The Lake District (aka. The Lakes or county Cumbria) is inspiringly beautiful, written about by poets and painted by numerous artists over the centuries. So imagine the widespread dismay when the UK government decided to site a nuclear power plant on the coast, just a few miles away! Originally Windscale, it is now called Sellafield.

Little Langdale Valley, Lake District, UK

But it’s worse! In 1978 the government decided that Britain would accept nuclear waste from other countries for reprocessing at Sellafield. It’s beyond stupid. Not only endangering the British people, who they were sworn to serve, but setting Britain up for massive, almost insurmountable costs, which continue to increase every year.

Sellafield now has the dubious notoriety of being the most toxic and dangerous place on planet Earth! It justifies a massive (and costly) independent police force called the Civil Nuclear Constabulary (CNC), fully armed and trained, to protect the plant in case of the unthinkable: a terrorist attack.

Highly radioactive waste in slowly corroding tanks at Sellafield. It will remain hazardous for 100,000 years!

Well, I could write a lot more about Sellafield but the point I want to make is that the young TV presenter was required to wear a “dosimeter” while he was shooting on site. Worn close to the heart, it tells how much gamma radiation he received on his visit to the plant. As a matter of fact doctors, nurses and radiologists also wear something similar, to measure their exposure to radiation (x-rays, MRI scans, etc.)

What Is A Toximeter?

The program set me thinking: why not a “toximeter” for us all to wear in our daily lives?

I imagine it would be difficult to create one but nothing is totally impossible (Elon, ya listening?) I assure you it would shock you to Hell and back. We are overwhelmed by what I have christened the “chemical blizzard” – urban atmospheric pollution, pesticides, solvents, PCBs, PFAs (polyfluoroalkyl substances) and other “forever chemicals”, detergents, cosmetics, flame retardants, dyes and preservatives… the list goes on and on.

But in addition, we have EMFs that have a profound biological effect, whatever governments and commercial interests claim to the contrary.

A typical dosimeter for radiation exposure. Could we develop a similar device for chemical and EMF exposures?

Wearing one of these chemical meters you would be driven crazy by the continuous alarm warnings!

Meanwhile, until we get such protection, is there anything we can do?

The master pioneer in this field was my old mentor Theron “Ted” Randolph who wrote one of the most important textbooks in medicine (totally ignored by all doctors): Human Ecology and Susceptibility to the Chemical Environment (1962)

He in turn influenced British psychiatrist Dr. Richard Mackarness, who wrote Chemical Victims (1980). Not only ignored but fought furiously by ignorant Pharma lackeys. Critics argued that his ideas “lacked sufficient scientific backing and were not widely accepted in the medical community.”

Just like anesthetics, antisepsis, handwashing and nutrition then! Not widely accepted by the medical community of the time. Haha!

It is surprising to most people to learn that indoor chemical pollution is often many times the allowed safety limits allowed at work. A 5-year-study carried out by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) found that peak concentrations of 20 toxic compounds monitored were many times higher indoors than outdoors.

[https://www.upi.com/Archives/1988/11/10/EPA-study-Air-pollution-often-worse-indoors-than-outdoors/6028015559141/]

Various laws have been enacted to protect the work force. However, to pretend this system is working efficiently and protecting workers properly is to be foolish and gullible in the extreme. Only a very small percentage of workers—those employed in larger factories and offices—effectively come under this sort of umbrella. Although the laws supposedly cover all offices, factories and places of work, in actual fact it is impossible to monitor the countless small businesses that this represents. Only if the individual workers complain is any action likely to be taken in the event of a hazard and many workers are reluctant to report breaches of the codes for fear of losing their jobs, either as retribution or indirectly because the works are closed down due to not being able to afford all the safety procedures required.

What To Do

In 1986 I came up with what I called a “nose survey”. True, some chemicals are odorless. But not many. So I would have patient’s going through their home sniffing!

SCOTT-MUMBY’S RULE OF THE NOSE. if there is enough substance present to cause an odor, there is enough to cause symptoms. 

Most chemical sensitive individuals have a very acute sense of smell; others have none and will need to enlist the help of someone else with a good “nose”! 

Most of the chemicals we encounter are derived, ultimately, from petroleum and the whole group we call “hydrocarbons” from their chemical structure. 

It makes good sense to clear your environment of as many of these unnecessary chemicals as possible. This will reduce your overall environmental burden. We choose the home for this because it is something you can control to a great extent. You can’t do much about what is at work or beyond your doors and windows (except move if you are down-wind from a factory or such) but, unless you have a particularly unsympathetic and selfish family, you should be able to effect enough changes indoors to produce a worthwhile improvement. 

Some substances you will be able to replace with safer substitutes. Many you will be able to dispense with altogether. Some you will need and no substitutes can be found. The answer is to recognize the danger, use them as infrequently as possible, preferably get someone else to carry out the task involved and store these substances outside the house, for instance in the garage

I usually get patients to comb the whole house, room by room, cupboard by cupboard and shelf by shelf, listing all the chemicals found. Sometimes, the list itself is a shock and this is salutary. To pinpoint all potential trouble, I insist that what can be smelled is added to what can be seen. 

As an interim measure, I would suggest that everything suspect list is put into a completely airtight plastic bag and sealed, then put outside the house, in a shed or the garage for instance.

