QUACKBUSTING THE QUACKBUSTERS

Free e-book launched exploring anti-nutritional lobby groups

Have you ever wondered why there is so much opposition to nutritional approaches for today's major health issues? Is it really because the science is weak, or is it more to do with politics and money?

I was fascinated to read the free e-book, published this month on the internet, by Martin Walker entitled Cultural Dwarfs and Junk Journalism - Ben Goldacre, Quackbusting and Corporate Science. It explores the associations Guardian columnist Ben Goldacre, and other 'quackbusters' have with an organised anti-nutritional medicine agenda and organisations funded by the pharmaceutical industry. Those familiar with Ben Goldacre's inability to expose the 'bad science' of drugs and antipathy towards nutritional medicine will not be surprised.

Martin Walker, author of Dirty Medicine and Brave New World of Zero Risk, looks at the quackbusting work of Ben Goldacre and others, placing them in the context of the global lobby groups that support the chemical, pharmaceutical, medical and processed food industries. It's an intriguing read. For the first time Walker's work focuses on this lobby's attacks on independent nutritionists, including myself, and traces the history of quackbuster campaigns against vitamin and food supplements.

Walker is giving away this publication as an e-book, in the hope that it will help people organise in defence of nutritional medicine.

Like all of Walker's work it is an erudite and detailed read that will certainly enlighten you to the darker side of those organising against non-pharmaceutically based medicine in general, and nutritional medicine in particular. The e-book can be downloaded for free from www.slingshotpublications.com and Walker hopes that many will place it on their web sites to be accessed and downloaded.

I hope you do take the time to read this and let others know about it because literally tens of thousands of people die every year from prescription drugs when better alternatives already exist and millions more suffer unnecessarily and die prematurely from ignorance, some scared off from trying effective, safe, nutritional approaches by individuals like Ben Goldacre and his fellow quackbusters.