What sense does it make to say you are happy and healthy if you live in a society where you could be imprisoned at any moment, on just a whim or the accusation of being, simply, different? Obviously that touched a raw nerve for the Russians.

But what has always lingered with me was the question of level 9: past lives and karma.

Whether one believes in reincarnation or not is almost beside the point. My purpose was never to persuade anyone of a particular doctrine but to encourage people to think more deeply about why illness occurs and what healing actually means. As healers, we are often so intent on removing disease that we rarely stop to ask whether there is a larger story unfolding in a person’s life.

This raises an uncomfortable question.

If suffering has meaning, and if a person’s life follows a path that includes lessons we cannot fully understand, is it right for doctors to always intervene? Could there ever be circumstances in which illness is not simply an enemy to be defeated but part of a journey that ultimately serves the individual?

Authors Ruediger Dahlke and Thorwald Dethlefsen think so. Together they wrote a marvelous book (1983) with what has to be the most intriguing title ever: The Healing Power of Disease.

Most doctors are understandably reluctant even to entertain such thoughts. We are trained to diagnose, to treat and, whenever possible, to cure. Yet anyone who has practised medicine for many years knows that healing and curing are not always the same thing. Patients sometimes die healed in spirit, while others survive physically but remain profoundly wounded. The longer one practises, the less tidy the relationship between disease and healing appears.

If karma exists, and if some people have accumulated an abundance of what we might call “good karma”, is it not allowable for them to share it with others less fortunate? I have always held that glorious, if slightly arrogant view, that I have abundant “good karma” and have been allowed to pass it on to others as a world-class healer and teacher. 

Then suddenly, perhaps due to the publication of my best-selling book New God New World, I have begun to frame the same question around a different aspect of Being: grace.

Could a person with abundant grace not share it with others around them?

The remarkable Russian saint Seraphim of Sarov believes so and expressed the idea beautifully:

“Acquire the Spirit of Peace, and thousands around you will be saved.”

Notice that he did not say, “Teach thousands.” He did not even say, “Heal thousands.” He spoke of becoming something, not merely doing something.

Perhaps this is the deepest form of healing.

Seraphim of Sarov (from OrthodoxWiki)

Modern psychology, interestingly, points in a similar direction. Researchers have demonstrated that emotions are contagious. Kindness encourages kindness. Hope spreads. Calmness influences those around us. One person’s inner state quietly shapes the emotional climate of an entire family, workplace, or community.

Science describes the phenomenon. Grace may explain its deepest source.

According to that sublime authoress Simone Weil (1909 – 1943), grace, “is the divine intervention that allows for spiritual uplift and liberation.

So am I on to something here? Let me point out that there is an important difference between grace and karma. Karma, in many traditions, concerns justice. We reap what we sow. Grace belongs to an entirely different realm. Grace is not earned. It is received. It is gift rather than reward, generosity rather than accounting.

But it can be shared, surely?

As I reflected on this, I realized that I had known people whose presence changed the atmosphere of a room before they had spoken a single word. We have all met individuals like this. They are not necessarily famous. They may never have written a book or held high office. Yet when they enter a room, people somehow relax. Conversations become kinder. Hope quietly returns. Nothing dramatic has happened, and yet something has undeniably changed.

The older I become, the more conscious I am that I have indeed been greatly blessed. Not because I imagine myself wiser than others, but because life has repeatedly granted me unexpected insights, extraordinary teachers, remarkable patients and learning experiences that have shaped the way I see the world. These have never felt like achievements to boast about. They have always felt like gifts to be grateful for.

Perhaps none of us possesses grace. Perhaps we simply become more or less open to it. Perhaps our task is not to manufacture blessing but to allow blessing to flow through us.

In the words of that wonderful writer Simone Weil, “Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it.”

Simone Weil, author of Gravity and Grace (La Pesanteur et la Grâce)

As doctors we often focus, quite rightly, on acquiring knowledge and technical skill. We should. Lives depend upon it. But after decades of practice I have come to believe that patients receive far more than our nostrums, remedies and prescriptions. They experience our presence. They sense whether we are hurried or attentive, anxious or calm, judgmental or accepting. They notice whether we see a diagnosis or a fellow human being.