Wait 2 – 3 weeks. If you feel better, the message is clear and I’m sure I don’t need me to tell you what to do from that point!

In my 1988 Allergy Handbook, I wrote:

This problem can be so bad that we have begun to pinpoint what is called the Sick Building or Tight Building Syndrome. Some modern buildings have such a high internal accumulation of these obnoxious substances, that almost everyone feels ill to some degree. Headaches, sore eyes and runny nose, fatigue and inability to concentrate are almost the norm. The effect on work efficiency is disastrous and absenteeism runs sky-high.

Since it is costing industry profits in lost man-hours, you may be sure (especially if you are cynical, like me) that a lot of money is now being spent on researching this problem.

In the meantime, the answer is simple. Open the windows! The problem is made far worse by the modem craze for energy efficiency. For chemical sensitives at least, draughts are good news. They help to circulate air and keep down internal pollution. This applies in the home also – double glazing and draught-proofing may be disastrous to those who suffer within the home environment.

The list below gives pointers towards chemical sensitivity in the work environment.

• Some places or rooms have a definite effect

• Potent odors (see “nose survey” above)

• The presence of any known hazards (eg. Toluene diisocyanate, formaldehyde, cellulose paints)

• You feel better at weekends

• Symptoms clear up on holidays

• Co-workers affected 

• Reaction started when you started your present employment

• Worst on Monday and Tuesday, clears up as you grow accustomed later in the week

NB. Keep in mind potential physical factors eg. VDU’s and back or eye-strain (not necessarily an allergy)

Well, of course, environmental hazards is an enormous topic and would take a book to deal with, not just a newsletter. But awareness is the great accelerator and if you KNOW what’s out there, you can do your best to safeguard against it.

I wish you “a clean local environment”, which is something you can personally create. We have to leave it up to governments and industry cartels to solve the general society-wide problem. Just don’t hold your breath!

To your good health,Prof. Keith Scott-Mumby
The Official Alternative Doctor

A personal note on nuclear power: I think it’s the best idea we have for the future. No fossil fuels! The PROBLEM is:

• Cutting corners

• Skimping on safety (to create more profits)

• Lying and incompetence (overpaid idiots in charge)

• The insistence on secrecy and cover ups, whenever there is a problem

One might just add UNBELIEVABLE IDIOT STUPIDITY, such as bringing the world’s nuclear waste to a tiny island nation or siting a nuclear plant on a geological danger zone (Fukushima

—Werner Heisenberg, one of the founders of quantum science.

One of the strangest myths of the modern age is that science has somehow “figured things out.” People speak as if the great mysteries have been solved and all that remains is to fill in a few technical details around the edges.

We hear expressions like “The science is in.” Nothing could be further from the truth.

The greatest scientists who ever lived were not arrogant. They were humbled.

The deeper they looked, the more astonished they became.

As Sir Isaac Newton famously remarked:

“I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore… whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”

Incidentally, the majority of Newton’s output was on occult and alchemical materials; what we would call today magical and mystical, not rock science, as his fans believe. To me, it adds to his repute as the greatest scientist of all time, though critics of the time were shocked to find this simple fact.

The pioneers of quantum theory were much the same. The deeper they probed into reality, the stranger reality became.

Niels Bohr observed:

“Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it.”

Werner Heisenberg confessed:

“The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.”

Max Planck, founder of quantum theory, went even further:

“I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness.”

Notice the tone. Wonder. Humility. Awe.

Not certainty. Not smugness. Not the modern illusion that everything important can be explained by a biochemical pathway and a colored diagram.

Take something as simple as a living cell.

Scientists can describe mitosis—the process by which a cell divides. They can show photographs of chromosomes lining up. They can identify proteins involved in the process. They can name dozens of molecular actors.

Wonderful.

But they cannot answer the deepest questions.

Why does it happen? What initiates it? What tells the cell that now is the moment? What summons the various parts into position? What causes millions of molecular components to cooperate in perfect synchrony?

A description is not an explanation.

The two are often confused.

Consider the mitochondria, the tiny power stations within our cells.

Across the membrane of a mitochondrion exists an electrical potential of roughly 150 millivolts. That sounds insignificant until you realize the membrane itself is only about 5 nanometres thick.

Do the arithmetic and the resulting electric field is on the order of thirty million volts per metre.

Thirty million. That is comparable to the electric fields found in lightning discharges. When did you ever read that? Scientists never mention it and many deny it, sometimes vociferously, “Hum. That’s nonsense. It’s not possible.”

In fact every cell in your body contains forces so extraordinary that they would have seemed magical to scientists a century ago.

Take reproduction. Why do sperm race upstream, to get to the egg and why only one can enter? To turn this great mystery of life into a supposed model of chemical gradients is not enough. What INITIATES it?

We can describe chemical gradients, receptor molecules, membrane potentials, signaling cascades and a hundred other mechanisms.

But mechanisms are not motives.

Modern pseudo-scientists think they can turn everything into explanations of chemicals and substance. That’s rot.

Even to say it’s all controlled by energy factors is still not enough. I mean, why do atoms in a teacup know they are in a teacup and so hold the shape of a teacup? Why don’t they just wonder off?

Electricity does a lot of things but what is electricity? WHAT IS CHARGE, actually, and how does it arise? What does the property of MASS mean and how does that come into being, as a property of matter? [mass, please note, is not the same as weight!]

