But in my unique position I know of lots of individuals who should have been OK (all the positive lifestyle factors in place) yet were not. It means there is still a lot to be learned.

Now, couple that with recent studies which purportedly showed that getting a shingles vaccination was partially protective against Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Do we care? What is it telling us? Are we impressed even?

Shingles you probably know is an extension of childhood chickenpox, caused by the varicella-zoster virus (aka. Herpes zoster). It becomes re-activated in later life as a burning, itchy sometimes painful, rash, which can usually be seen lying along the pathway of nerves. Not surprising, since the virus hangs out for years in the peripheral nerves.

One very painful outcome is a condition called post-herpetic neuralgia. Treatment for that has at times reached desperate measures, including repeatedly hitting the painful part with mallets when I was at med school! Personally, I always found that homeopathic Ranunculus did the job of clearing it very well.

Obviously then, because it’s unpleasant, shingles became a natural target for a vaccine. Eventually in 2017 we got Shingrix, from Glaxo-Smith-Kline. It is claimed to reduce the incidence of shingles in adults by over 90%.¹

So far, so good. Lots of profits for us and less pain and trouble for the patients!

Understand, these reductions are not massive (2-5% range) but it does indicate something is going on. But what?

Certainly the focus is on brain tissue. The varicella-zoster virus hangs out in the nervous system, as I said. Logically if there is a commotion of inflammation due to a latent virus, brain harm becomes a very real possibility. Blocking that virus from causing inflammation, as with a vaccine, makes sense.

Thus a study published June 16, 2026 in the Annals of Internal Medicine indicates 1 in 17 dementia cases could possibly be prevented by shingles vaccination. Patients in nursing facilities who had received at least one dose of the shingles vaccine within a year of admission had a 5.8% lower risk of developing dementia over the next four years, according to health records of more than 509,000 people, ages 66 and older, who had been admitted to U.S. nursing facilities from 2017 through 2022.²

A study of more than 282,000 older adults in Wales, published in Nature in 2025, found shingles vaccination was associated with a 3.5% reduction in dementia risk.³

Other studies have yielded comparable results. 

In reverse, a study published last year in the Journal of Prevention of Alzheimer’s Disease found that older adults in Italy, hospitalized with severe shingles, had a 13% higher risk of dementia compared to the general population!

Any Old Vaccine?

But here’s the thing. It doesn’t need to be a Herpes zoster vaccine. A startling recent study showed that having the BCG (anti-TB) vaccine also gave some protection against dementia!

It is known that BCG (and probably other vaccines) bolster what is known as “innate” immunity, that is the body’s anti-infection protection measures that do not depend on an antibody response. This very important mechanism is, of course, ignored by Big Pharma and vaccine manufacturers. It doesn’t fit their profit model.

They apply for approval based on tests which show that their vaccine induces antibodies. They don’t have to show it protects against any disease, as indeed is the case with measles, only that it produces antibodies. It’s a joke really. We can’t say how much good antibodies do but we can say YOU DON’T NEED THEM! Individuals with a condition called agammaglobulinemia, who are essentially void of B cells and so cannot produce any antibodies, nevertheless acquire normal antigen-specific memory T-cell responses, proving  that antibodies are not the sole basis of long-term immune memory.⁴

This demonstrates conclusively to me that innate or cellular immunity is far more powerful than “acquired” or antibody-based immunity. Yet doctors continually play down innate immunity.

BCG is known to induce “trained immunity,” a form of long-lasting reprogramming of innate immune responses of the non-antibody type. That’s slightly different from the memory of acquired immunity, as I say.

A pilot study provided evidence that BCG vaccination can alter immune activity not only in the blood, but also in immune cells found in the cerebrospinal fluid, the fluid which surrounds and bathes the brain and spinal cord.

“This study was not designed to show that BCG prevents or treats Alzheimer’s disease,” the lead author pointed out. “It was small, open-label, and designed to look at safety and biological mechanisms. But it gives us a biologically grounded rationale for testing whether immune training with BCG could be useful as an early prevention strategy for Alzheimer’s disease.”⁵

Beyond Plaques and Tau Proteins

The media—and you would think 90% of the medical profession—appear to be fixated on amyloid plaque and tau proteins as the “cause” of Alzheimer’s, which is nonsense.

In fact the abnormalities are likely the body’s own fight-back response and are therefore a good thing.

Alzheimer’s research suggests that the disease is really about immune aging, impaired clearance mechanisms, and chronic neuroinflammatory dysfunction. The role vaccines play in these processes is unclear, but a growing body of literature supports protective associations between vaccines targeting pathogens like influenza, pneumonia, or herpes zoster (shingles) and Alzheimer’s risk.

Yes, to cap it all, it is now emerging that the flu vaccine may give some protection against AD. One wonders where this is going to end!

In one particular study, they chose 65+ years individuals from 2009 to 2019 with a median follow up of 46 months. There were 935,887 matched pairs; 47,889 in the vaccinated group and 79,630 in the unvaccinated group. 5.1% of the vaccinated group developed AD and 8.5% in the unvaccinated group, showing a clear benefit for flu vaccination.

You could argue that was a 40% reduction of risk, which drug companies usually do. But really it is only a reduction of 3.4% overall.

It means we’d have to vaccinate 29 people to save one patient. Not so impressive.

But I’m bringing all this up about vaccines for a reason. A few years ago I raised the question: Is dementia something you “catch”; like a viral illness maybe? 

In 2016 I wrote about a series of fascinating studies highly suggestive of the fact that Herpes simplex #1 (HSV1) virus might be a contagious cause of AD. The work was done by Ruth Itzhaki, professor emeritus of molecular neurobiology at Britain’s University of Manchester (where I qualified in medicine!), and her figures were pretty persuasive. 

In March 2016, Itzhaki and a world-wide group of researchers published an editorial in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, asking the scientific community to consider a proposed link between Alzheimer’s and certain microbes, notably herpes simplex virus Type 1 (HSV-1), Chlamydia pneumoniae and spirochetes.⁶

Big Pharma wanted the research stifled because it was contrary to their amyloid plaque reduction drugs approach and resultant enormous profits.

Prof. Ruth Itzhaki made it to the prestigious Status List of leaders for 2025. I’ve been championing her work for over a decade. 

So although Itzhaki and her lab published their first paper in 1991 finding a clear HSV-1 link to Alzheimer’s and there have been over 100 published studies since then, from her lab and elsewhere, the research has gone nowhere.

Out of the $589 million allocated to Alzheimer’s research by the National Institutes of Health in 2015, exactly zero appeared to be spent on studying the proposed HSV-1 connection.

So they can go on saying “there’s no scientific proof” because there isn’t any; they are making sure of that.

Nearly all of us carry the Herpes simplex virus 1 or HSV-1 (the one that causes cold sores), our peripheral nervous system serves as its dormant nesting ground. From there, HSV-1 can reactivate and occasionally cause mild flare-ups of disease, typically when our immune system is overwhelmed due to stress or other infections. Itzhaki’s lab, however, found that by the time we reach our golden years, the virus often migrates to the brain, where it remains capable of resurrecting itself and wreaking a new sort of havoc when opportunity presents, such as when our immune system wavers in old age.

Itzhaki’s team has discovered the presence of HSV-1 in the telltale amyloid plaques used to diagnose Alzheimer’s, so I think she’s onto something here. 

It’s probably not a case of a straightforward viral presenting symptom but rather that viral and/or bacterial infections are just one ingredient in a soup of risk factors. But for Alzheimer’s, HSV-1 could be especially significant. Itzhaki has found that elderly people who carried both HSV-1 in the brain and the e-4 subtype of the APOE gene (responsible for creating a protein that helps transport cholesterol throughout the body) were 12 times more likely to develop Alzheimer’s than people without either. 

In a 1997 paper in The Lancet, Itzhaki’s group concluded that HSV-1 infection, in conjunction with APOE-e4, could account for about 60 percent of the Alzheimer’s cases they studied. Due to limited funds, however, her group was able to study only a relatively low number of cases.⁷

“If more funding had been available, more information would probably have been obtained, providing even more supportive data,” she says.

So, circling back to the vaccine benefit issue, I ask: is it possible that the vaccine brings on a more general immune response which leads to a reduction or slowing inflammation caused by other viruses, such as HSV-1?

In the case of the shingles vaccine, and if Itzhaki is right, then would it not make sense that giving an anti-Herpes shot could maybe calm or hold back inflammation due to a latent colony of the same family? And that vaccines aimed at other organisms, if they were effective via the cellular memory mechanism, could also, logically, bring about a certain degree of relief!

I think so. I hope so because, for all their clumsiness and stupid man-made additional dangers, vaccines essentially play to nature’s own skills!

Stay sharp!

Prof. Keith Scott-Mumby
The Official Alternative Doctor

References:

1. https://www.cdc.gov/shingles/vaccines/index.html
2. dos Reis S, et al “Reduced risk of dementia with recombinant zoster vaccine in US adults age 65 or older” Alzheimer’s Dement 2026; DOI: 10.1002/alz.71407. Please note this study was financed by GSK and had their people in key positions in the study.
3. Nature 641, 438–446 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-08800-x
4. Plebani A, et al. (1997). T cell activity and cytokine production in X-linked agammaglobulinemia. Clinical and Experimental Immunology. 109(2): 234–238
5. Weinberg MS, et al. “Bacillus Calmette–Guérin (BCG) immunotherapy reprograms CNS immunity and alters Alzheimer’s biomarkers: results from two open-label clinical trials” Commun Med 2026; DOI: 10.1038/s43856-026-01691-7
6. Microbes and Alzheimer’s Disease. Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, 51(4), 979–984. https://doi.org/10.3233/JAD-160152
7. The Lancet, 349(9047), 241–244. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(96)10149-5

Get your flu shot.

The reasoning sounds straightforward enough. Influenza can be unpleasant, sometimes dangerous, and vaccination is presented as the best available protection. But what if the story is not quite that simple? What if, in some circumstances, repeated vaccination could actually make you more vulnerable to future influenza infections?

That possibility has a name that sounds almost biblical: original antigenic sin.