In that sense, every consultation becomes much more than an exchange of information. It becomes an encounter between two people, each bringing something invisible into the room.

Could that invisible quality itself be therapeutic?

This idea resonates with something I have gradually learned over the years. Presence is not a technique. It cannot be faked. It arises naturally when we ourselves have become more peaceful, more compassionate and more accepting. Patients recognize authenticity with astonishing accuracy.

Perhaps this explains why some healers accomplish far more than their technical abilities alone would predict. Their knowledge matters, of course, but it is accompanied by something less easily measured. Their very presence reassures. Their confidence steadies frightened minds. Their compassion eases suffering that no drug can reach.

Looking back, I wonder whether grace may indeed be an Eleventh Level of Healing?

If that is true, then the greatest calling of a healer is not merely to become more knowledgeable, although knowledge remains essential. It is not merely to become more skillful, although skill saves lives. It is to become the kind of person whose presence itself carries hope.

When patients leave our consulting rooms, they may remember very little of the technical explanation we gave them. They are much more likely to remember how we made them feel. Did they feel heard? Did they feel valued? Did they leave with a little more courage than they brought with them?

Perhaps that, too, is healing.

And perhaps grace, unlike almost everything else in this world, does not diminish when it is shared. Like the flame of a candle lighting another candle, nothing is lost. Instead, there is simply more light.

If so, then every encounter with another human being becomes an opportunity. Not necessarily to solve every problem or remove every pain, but to leave that person carrying a little more hope, a little more joy and a little more sense of their own worth than when they first arrived.

From C. S. Lewis: “Joy is the serious business of Heaven.”

From Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: “Joy is the infallible sign of the presence of God.”

And from Mother Teresa: “Let no one ever come to you without leaving better and happier.”

For me, that is an inspiring thought. It also places a gentle responsibility upon all of us who seek to heal. Our greatest contribution may ultimately be not only what we know, but who we have become.

In the end, perhaps healing is not simply something we do. It is something we become. And if, by God’s grace, our own lives have become a little more peaceful, a little more joyful and a little more loving, then perhaps those who meet us may leave carrying something of that blessing with them. 

That, I believe, is healing by grace.

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

PS Level 10, if you are intrigued, is DEATH. That great humanitarian Bernie Siegel described death for suffering cancer patients as “a form of healing”.

A balance of ultra-processed foods? Refined flour? Added sugars? Artificial flavourings? Seed oils heated to destruction? Fruit and vegetables grown in mineral-depleted soils? Meals eaten in five hurried minutes while staring at a mobile phone? Aw, come on! 

If that’s balance, I’d rather be gloriously unbalanced.

Taking supplements they claim is a waste of time and only leads to “expensive pee”. Well my reply to that has been consistent over the decades: not nearly as expensive as getting sick without supplements! Besides, statins lead to very expensive pee (and no earthly good), anti-depressants lead to expensive pee and little else of good. Oh sure, antidepressants kill ALL emotion, including depression, but is that really what we want? It’s so much easier to get rid of inflammation in the body, which solves all but the most extreme cases of depression (such as that based on life disasters). 

The trouble is with doctors (some doctors) is that nutritional deficiency has to be really gross before they can see it. Beri-beri or Pellagra they can remember from text books. But the common degrees of malnutrition you see everywhere in the streets and homes of London, New York, Paris, or anywhere in the Western world escapes them. Apparently the person is not “unhealthy” until they just about drop dead.

That’s not what we should be pursuing. We want vibrant, toned, supple, healthy bodies that are a joy to occupy and sing our lives with. Good health isn’t “not malfunctioning” but is “the best we can get”… and for longer.

Even if the dopes don’t accept that 98% is healthy but that 88% is unhealthy, there’s another important angle on this that all who tend the sick must know. Cells cannot manufacture what they do not possess. Nature is wonderfully forgiving—but she refuses to perform miracles without building materials. And those materials are nutrients.