It’s INFORMATION that holds the universe together and causes it to function. But what IS information? It’s been a saying of mine for decades that information implies consciousness but then where does that lead us? That consciousness creates all, NOT factors at work in the physical universe.

Hormones are marvelous chemical messengers. But they are not two-way radios. They carry signals. They do not explain the origin of the signal.

They tell us how instructions are transmitted. Not where the instructions came from.

At some point we must confront the uncomfortable fact that life behaves as though it knows what it is doing.

And that thought terrifies materialists.

The deeper we go, the less we know.

Richard Feynman, one of the greatest physicists of the twentieth century, admitted: “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.”

Nobody.

Not then.

Not now.

Not despite all our computers, particle accelerators, satellites and artificial intelligence.

Even to say it’s all controlled by energy factors is still not enough. I mean, why do atoms in a teacup know they are in a teacup and so hold the shape of a teacup? Why don’t they just wonder off?

The answer is INFORMATION.

But now we arrive at the greatest mystery of all.

What is information?

Not bits. Not data. Not symbols. They carry information, yes. But what is information itself?

Information is not a thing you can hold.

It has no weight.

No colour.

No smell.

Yet without it, nothing functions. Everything in the universe appears to depend upon it.

For decades I have repeated a simple observation: Information implies consciousness.

After all, information only has meaning to a knower.

A message implies a recipient.

A pattern implies recognition.

Information and consciousness appear inseparable.

Which leads us naturally to the possibility that many scientists resist but many great thinkers have entertained: Perhaps consciousness produces the universe.

Perhaps matter emerges within consciousness rather than consciousness emerging from matter.

Perhaps what we call physical reality is the visible expression of deeper informational and conscious principles.

John Wheeler, one of the giants of modern physics, proposed the astonishing phrase:

“It from bit,” (it referring to “stuff”, bit referring to information (“bits” make up bytes, which make up everything in your computer and phone).

In other words, physical reality emerges from information.

Well, it’s a bit of a ramble from Prof. But you’ve got to let me hang down my metaphysical hair once in a while! As I said in my book MEDICINE BEYOND, if medicine is based on faulty science, then you’ll have faulty medicine (duh!) Medicine that is dogmatic, silly, out of touch with reality and is self-limiting to a remarkable degree, ie. doesn’t really work. Which is what we’ve got!

I rest my case.

Prof. Keith Scott-Mumby
The Official Alternative Doctor

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.

We all dream of the day when we revisit special places we have known, revived times that were happy and carefree, put our feet firmly back in a special, indeed sacred, place that, for us, was quite pivotal in our lives.

Well, take care! It rarely works, for one thing. And it can be quite heartbreaking for another. After all the word nostalgia means “painful homecoming” (algos is Latin for pain, hence an-algesia for painkillers!)

The word was coined by a 17th-century medical student to describe the anxieties displayed by Swiss mercenaries fighting away from home. It’s a medical condition! [Wikipedia]

Nostalgia is associated with a longing for the past, its personalities, possibilities, and events, usually described as the “good old days” or the “glory days”. There is a predisposition, caused by cognitive biases such as rosy retrospection, for people to view the past more positively and the future more negatively. When applied to one’s beliefs about a society or institution, this is called declinism, which has been described as “a trick of the mind” and as “an emotional strategy, something comforting to snuggle up to when the present day seems intolerably bleak”.¹

So yes, this is a health issue. It can be very disturbing, even hurtful, to try to go back in time and suppose that everything will be hunky-dory, just as it once was. You could end up disillusioned and the good times you were anchoring your present in might disappear forever.

It happened to me just recently. Vivien and I took a short break; I wanted to show her my old haunts in Andalucía in southern Spain, where I had lived for several years. Included was an intended visit to the Mezquite (mosque) in the city of Cordoba. I rate it as one of the most beautiful buildings in the world, even though the Christians had trashed it by building a cathedral right in the middle of it.

What remained was still glorious when I last saw it, nearly 30 years ago.

The Mezquita or mosque in Cordoba.

Anyway, let’s go back some. I washed up in Spain with a broken heart, after my first marriage ended. I moved abroad and that was the first time in my life I lived outside the UK. I licked my wounds and gradually recovered. I even dreamed we may one day be reconciled.

By a quirk of Fate I was living in a property that had once belonged to a famous movie director and Marilyn Monro had stayed there! It had been unoccupied and dilapidated for over 30 years and I tried to buy it but failed (I was skint after the first marriage broke up). I mention it only because there was wild mountain thyme growing all over the property and I LOVE the song Wild Mountain Thyme (aka. Will Ye Go Lassie, Go?”). There is one line in the song that literally saved my soul: “If my true love should leave me, I will surely find another…”

It’s a lovely song. And I did find another; my lovely Vivien! See, even heartache has a purpose. It’s to get you through to the next glorious bit of your life!

If you want to hear the song it’s here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uCDw30wCe0 It’s a man’s song, not a woman’s, but Ella sings it beautifully and not like a funeral dirge, which is way it’s often sung!

So I was there for some three years and met a beautiful young Belgian girl half my age nicknamed Telly. Her really name was Machtelt (Matilda) and she was surely an angel in disguise. She restored all my belief in humanity, music, magic, spirit and—I’m so grateful—in myself.

