it is time for those training doctors to examine the belief systems about wellness and getting well, and aiming for a drug free health – and if they were thinking that way more of the time – perhaps they would have a system for getting people off medication …not just on it. So please – if you feel you are on a conveyor belt which has no end, don’t assume there is a plan or an end – it seems all the NHS think tanks over the last decades have been looking the other way!

Our work focuses on finding causes and correcting the chemical toxicities or deficiencies that have lead to that symptom in the first place. But our work is often made harder by a really deeply held belief in many people that once they have an illness/disease etc, they are on pills for life…. that is it.  When we get their biochemistry back in balance and their smptoms go (which can take some time as symptoms may go last),  they often still believe they have their disease, because that is how it has been communicated to them.

So please – many illnesses are just a build up of toxicity or a deficiency which throws one of the body systems out, and once rebalanced, many problems do go away… and so should the disease label… AND the medication!

We are hoping to look into this with some GPs when we can and soon, so watch this space!