As I say constantly in my public lectures: you cannot heal anybody of anything if there is a deficiency of the basic nutritional buildings block. I’m sorry if this offends people, even alternative practitioners, but it’s all a waste of time doing Reiki, reflexology, Chi Gung, micro-current therapy (MCT), massage, homeopathy or anything else if the body hasn’t got the basic necessary materials for health!

I’m not talking about gross malnourishment—famine or starvation. That’s a problem for the Third World and unless you are working in that environment, the malnutrition you will meet is lack of enough of the basic health vitamins, key minerals, enzymes, co-factors and all the other stuff. 

Medicine has become remarkably good at diagnosing catastrophic deficiency. Mention beriberi, pellagra, rickets or scurvy and every medical student remembers the textbook photographs.

What medicine is far less comfortable discussing is suboptimal nutrition.

Millions of people are not starving; they are simply running on less than they need. They look reasonably well. They go to work. They pay their taxes. They raise families.

Yet they wake tired, suffer frequent infections, heal slowly, battle aching joints, lose concentration, experience poor sleep, low mood, thinning hair, brittle nails and endless “minor” complaints that are never quite serious enough to deserve attention.

The laboratory may say “normal.” The patient knows something is missing. Normal is not the same as optimal. That distinction has shaped my entire professional life.

What Do Veterinarians Know Thats Doctors Don’t?

The best people at nutrition, surprisingly, are the veterinary experts. They would not dream of letting an animal go to stud in the pathetic nutritionally compromised state of most humans. 

Veterinarians learned long ago that the right balance of nutrients is essential for vitality and longevity in anything from a cockatoo to a pedigree horse. Why is it that what is good for animals is unimportant for humans? It’s just another case of specialist isolation; knowledge from one field is ignored completely in another. 

If you think I’m overstating it, take a look at a can of pet food. Lynne McTaggart did some 20 years ago. She found that dog food contained the equivalent of 8000 IU of vitamin A, 464 mgm of vitamin E and 812 mgm of vitamin D (Source: What Doctors Don’t Tell You, Vol 13 no 9, Dec 2002). 

That’s way over the recommended daily allowance for humans (for adults, the dietary intake level for alpha-tocopherol is set at 13 mg/day for men and 11 mg/day for women. For children, far less). That’s according to the European Food Safety Authority, the “scientific arm of the European Union: What — dogs deserve better than voters? It doesn’t even make political sense, does it?

[https://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/efsajournal/pub/4149]

In the USA, that’s just 15 mgm.

You’ll have to educate yourself about nutrition, there’s really no choice. Fight for your own health. Don’t expect any help from the medical profession or government advisors. Ignorance in doctors can kill you. For example vitamin A is known to protect against cancerous changes in cells (hundreds of studies support this), yet standard medical advice is now to severely limit the intake of vitamin A. Why? Because it can be toxic if you take it at idiot levels. Well aspirin at idiot levels will kill you for sure, but we don’t hear any calls for its removal.

A Rolls-Royce that Crawls?

Don’t think of health as merely the absence of disease. That is an extraordinarily low ambition. Imagine buying a magnificent grand piano and celebrating because only half the keys are broken. Imagine owning a Rolls-Royce that only reaches thirty miles an hour and declaring yourself delighted because technically it still drives.

We should expect far more from the human body. Our goal should be vibrant health. Energy that lasts all day. Not just energy is needed but clear, lively thinking. Strong muscles. Supple joints. Resilient immunity. Excellent sleep.

A body that feels like a joy to inhabit rather than a burden to drag through life. Otherwise you are not truly healthy!

And there is an answer. Take a good nutritional formula and… by good luck, I’ve got one! In fact it’s coming back on stream next week. It’s called Liquid Gold.

This is an awesome health and longevity formula. Let’s just say I did all the thinking and research. You just have to drink it: one ounce of a delicious beverage every day and you’re done!

You’ll be hearing more next week. Look out for the messages and grab some while you can (extra discounts for the re-launch).