We toured all over Andalucia, from Seville and Tarifa in the west, Granada in the east, and as I mentioned, Cordoba where we saw the exquisitely beautiful Mesquite (mosque).

Telly spoke five languages (she was in Spain to brush up her Spanish). She loved politics and was very ambitious. She used to tease me with the prospect I might have bedded the first woman President of Europe!

I begged her beware of politics. “It will break your heart,” I told her. But she was young, delighted in life and wanted to wake up the whole world to good things.

So… back to nostalgia. It was with some trepidation that I finally returned to Spain; the first time since I had left some twenty seven years earlier. We flew from Bordeaux to Madrid, picked up a car and drove off into the Andalucian sunset!

The first big disappointment was that we could not get to see the Alhambra in Granada. It was necessary to buy tickets months in advance and we did not know that. The world today is suffering from a condition called “over-tourism”, or “tourist saturation”, where there are massive queues and inordinate numbers to see the classic tourist sites.

Never mind, we had a nice tapas supper and wine, that was authentic for Viv!

Next day we drove on to Fuengirola, a nice 4-star hotel called the Leonardo. This was the town near where I’d lived for most of my time in Spain.

But it was changed… and not for the better. I tried to show Viv where I’d been walking with a tall beautiful blonde and somebody shouted “Hiya Sean!” It took me half a minute to realize I was being mistaken for Sean Connery. He lived nearby and I was often mistaken for him at that time (no, really!)

What do you do? It was a lot of trouble to walk over to the admirer and explain I was not the famous film star. So I gave him my best wave and walked on. Well, no lies told, and it probably made his day, to have James Bond wave to him!

But I couldn’t find the street! It was totally built up around about with concrete high rises. In fact it was trouble enough to even find the place where I had once lived. That property and all the mountain thyme too, presumably, had been built over with houses and apartments.

And that was the story for the rest of the trip, sadly. Concrete EVERYWHERE. 

Here’s the “before and after:

Fuengirola old and new

By this stage I was a bit mopey. Not sad for myself but sad for Viv’s experience. I wasn’t able to share my old haunts with her, which was the whole reason for the trip. There was nothing left. It was indeed the pain of homecoming!

Never mind, I thought. I’ll take her to see a feria; that’s an Andalucian horse fair. It’s great to see ladies dressed in traditional costume, all flounces and frills, and the men (caballeros) so elegant on their beautiful horses.

Feria. It’s a festival on horseback, in effect.

The only timely feria was in Jerez (where sherry comes from). We drove 2½ hours and we saw NOTHING! It poured and poured with rain, the feria stadium was MUD and in any case the feria did not start till the evening on day one, the day we were there. Tourism websites just slightly omitted to mention that. We had to leave before evening, for the long wet drive back.

Never mind, there was always going to be the Mezquite. But no… We did get tickets but, talk about “overtourism”! There were queues and queues and queues and there was no chance to sink into what I remember as the deep tranquil silence. Boohoo!

Next day we had to start back towards Madrid. Are you getting this; that the trip was a disaster!

So don’t say I didn’t warn you about nostalgia. It can be a real pain! But analgesics won’t help.

Haha!

Prof. Keith Scott-Mumby
The Alternative Doctor

Reference:

1. Lewis, Jemima (January 16, 2016). “Why we yearn for the good old days”. The Telegraph. Retrieved 20 December 2016

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

Sometimes they are punished for offering dietary advice. As long ago as 35 years, a colleague of mine was hauled before a medical tribunal. Why? His prescribing costs were very very low. He clearly wasn’t practising “proper” medicine, so he was attacked. The fact that ALL his patients were happy with his care and mostly got well didn’t protect him.

He was doing what I was doing: eliminating bandit foods, cleaning up their chemical environment, turning people to whole foods, adding nutritional supplements and counseling (in his case it was prayer). No place for God in modern medicine. Food is irrelevant. $$$ is the watchword.

Of course there is a whole segment of modern medicine that doesn’t WANT cheap and effective health care. They want bigger and bigger bills, more costs, more money, more profits. And the majority of those, it has to be said, are not doctors and not even qualified to hand out payments for effective treatment. In other words the insurance bandits.

They are simple parasites on the body of society. 

But all this may be about to change.

Tuft University Leads The Way

Diet should be considered an important part of a patient’s treatment along with medication, surgery, and other options, several experts said Wednesday at a “Food Is Medicine” meeting sponsored by Tufts University.

“I would want to see, in 2030, food as a vital sign,” said Sean Hashmi, MD, a nephrologist at the Southern California Permanente Medical Group in Woodland Hills. “And if we could do that, if we could make it so simple as … eat more of this, eat less of this — it’s very basic at its core. And if we as physicians were able to prescribe food as we prescribe an ACE inhibitor, how powerful would that be?”

Pretty heretical stuff. And like medieval heretics, it could get you burned. Big Pharma would be after your hide, with their army of shills to testify you are not practicing proper medicine; you are dangerous; your incompetence will kill people.

But as Hashmi said during the “Food is Medicine in the Era of GLP-1s” panel discussion, although improving diet can be an important component in treating various diseases, it doesn’t need to be done in isolation.

“Sometimes, when we start to talk about things like food as medicine, people automatically assume that you are anti-medications, and it couldn’t be further than the truth,” he noted. Instead, “we are carpenters. We use the most effective tool when it’s needed.”

