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 to 1993, I don’t
think I realized the importance of the attack on vitamins and
mineral supplements. It’s only recently that I’ve understood
that the people attached to the Campaign Against Health Fraud
(CAHF - now called HealthWatch) in the UK, the American
National Council Against Health Fraud (NCAHF) and Quackbusters
in America were only the first wave of a more organized,
powerful and centralized attempt to destroy vitamin and
mineral supplements. I tended at that time to view the people
I was writing about as rather quirky individuals who were in
favor 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 organization of CAHF and NCAHF was the first stage in the
battle. 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 MCA, raiding
premises, striking people off professional registers, bringing
people before disciplinary board hearings, conducting bogus
scientific trials, the 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
groupings 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 maximize 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 upon professional medicine and
pharmaceutical products.
Tell me more about the other books
Slingshot has published or is going to publish?
When I published Dirty Medicine in 1993 I set up Slingshot
Publications and it was my intention to publish my own books.
Dirty Medicine went out of print in 1998 after selling 7, 000
copies mainly by mail order.
In 1998 I published a small booklet about Loic Le Ribault, an
important French forensic scientist, mercilessly denigrated by
the French State and by medical interests because he
discovered the use of organic silica as a medicine for
arthritis. I wrote a short booklet about him and he has since
published his own series of books about his struggles,
culminating in the recent publication of The Cost of A
Discovery (available from LLR-G5 Ltd., C/o Ross Post Office,
Castlebar, County Mayo, Republic of Ireland).
Around 1999 or so, I thought that I would actually like to
publish other people’s work as well. In December 2002
Slingshot published A Cat in Hell’s Chance, a campaigners view
of the battle to close Hill Grove Farm in Oxfordshire, which
bred cats for vivisection. During its production I came to
understand more than I had previously about the link between
vivisection and medicine and therefore people’s health. There
are no good aspects of vivisection or chemical testing and
they have to absolutely abolished, they cannot be reformed.
SHAC, the campaign against Huntington Life Sciences is the way
forward, attacking companies and the industry on every front
possible and trying to cut off their financial backing and
destroy their economic infrastructure.
One of the things that has always been of interest to me is
the generational continuity of ideas, especially political
ideas. So I thought it would be a good idea to publish some of
the original texts which had a great impact on people. I
offered to reprint an English language edition of Hans
Ruesch´s ground-breaking and seminal anti-vivisection book
Slaughter of the Innocent . This book has just come out.
Although it was first published over 20 years ago in 1979, it
still gives you a sense of direction today. It was very
difficult to do, we had to create an electronic manuscript for
it which meant copying every page with data recognition
technology. Then it all had to be typeset again in the
original form, so that there was continuity of the references.
Despite the fact that testing on a tiny mouse or rat cannot
have any real bearing on how a drug will affect a human and
can lead to adverse reactions when given to humans, there are
apparently more animals being experimented on today than ever
before, even though New Labour promised in their manifesto to
cut down.
The New Labour government has reneged on its
anti-vivisectionist vote-catching rhetoric because they are so
heavily indebted to and entrenched with the pharmaceutical
multinationals. They can’t back down from the position the
chemical and pharmaceutical companies demand and that is why
millions of animals continue to be slaughtered every year.
Testing of chemicals on animals is growing in Britain and
America. When it comes to the questioning of a particular
chemical, which has been known to be carcinogenic for a long
time, the solution that has occurred to the chemical companies
is to get full scale massive animal testing trials for that
chemical. This means that they can put off making decisions
for at least 5 or 6 years, which gives them another 5 or 6
years’ profit and another 5 or 6 years’ unaccountable deaths,
while we wait for these massive animal slaughtering exercises
to be carried out. Then of course there is another 5 or 6
years in implementing any reforming regulations.
Buying time?