Meantime, there are lots of books to advize you and thousands of websites to supply you through your letter box, even without the FDA’s consent! Live healthy, live long! It’s your right!

It starts with knowledge.

Prof. Keith Scott-Mumby
The Official Alternative Doctor

While folks today are congratulating themselves with their smart skills and up-to-dateness, I had been on it for years or sometimes, as in this case, for DECADES before the rest of the pack.

Influencers often portray themselves as very savvy and switched on… but then forget to mention earlier sources they’d copied from! I’ve lived with it for years and it no longer aggravates me; I’m just amused.

Take “earthing”, the idea of grounding your body electrically, to discharge static build up. You would suppose this idea was “discovered” by Clint Ober or the late Stephen Sinatra, according to your sources, but was actually published by me as long ago as 1988, in a little book called The Allergy Handbook (no longer  in print).

Me and friend, the late Stephen Sinatra MD

So what is it this time?

Well, let me start with a story in the press. It concerns a man in his late 50s, who was training to be a Catholic Deacon.¹

He was repeatedly found in a stupor, over quite a number of years. Coupled with this was unsteadiness. He would sometimes stumble and fall. It looked to onlookers as if he was drunk! In truth he drank a little and occasionally, but nowhere near enough to be inebriated.

What was happening?

On one occasion the wife came home to find her husband on the front steps in a stupor. 

On another night, when he returned from walking their dog, he seemed unsteady and in a “trancelike state,” the wife said. He told her he had fallen because his shoes were too big.

These zombielike spells became more frequent, coming on suddenly and usually in the evening. The wife began wondering if he was developing dementia; very unusual at his age but by no means unheard of. She saw a therapist to learn how to cope.

He went to his doctor, who attributed the problem to dehydration! Later, after he drove the wrong way down a local parkway, his wife insisted he seek additional medical care. A neurologist suspected seizures, but tests didn’t pinpoint a cause.

It was only after stumbling and hit his head on a coffee table that a trip to the emergency room started the process of real discovery.

At the ER, a blood test yielded a startling result: the patient’s ethanol level was 363 milligrams per deciliter, equivalent to a blood alcohol content of .363%, more than four times the legal limit for driving. But he hadn’t been drinking at all! Scheduled to have prostate-reduction surgery in a few days, in preparation, he hadn’t had even a drop of alcohol.

Of course the usual response in this situation is “Ah, a drinker in denial. We know you’ve been boozing. We have the scientific proof. It’s no use you lying!”

But he was telling the truth: this was a case of so-called auto-brewery syndrome or as I christened it decades ago, an “on-board brewery”. In this condition, Candida albicans (a kind of yeast), food yeasts or intestinal microbes break down food sugars and carbs to produce unusually high levels of ethanol in the gut, leaving people in a drunken state.

They essentially brew their own alcohol right in the gut.

I was once asked (around 1988, I seem to recall) to act as expert witness in defence of a man who had this condition quite obviously. I proved it by giving him a loading dose of sugar and taking repeat bloods. The man’s blood alcohol went up and up and up, while sitting in front of me and drinking nothing but water.

Unfortunately, the court wouldn’t listen and followed the police line: he was drunk while in charge of a vehicle, with an illegal blood alcohol level, obviously due to imbibition. His protests he had not been drinking were simply ignored because the charge was simply “illegal blood alcohol level”, without any emphasis on where it came from.

That was the state of the science then, and even now. It’s rare to encounter a doctor or health worker who know about this condition, much less understands the mechanism.

However, today we have a nonprofit, Auto-Brewery Syndrome Advocacy and Research. The Deacon and his wife were connected with Bernd Schnabl, a gastroenterologist at the University of California at San Diego, who was conducting a study of people with signs of this condition. He enrolled.

He met with Prasanna Wickremesinghe, a gastroenterologist at Richmond University Medical Center in New York City, who with colleagues published a case study in 2019 about auto-brewery syndrome.² 

To determine whether this was the problem, “Dr. Wick,” as patients call him, conducted a glucose challenge test, exactly as I had done nearly 40 years ago. Then, Wickremesinghe collected samples from the patient’s digestive tract and found a massive overgrowth of Saccharomyces cerevisiae, or “brewer’s yeast”.