The term was coined by American virologist and immunologist Thomas Francis Jr. in the 1960s.¹

It describes the tendency of your immune system to become “imprinted” by its first encounters with a virus. Instead of responding flexibly to new viral variants, the immune system may continue to rely on old immunological memories, even when they are no longer the best match for the threat at hand.

In other words, your immune system can become stuck in the past and therefore of less use to you in the present! (you won’t read this in press releases).

Scientists today often use the gentler term immune imprinting, but the principle remains the same. Repeated exposure to similar vaccine antigens may sometimes narrow the range of immune responses available when a genuinely different influenza strain appears.

This is no longer merely a theoretical concern.

A major prospective study conducted by researchers at the Cleveland Clinic during the 2024–2025 influenza season followed 53,402 healthcare employees over 25 weeks. More than 82% of participants received the seasonal flu vaccine. Using sophisticated statistical analysis, the investigators found something unexpected: vaccinated employees experienced a significantly higher rate of influenza infection than their unvaccinated colleagues.

The calculated vaccine effectiveness was minus 26.9%.

Put simply, those who received the vaccine had a 27% higher risk of contracting influenza during the study period than those who did not receive it. The difference was statistically significant and persisted throughout the observation period.² 

The authors themselves suggested immune imprinting and repeated annual vaccination as possible explanations.

This was not the first warning signal.

During the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, Canadian researchers reported that individuals who had received the seasonal influenza vaccine appeared to have an increased risk of infection with the novel pandemic strain. The findings generated considerable debate but have remained an important part of the scientific discussion surrounding immune imprinting and vaccine-induced susceptibility.³ 

None of this means influenza vaccines never work. In some years and for some populations they may offer meaningful protection. But it does challenge the simplistic assumption that more vaccination automatically equals more immunity.

Reality is often more complicated.

Safety concerns also deserve honest discussion. A wide range of adverse effects have been documented in the medical literature, including neurological, autoimmune, inflammatory, and hematological reactions. Most are uncommon, but they are real and should be part of any balanced risk-benefit assessment.

Yet while public health authorities devote enormous attention to vaccines, remarkably little attention is paid to alternatives that work through entirely different biological pathways.

One of the most intriguing is bovine colostrum.

Moo!

Colostrum is the first milk produced by mammals after giving birth. Rich in antibodies, immune factors, growth factors, lactoferrin, and signaling molecules, it serves as nature’s original immune support system.

For decades, researchers have investigated whether bovine colostrum could strengthen human immunity.

The results have been surprisingly impressive.

In 2007, researchers led by Gianni Cesarone studied high-risk cardiovascular patients and compared bovine colostrum supplementation with influenza vaccination. The findings were remarkable.

The colostrum group experienced significantly fewer episodes of influenza and respiratory illness. Overall protection appeared to be approximately three times greater than that achieved by vaccination. Even more striking, there were no hospital admissions in the colostrum group, while the vaccinated group experienced several hospitalizations and one death. Total healthcare costs associated with influenza and respiratory illness were reduced by approximately 70% among those taking colostrum.⁴ 

These are not trivial outcomes.

A follow-up investigation by Belcaro and colleagues in 2010 confirmed many of these benefits, again demonstrating substantial reductions in respiratory infections among individuals taking bovine colostrum.⁵ 

Why might colostrum work so well?

The answer lies in its fundamentally different mode of action.

Vaccines are highly specific. They attempt to train your immune system against predicted viral strains. If those predictions are accurate, protection may follow. If the virus changes substantially, effectiveness may fall.

Colostrum operates according to a different philosophy.

Rather than targeting a specific virus, it appears to strengthen the body’s overall immune competence.

It contains secretory immunoglobulins, especially IgA, which help defend mucosal surfaces such as the nose, throat, lungs, and digestive tract. It contains lactoferrin, a powerful iron-binding protein with antimicrobial and antiviral properties. It contains cytokines and growth factors that help regulate immune responses. 

It also supports the gut microbiome, increasingly recognized as a central player in immune resilience.

In effect, colostrum helps strengthen the terrain rather than chasing individual pathogens.

That distinction may be especially important in a world where viruses constantly mutate.

The obvious question is this: if the evidence is so promising, why don’t we hear more about it?

Think dollars. The global flu vaccine market was valued at nearly $8 billion in 2023 and is projected to exceed $17 billion within the next decade.

Bovine colostrum is a natural substance. The cost is for pennies. It cannot easily be patented. Without patent protection, there is little incentive for pharmaceutical companies to invest tens of millions of dollars in the large-scale clinical trials typically required for official policy endorsement.

That economic reality does not prove crooked dealings, but it certainly helps explain why some interventions receive enormous attention while others remain largely invisible.

The same pattern can be seen elsewhere.

Vitamin D supplementation reduced the risk of influenza A by 59% in Japanese schoolchildren receiving 1,200 IU daily in a randomized controlled trial but you never hear about such science!⁶  Published studies have also reported benefits from probiotics, elderberry, echinacea, ginseng, and green tea extracts in supporting resistance to respiratory infections.

Yet these approaches rarely occupy center stage in public health messaging.

The lesson here is not that vaccines are always bad and natural remedies are always good.

The lesson is that you deserve the whole picture and you are never going to get it from dyed-in-the-wool doctors who listen only to Pharma science.

When evidence suggests that repeated vaccination may sometimes produce immune imprinting and even negative effectiveness, that evidence deserves attention, not being buried.

When a natural intervention such as bovine colostrum demonstrates superior outcomes in published clinical studies, that evidence deserves attention too.

Your immune system is not a machine waiting for annual software updates.

It is a dynamic, adaptive, extraordinarily sophisticated living self-regulating system that’s been in place of millions of years (long before Big Pharma and its profit takeover of “science”.

Perhaps the future of influenza prevention lies not in endlessly trying to outguess mutating viruses, but in learning how to strengthen the remarkable immune intelligence you already possess?

In other words, enhancing the terrain!

Prof. Keith Scott-Mumby
The Official Alternative Doctor

References

1. Francis T Jr. On the doctrine of original antigenic sin. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society. 1960;104(6):572-578.
2. Shrestha NK, et al. Effectiveness of the Influenza Vaccine During the 2024–2025 Respiratory Viral Season. Cleveland Clinic cohort study, 2025.
3. Skowronski DM, De Serres G, Crowcroft NS, et al. Association between the 2008–09 seasonal influenza vaccine and pandemic H1N1 illness during spring–summer 2009: four observational studies from Canada. PLoS Medicine. 2010;7(4).
4. Cesarone MR, Belcaro G, Di Renzo A, et al. Prevention of influenza episodes with colostrum compared with vaccination in healthy and high-risk cardiovascular subjects. Clinical and Applied Thrombosis/Hemostasis. 2007;13(2):130-136.
5. Belcaro G, Cesarone MR, Dugall M, et al. Prevention of flu episodes with colostrum compared with vaccination in healthy and high-risk cardiovascular subjects. Clinical and Applied Thrombosis/Hemostasis. 2010;16(5):530-534.
6. Urashima M, Segawa T, Okazaki M, Kurihara M, Wada Y, Ida H. Randomized trial of vitamin D supplementation to prevent seasonal influenza A in schoolchildren. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. 2010;91(5):1255-1260.

The idea originates with the founder of homeopathy, Samuel Hahnemann (1745  – 1853, who after decades of clinical observation became troubled by a recurring phenomenon: patients improved beautifully under carefully selected remedies, only to relapse months or years later, often into entirely different forms of illness. It seemed as if some deeper layer beneath the visible symptoms remained untouched.

This led Hahnemann into one of the boldest conceptual leaps in medical history. He proposed that beneath chronic disease lay fundamental constitutional taints or inherited energetic dysregulations—miasms—which shaped how disease expressed itself.

I think of these as disease “shadows” that color the patient’s life, bringing darkness from the past, carrying it forward through families and generations.

In his great work, The Chronic Diseases (1828), Hahnemann proposed three primary miasms: psora, sycosis, and syphilis. Later generations of homeopaths added others, particularly the tuberculosis (I agree there) and cancerinic (carcinominum) patterns. I’m not quite so sure about that one.

Candida and sugar miasm I have also heard suggested, which borders on silly!

Psora was regarded by Hahnemann as the primordial disturbance, the mother of chronic disease. Not simply “itch” in the literal dermatological sense, though he traced it historically through suppressed skin eruptions, psora represented insufficiency, striving, hypersensitivity, insecurity, lack, and chronic vulnerability. The psoric individual often feels incomplete, anxious about survival, fearful of failure, or driven by perpetual striving. Physically, psora manifests through functional disturbances more than destructive pathology: allergies, itching conditions, digestive irregularities, fatigue, nervousness, hypersensitivity, and fluctuating symptoms.

Many great homeopaths came to view psora almost philosophically—as humanity’s estrangement from natural harmony.

The great American homeopath James Tyler Kent described psora as “the beginning of all sickness,” linking it not merely to skin conditions but to disturbed vitality itself.

Then comes sycosis, classically associated with suppression and excess. Historically linked to gonorrheal infection and its suppression, the sycotic miasm is characterised by overgrowth, concealment, accumulation, and rigidity. Warts, cysts, fibroids, polyps, thickened tissues, oedema, obesity, rheumatism, and secretiveness all fit within the sycotic sphere.

Sycosis miasm is often conflated with medorrhinum, a remedy derived from gonorrhea.

Psychologically, sycosis often expresses itself through hidden shame, guardedness, fixed ideas, compulsions, or the sense of carrying a secret burden. The sycotic patient may compensate excessively—becoming flamboyant, exaggerated, overbuilt, or defensive.

One of the great insights of miasmatic thinking is that symptoms are symbolic as well as physical. The body speaks in metaphor. The sycotic organism “covers,” “thickens,” “stores,” and “conceals.”

The syphilitic miasm is different again. Here we enter the realm of destruction, degeneration, breakdown, nihilism, and collapse. Associated historically with syphilis, but extending far beyond the infection itself, the syphilitic current expresses as ulceration, deformity, tissue destruction, violence, congenital malformation, suicidal despair, psychosis, and self-annihilation.

Where psora struggles and sycosis defends, syphilis destroys.