For patients with congestive heart failure, for instance, “we’ve found by teaching them how to eat better, it’s making their medications far more effective. We find their ejection fraction [how much blood the heart pumps per contraction] improving because their weight is going down. We use GLP-1s all the time in that population, but the combination makes a difference.”

A great and informative story was shared by Alka Gupta, MD, a Washington internist and board member of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine. A 65-year-old patient had walked into her clinic 5 years ago.

“He had just gotten on Medicare, and he came in saying he had no medical problems,” she said. “Unfortunately, when he had his first set of blood work done, it revealed a hemoglobin A1c of 11.5%, consistent with floridly uncontrolled type 2 diabetes. This was a devastating diagnosis for him.”

“I could tell in that conversation that he was not open to starting insulin,” Gupta continued. “He was not open to starting three different medications to bring his blood sugars down. But, together, we decided on a combination approach: intensive lifestyle modification right away, plus, perhaps, medication. We sent him home with a Bluetooth-connected glucometer to check his glucose, and a weight scale, so when he checked his sugar or stepped on the scale, our team was able to see it, and we were able to be a bit reassured.”

Apparently this patient took it all on board and moved immediately towards a whole-food, plant-forward diet. Plus he walked an hour per day. Three months later, his hemoglobin A1c was 6.7% and it continued to decrease thereafter. And now — this is 5 years later — his diabetes has been in remission for almost the entire time.”

He had quit his medications within the first 3 months, and has continued without them since. Not only that but his chronic low back pain resolved itself, and he now leads a community walking group and shares his story widely.

Patient power, yay!

“If you think about that from the quality-of-life perspective, first and foremost, the rest of his life will likely look very different than had he taken a different path,” said Gupta. “And if you look at it from a systemic perspective, I think in the last 5 years, it’s very likely that he has avoided at least one, possibly multiple, hospitalizations for high blood sugar. He’s sidestepped the potential of side effects or low blood sugars from diabetes or other medications.”

Food Is Medicine

This is a trope I hope you’ll be hearing more of.

Efforts to implement a food-is-medicine approach are being aided by some efforts in Congress and at outside organizations, said Colin Schwartz, MPP, senior advocacy advisor for the American Heart Association’s Health Care by Food initiative.

[I didn’t even know the AMA had a “healthcare by food” initiative! It keeps very quiet normally].

Irrespective of the current government shutdown, “in the fiscal year 2026 appropriations bill … we had a lot of food-is-medicine wins in it,” he said on a separate panel. “It was nice to see, for instance, there was funding for the ‘[food] prescription’ pilots at the Indian Health Service. There’s funding for HHS to continue its food-is-medicine collaborative, and language supporting or encouraging establishment of centers of excellence at NIH for food is medicine.”

In addition, the NIH Office of Nutrition Research was flat-funded, “and that actually is a win in my book, in this [political] climate,” said Schwartz.

In other congressional developments, a bipartisan bill was recently reintroduced that would authorize a demonstration project to provide medically tailored home-delivered meals to Medicare patients in an effort to reduce rehospitalizations, he said. On the regulatory side, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) is asking for the public to provide comments on coding and billing for medically tailored meals, “and the House MAHA [Make America Healthy Again] Caucus just sent a letter to CMS asking that Medicare Advantage do more on food-is-medicine. So a lot of progress has been made.”

Billing for services related to food-is-medicine — and defining those services well — are definitely big issues, said Katie Garfield, director of Whole Person Care at the Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation at Harvard Law School in Boston.

“We don’t have billing codes for a lot of these interventions right now, and there has been an incredible effort by the Coding4Food project to create those billing codes,” she said. “As part of that process, you’re fundamentally also creating a more consistent definition of what these interventions are. And so I’m continuing to think about how we expand that work of definitions and standards that can really make sure that all services are sort of consistent in quality across the country.”

It would be great to see Uber Eats, Deliveroo and JustEat bikes zooming around town delivering healthy food to those who can’t really afford it! In the UK, we have “Meals on Wheels”, which is a charity but maybe they could be subsidized to do this work too!

Now that the stupid food pyramid has been turned on its head and started to work healthily, why not?

SOURCE: 

Reporting by Kristen Monaco, Senior Staff Writer, MedPage Today

https://www.medpagetoday.com/people/km1521/kristen-monaco

https://www.medpagetoday.com/meetingcoverage/nkf/121214

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

But I think a major often-overlooked reason is the correction of vitamin A deficiency in the population, so let’s look at that first. 

You will know that I personally choose vit A as the “antibiotic vitamin”, not D as some try to maintain. In the 40s and 50s kids in the Western world were widely dosed with cod-liver oil, which contains lots of vitamins A and D.

That helped… a LOT! (the D also cleared up rickets!)

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) defines Vitamin A as the name of a group of fat-soluble retinoids, primarily retinol and retinyl esters. This vitamin is involved in immune function, supports cell growth, and plays a critical role in the normal functioning of the heart, eyes, lungs, and other organs.

Add to that the fact that vitamin A is a far better protective against the ill effects of measles than any vaccine ever was (vitamin A is the recommended treatment for acute measles, even on the CDC website, did you know?) and you’ll realize this enhancement of vitamin A status was crucial.