Wickremesinghe prescribed Nystatin, an antifungal medication which I used routinely in my office at the time, and recommended a reduced intake of carbohydrates and alcohol. For several months, the episodes went away.

But the episodes kept recurring. “It’s like flipping a switch,” the patient said. “You’re perfectly normal one minute, and the next minute you’re toast.”

He was put on another antifungal, fluconazole (Diflucan). It seemed to help, but there were still periodic events. It was very worrying. Due to concerns, he was forced to take a leave from his deacon duties, fearing he would zone out while conducting a baptism or wedding. They bought a $1 million liability insurance policy in case his unpredictable behavior left someone injured. He tried acupuncture, coffee enemas and sessions in a sauna. He saw a naturopathic doctor, who prescribed a special probiotic pill for which the Andersons paid $1,500 a month. It didn’t stop the spells.

Fecal Transplant

In this procedure, microbes from the processed feces of screened healthy donors are consumed in oral capsules, which can restore a healthy microbial ecosystem in the recipient’s gut (needs FDA approval, case by case).

Elizabeth Hohmann, an infectious-disease specialist at Mass General Brigham medical center in Boston was contacted. Hohmann had administered hundreds of fecal transplants, mostly to patients with infections of bacteria known as Clostridioides difficile (C. diff). In research studies, she also gave them to people with obesity, liver disease and conditions requiring bone marrow transplants.

However, even she was skeptical of the Deacon’s case. But agreed to talk to Schnabl, the gastroenterologist in San Diego. She learned that when glucose was added to stool samples (out of the body) from this patient and other study participants in a lab bioreactor, ethanol levels in the samples shot up.

No arguing with that. So Hohmann instituted the treatment. It took some time but ultimately the result was a Wow!

I diagnosed Candida for this a lot in the 80s and 90s, because I was looking for it. I did also mention yeasts or Saccharomyces species in my writings of the time. But it has subsequently emerged that other bacteria, including Escherichia coli and Klebsiella pneumoniae, are capable of fermentation reaction too.

The Deacon had taken at least 18 courses of ciprofloxacin and other antibiotics over the years, mostly for prostate inflammation. That’s the usual cause: messing with the patient’s homeostasis. The results aren’t always so horrible but doctors go on blithely prescribing these drugs, as if there were never any consequences. No follow-ups after a certain minimum time on complex antibiotics!

For this patient, the story ended well. But I know from bitter experience that for most unlucky individuals, they are trapped in a personal hell, because of doctors and “experts” who are too stuck in their ways to consider anything out of the ordinary!

Well, I told ‘em!

Prof.

References: 

1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2026/07/11/years-hed-be-found-stupor-until-fall-led-surprising-diagnosis/
2. Malik F, Wickremesinghe P, Saverimuttu J. Case report and literature review of auto-brewery syndrome: probably an underdiagnosed medical condition. BMJ Open Gastroenterology. 2019;6(1):e000325. doi: 10.1136/bmjgast-2019-000325. PMID: 31423320. PMCID: PMC6688673

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

As a result of the searing heat in France, there have been terrible fatalities. The mortuaries of Paris were full! There are so many deceased, the system was overwhelmed. They had to send corpses to faraway cities, like Chartres, 50 miles away, for storage.

Nobody knows what the final figures of excess death will be (it will take weeks, maybe even months, to investigate and calculate). But it’s already apparent that the toll exacted by the intense, unrelenting extreme temperatures was terrible, chiefly among over-65s who died at home and alone.

Public Health France said there were more than 1,200 deaths last Wednesday, when France registered its hottest day EVER, breaking a record that had been set only the previous day! By way of comparison, the pre-heat wave death rate in April and May was around 900 to 1,000 per day, it said.

But there is another sad aspect to this situation. In 2003 France had a similar scorching episode, with record temperature highs and 15,000 resultant deaths, provoking a national reckoning about care of older people, who were particularly hard-hit. 