If the tests prove to be unequivocally against the chemical,
no doubt the chemical companies will come up with bizarre
arguments such as: ‘Oh well, you can’t rely on animal testing,
can you? It’s not the same as human physiology’. Which is what
they have said in the past. Then you get another 5 years of:
‘How can we test chemicals on humans?’ or ‘How can we collate
anecdotal stories of the effect of chemicals on humans?’ and
‘Let’s have a think about this and find some way of doing it’.
Then there’s another 5 years and it just goes on indefinitely.
Talking of chemicals, I believe you
wrote a paper about the epidemiologist, Sir Richard Doll and
his work on the (lack of a) link between cancer and the vinyl
chloride industry, while he was a consultant for Monsanto, at
that time one of the major producers of vinyl chloride?
I don´t want to go into the details of that particular paper,
its one of two papers I wrote over the last couple of years
about the contemporary role of medical epidemiologists. I am
very interested in writing about the connection between the
life of the professional and those larger agencies in society
which have power and which determine power and the direction
of society. One of the best works on asbestos for example, is
the book by Geoffrey Tweedale, called From Magic Mineral to
Killer Dust. It isn’t just about the company that manufactured
asbestos or about the scientists who agreed the toxic and
regulatory levels for asbestos fibre. It’s about a whole nexus
of social, scientific and economic factors. In important
writings about health, one has got to take account of a whole
series of social and political ideas, not just write about one
particular avenue.
There is a real problem with much contemporary writing about
health, in that it is over-simplistic, written by people who
are trying to push a particular theory or aspect of health.
Sociologically or in relation to campaigns, such books are
useless because they don’t take into account the whole of the
social structure that surrounds that illness or therapy.
Can you tell us about companies and
organizations that are set up to allay the fears of the public
on health and environmental issues but are really working for
the benefit of chemical and pharmaceutical industries?
Up until the end of the’80s, if a company wanted to deflect
public criticism, in the area of health, it would set up its
own propaganda arm, creating an institute or some kind of
lobby organization that was probably part of a PR company.
Towards the mid-1990s, a lot of critics, commentators and
journalists began to see these organizations for what they
were. You couldn’t just run a fake institute that published
good news about your industry without somebody finding out the
financial links between the industry and that institute.
So in the mid-1980s, a number of companies came into being
which were problem solving companies. A part of these
companies’ briefs entailed finding technical, scientific or
mechanical solutions to industry or company problems. Another
part of their work however, involved solving problems of
‘consumer perception’ faced by a particular industry, company
or product. So if the waste disposal industry had a problem
with the public perception of Dioxin, for example, then the
’problem solving’ company would take this on.
Their role is clearly similar to the one taken by PR companies
in the past. The difference is that their approach is more
integrated. These companies have their own epidemiologists,
their own scientists, their own smaller agency companies. They
have managed to integrate all of these areas into government
structures as well. They receive government grants for various
projects and are represented on peer review panels, etc. They
carry on a more authoritative and aggressive protection of
harmful products and a more determined attack on consumer and
citizens’ lobbies. These organizations are much more dangerous
in terms of their defense of bad health products because you
can’t track them down easily.
Lets move on to another Slingshot
book due out next year, ‘The Gatekeepers’, which deals with
alternative cancer healers.
The Gatekeepers is a book which I started by accident. When I
finished Dirty Medicine, I was doing a lot of research into
chemicals and cancer and I came across a particular
naturopath, who had been a cancer healer in England. I
followed and researched his work and looked at his methods in
some detail. I found that the British Ministry of Health as it
was then and the organs of orthodox medicine, had waged a
campaign against him. I had only previously read about
American cancer therapists and the way the American
government, American industry and American professional
medicine had attacked them.
I studied the work of this naturopath and uncovered the things
that happened to him. I went on to look at others and decided
to write The Gatekeepers, about the struggle between natural
cancer curers, orthodox medicine and the British government
from 1850 to the present day. It’s not a book about
alternative cancer cures or a book about cancer. It’s a book
about the power of professional medicine - dirty tricks and
strategies that are used by people in power to deny other
people a competitive place in the market. It deals with just
three or four people and looks at their cases in depth, as
individuals and therapists in an attempt to describe them in
rounded terms and not just at their cancer cures.
