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

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/