Part of an Interview with Louise Mclean

Published by Zeus Information in 2005

 

 

When Martin Walker published his fifth book in 1993 - Dirty Medicine: Science, big business and the assault on natural health care, it sent shock waves through the natural healthcare industry. He set up Slingshot Publications to publish this book and others for writers having difficulties getting their books published by mainstream publishing houses. Louise Mclean talks to Martin about his books, his views and his writing.

 

Many people believe there is presently a worldwide move through Codex Alimentarius to outlaw natural therapies and remedies. The first phase of these has been implemented through the EU Food Supplements Directive, with the Herbal and Medicines Directives to follow. In your book Dirty Medicine you outlined some of the strategies used by the pharmaceutical industry to discredit alternative medicine. What do you think is going on at the moment?

 

When I was writing Dirty Medicine from 1988 to1993, I don't think I realised the importance of the attack on vitamins and mineral supplements. Only recently have I understood that the people attached to the Campaign Against Health Fraud (now called HealthWatch) in the UK and the American National Council Against Health Fraud (NCAHF) in America were only the first wave of a more, powerful and centrally organised attempt to control vitamin and mineral supplements. I tended at that time I was writing Dirty Medicine  to view the people I was writing about as rather quirky individuals who were in favour of professional medicine, biased towards scientific medicine and the pharmaceutical companies, but not as people supported by multinational agencies involved in a continuous conflict over supplements and holistic health therapies.

 

Of course now that the plan has been unveiled, I can see that the organisation of CAHF and NCAHF was the first stage in a war. The techniques they were using - the character assassination of alternative practitioners and researchers, the commissioning and planting of press stories, the linking up with more formal agencies like the FDA and the MHRA, raiding premises, striking people off professional registers, bringing people before disciplinary board hearings, conducting bogus scientific trials, and undeclared work with large corporations. All these things were linked to a kind of regulatory

ground clearing exercise. Now, a legislative battle is taking place on a different level and involving whole groups of countries.

 

The pharmaceutical cartel are losing money worldwide to natural health care. They don't really want people to get better by themselves when they could be taking pharmaceutical medicine?

 

The chemical and pharmaceutical companies would like to retain hegemony over the social structure of health and medicine. It isn´t that they want to do away with vitamins and food supplements, it´s that they want to control production and distribution of these things to maximise profit. The fact that they are campaigning to end self administration of vitamins, minerals and food supplements would not stop them from putting them in food, for instance. They want to control pre-packaged distribution of vitamins and if they could put them in foods, shirts, lipsticks or patches or whatever, they will do that. They also want to end the confusion that has arisen between nutrition and medicine and they want to end any evident connection between nutrition and health so that in the public perception, health is dependent only upon professional medicine and pharmaceutical products.