What happened is that the people (not the government bureaucrats, of course) rallied together and responded. It was a kind of “movement” in which everyday folks began to think about their neighbors, to check on them regularly, to see they were drinking enough water and being looked after.

Sweet!

But the lessons have been forgotten, apparently. According to Véronique Bertrand, a Paris funeral director, “With the passing years, we’ve perhaps forgotten that it could happen again and that things would even perhaps be worse.” 

“I think people absolutely need to wake up, that solidarity needs to come back… with people thinking about their neighbors, of those around them who live alone,” she said.

Since the 2003 event, France has introduced one of the world’s most sophisticated heat-alert systems, with early warnings, public cooling centers, welfare checks on vulnerable people and mandatory heat plans for care homes. These measures have undoubtedly saved lives, but heat remains a major public-health threat. Between 2014 and 2023, researchers estimated 37,825 heat-related deaths in France alone, Europe’s largest country.

Overall, France’s experience demonstrates that heat is now among our deadliest natural hazards. Even with improved emergency planning, rising temperatures continue to produce thousands of preventable deaths, particularly among the elderly.

Low Salt Diets

Those of you who have been with me for years will know I write from time to time about the very obvious association between low-salt diets and heat deaths. Salt restriction may be an overlooked vulnerability in extreme heat, especially among older adults, diuretic users, and people drinking large volumes of plain water. It leads to hyponatremia, meaning low blood sodium, which you would think from medical rantings about salt was a good thing. Not!

Hyponatremia occurs because high temperatures induce sweating, which depletes sodium, while concurrent excessive intake of plain water dilutes the remaining sodium in the blood.

Low salt diets are dangerous and are handed out indiscriminately, without adequate advice. [Ooops, sorry. Did it look like I was implying most doctors are gravely ignorant of nutritional issues?]

In 2022, a Swedish nationwide study, found hospitalization for hyponatremia rose sharply with temperature; future warming was predicted to increase cases further.¹

A newer JAMA Network Open 2024 paper found urban heat was associated with increased hyponatremia burden, especially in older people and women.²

There is also a 2006 direct experimental paper: “Heat stress responses in men after ingestion of a low-sodium diet,” using only 580 mg sodium/day, showing low-sodium intake changes physiological response to heat stress. There is English on the page, promise!³

I soon noticed, after moving to Las Vegas, that in the extreme heat episodes of the south-western deserts, people on low-salt diets were dropping like flies. I still seem to be the only person making a fuss about this! The honest answer is: the physiology is well-supported, the heat–hyponatremia association has been published. Everyone needs to be on guard, given the current fad for salt restriction.

Don’t just drink water, you need electrolytes too!

What About Vivien and Me? Did We Fry?

Thankfully not. We went to England, about 500 miles to the north! Definitely cooler. We visited family, which was nice, and ultimately found ourselves in the ancient medieval city of Lincoln, which was really nice! All the Mumbys come from within 30 miles of the city, including the hordes in my Dad’s family!

We toiled up the well-named Steep Hill to the cathedral, past ancient buildings, like the “Jew’s House” of 1170 (now a restaurant), to the cathedral, with its warm honey-colors stone. High up on a hill, it was preserved from some of the worst of acid-rain erosion which characterizes most medieval European buildings, and I thought it looked glorious.

For over 237 years Lincoln cathedral was the tallest building in the world, when its timber and lead central spire reached 525 ft (160 metres). It was the first edifice to surpass the Great Pyramid of Giza, which had held the record for nearly 4,000 years! 

Sadly, when the great spire was blown down in a storm in 1548, it lost the title.

Model of Lincoln Cathedral as it once was, with spires

But what interested me most was the Magna Carta. You probably know the historical importance of this document which was drafted by King John and his barons, at Runnymede island, on the River Thames, in 1215. It limited the powers of the king and established the important principle that even the king is not above the law, which is universal, even today.

The most celebrated is Clause 39, which states:

“No free man shall be seized or imprisoned… except by the lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land.”

This was revolutionary because it declared that even the king could not imprison people arbitrarily.