[The CDC website has recently carefully manicured its recommendations: it now says: “Consistent with guidance from the American Academy of Pediatrics, vitamin A may be administered to infants and children in the United States with measles under the supervision of a healthcare provider as part of supportive management. Children with severe measles, such as those who are hospitalized, should be managed with vitamin A!] That’s as near as they get to suggesting supplements are a good thing!

The CDC suggests doses as follows:

If vitamin A is recommended, it should be administered immediately upon diagnosis and repeated the next day for a total of 2 doses under the supervision of a healthcare provider. The recommended age-specific daily doses are:

• 50,000 IU for infants younger than 6 months of age

• 100,000 IU for infants 6–11 months of age

• 200,000 IU for children 12 months of age and older

These are very substantial doses. I have never taken more than 50,000 IU as an adult!

Be aware that you can have too much vitamin A, as well as too little. Hypervitaminosis A, as it’s called, can cause symptoms like nausea, dizziness, blurred vision, and long-term issues like liver damage and bone problems. The Tolerable Upper Intake Level for adults is 3,000 mcg RAE per day. RAE = retinol activity equivalent. That comes out at 10,000 IU daily max.

In pregnant women, high doses of vitamin A have been linked to severe birth defects.

So set the obvious and powerful benefits of correcting widespread vitamin A deficiency among kids against the claims for vaccination and you will see obvious hysteria on show. They now claim that measles deaths dropped by over 99% following the introduction of the vaccine in 1968. [Oxford University] 

That’s just sheer massaging of facts (lying). In the United States the mortality rate for measles decreased by more than 98% before the introduction of the measles vaccine in 1963 (Figure 1). 

In England, we see the same thing—a dramatic decrease in deaths before the introduction of the measles vaccine in 1968 (Figure 2). The percent decline from peak was 99.6% down at the time that the measles vaccine was introduced. Measles deaths were gone!

And that’s a fact: in some New England states, in 1963, when the measles vaccine was introduced, there no deaths at all from measles. 

The same can be said incidentally for other infectious diseases such as whooping cough—massive declines in death before the introduction of any vaccine. Scarlet fever, which was during the 1800s a bigger killer than whooping cough or measles, went to near zero without the use of a vaccine.

[https://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2015/07/31/measles-the-new-red-scare/]

The Hysteria and Fear Game

But the criminal shills for the pharma industry never stop, for shame. I just came across the fact that Stanford University researchers modeled what could happen over a quarter-century if Americans no longer took vaccines: 290,000 measles deaths (they claimed); 23,000 cases of polio paralysis (they claimed); 41,000 babies born with congenital rubella syndrome (they claimed); and possibly more than a million deaths from diphtheria (they claimed). 

What a scam! As I said, by the time that measles vaccine was introduced there were VERY FEW deaths anywhere. All that can be honestly predicted is that it would go back to the status quo, ie. not a problem. For example there were only 5 measles deaths in all of New England before vaccines. Washington state had a measles death rate of 0.3 per 100,000. 

The Pharma Scammers Have Scant Regard For Mere Truth

There was no possibility of using the truth to spin their webs. So they make up lies or, as they call it, modelling

First notice the word “modeled”. They did a made up scenario and then pretended it was fact. Actually, what they did was took a range of their own guesswork figures, averaged them, and then supposed that would give a fair, unbiased estimate of what would happen. [They call this “science”]

Their second sly trick was to suppose matters would go back to how they were in Victorian times: poverty, open sewers, widespread malnutrition and so forth. That’s just not true. By the time vaccinations came along, the death had all-but vanished (actually was ZERO in several states by that time). So logic decrees that we would just go back to that era. Except…

Third, and the most hidden and nasty, is that they fail to mention the terrain has now been altered to an unsustainable degree by vaccination itself (see below). 

Here’s Where It Gets Really Worrying:

A controversial study done on chickens shows that vaccinated birds caused the viruses to mutate to a more deadly form. Of course some scientists say it has little relevance for human vaccination! Well haha! Chickens are very relevant when it suits them. How often have you seen “bird flu” traipsed through the media as a deadly threat to humans?

But when it threatens their status, they deny it works that way round.

Evolutionary science suggests that many pathogens aren’t deadly, or not even very virulent, because if they kill their host too quickly they can’t spread to other victims. Now enter vaccination. Some vaccines don’t prevent infection, but they do reduce how sick patients become. By keeping their hosts alive, such “imperfect” or “leaky” vaccines could give deadlier pathogens an edge, allowing them to spread when they would normally burn out quickly.

Now a 2015 study proves it can happen with Marek’s disease, a viral infection in chickens. Over the past few decades, Marek’s disease has become much more virulent—which some researchers believe is the result of vaccination.

When the birds weren’t vaccinated, infection with highly virulent strains killed them so fast that they shed very little virus—orders of magnitude less than when they were infected with less virulent strains. But in vaccinated birds, the opposite was true: Those infected with the most virulent strains shed more virus than birds infected with the least virulent strain.

Thus, “vaccination enabled the onward transmission of viruses otherwise too lethal to transmit, putting unvaccinated individuals at great risk of severe disease and death,” the authors wrote in PLOS Biology. It made matters worse!