In emotional terms, syphilitic states may manifest as hopelessness, obsession with death, profound self-loathing, or destructive impulses turned inward or outward. Physically one sees degeneration: aneurysms, ulceration, bone destruction, severe neurological pathology, and congenital defects.

Yet homeopaths never viewed these as merely “bad” categories. They are patterns of imbalance, yes—but also maps of human struggle.

Later practitioners elaborated these themes enormously. J. H. Allen expanded the miasmatic concept in The Chronic Miasms, exploring inherited tendencies across generations. John Henry Clarke linked miasms with constitutional prescribing and chronic susceptibility.

Then came the tubercular miasm, perhaps one of the most poetically tragic of all. Tuberculosis haunted the nineteenth century like a ghostly fire. Homeopaths perceived in tubercular patients a profound restlessness: longing for change, dissatisfaction with confinement, romantic idealism, burning vitality alternating with exhaustion.

The tubercular type wants freedom above all.

There is intensity, creativity, travel hunger, sensitivity to beauty, rapid burnout, and continual dissatisfaction with limitation. Physically this pattern may include recurrent respiratory infections, allergies, fine-boned physiques, night sweats, fluctuating energy, and rapid metabolism.

It is almost the miasm of the wandering soul.

Then there is the possible cancerinic miasm, articulated most fully in the twentieth century. This pattern often develops in individuals exposed to extreme pressure, domination, perfectionism, emotional suppression, or impossible expectations. Cancerinic constitutions frequently appear conscientious, refined, overly responsible, dutiful, self-controlled, and eager to please.

The keynote is control.

Everything must be held together. Chaos is intolerable. Emotion is restrained. The individual may live under immense internal pressure for years before collapse occurs.

Physically, cancerinic patterns are linked not only with malignancy but with chronic fatigue, insomnia, hormonal disorders, autoimmune tendencies, eating disorders, and nervous exhaustion.

Some modern homeopaths have proposed additional miasms linked with newer disease states—malarial, ringworm, leprosy, AIDS-related patterns, and more. Rajan Sankaran notably developed an expanded miasmatic framework integrating mental and behavioural themes with remedy states. His work helped bring miasmatic understanding into a more contemporary psychological language.

What makes miasmatic theory so enduring is that it attempts to explain why people react differently to the same circumstances. Why does one individual develop eczema while another develops arthritis? Why does grief destroy one person physically yet deepen another spiritually? Why do certain family lines repeat the same illnesses, fears, addictions, or emotional dramas generation after generation?

Miasms propose that beneath the visible disease lies a terrain of susceptibility.

In this sense, the theory parallels ancient ideas from many cultures. Ayurveda speaks of constitutional imbalance through doshas. Traditional Chinese medicine describes inherited weakness through organ systems and jing essence. Even modern epigenetics, though operating in entirely different language, acknowledges that trauma, stress, toxins, and environment may influence inherited biological expression across generations; an effect we call epigenetics.

Homeopathy approaches this terrain symbolically, energetically, and constitutionally.

Importantly, miasms are not viewed as fixed mandates. They are tendencies. Patterns. Like weather systems within consciousness and biology. A skilled constitutional prescription seeks not merely to palliate symptoms but to untangle these deep inherited knots.

Clinically, many experienced homeopaths report that true cure often involves layers of miasmatic unfolding. A patient may move from destructive pathology toward superficial skin eruptions; from despair toward anxiety; from rigidity toward emotional fluidity. Old symptoms may briefly reappear in reverse order before resolving. Hahnemann himself considered this movement outward—from deeper organs toward the skin and periphery—as a sign of genuine healing.

Miasmatic analysis also transformed remedy understanding. Remedies themselves came to be associated with dominant miasmatic tendencies. For example:

Psoric remedies: Sulphur, Psorinum, Lycopodium
Sycotic remedies: Thuja, Medorrhinum, Natrum sulphuricum
Syphilitic remedies: Mercurius, Syphilinum, Aurum metallicum
Tubercular remedies: Tuberculinum, Phosphorus, Calcarea phos.

Yet great practitioners of homeopathy caution against simplistic categorization. Human beings are rarely pure expressions of one miasm. Most people contain blended currents, shifting throughout life according to stress, trauma, relationships, nutrition, environment, and spiritual development.

Generalizations are always a bit dangerous but it can be suggested in outline that someone with 4 or 5 full-on miasms will likely die by the age of twenty. With just 3, he or she will pass in their thirties or forties. With just 2, he or she should make it to the 50s and 60s and with just one miasm, good chance of breaking the eighty years barrier!

Generalizations are tricky but the essential notion was that the greater the miasmatic complexity or layering within an individual, the shorter and more burdened the lifespan was likely to be. In other words, the organism could only compensate for so many deep chronic taints before vitality collapsed.

Older homeopaths often spoke of “mixed miasms” with a kind of grave respect. A person carrying strong psoric instability combined with destructive syphilitic tendencies, sycotic overgrowth, tubercular dissipation, and later perhaps cancerinic suppression, was thought to possess a profoundly conflicted vital force.

Interestingly, some contemporary longevity science ends up circling similar territory from another direction. Multiple overlapping systems in chronic dysregulation—immune, mitochondrial, inflammatory, neurological—do indeed correlate with earlier morbidity and mortality. The old homeopaths expressed this symbolically through miasms rather than biomarkers.

There was also a deeper philosophical idea underneath it all: that vitality is finite unless renewed. The more fragmented the vital force becomes, the harder it is for the organism to maintain coherent order.

Seen this way, miasms become more than medical categories. They become lenses through which to understand culture, psychology, and collective evolution.

Sources and classic texts worth revisiting:

George Vithoulkas. The Science of Homeopathy. New York: Grove Press; 1980.
Ortega PS. Notes on the Miasms. Mexico City: Homeopathic Medical Publishing.

And there is a great section on miasms in my own masterpiece Medicine Beyond.

Truly, miasms are one of those strange crossroads where medicine, mythology, inheritance, psychology, and spiritual pattern-recognition all sit around the same fire drinking strong coffee and arguing about destiny!

Go learn more…

To your good health,

Prof. Keith Scott-Mumby
The Alternative Doctor

We are creatures of earth, sunlight, wind, water, movement, and seasons. Every cell in the body was shaped under open skies. Human physiology evolved not in sealed rooms under artificial light, but outdoors—walking uneven ground, breathing living air, rising with dawn, resting with darkness, touched daily by sunlight, weather, plants, soil, and the countless subtle biological exchanges that happen between body and environment. The modern world has brought extraordinary convenience, but convenience often comes with invisible biological costs.

Many people now wake indoors, work indoors, travel enclosed in vehicles, exercise indoors, shop indoors, and spend evening hours bathed in blue light from screens before sleeping in air-conditioned rooms cut off from the rhythms of the natural world. The body, ancient in design though modern in setting, quietly pays attention to all of this. It registers light, darkness, temperature, movement, microbial exposure, air quality, and environmental texture in ways both conscious and unconscious. When these inputs become artificial, limited, or absent, health can begin to drift.

Sunlight is perhaps one of the clearest examples of “nature deficiency”. It has emerged as an important, if not THE most important nourishment. Natural sunlight helps regulate circadian rhythms—the internal biological clock that governs sleep, hormones, metabolism, immune function, and mood. Morning light exposure helps anchor healthy cortisol release, supports melatonin production later in the day, and improves sleep quality at night. Sunlight also stimulates vitamin D production, which influences bone health, immune resilience, inflammation control, muscle function, and even mental wellbeing. 

Yet modern life has turned many people into near-permanent indoor dwellers, living under electric light while becoming starved of one of biology’s oldest medicines.

Fresh air is another forgotten nutrient. Outdoor air, especially in natural environments, often contains compounds released by trees and plants, beneficial airborne microbes, richer oxygen dynamics, and far fewer indoor pollutants than many homes and offices. 

Research on forest exposure—sometimes called forest bathing (Japanese shinrin-yoku) —has shown reductions in stress hormones, improvements in mood, enhanced immune activity, and measurable calming effects on the nervous system. Time among trees appears to do more than relax the mind; it nourishes physiology itself.

Then there is movement—not exercise in the narrow modern sense of gym sessions and fitness routines, burpees and the like, but natural movement woven throughout daily life. Walking, stretching, bending, carrying, climbing, balancing, and simply being physically engaged with the world are profoundly regulating to metabolism, circulation, joints, muscles, lymphatic flow, and brain health. Human bodies were built for regular, varied movement, not prolonged sitting interrupted by brief bursts of exercise. Sedentary indoor life creates stagnation that the body interprets as dysfunction.

You may have heard the phrase: sitting is the new smoking.

Contact with nature also shapes the immune system in remarkable ways. Soil microbes, plant compounds, diverse environmental bacteria, and exposure to biodiverse outdoor ecosystems help educate and regulate immune responses. Some researchers believe the explosion in allergies, autoimmune disorders, and inflammatory illness may partly reflect immune systems raised in overly sanitized, biologically narrow environments. We have reduced our contact with the microbial richness that helped shape healthy immunity across human history. [The so-called Hygiene Hypothesis, which I utterly believe in).

Our bodies are an entire ecosystem and our obsession with sanitizing it leads to a collapse of a healthy system. I’m not advocating you turn up to the table with dirty hands and fingernails… well, maybe! (depends what you’ve been handling). But I remember as a kid on the farm; we’d wipe the cow shit off our hands just by rubbing them against our pants and ate our sandwiches with greenish fingers! (much to mother’s dismay) But I was never sick, except for the usual (measles, chicken pox, etc.)

Nature also heals something less measurable but equally important—the mind’s burden. The modern nervous system is overstimulated by noise, screens, speed, social pressure, information overload, and relentless artificial input. Nature offers something radically different: complexity without demand. A forest, coastline, meadow, or garden engages the senses gently rather than aggressively. The nervous system softens. Attention broadens. Thought slows. The body receives cues of safety. Blood pressure drops. Muscles unclench. Breathing deepens. The mind remembers another pace of being.

This is not romantic nostalgia. Actually it is biology.

What Can You Do?