Closely related is Clause 40:

“To no one will we sell, to no one deny or delay, right or justice.”

Together, these principles established what later became known as due process of law.

Several copies of the 1215 document were made, sealed with the king’s seal, and sent to various cities in England, including Lincoln. The only surviving copies of this great charter are now the one in Lincoln castle, one in Salisbury cathedral and the British Library (2 copies). 

The Magna Carta near is unreadable but I don’t speak Latin anyway!

It was awesome to behold this ancient manuscript, from just a few inches away, even though hermetically sealed behind glass in a darkened room!

Well, that’s all from Europe. I hope to be back in Vegas in just a few weeks.

Meantime, stay positive and stay healthy (don’t go near doctors!)

To Your Good Health,

Prof. Keith Scott-Mumby
The Official Alternative Doctor

Source Article:

https://www.medpagetoday.com/publichealthpolicy/environmentalhealth/121970

References:

1. 1. Current and Future Burdens of Heat-Related Hyponatremia: A Nationwide Register-Based Study. J Clin Endocrinol Metab. 2022 May 17;107(6):e2388-e2393. doi: 10.1210/clinem/dgac103
   2. Prpic M, Hoffmann C, Bauer W, Hoffmann P, Kappert K. Urban Heat and Burden of Hyponatremia. JAMA Netw Open. 2024;7(12):e2450280. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2024.50280
   3. https://www.czytelniamedyczna.pl/822%2Cheat-stress-responses-in-men-after-ingestion-of-a-lowsodium-diet.html

The real marker of ageing may not be your face at all. It may be your muscles.

That might sound surprising. We tend to think of muscles simply as the machinery that moves us about. They help us climb stairs, lift shopping bags and get out of a chair. Useful, certainly—but hardly exciting.

Yet this old view has been turned upside down.

Today, muscle is increasingly recognized as one of the body’s most important organs. In fact, many researchers now describe skeletal muscle as an endocrine organ—a tissue that manufactures and releases hundreds of powerful messenger molecules known as myokines. These tiny chemical signals travel throughout the body, influencing inflammation, blood sugar control, immunity, bone strength, heart health and even the function of the brain.

Your muscles aren’t simply carrying you through life. They’re talking to every organ you possess. That’s extraordinary.

Even more extraordinary is what happens when we begin losing them.

Most people begin to lose muscle mass surprisingly early. The process can start in the thirties, gathering pace after fifty and accelerating still further after sixty. Doctors call this gradual decline sarcopenia, but you don’t need to remember the name.

Just remember the consequences.

Less muscle means poorer balance. Greater frailty. Slower recovery from illness. Increased risk of diabetes. More falls. More fractures. More dependency. Even maybe a shorter lifespan.

It isn’t simply that weak muscles make us old. Weak muscles seem to help make us ill. I bet you never read that before!

One of the simplest tests of future health isn’t a complicated blood analysis or an expensive body scan.

It’s grip strength.

Again and again, studies have shown that people with stronger handgrip tend to live longer, recover better from illness and enjoy greater independence well into old age. Grip strength predicts future disability so consistently that many geriatricians now regard it as one of the most useful indicators of biological ageing. Now you can understand why this is so!

A handshake may reveal more about your future than your wrinkles ever could. Think about that.

The story becomes even more fascinating when we look inside the muscles themselves.

Every time you contract a muscle—whether walking briskly, lifting weights, digging the garden or climbing a hill—it begins producing myokines. These remarkable substances help dampen excessive inflammation, improve insulin sensitivity, stimulate repair mechanisms and encourage healthy communication between organs.

Scientists have even nicknamed one of these molecules “exercise in a pill” because of the extraordinary benefits it appears to deliver.

Of course, there is no pill. The muscle has to do the work.

Perhaps the most exciting discovery concerns the brain. For decades we believed that exercise helped memory simply because it improved blood flow. Now we know much more.

Active muscles release substances that encourage the brain to produce new nerve connections and protect existing brain cells. Exercise also increases production of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), often called “fertilizer for the brain.” This helps support learning, memory and resilience.