[https://www.science.org/content/article/could-some-vaccines-make-diseases-more-deadly]

What if this should happen to the new Ebola vaccine? That’s a sensible question asked by study author Andrew Read, a biologist at Pennsylvania State University, University Park. To which industry-fan Adrian Hill, a vaccine researcher at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, retorts “He [Read] should stop scaremongering.” The whole distinction between leaky and nonleaky vaccines is flawed… Every vaccine is leaky, in that some people don’t get protected by it, some people are partially protected, some people have prevention of disease, and others prevention of infection.” Millions of people around the world receive shots every month, and there is no evidence that that has ever led to any disease becoming deadlier, Hill says.

But Hill is disingenuous at best, possibly a pharma shill. We now have new and nasty microbes CAUSED BY VACCINATION. The official term is vaccine-derived viruses (and bacteria). We now have “wild” measles (an atypical form) caused by the vaccines; an altered polio viruses pool; immunity-adapted hep B; antigen loss strains of pertussis (which thus escape the vaccines antibody response); evolved pneumococcus serotypes, which evade the vaccine; and more are being documented. 

Of course we get only official denials. “It’s not a problem, keep taking your shots.” As for the media, they just spew out what they are told to. But there are lots of honest doctors and scientists around the globe, finding awkward facts that contradict the official narrative. You’ll just never get to hear of their work.

Meanwhile they go on ranting and railing about the naughty people who won’t “follow the science”. Well, I follow the science; there isn’t any sometimes!

Just to finish:

Cod liver oil is recognized by the National Library of Medicine as a source of Vitamin A and can be obtained from eating fresh cod liver or by taking supplements.  Fortune Business Insights notes that the “global cod liver oil market is projected to grow from $88.75 million (2022) to $162.86 million by 2029.”

Get some!

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

There is a tendency to think that lead pathology has been dealt with, as in largely eliminated. Unfortunately that’s far from the case. While it is true that lead levels in the environment are less than, say, 50 years ago, it is sill incredibly persistent and is carried in human tissues almost permanently. We do not shake off lead so easily and IT’S DEADLY!

You may had read the theory that lead poisoning is probably what sank the Roman empire. They had lead in their plumbing, lead in their baths, lead cookware, even wine sweetened with lead acetate (sapa), and obviously large amounts of the metal has been found in their bodies: over 70 times higher than pre-Roman populations. They were once a brilliant and advanced civilization but maybe they died of being somewhat weakened, relatively infertile and perhaps deranged!¹

CHRIS73/CREATIVE COMMONS

Geochemist Clair Patterson (1922 – 1995) published that in our time we are born with 1000 times more lead in our bones than was found among our ancestors centuries ago! Patterson was a strong advocate for the removal of toxic lead from our environment. He also used a uranium-lead isotope to determine that the earth was 4.5 billions years old and he received the Nobel Prize for his great contribution to human knowledge… Oh, no, wait a minute. No he didn’t. Actually he was IGNORED by the Nobel committee, who awarded it instead to two independent workers on the chemistry of organometallic “sandwich” compounds!²

(Yawn)

Here’s something critical you may not know: lead levels in your bones (bone lead) is a perfect monitor for your risk of dying from all causes. 

This startling fact is from The Harvard bone-lead mortality study (?2007–2009).³

You have unsafe levels of lead in your bones even if you have had 100 IV EDTA infusions (aka. IV chelation), slow with sodium EDTA or rapidly with Calcium EDTA.  Rapid Calcium EDTA infusion is proven to take out more lead than the slow but slow infusion is better for those few patients where the primary issue is pathologic calcification, as in vascular calcification or high calcium coronary score.

Remember: hair, blood and urine levels tell you almost nothing about your bone lead score!

From “Safe” to None at All 

There was a time—not very long ago—when a child could carry a measurable burden of lead in their blood and still be considered “fine.” Not healthy, not thriving—just not yet alarming enough to trigger concern. That illusion has been steadily dismantled over the past half century, piece by piece, study by study, until today the conclusion is stark:

There is no safe level of lead exposure in children.

That statement, now widely accepted, represents one of the most profound reversals in environmental health science.

The CDC’s Turning Point (2012)

In 2012, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) formally lowered its reference level for blood lead in children from 10 micrograms per deciliter (µg/dL) to 5 µg/dL, effectively doubling the number of children considered at risk.

This decision, reported by John Gever in MedPage Today, was more than a numerical adjustment—it was a philosophical shift. The CDC also abandoned the term “level of concern,” acknowledging that it falsely implied safety below a threshold.

The agency stated plainly:

“No level of lead in the blood is safe.”

This position was based on recommendations from the Advisory Committee on Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention, which emphasized that even low-level exposure is associated with measurable harm. The new 5 µg/dL benchmark was not a safety cutoff, but a statistical marker—the 97.5th percentile of U.S. children’s blood lead levels at the time.

The implication was unsettling: what had once been considered “acceptable” exposure was now recognized as biologically active and potentially damaging.

To understand how dramatic this shift was, we have to rewind.

In the mid-20th century, lead poisoning was recognized primarily as an acute condition. Children with very high blood lead levels—often above 60 µg/dL—presented with seizures, coma, or death. These were unmistakable cases.

Chronic lead poisoning, I learned at med school, was characterized as “The dangles and dry colic”, meaning abdominal pains and peripheral nerve damage, leading to weak wrists and difficulty walking.

Lower levels were largely ignored.