The remedy does not require abandoning modern life or moving to a mountain cabin—though a cabin by a lake has undeniable charm. Healing can begin with small, deliberate acts of rewilding daily life. Step outside early and let morning light touch your eyes. Walk among trees. Open windows. Grow plants indoors and outdoors. Put bare feet on grass or sand if you enjoy it. 

My advice? Eat food that comes from living soil rather than industrial chemistry. Spend time where birdsong replaces traffic noise. Let your skin feel weather. Watch a sunrise. Sit beneath a tree with no agenda. Allow yourself moments not optimized for productivity.

These are not luxuries. They are forms of nourishment. We really are suffering from a “nature deficiency.”

Modern health conversations often revolve around supplements, medications, lab tests, and complex interventions. Some are valuable. But alongside them sits a simpler truth: many people are deficient not only in nutrients, but in sunlight, fresh air, natural movement, microbial diversity, quiet, beauty, and contact with the living world.

Perhaps one of the great health frontiers of our time is not discovering something entirely new but remembering something very old—that human beings are not separate from nature. We are expressions of it. 

And when we return, even briefly, to the rhythms and textures that shaped us, the body often responds with a quiet sigh of recognition, as if saying, Yes… this is what I remember.

What can I do during the workday to offset sitting all day? 

Andrew Dorsey, MS, an Exercise Physiologist at The Mount Sinai Physiolab and  Clinical Research Coordinator at Mount Sinai’s Department of Environmental Medicine, recommends to have about 150 minutes of moderate intensity physical activity per week.¹ That may seem like a lot, but it is manageable when you break it down. If you took three, five-minute breaks during a workday, five days a week, that’s 75 minutes. That’s already half of what you’re aiming for. 

You can incorporate movement in short, simple ways:  

• Get up from your desk, walk around, stretch, even walk in place. Just standing while you read something or take a phone call can help. It adds up over time. 

• Hold a conversation or meeting standing up!

• Make the conscious decision to take the stairs, rather than the elevator, can make a difference. If you take the stairs once a week, that is a meaningful change. You don’t have to do it daily to see benefits. 

Live better. Live longer!

Prof. Keith Scott-Mumby
The Official Alternative Doctor

References:

1. https://health.mountsinai.org/blog/why-sitting-is-the-new-smoking-how-to-combat-the-health-effects-of-sitting-all-day/

I stand by my position. But there have been interesting developments and orthodoxy is getting interested in the issue. Maybe it’s the microbiome? There are some genetic traits (they always trot those out, as if it’s some kind of magic rite) but not enough to explain all cases. But certainly there are environmental factors too.

I agree with that!

But what interest is this to us Boomers and Oldies? Actually more than you think. Yes there has been a surge in younger kids (under 50). But we are all vulnerable to this particular grotesque tumor.

Colorectal cancer (to give it its full title) is the third-leading cause of cancer-related deaths in men and the fourth leading cause in women, but it’s the second most common cause of cancer deaths when numbers for men and women are combined. It’s expected to cause about 55,230 deaths during 2026.¹

From 2013 to 2022, incidence rates dropped by about 1% each year. But this downward trend is mostly in we older adults. In people younger than 50 years of age, rates have increased by a staggering 2.9% per year from 2013 to 2022 (as I said earlier, starting long before COVID on the mRNA vaccines which conspiracy theorists like to blame). In adults aged 50-64, the rate has increased by 0.4% per year during this time.

So it’s a real worry. And you should pay attention.

Prof. Note: Look, there are 4 main causes of disease: environmental, degeneration, genetics and malnutrition. “Faulty nutrition” would be a better term than malnutrition, since most people in the West overeat but are still malnourished. Microbes, parasites, viruses and other infections, don’t forget, are environmental in origin, meaning “in the environment, coming from outside”.

Thing is, the smart scientists are now looking at the microbiome as a real danger zone. Ironically, that is an environmental issue, since the gut is really, technically, “outside” our bodies (you could pass a string from the mouth to the opposite end, so we are really a donut!)

So is food an environmental factor. Our ultra-processed diets, plus the wrong—possibly toxic—microbes living within constitute a major environmental threat. Throw in the toxic chemical burdens, especially those which contaminate our food, and we have a problem. A BIG problem.

No question: the term “turbo-cancers” fits well with what is happening in our colons; just that the assumed cause is wrong and environmental factors are more likely to blame (yes, yes, a vaccine would technically be an “environmental” insult. But let’s not get tricky here).

Ohio State University oncologist Ning Jin has declared herself alarmed by the number of patients in their 30s and 40s with late-stage cancer in their lower digestive tract. It’s not just that these patients are decades younger than what had been typical for colorectal cancer; Jin says the tumors themselves are also more stubborn to treat.

“Even though we treat young patients with more aggressive chemo — more chemo or more surgery — patients’ outcomes are not necessarily better,” Jin says. And the disease has become the top cancer killer among people under 50 — even as death rates decline in older age groups, as I said.

It is highly unusual to see dramatic changes in disease patterns within a single generation. But that’s precisely what veteran oncologist Dr. John Marshall, head of clinical research at the Lombardi Cancer Center at Georgetown University, has observed.

“Thirty-plus years ago, when I first started, no one — no one; zero number of patients — were in my clinic under the age of 50 with colon cancer,” he says. “And now it is almost half of the patients that I see.”

That’s a staggering shift in demographics. Marshall says there are other changes in disease pattern, too: Earlier onset tumors tend to show up differently — more tumors are found near the rectum, lower in the tract.

Doctors claim that advances in science in recent years have made many cancers more treatable and survivable — but not colorectal cancer, which has become more lethal, striking people at younger ages. And it’s occurring more often too.

Increasingly, doctors suspect that the gut’s microbiome is a key factor behind these forms of cancer in particular.

Genetics plays some role in colorectal cancers. Dr. Jin says as many as a fifth of patients have hereditary markers — like a genetic mutation for Lynch syndrome — that increase the risk of getting colorectal cancer, among others. But genetics do not explain what drives the vast majority of cases — about 80% of colorectal cancers.

So Jin and others have concluded: “There must be some environmental factors or changes.”

“The way I think of it is, it’s our soil; it’s a very important part of our interface with the world,” Dr. Marshall says, because digestive organs’ primary role is to help incorporate the things we eat into our bodies.

“What I think is that we have somehow altered the soil in some way so that it’s now causing this phenomenon of colon cancer,” he says. “It may be causing other diseases, too. But the most striking one is colon cancer.”

Smart thinkers suspect several factors may be leading to these more frequent, virulent cancers: One is our greater reliance on ultra-processed foods, as well as plastics and chemicals that can leach into water and our bodies. Plus, there are other notable lifestyle changes: As a population, we are not as active as we used to be.

Let’s list those:

• Ultra-processed foods

• Plastics from the environment

• Chemical pollution

• Not so active

All of those factors act on our gut and can trigger widespread changes in the microbiome (the bacteria and myriad microorganisms living there). And a disturbed microbiome may contribute to colorectal cancer. 

Escherichia coli or E. coli is a part of family of bacteria that are commonly found in the human gut. Scientists found that a toxin the bacteria release is linked to some cases of colorectal cancer. Colibactin, from certain strains of E. coli and other bacteria, causes DNA damage, which could well be a precursor of cancerous changes.

Trouble is, it’s incredibly difficult to study the microbiome and it effects; it’s so VAST in scope. There are trillions of organisms down there, all sharing their own genes. It amounts to just one thing: you need to take care of your microbiome; I mean, seriously!

What Can We Do?

To keep the human microbiome thriving, the broad aim is simple: feed the beneficial organisms, avoid carpet-bombing them, and maintain the body’s natural rhythms.

1. Eat a wide diversity of plant foods—aim for 30+ different vegetables, fruits, herbs, nuts, seeds, legumes, and whole grains each week. Diversity feeds diversity.

2 Prioritize fibre-rich foods: oats, beans, lentils, onions, garlic, leeks, asparagus, artichokes, flaxseed, chia, apples, berries. Jerusalem artichokes are stars!

3. Include fermented foods regularly: Yogurt, Kefir, Sauerkraut, Kimchi, miso, tempeh, kombucha (if tolerated).

4. Eat polyphenol-rich (brightly colored) foods—these are microbial fertiliser: blueberries, pomegranate, cocoa, green tea, olives, extra virgin olive oil, colourful veggies, spices.

5. Spend time in nature— soil microbes, plants, forests, and even gardening increase exposure, especially to a very valuable microbe called Mycobacterium vaccae. It has become famous because research suggests it may help regulate immunity and positively influence mood and stress resilience.2 Get your hands dirty!

6. Avoid unnecessary antibiotics; as you know, they can dramatically reduce microbial diversity for months or longer.

7. Limit ultra-processed foods—emulsifiers, artificial sweeteners, preservatives, and low-fiber processed diets may disrupt gut ecology. Yuck. Who would eat this crap anyway?

8. Get enough omega-3 fats: walnuts, flax, chia, oily fish.

9. Correct low vitamin D if present; it influences gut immunity and microbiome balance.

10. Stay hydrated; microbes like a well-hydrated intestinal environment.

11. Chew food thoroughly; digestion begins in the mouth, and the oral microbiome matters too.

12. Reduce smoking and heavy alcohol use—they strongly disturb microbial balance. Better still STOP!

13. Don’t forget good sleep and adequate exercise. They too play a vital role.

And remember: the microbiome is less like a machine and more like a rainforest: richness, variety, and steady care make it flourish.

To your good health!

Prof. Keith Scott-Mumby
The Official Alternative Doctor.

References:

1. https://www.cancer.org/cancer/types/colon-rectal-cancer/about/key-statistics.html
2. Holbrook EM, Zambrano CA, Wright CTO, et al. Mycobacterium vaccaeNCTC 11659, a Soil-Derived Bacterium with Stress Resilience Properties, Modulates the Proinflammatory Effects of LPS in Macrophages. Int J Mol Sci. 2023;24(6):5176. Published 2023 Mar 8. doi:10.3390/ijms24065176

True to its ridiculous history of attacking anything they didn’t think of first, medical orthodoxy has always viciously impugned any suggestion that electrical healing has validity and it’s been labeled charlatanism for the best part of a century. Now they are having to eat humble pie and admit that claims, all along, had some validity albeit in a rather hit and miss fashion until the advent of modern scientific trials.