In other words, your muscles help feed your mind. Perhaps this explains why physically active people have lower rates of dementia than those who remain sedentary. The muscles and brain are in constant conversation.

Here is another surprise. Muscle is one of the largest consumers of blood sugar in the entire body. Healthy muscle acts like a huge sponge, soaking glucose out of the bloodstream without demanding excessive insulin. In other words, counter-diabetes.

Lose muscle and the sponge shrinks. Blood sugar begins rising. Insulin resistance develops. Type 2 diabetes follows ever more easily. This may explain why resistance training has become one of the most effective non-drug approaches to improving blood sugar control.

The medicine isn’t sitting inside a bottle. It’s attached to your skeleton. Haha!

Your bones benefit too. For years we’ve been told to think about calcium. Calcium certainly matters but as my friend Tom Levy points out, calcium is DEATH, literally. We don’t want too much calcium. It causes crusting and aging of joints. It slowly infiltrates and damages heart circulation too (coronary artery calcification tests predict aging and death).

Vitamin D matters for bone.

Vitamin K2 matters.

Magnesium. Boron.

But none of these works particularly well if the bones are never challenged. Bones respond to pull. When muscles contract, they tug against bone. This mechanical stress tells the skeleton to remain dense and strong. Without that message, bone quietly dissolves away.

Muscles literally tell bones to stay alive.

Perhaps the greatest misconception is that muscle belongs only to athletes or bodybuilders. Nothing could be further from the truth. You don’t need enormous biceps. You don’t need six-pack abs (uuggh!)

You don’t need to join a gym if you dislike gyms. The goal is not bodybuilding. The goal is preserving the engine that keeps every other system functioning.

Fortunately, muscles remain astonishingly adaptable.

Even people in their seventies, eighties and nineties can increase muscle strength significantly. Numerous clinical trials have shown that resistance exercise performed just two or three times each week improves balance, walking speed, confidence and independence.

The body never completely forgets how to rebuild itself. You simply have to ask.

So how do we protect this hidden organ?

First, use it.

Here’s me building some muscle on Waikiki beach

Walking is wonderful for the heart and circulation, but muscle particularly responds to resistance. That resistance may come from weights, resistance bands, gardening, climbing stairs, swimming, rowing, carrying shopping, yoga or simply repeatedly standing up from a chair.

Challenge creates adaptation.

Second, feed it. Many older adults simply do not consume enough protein. Good-quality protein provides the amino acids required for muscle repair and growth. Fish, eggs, meat, dairy products, beans, lentils and other protein-rich foods all have a role.

Third, don’t fear ageing itself. One of the saddest myths is that losing strength is inevitable. It isn’t. Some decline occurs naturally, certainly. But much of what we call aging is really disuse.

See, we’re typically taught that we are weaker because we are older. But it’s the wrong way round. We are older because we let ourselves get weaker!

The body is astonishingly economical. If we stop asking muscles to work, they conclude they are no longer required. So they quietly disappear.

The good news is that they are surprisingly willing to come back.

Perhaps we should stop asking, “How old are you?” Instead, we should ask, “How much useful muscle have you kept?” That answer may tell us far more.

As medicine advances, we are beginning to realize something deeply encouraging: Health is not merely the absence of disease. It is the presence of reserve.

• Reserve in the heart.

• Reserve in the lungs.

• Reserve in the immune system.

• Reserve in the mind.

• And reserve in the muscles.

Your muscles are far more than motors.

• They are chemical factories.

• Sugar regulators.

• Anti-inflammatory pharmacies.

• Bone builders.

• Brain boosters.

• Perhaps even guardians of longevity.

So if you’re looking for one of the best anti-ageing investments you can make this year, don’t think in terms of yet another expensive cream or another miracle supplement. Start with the remarkable organ you’ve been carrying around all your life. It has been waiting patiently for your attention.

And the wonderful thing is this: It is never too late to answer the call.

Get up, get about, walk, cycle, swim or play sports. You’ll be glad you did!

Now, where’s my tennis racket…

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

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