This paradigm began to crack in the 1970s, largely due to the work of Herbert Needleman, a pediatrician and psychiatrist who asked a radical question:

What if lead harms children even when it doesn’t cause obvious poisoning?

In a landmark 1979 paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine, Needleman and colleagues measured lead levels in children’s shed baby teeth and compared them with cognitive and behavioral outcomes.

Herbert Needleman. The kid’s hero!

They found that children with higher lead burdens—even at levels far below those causing acute poisoning—had:

• Lower IQ scores

• Reduced attention span

• Increased behavioral problems

This study was explosive. It suggested that lead was not just a poison—it was a neurodevelopmental disruptor at levels previously considered harmless.⁴

By the 1990s and early 2000s, a new generation of studies confirmed and extended Needleman’s findings.

One of the most influential came from Bruce Lanphear and colleagues:

They found something deeply counter-intuitive: the largest drop in IQ occurred at the lowest levels of exposure! Children whose blood lead rose from 1 to 10 µg/dL experienced a greater IQ decline per unit increase than those at higher levels.

In other words, the dose-response curve was steepest at the low end—exactly where previous standards had assumed safety.⁵

This pooled analysis of multiple international cohorts revealed something deeply counterintuitive:

Why Are Children So Particularly Vulnerable?

Lead interferes with multiple biological systems central to brain development:

• Synapse formation (disrupting neural connections)

• Calcium signaling (essential for neuron communication)

• Neurotransmitter release

• Gene expression and epigenetic regulation

So much so that a major review by the National Research Council concluded:

Lead exposure during early childhood can cause permanent alterations in brain structure and function, with effects that persist into adulthood.⁶

Behavioral and Social Effects

• The impact is not limited to IQ.

• Longitudinal studies have linked childhood lead exposure to:

• Increased impulsivity and aggression

• Reduced academic achievement

• Higher rates of delinquency and criminal behavior

Reyes demonstrated that reductions in environmental lead—particularly after the phase-out of leaded gasoline—were strongly associated with declines in violent crime decades later.⁷

From Treatment to Prevention

By the time of the CDC’s 2012 decision, the scientific consensus had shifted decisively:

• There is no threshold below which lead is harmless

• Effects occur at levels once considered negligible

• Damage is often irreversible

The Advisory Committee emphasized that policies should move away from reacting to elevated blood levels and toward primary prevention—eliminating exposure before it occurs.

The Quiet Reality

The most unsettling aspect of this story is not that lead is toxic—that has been known for centuries.

It is that for decades, “acceptable exposure” was defined not by biology, but by what was economically and politically convenient.

Each time the threshold was lowered—from 60 µg/dL, to 30, to 10, to 5—it wasn’t because lead became more dangerous.

It was because we became more honest about what it was doing all along.

What You Can Do

My old pal the late Garry Gordon was a big activist with lead: he said we older ones should undertake daily chelation for the rest of our lives. He was thinking of oral or rectal chelation with EDTA (which tires after a while, let’s be honest!)

He also used zeolite and found some benefits from daily ingestion of high dose vitamin C, 10 grams or more, plenty of fiber, and other natural chelators (such as pectin and parsley). Garry’s point being that there is new lead coming in daily from water, food and air and from lead released by bone turnover.  

Calcium is the simplest, most underrated intervention. Lead and calcium compete for the same biological pathways. So…

• Low calcium ? more lead absorption

• Adequate calcium ? less absorption + less bone release

Calcium doesn’t exactly “chelate” lead—it prevents it from getting in and coming out of bone.⁸

Iron status matters more than people realize. Iron deficiency dramatically increases lead uptake. Children with low iron absorb significantly more lead.⁹

So eat red meat, liver (if you’re open to it), or iron supplementation if deficient. But do NOT take iron supplements without first getting your doctor to measure your serum ferritin levels. Overdosing with iron can be dangerous. No kidding.

OK, that’s it for this week! Not too “heavy” a topic, I hope (joke).

To your good health,
Prof. Keith Scott-Mumby 
The Alternative Doctor

References:

1. https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/londinium-romans-blood-lead-levels-so-high-they-may-have-lowered-birth-rates/4010808.article
2. Patterson, Clair C. Contaminated and Natural Lead Environments of Man. Archives of Environmental Health, 11(3), 344–360 (1965)
3. Circulation. Volume 120, Number 12: https://doi.org/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.108.827121
4. Needleman, Herbert L., et al. Deficits in psychologic and classroom performance of children with elevated dentine lead levels. New England Journal of Medicine, 300(13), 689–695 (1979)
5. Lanphear, Bruce P., et al. Low-Level Environmental Lead Exposure and Children’s Intellectual Function: An International Pooled Analysis. Environmental Health Perspectives, 113(7), 894–899 (2005)
6. National Research Council. Measuring Lead Exposure in Infants, Children, and Other Sensitive Populations. National Academies Press, 1993
7. Reyes, Jessica Wolpaw. Environmental Policy as Social Policy? The Impact of Childhood Lead Exposure on Crime. The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy, 7(1), 2007
8. Gulson, Brian L., et al. “Dietary calcium supplementation reduces mobilization of lead from bone in lactating women.”Environmental Health Perspectives, 112(3), 2004
9. Wright, Robert O., et al. “Association between iron deficiency and low-level lead poisoning in an urban primary care clinic.”American Journal of Public Health, 89(7), 1999