We’re now learning to speak the electrical language of the body – and using it to develop treatments for diseases from arthritis to diabetes and possibly even cancer.

It’s no surprise to me, of course, nor should it be to anyone who knows of Robert O. Becker’s classic book The Body Electric. He first wrote vividly about experiments with salamanders, in which correctly applied electrical currents could stimulate the remarkable regrowth of whole limbs.¹ 

I predicted in the first edition of Virtual Medicine that this is the direction healing would be going and introduced the revolutionary Russian SCENAR device, which swept the world as a result. We’ll see more about that device in a subsequent chapter.

Cell migration and multiplication plays a key role in development and healing. Most research in this area, true to form, has been on chemical factors, totally ignoring the energy element (bioelectromagnetism). Now several studies have shown that applying electric fields can affect cell migration and division as well. 

Cells and tissues essentially function as chemical batteries, with positively charged potassium ions and negatively charged chloride ions flowing across membranes. This creates electric field patterns all over the body. When tissue is wounded this disrupts the battery, effectively short-circuiting it. 

Take, for example, a Scottish study, at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, looking into repair of the cornea (in the eye).

In a healthy eye, cells pump positively charged ions into the cornea and push negatively charged ions out, creating an electrical potential of 40 millivolts. But in damaged areas this voltage disappears, setting up an electric field between the damaged area and the surrounding corneal tissue. By enhancing or diminishing this electric field, scientists found they could speed up or slow down the rate of healing.² 

The conclusion: the electric field is the primary driver of the healing process. As one of the researchers stated, it’s a big step forward to realize that fields play an important part in healing. They are just so far behind the pioneers in this! ³ 

Nowhere is the old adage more true than in this domain of bioelectromagnetic fields and healing, that discovery goes through four stages; 

1. It’s quackery and nonsense 

2. There might be something in it 

3. There might be something in it but where’s the proof? 

4. We knew that all along!

A Little History

Electrotherapy has a long history. William Gilbert, the Cambridge mathematician who later read medicine and became Queen Elizabeth’s court physician in 1600, experimented with static electricity.

In 1757 John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, wrote in his diary of prescribing treatment with a specially made electrostatic machine for people “ill of various disorders: some of whom found an immediate, some a gradual cure”.

In 1882 James Wimshurst invented the machine bearing his eponymous name. 

By the end of the 19th century, the work of Faraday and many others had produced a host of convenient ways of generating electricity of various kinds: electrostatic, direct current and low-frequency and high-frequency alternating currents. Each had its advocates and to each was ascribed marvelous healing powers for every conceivable medical situation.

Magnetos proved more convenient to use than the Wimshurst and other electrostatic machines, which tended to be temperamental and intolerant of dust. Catalogues of the General Electric Company in the late 19th century had a number of such devices. Its 1893 catalogue illustrates nine magnetos, ranging from one 20 centimetres long, boxed in pine, to the Phoenix, boxed in mahogany with a dial “to measure strength”. Assorted electrodes “for foot, tooth, and ear, with plated handles” were available for the device.

Crank the handle and it generates a low-voltage alternating current. Instructions inside the lid claim that, when wound at the speed “most agreeable to the patient”, this magneto will treat no fewer than 50 ailments, from weak eyes to spinal and nervous diseases, debility, fits, paralysis and gout.

Another type of device was the induction coil, originally developed to detonate explosive charges. By 1888, GEC was offering induction coil apparatus for medical use, complete with bichromate battery, in a wooden case. By 1890 their range had grown to 10 models, with many variants, and electrodes engineered to treat particular parts of the body, from eye muscles to the spine. 

Early in the 20th century so-called “hydroelectric baths” became fashionable. A wooden or porcelain bath was fitted with plate electrodes. Sometimes medicines were added to the bathwater in the belief that the patient would thereby receive whole-body treatment through the skin, cataphoresis as it was called. Knowing what I know now, all these devices make sense and although they were not subject to modern-style scientific trials, there is little question they had benefit to some, at least equivalent to today’s pharmaceutical drugs.

I was pleasantly surprise in my research to find that the famous Mayfair chemists John Bell and Croydon, just around the corner from my former Harley Street clinic, at one time carried a range of electrotherapy devices. They even had their own workshop, making induction coil machines tailored to what the doctor wanted for his patients in terms of output, portability and price, and the electrodes necessary to deliver the current where it was needed.

Historically, as far back as 1890, the American Electro-Therapeutic Association conducted annual conferences on the therapeutic use of electricity and electrical devices by physicians on ailing patients.

The effect of an electrical current on the body depends on its intensity. At 25 milliamps, the current, if it lasts for about 20 seconds, can stop the heart beating, so they are not inherently safe (the electric chair operates on this principle). But below 10 milliamps, whether direct current from a battery or an alternating current at ordinary mains frequencies (50 to 60 hertz), the current can create a rather pleasing tingle.

Writing in New Scientist, David Fishlock, an avid collector of these early devices, tells us that in the 1920s, a version of the Tesla apparatus (see below), known as Roger’s Vitalator, began to make its appearance in barbers’ shops as a way of treating minor ailments, including bald patches and dandruff. The barber would fit one of a number of glass tubes into an ebonite holder and switch on, whereupon sparks sizzled from the tube to scratch and tickle the pate. The maker recommended it for 127 conditions, including sexual debility, impotence and breast development. That’s barbers for you!⁴ 

Fishlock asks the question: do black boxes emitting electricity or rays have a serious place in medicine? There is no doubt that the early inventions attracted the “snake-oil merchants”. As early as 1882, Silvanus Thompson, a fellow of the Royal Society and president of the Institution of Electrical Engineers, warned of the “gross impositions of the quacks and rogues who deal in the so-called magnetic appliances and disgrace alike the science of electricity and medicine while knowing nothing of either”. 

We shouldn’t worry. Don’t forget Lord Kelvin (1824-1907), the greatest scientist of his day, declared that x-rays were a hoax!

To learn about one of the most remarkable modern electronic healing devices available in the modern world (the Avazzia) go here.

[We’ll try and get the old purchase link, with its special discount, in case you want to purchase one]

And for amazing psychological transformations, again due to modern electronic wizardry, go here.

To your good health (and superior wisdom!),Prof. Keith Scott-Mumby
The Alternative Doctor

References

1. Robert O. Becker, The Body Electric, Morrow, New York, 1985, pp. 994-102
2. Nature, vol 442, p 457
3. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (DOI:10.1073/ pnas202235299)
4. New Scientist, 1957, 24 December 1994, p.58

Measuring Biological Aging

There is no single dial on the body that reads “You are 47.3 years old, biologically speaking.” Instead, we triangulate. We infer. We listen to multiple systems at once and look for points of convergence.

That said, we can now go far beyond the guesswork of old.

The first thing to understand is that biological age is not one thing. It is a composite signal emerging from many interacting systems. Any attempt to measure it with a single marker is guaranteed to be incomplete. Accuracy comes not from perfection, but from overlap—when different measures, drawn from different layers of biology, begin to tell the same story.

Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man re-imagined!

One of the most powerful approaches currently in use is epigenetic aging. This is based on DNA methylation patterns—chemical tags that sit on DNA and regulate which genes are turned on or off. These patterns change predictably with biological aging, but crucially, they change faster or slower depending on lifestyle, stress, illness, trauma, and environment.

Epigenetic clocks—such as those developed by Steve Horvath and others—compare an individual’s methylation profile to large population datasets to estimate biological age. When someone’s epigenetic age is higher than their calendar age, it correlates strongly with increased disease risk, frailty, and mortality. When it is lower, it correlates with resilience and longevity.

What makes epigenetic clocks compelling is not that they measure time, but that they measure cellular memory. They capture the imprint of lived experience on gene regulation. This is why they respond to interventions—diet, exercise, stress reduction, sleep, even psychosocial changes. The clock can slow. Sometimes it ticks backward.

Another major axis of measurement involves inflammatory burden. Chronic, low-grade inflammation—often called inflammaging—is one of the strongest drivers of biological aging. Markers such as C-reactive protein, interleukin-6, tumor necrosis factor-alpha, fibrinogen, and white blood cell ratios reveal whether the immune system is in a state of calm vigilance or chronic activation.

An immune system stuck in alert mode ages tissues faster. It degrades collagen, damages blood vessels, disrupts insulin signaling, and interferes with repair. Elevated inflammatory markers often predict biological age more accurately than calendar age ever could. 

The importance of the immune system is such that over 35 years ago, I wrote: “We live just as long as our immune systems will allow us”.

That came from the observation of AIDS victims, whose immune systems collapsed. They aged frighteningly fast, often dying within months but suddenly looking decades older.

Then there is metabolic age, which quietly governs how efficiently the body turns fuel into life. Measures like fasting insulin, insulin sensitivity (HOMA-IR), triglyceride-to-HDL ratios, HbA1c, lactate thresholds, and resting metabolic flexibility give insight into how “old” the metabolic machinery is behaving.

Cardiovascular measures also serve as remarkably accurate proxies for biological age. Arterial stiffness, pulse wave velocity, blood pressure variability, endothelial function, and heart rate variability reflect the condition of both blood vessels and the autonomic nervous system. A heart that recovers quickly, varies its rhythm fluidly, and responds gracefully to demand is biologically younger than one that plods, stiffens, and overreacts.

Heart rate variability, in particular, is fascinating because it bridges physiology and perception. It reflects vagal tone, emotional regulation, and nervous system flexibility. High variability correlates with youthfulness, resilience, and longevity. Low variability correlates with accelerated aging, chronic stress, and disease risk. The heart, it turns out, is an excellent historian.

There is also functional age, which medicine is slowly rediscovering after decades of obsession with lab values alone. Grip strength, gait speed, balance, reaction time, VO? max, recovery from exertion—these are not cosmetic metrics. They integrate muscle strength, nerve tone, cardiovascular vitality, and metabolic health into real-world performance.

How fast do you get tired? How fast do you recover? How confidently does your body move through space? These questions often predict mortality better than sophisticated imaging.

