A bill sponsored by practicing pharmacist Kate O Connell TD (FG), now part of the Government legislative pipeline, proposes to ban promotion and discussion of cancer treatments that fail the tests set by current medical knowledge. It proposes to apply the oxymoron of scientific consensus to cancer treatment. Mislabelled as a bill to curtail advertisements relating to cancer treatment, its intention is to crush any engagement on non-conventional treatments even if done in conjunction with conventional and, by logical extension, toxifies non-conventional treatments across all human diseases. Acupuncturists, Chiropractors and Herbalists need to sit up and take note that big Pharma is on the verge of an annexation because the bill, as formulated, also covers cancer risk prevention treatments.
Although formulated on the pathway of good intentions, like all orthodoxy its doctrinal approach protects the current establishment, buttresses its hegemony over scientific knowledge and economic muscle and treats knowledge as property to be controlled by those who know best. This alienates citizens from free choice and practitioners from free speech, thinning constitutional rights to bodily integrity and freedom of expression.
Great strides have been made by medical science in the treatment of cancer and some of the best brains in medicine are passionately committed to increasing outcomes but disease of any kind isn’t just rooted in the mechanics of the human body, when it is clear that external environmental issues and chemical food intake may play a key role since the Pharma companies like Monsanto first sprayed soils with glyphosates. Next time you drive from Cork to Dublin, count the number of flies on your windscreen. Big pharma for good or ill is locked into our food chain but is also at the other end focused on selling remedies to disease, some of which may inflamed by its own chemicals.
Einstein, who in 1905 added substantially to our early knowledge of quantum physics observed that “If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it”. If it wasn’t for breakthroughs by great thinkers like Einstein, Planck, Hawking prepared to challenge existing consensus, knowledge would be first filtered by those most at risk to its dissemination. As worded this appears to lie behind the Treatment of Cancer (Advertisements) Bill.
Ads and offers mean any material published including reports, instructions, accounts, brochures, posters. It amounts a blanket prohibition on an ‘offer’ of treatment, remedial prescription, consultation, diagnosis or treatment of any kind and although it is aimed squarely at charlatans, rogues and quacks it catches a great swathe of established alternative treatments used in conjunction with conventional.
Modern medicine still relies on Newtonian physics which treats the human body as a mechanical unit largely separated from its sub-atomic environment. Quantum physics challenges our understanding of everything proposing, as Einstein has that all matter is energy slowed down which means that we are only on the cusp of grasping how everything interconnects a century after Max Planck won the Noble Prize.
The Minister for Health’s bill is built on foundations which always fall because human knowledge and scientific breakthroughs cannot be contained by coercive controls. Widely regarded as the founding father of the scientific method, Galileo who died aged 77 in 1642 spent his final years under house arrest for proposing that the earth wasn’t the centre of the universe having been first instructed by the Pope in 1616 to abandon the opinion that “the sun stands still at the centre of the world and the Earth moves, and henceforth not to hold, teach, or defend it in any way whatever, either orally or in writing”.
In this Bill the Government proposes to make it illegal to publish whether orally or in writing any treatments that are not approved by the current scientific convention. The prohibition isn’t to be administered by Rome but by the Health Products Regulatory Authority. Contravention will not be subject to house arrest but to fines or imprisonment decided by a Court as distinct to an Inquisition.
Eddie Hobbs
28th November 2019
eddie@eddiehobbs.com