At the cellular level, markers of repair capacity matter enormously. Telomere length was once hyped as the aging marker, and while it is no longer considered enough on its own, it still tells an important part of the story. Telomeres shorten as cells divide, but their rate of shortening varies dramatically based on stress, inflammation, oxidative load, and lifestyle. Short telomeres are not destiny, but they do signal accumulated strain.

Equally important—but less commonly measured—are markers of mitochondrial health. ATP production efficiency, oxidative stress levels, mitochondrial DNA integrity, and metabolic byproducts reveal how energetically “young” cells are. Aging, at its core, is often an energy problem before it is a structural one.

Cognitive and neurological measures also belong in any serious assessment of biological age. Processing speed, working memory, sensory acuity, sleep architecture, and circadian rhythm robustness all decline with biological aging—but not inevitably with time. Brains, like bodies, age fastest under chronic threat and slowest under curiosity, safety, and engagement.

Here is the key point that often gets missed: no single test gives you biological age. Accuracy emerges from accumulated pattern recognition across systems. When epigenetics, inflammation, metabolism, cardiovascular function, and performance all point in the same direction, you are no longer guessing. You are listening to the body in stereo.

And there is an even deeper layer—one medicine is only beginning to acknowledge. Biological age is inseparable from nervous system state. A body that feels perpetually unsafe (high active stress) ages faster, regardless of diet or supplements. A body allowed to regularly enter deep parasympathetic repair modes slows aging across every measurable domain.

This is why two people with identical lab panels can age differently over time. One heals. One doesn’t. The difference is not compliance—it is coherence.

So how do we accurately measure biological age?

We triangulate it like a constellation. We track trends over time rather than relying on single numbers. We investigate whether the organism is becoming more resilient or more brittle, more adaptable or more reactive, more coherent or more fragmented.

Back to our first metaphor, let’s say calendar age tells you how many laps around the sun you’ve completed. Biological age tells you how intact the vehicle is—and whether it’s learning how to repair itself while still moving!

Identifying reliable biomarkers of aging is a current major goal in geroscience. Things have moved very fast in the last 2 decades!

Testing Biological Age

The most widely validated and scientifically accepted biological age tests are epigenetic clocks. These look at chemical tags on your DNA — especially DNA methylation — that change in very predictable ways as your body ages.

Unlike genetic sequences (which are fixed in your DNA), methylation patterns shift depending on life history: lifestyle, stress, diet, pollution, inflammation, and even social experiences leave detectable scars on your epigenome. By reading these patterns across hundreds to thousands of sites in the genome, algorithms can estimate your “biological age” relative to a population average.

The famous Horvath clock, developed by Dr. Steve Horvath, analyzes over 350 CpG sites (regions of DNA where methyl groups attach) and has a median error of only a few years compared to chronological age — remarkably precise for a biological process.  

Commercial tests like TruDiagnostic’s TruAge and myDNAge are based on this kind of analysis — you send a blood or saliva sample, and they return an estimate of your biological age along with personalized insights. 

Researchers have also developed variations like PhenoAge, GrimAge, and the DunedinPACE clock — each tuned to different aspects of aging (disease risk, mortality prediction, aging pace, etc.). 

Telomere Length Tests. Telomeres are protective caps at the ends of chromosomes that shorten with each cell division. Early aging research popularized telomere length as a proxy for biological age. Today, we know telomere tests are noisy and less predictive than epigenetic clocks — telomeres can vary widely between individuals and even fluctuate with temporary stressors — but they still supply useful context when interpreted alongside other biomarkers. 

Companies such as Life Length specialize in telomere diagnostic services, often combining telomere length with telomerase activity (the enzyme that rebuilds telomeres) for a richer picture. 

Blood-Based Biomarker Age and Machine Learning Models. Some commercial and research programs don’t rely solely on DNA at all. Instead, they analyze panels of blood biomarkers and use machine learning (AI) to derive an age estimate based on how your physiology compares to large datasets.

These can include patterns across:

• Inflammatory markers like C-reactive protein

• Metabolic markers like glucose and triglycerides

• Hormones, cytokines, and more

Such tests — sometimes called proteomic or deep aging clocks — can use hundreds of circulating proteins and cell counts to estimate biological age and even predict disease risk before symptoms appear. 

Composite Age Scores with Frailty and Functional Metrics

Some approaches combine clinical measurements (like blood pressure, glucose regulation, body composition) with functional performance (strength, gait speed, cognitive tests) into composite indices that estimate biological age.

This is less molecular but very practical for assessing overall physiological reserve and real-world function. 

Emerging and Multimodal Tests

Cutting-edge methods blend multiple data layers — epigenetics + proteomics + metabolomics + phenotypic signs — often refined by with AI models to give an age estimation beyond what any single marker can offer. 

None of these tests claim to measure a literal “number of years lived,” because that wouldn’t be biological. Instead, they measure patterns that correlate with:

• Cellular maintenance capacity

• Immune function

• Metabolic resilience

• Inflammatory burden

• Epigenetic change rates

• Disease susceptibility trajectories

In short, they measure how your body is functioning relative to its chronological peers, which is far more meaningful for health outcomes than the number of candles on your birthday cake.

Accuracy and Real World Use

Epigenetic clocks currently represent the most scientifically robust measure of biological age available — but it’s not perfect. Different clocks can give slightly different ages, and results are influenced by which tissues are sampled (blood vs saliva, etc.), the model used, and technical variability in lab processes (no two lab give identical results). 

Many experts caution that these tests are predictive tools, not definitive statements of destiny. But compared to traditional age markers like telomeres, they are far more predictive of disease risk and mortality patterns. 

Poetically speaking, what all these tests do is read the echo of your life in your biology. They read the impact left by nutrition, trauma, adaptation, stress management, repair capacity, and systemic resilience. They capture your physiological biography rather than your chronological biography.

All of them, in their own way, try to answer one question: Is your biology older, younger, or on track — and what does that mean for your future health?

To Your Good Health,Prof. Keith Scott-Mumby
The Official Alternative Doctor

Calendar age is the number stamped on your passport and defined by how many times the earth has gone round the sun since you were born. It’s what we normally mean when we refer to a person’s age.

But in terms of health, and especially longevity, we need to look at things slightly differently. Here we are concerned with how vibrant your organs and tissues are and how long they will last, starting from NOW! We call this “biological age.”

Say a person is sixty years old (calendar age) but has lived a healthy life, done all the right things and not “burned the candle at both ends”. Such a person’s body might be in roughly the same biological shape as the average fifty year-old. That would mean he or she has a biological “age” of fifty and is 10 years in credit for a long and healthy life. This individual might expect to live well past 80, maybe even 90 – 95 or more.

But another kind of sixty year-old individual who smokes, eats badly and doesn’t take nearly enough exercize might be in similar condition to someone healthy but 20 years older. Chances are her or she will die younger than the first individual, maybe a lot younger. Maybe very soon, in fact!

See it’s easy, really. 

Your calendar age is exact: you have a certificate, given when you were born, that tells us exactly how “old” you are. But how old you body “feels” and what sort of dynamic shape it’s in—actually more important—is not nearly so easy to establish.

It depends on what is happening within: are your organs doing the job as well a they should? Is some of you deteriorating, while other parts are not? See, that is important because if you are healthy in every way EXCEPT your heart is stressed, swollen and beating irregularly at times, then you might die quite soon, while MOST of the rest of you is in good shape.

Maybe everything is OK in the heart and blood vessels department but you start to lose your mental skills and grow a bit dotty over the years. That happens, but clearly the person is defined by the onset of dementia, not by heart health! He or she will be “old” before their time.

[It’s a tricky example because dementia is unlikely without considerable deterioration of the circulatory system, even if it’s undetected for a time. The blood brings nutrients and carries away toxins, so any under-performance of the circulatory system (properly called the cardio-vascular system) will have widespread aging consequences, but you get the idea].

Biological aging is intimate, cellular, and deeply personal. It unfolds not by birthdays but by biochemical conversations happening in your tissues, your mitochondria, your epigenome, your immune system, and—if we’re being honest—your nervous system’s relationship with meaning, stress, safety, and love.

To confuse the two is one of modern culture’s great conceptual errors.

Calendar age measures time elapsed since birth. That’s it. It does not care whether you slept, loved, healed, raged, starved, meditated, or laughed yourself senseless. It ticks forward with the same indifference whether you are flourishing or unraveling. Two people born on the same day share a calendar age but may inhabit bodies that differ by decades in functional capacity, resilience, inflammation, cognitive clarity, and regenerative potential.

Biological age, by contrast, asks a far more interesting question: How old is your body behaving?

It is an emergent property, not a single number. It arises from the cumulative state of cellular repair, metabolic flexibility, immune competence, hormonal signaling, mitochondrial efficiency, epigenetic regulation, and nervous system tone. It is shaped not just by genetics, but by environment, nutrition, trauma, beliefs, relationships, purpose, sleep, movement, toxins, and the stories the body has been forced to tell itself in order to survive.

Calendar age is destiny only if you believe in clocks more than cells.

At the biological level, aging is damage accumulating faster than repair. When repair keeps pace, aging slows, stalls, or even partially reverses. Yes, that is possible.

When damage overwhelms repair, biological aging accelerates—sometimes dramatically. This is why a person can “age” ten biological years in five calendar years under chronic stress, illness, or grief, and why another can appear to grow younger across a decade of conscious living.

See, cells do not own calendars. They respond to signals.

One of the most profound discoveries in modern biology is that aging is plastic. Not infinitely so, perhaps—but far more malleable than once believed. Telomeres shorten, yes, but their rate of shortening varies wildly. DNA accumulates mutations, but repair pathways can be upregulated or suppressed. Proteins misfold (which is bad), but chaperone systems can be strengthened. Mitochondria decline, but they also biogenically rebound under the right conditions. Epigenetic markers drift, but they can be re-patterned.

Biological age is not fixed at birth. It is negotiated daily.

Calendar age moves in a straight line. Biological age zigzags, stalls, accelerates, decelerates, and occasionally moonwalks backward when conditions allow. At 50 calendar years, one person may have the inflammatory profile, muscle mass, insulin sensitivity, and cognitive speed of a 35-year-old, while another carries the metabolic and immune burden of 70.

This divergence is not cosmetic. It predicts disease risk, recovery capacity, and mortality far more accurately than birthdate ever could.

What we call “aging” in everyday language is usually not aging at all—it is accumulated dysregulation. Systems falling out of coherence. Communication breakdowns between cells. Chronic low-grade inflammation smoldering like an unattended fire. Hormonal rhythms flattening. Repair cycles shortening. Autophagy (removal of dead cells and debris) slowing. Sleep architecture fragmenting. The nervous system remaining stuck in vigilance long after the danger has passed.

None of this is required by time itself.

Calendar age has no memory. Biological age remembers everything.

It remembers famine and abundance. It remembers safety and terror. It remembers loneliness, overwork, grief, unresolved shock. It remembers whether the organism felt supported or hunted by life. It remembers whether the body was treated as an ally or a machine to be driven until parts failed.

This is why two seventy-year-olds can walk into a room and feel like different species.

One carries stiffness, brittleness, and caution in every movement. The other carries fluidity, curiosity, and strength. One’s immune system is reactive and exhausted; the other’s is responsive and calm. One’s cells whisper inflammation; the other’s murmur repair. Calendar age cannot explain this. Biology can.

Modern medicine historically conflated age with inevitability. Decline was treated as natural rather than conditional. Wrinkles, sarcopenia, cognitive slowing, insulin resistance, osteopenia, immune senescence—these were framed as the unavoidable tax of time. “You’re growing old, what do you expect?”

But what we are now discovering is that many of these phenomena correlate far more strongly with biological age than with calendar age. Rather than the phenomenon of clocks ticking down, the real emphasis is systems wearing out under load.

There is also a crucial distinction between appearance and biology. Some people look young but are biologically old—propped up cosmetically while inflammation, metabolic dysfunction, and immune exhaustion quietly advance. Others look weathered but function with remarkable resilience. The grizzly old goat type of countenance. Skin is a visible organ, but it is not the whole story. Biological age lives in blood markers, tissue elasticity, mitochondrial output, cognitive flexibility, and recovery speed.

The Search For Markers Of Aging

The emerging science of aging biomarkers—epigenetic clocks, glycation levels, inflammatory indices, immune cell ratios—exists precisely because calendar age is such a blunt instrument. These tools attempt to quantify biological age, not because time matters less, but because time alone explains so little.

And here is where things get quietly radical.

If biological age is responsive to signals, then perception matters. Meaning matters. Belief matters. A nervous system that perceives life as hostile and difficult ages faster than one that perceives life as joyous and workable. A body trapped in perpetual defense spends its resources on survival, not regeneration. Over time, that trade-off becomes visible as “aging.”

The immune system, endocrine system, and nervous system are in constant conversation. Fear ages. Safety heals. Purpose stabilizes. Joy lubricates repair. Loneliness corrodes at a cellular level. Chronic resentment is not just an emotion; it is a hormonal climate.

Put another way, calendar age does not care whether your life makes sense or not. Biological age very much does care!

Perhaps the most important implication of this distinction is ethical. When society treats calendar age as the primary metric of vitality, it enforces decline narratives prematurely. People are told they are “too old” to heal, adapt, learn, love, desire, or change. Biology does not agree. Cells are opportunistic. Give them the right signals and they respond—often astonishingly late into life.

We are not aging because we are getting older. We are aging because our systems are losing coherence.

Today that coherence can be restored to degrees once thought impossible.

This is not talking about immortality. It means flexibility. It means that aging is not a straight slide into the pit (entropy), but a dynamic negotiation between damage and repair, stress and recovery, meaning and exhaustion.

In the end, the difference between the two is the difference between counting years and telling a story. Calendar age is like a tax, a tally. Biological age is a narrative story written in cells—edited daily, revised constantly, responsive to how you live, what you eat, how you breathe, how you move, how you love, and whether your nervous system believes it is allowed to rest.

To Your Good Health,Prof. Keith Scott-Mumby
The Official Alternative Doctor

Influenza-like illness (ILI), on the other hand, refers to a syndrome characterized by symptoms similar to those of influenza, such as fever, cough, and sore throat, but which may be caused by other pathogens. 

In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that since 2010, influenza has resulted in millions of illnesses, hundreds of thousands of hospitalizations, and tens of thousands of deaths each year. 

Be alert: these are “estimates”  as it says, not based on facts or figures. It’s a game. If you are going to publish guesses, you can paint any scary scenario you like. Alert individuals would also note that flu statistics were suddenly not being collected or published in 2020 – 2022. They wanted to artificially boost the COVID deaths and so reported all flu as SARS-CoV-2 and suddenly there was “no flu”!

According to orthodox doctors, vaccination remains the primary preventive measure against influenza; however, they admit that challenges persist regarding its effectiveness and public acceptance.?

That’s because, contrary to all their propaganda, vaccination is very little use. Some years its “effectiveness” (questionable) is as low as 40%.

Couple the false claims with the fact they totally ignore natural preventatives, which can be formidable and even try to demonize them. Vaccination is NOT the only viable preventative. More of that later.

Background

Influenza viruses are a family, categorized into types A, B, C, and D, with types A and B responsible for the seasonal epidemics observed annually. Type A viruses are further divided into subtypes based on two proteins on their surface: hemagglutinin (H) and neuraminidase (N). So, for example, H5N1, which is bird flu.

The big problem with flu viruses is that they mutate constantly. What is prevalent at the start of the winter season may be gone by Christmas and a new strain emerges. So immunity cannot last very long.

And that’s the problem for flu vaccines: by the time they come to the market they are out of date and worthless. Only a steady symphony of false boasts (marketing lies) and credulous doctor enthusiasm keeps the myth going from year to year.

“Must get your shot this year,” is the constant chime. “Get your FREE flu shot here,” say the placards outside the pharmacy.

No doctor worth his degree would ever say “Don’t bother with the flu vaccine this year; it’s the wrong formulation.” It might be true but he or she would face heavy censure.

So annual vaccination remains the primary strategy for preventing influenza and its complications. To protect Big Pharma profits they always claim that even when the vaccine and circulating viruses are not closely matched, vaccination can still reduce the severity of illness and prevent hospitalizations and deaths.

But there is another failing: since flu vaccines are designed to protect against specific influenza viruses, they do not prevent illnesses caused by other pathogens that present with similar symptoms. This limitation means that even vaccinated individuals can experience ILI due to non-influenza viruses.

Historical events have also influenced public perception of flu vaccines. The 1976 swine flu vaccination campaign in the United States, for example, was associated with an increased incidence of Guillain-Barré Syndrome (a kind of paralysis), leading to heightened public concern about vaccine safety. However, the official line is that subsequent studies (read: hasty damage limitation) have shown that the risk of GBS following flu vaccination is very low, and the benefits of vaccination in preventing influenza complications outweigh this risk.

So Where Does This Leave Us?

According to my old pal from the UK, Dr. Damien Downing, a major review appeared in the journal Lancet Infectious Diseases¹, in October (principal author Prof. Michael Osterholm, a respected researcher into infectious diseases). The paper, which found only 31 studies worthy of inclusion out of a massive 5,700 screened, concluded that there was only good evidence for moderate flu vaccine efficacy in healthy adults, and no real evidence of protection in those over 65 years, or for that matter in children. Of course it is the elderly, and particularly the frail elderly, that doctors are more concerned about – and in whom 90% of flu cases occur – and there was no evidence that flu vaccine prevents flu infection in this group.

Put another way, after nearly 6,000 studies of all sorts, there is no good evidence that flu vaccine prevents flu in its main target population.

The pooled effect in those healthy adults, aged 18 to 65, is reported as 57%, which means the vaccine roughly halves your chances of getting flu. 

BUT: what is well known about placebo effects can account for most of that 57% effect. If you know you’ve had a shot for the flu you think you’re invincible. But since the chance of getting flu in that age group was less than 3% to begin with, that’s really only about a 1.5 percent reduction. 

Then of course, this all happens at a price. Whatever you may have heard, there is no such thing as a medication without the risk of side-effects. In vaccines that risk can also come from the adjuvants. A vaccine is a small dose of an organism plus adjuvants – chemicals that are irritants to the immune system and trigger it to react to the organism part. Without adjuvants vaccines generally won’t work. Popular adjuvants include the antibiotic gentamicin (too much of which can make you deaf), aluminum compounds (which probably contribute to Alzheimer’s and other neurological diseases)², and the mercury antiseptic, thiomersal/thimerosal (long known to be toxic and recently suspected in autism) – after all, they have to be toxic to work as adjuvants. Fluarix, one of the main brands of flu vaccine in the USA and UK, is stated by the manufacturers to contain both gentamicin and thimerosal.

We also used to think that flu vaccine prevented deaths from flu to a significant extent, even if it didn’t prevent overt infection – until we realized there was a major artifact at work. This is known as the healthy vaccine recipient effect, and the clue is in the name; a frail elderly person is much less likely to get down to their GP to have the vaccine than is a fit elderly person, who by the way is more likely to eat and live well, take vitamins and so on, and so has better resistance to viruses anyway.

What Osterholm and colleagues concluded, citing a couple of Californian studies, is that flu vaccine reduced all-cause mortality in those over 65 by a mere 4.6%. Is that worth the risk of adverse effects? That’s the choice you have to make but now you can make it knowing these facts.

Tamiflu

What about Tamiflu (oseltamivir), is that any good? It’s always being touted “officially”. They claim it reduces the duration of flu symptoms by 1 to 1½ days but it can give you other unpleasant symptoms, such as nausea and vomiting, and serious brain-fog (“I couldn’t think past a comma”), even according to the official website.³ 

But the reality is worse: basically, the whole planet is starting to become resistant to it.⁴  Why? Well Tamiflu is excreted largely unchanged in the urine of patients, and is barely affected by sewage treatment. So the active drug enters the waterways, as was shown during a flu outbreak in Japan, where ducks, the natural reservoir for the virus, can pick it up. And when this happens, the virus can probably (which means that so far it has happened in a lab experiment) develop resistance to Tamiflu.

So Tamiflu, which governments hand out so readily is rapidly becoming obsolete, because of resistance. This is just the same situation as overuse of antibiotics leading to seriously resistant hospital bugs like MRSA. But that took decades. Tamiflu has gone from, well maybe (I’d never take it), to it’s no longer any use in lightning fast time.

Save your money

As Dr. Damien, retorts: “It shows that we live on a small planet – and there’s nowhere left to hide our waste.”⁵ 

What’s Better?

Well frankly, anything that’s natural, overwhelmingly safe and yet effective is to be referred to synthetic, patented drugs with side effects of any kind.

Good ways to beat flu (and ILI) include:

Vitamin D. Take 20,000 IU to 50,000 IU, just for 3-4 days. It’s very cheap and harmless at such low intake. Add to that:

Vitamin C. Top up with about 20 – 25 grams but with a caution. You need to sip it constantly during the day. So much all at once would results in stomach pains and diarrhea and would not benefit blood levels.

Hydrogen peroxide. Get a nebulizer, 3% food grade hydrogen peroxide, and breathe in the mist, 3 to 5 times daily. If you can’t afford a nebulizer, then dilute the hydrogen peroxide to 1% (2 parts water to 1 part of the store-bought strength) and GARGLE (don’t swallow!) It’s almost as good, in fact 100% effective at preventing COVID in a busy hospital situation.⁶ 

Antibiotics are worthless against flu and viruses. But if the coughing and sneezing persists to the point where you have yellow-greenish sputum or snot, then might be a time to ask for antibiotics. That’s because colored mucus or slime like that means that opportunistic bacteria have invaded.

Final Tips.

I say this most winters: DO NOT BLOW YOUR NOSE. Increased pressure in the nasal passages caused when you blow your nose will send infected snot sideways into your sinuses and the resulting sinusitis could take days (even weeks) to clear.

Instead SNIFF. That pulls the muck backwards and you can swallow it (for convenience) or spit it out (better for you).

Recovery

A final tip from the masters of holistic science (which includes me) is that sneezing and cough are DETOX mechanisms, to expel unwanted pathogens. So if you seem to be recovering and then, suddenly, your nose starts streaming or sneezing ramps up and gets nasty, just remember that is a good thing! It’s the excretion phase! Wipe your nose a lot; just don’t blow it.

The ultimate principle, for those who are curious, is that healing takes place from the inside out!

Stay well (it’s simpler)!
Prof. Keith Scott-Mumby
The Alternative Doctor

References:

1. PMID: 22032844, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=22032844
2. PMID: 21568886, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=21568886
3. http://www.tamiflu.com/hcp/influenza-treatment.aspx
4. http://uu.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2:453789
5. Orthomolecular Medicine News Service, January 14, 2012. Flu Vaccine: No Good Evidence, Damien Downing, M.D.
6. Amoah GB, Quakyi IA, Sagoe KW, et al. (2021) Re: Oral antiseptics against coronavirus: in-vitro and clinical evidence. J Hosp Infect. 118:108-109. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34487774

A few radicals and big names in the public space believe there is. Russell Blaylock comes to mind; Joe Mercola; Ryan Cole and William Makis. What exactly is meant by “turbo-cancers”? That’s quite a large part of the problem. There is no real definition and so no consensus. It’s more the sort of label that gets started by so-called influencers on the internet. They have no medical training and use such catchy terms to make a point, not a fact.

But generally what is meant by turbo is fast-growing cancers that are unusually aggressive and which tend, for some reason, to strike younger people.

This possibility is generally compounded by the suspicion/belief that a sudden rise in extra-deadly cancers has been caused by the mRNA vaccines developed for COVID. It’s plausible, certainly. mRNA vaccines have been a worldwide experiment in manipulating human genetic material, without any foreknowledge whatever of likely consequences (and seemingly no concern whatever, in the rush for profits, about possible unpleasant or deadly consequences).

Turbo cancer is now definitely a term linked with COVID vaccines. And sources are lumping the two together as one causing the other. You may have read widespread speculation that recent cancers in the British Royal family (viz. King Charles and Catherine, Princess of Wales) were brought on by their COVID vaccination.

Of course, once again, it’s plausible. But not proven.

Putting the pieces of the puzzle together has proved very difficult, since Big Pharma has been gaslighting us all, lying and obscuring poor outcomes. “There’s no link,” they scream, defensively. “Turbo cancer” is not real. “COVID-19 vaccines don’t cause cancer.”¹

How can they possibly know? It will take many years, possibly a decade or more, to establish causality. Even the layman knows that.

Any denial at this stage is just flim-flam from Pharma toadies. 

Dr. Paul Marik of high-dose-vitamin-C-saves-lives fame thinks there is definitely an issue. I quote:

“The incidence of cancers has increased exponentially worldwide since the universal COVID-19 vaccination program began at the end of 2020. These cancers tend to present at an advanced stage, progress rapidly, and occur in younger patients. Additionally, some patients previously in remission have been reported to develop uncontrolled cancer relapses shortly after receiving a COVID-19 vaccination (usually a booster). The temporal association between these cancers and COVID-19 vaccination is undeniable. These observations have given rise to the term “turbo-cancers.” 

“In addition, we propose that the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein directly interferes with the fundamental pathways causing carcinogenesis, namely metabolic reprogramming, cancer stem cell propagation, apoptosis resistance, metastatic potential, and altered immune surveillance.”²

Trouble is, a person of scientific bent like myself, wants to see charts and I had a great deal of trouble finding the evidence of this recent “exponential” rise. I spent an hour combing the net and had ChatGPT looking too, for actual charts showing the supposed increase.

Rather what becomes obvious is that cancer incidence was beginning to soar long before the COVID vaccine was rolled out. For instance, a JAMA article published in 2023 but looking at the period 2010 – 2019 was already referring to the incidence rates of early-onset cancers (cancers under 50) increasing “substantially” over the study period. Gastrointestinal cancers had the fastest-growing incidence rates among all early-onset cancers.³

The best chart I could find was for the period up to 2018, where it is clear that the rise in cancers affecting the young was well under way by 2020.

But it’s nowhere near “exponential (steep). According to a publication by the American Cancer Society, the incidence rate among non-Alaskan younger people has increased by about 1% per year since the mid-2000s.⁴

What’s Really Going On

I think there is another explanation of the recent changes in cancer incidence and mortality. It’s due to the COVID “pandemic” but not necessarily anything to do with the mRNA vaccine.

At the height of pandemic hysteria in 2020 – 2021, almost all hospitals and health facilities ground to a halt. Cases were not being seen routinely, no screenings, far fewer treatments, no follow ups, just pandemonium on the wards, caused by the gross mismanagement of the situation.

People were afraid to go to hospital and did not come forward for diagnosis or treatment of a wide variety of conditions, including cancer.

As a result, cancer that should have been diagnosed during the pandemic would now be diagnosed later, and likely at a more advanced stage. This backlog could be expected to lead to an overall higher mortality rate from cancer since more advanced cancers are also harder to treat. They would seem extra-aggressive.

There is a rapidly growing corpus of data that gives weight to this point of view:

National Cancer Institute / U.S. data — delayed diagnoses in 2020

A 2024 U.S. study found that during 2020 the number of new cancer diagnoses dropped sharply — presumably as I said because people skipped or couldn’t access screening and diagnostic care.

The study notes that early-stage diagnoses (the easier ones to catch early) were especially reduced, resulting in fewer “early-catch” cancers.5

Because early detection is tightly linked to better outcomes, this underdiagnosis could lead to a later surge of more advanced cancers and worse prognoses.6

Thing is, this wasn’t just happening in the US or UK. It was a global phenomenon. A 2022 review covering 33 publications found that worldwide cancer-screening rates dropped sharply during COVID — across cancers, across all demographics. Cancer screening was suspended for at least 30 days in 13 countries (in some cases a lot more than 30 days). Many screening types were suspended or postponed, sometimes for months.7

This caused a backlog of “missed” screenings and diagnostics that — once services resumed — would surface as a wave of later-stage diagnoses.

And that seems to have been exactly what happened. I’m no apologist for the COVID mRNA experiment, as you know. But we need to keep our feet firmly on the ground. Numerous authors/influencers are reporting “turbo cancers” but I can find little evidence, at this stage, for such a concept. Instead, I find evidence for a couple years of strangled cancer screening and treatments, leading to missed diagnoses and lost treatments opportunities, in turn leading to a later outburst of more advanced (ie. more aggressive) cancers once everyone got back to normal work.

We won’t know the truth for a little time yet. Meantime I reaffirm the need to search for real causes. Crappy diets, toxic burdens, psychological stresses and the burgeoning tendency to use dangerous drugs as a “solution” to all of nature’s ills are where my money lies. These are the important current dangers. Let’s not get distracted by the Plandemic. That’s over and we are now back in the real world!

Stay healthy, enjoy the rewards of good health.

Prof. Keith Scott-Mumby
The Official Alternative Doctor

References:

1. https://scienceupfirst.com/covid-19/turbo-cancer-is-not-real-covid-19-vaccines-dont-cause-cancer/
2. Paul Marik and Justus Hope. COVID-19 mRNA-Induced “Turbo Cancers”. J Indep Med. 2025. Vol. 1(3):185-194. DOI: 10.71189/JIM/2025/V01N03A02
3. JAMA Netw Open. Published Online: August 16, 2023. 2023;6;(8):e2328171. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2023.28171
4. https://www.cancer.org/content/dam/cancer-org/research/cancer-facts-and-statistics/annual-cancer-facts-and-figures/2024/2024-cancer-facts-and-figures-acs.pdf
5. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaoncology/fullarticle/2815435
6. https://www.cancer.gov/news-events/press-releases/2024/covid-pandemic-impact-on-new-cancer-diagnoses
7. Impact of COVID-19 on cancer screening: a global perspective. Curr Opin Support Palliat Care. 2022 Sep 1;16(3):102-109. doi: 10.1097/SPC.0000000000000602. Epub 2022 Jul 18. PMID: 35862881; PMCID: PMC9451605.