I’ve tried to look at these people, at their therapies and
philosophy as an aspect of their life and then I’ve looked at
the people who are attacking them in the same way - although
it’s quite difficult. For instance in the case of this
particular naturopath, somebody in the Ministry of Health set
the police on him. It’s difficult to understand the
consciousness of police officers trying to track down and
bring to trial an alternative medical practitioner. We can
understand the police arresting a criminal doing obvious harm
to property or to a person but we are not quite sure how to
describe the social environment of a police officer involved
in a campaign on behalf of the State against an alternative
medical practitioner.
This obviously has something to do with the common view about
medicine, the honesty of the medical profession and the
implied lack of competence of ´untrained´ practitioners. There
is clearly a view, very often projected in the press, that
whereas doctors have only one motive which is to cure people,
alternative practitioners have pecuniary motives and can be
responsible for harming people.
Yes, this is clearly the case when you think about it and of
course there is the contact with the pharmaceutical industry
which affects much professional medicine. The Gatekeepers is
going to be an interesting book to finish because I’ve been
working on it now for nearly 10 years on and off. I spent 2
years in 2001 and 2002 trying to help look after my mother who
died of cancer and that brought me into conflict with a lot of
things I questioned in the NHS.
I have tried to introduce personal anecdotal narrative into
the book because I became very involved in my investigation
into the naturopath. I wanted as well to write about the
process of investigating because I think it is important to
people. Writers as a professional body tend to keep their
methodologies to themselves. We should really try to explain
how we research a subject and put information together, just
so the reader can more fully understand where we are coming
from. In The Gatekeepers, I talk about my investigations, and
how you look at people and their past.
An idea that has come into focus for me recently, is to do
with the intrusion of the State and medicine into the life of
the family. I want to write more about this. The State and the
medical profession these days seem to be taking great leaps
and bounds into the previously accepted private area of the
family. Ironically a direction which the British Conservative
establishment was accusing communists, socialists and Labour
followers of in the early part of the last century.
Are you referring to situations like
the Shaken Baby Syndrome and MMR court cases?
Yes, and for example the HIV baby test case about whether the
baby should be tested for HIV. And of course the whole trend
in North America of legislating for pre-birth or even
pre-pregnancy testing for possible hereditary illnesses. At
the end of this continuum there is the overshadowing question
of legislating for various kinds of genetic testing.
There are examples too in another of my books, SKEWED,
regarding ME and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Cases are described
where psychiatrists put children with ME in closed mental
hospital facilities. In some cases the parents are arrested
and in one case imprisoned because they were said to be
inflicting false illness beliefs on their children. Some of
the mothers were accused of having Munchausen’s Syndrome by
Proxy.
It appears that we are entering an area where abuse becomes
defined by doctors, not simply in criminal terms or in terms
of violence or even mental cruelty but on the grounds that the
parent disagrees with orthodox medicine. This is going in the
wrong direction and appears to be part of a much larger plan
for the medical profession, science and pharmaceutical
interests to gain a greater hegemony over the family.
Let’s talk about your book ‘Skewed’.
Nowadays many people are becoming ill from ‘hidden’ causes
such as air pollution, pesticides in food, prescription drugs,
vaccinations, radiation from mobile phones and computers. They
become tired and weak. This book deals with the fact that
these people, who are diagnosed with ME or Chronic Fatigue
Syndrome, are frequently referred to psychiatrists. Since no
concrete physical diagnosis can be found, these sufferers are
told that ‘it is all in their minds’, that it’s psychosomatic.
Skewed came out at the end of October 2003 and it’s a book
about the way that a small group of psychiatrists have tried
to control and redefine the illness of ME.
What this particular group of psychiatrists have done is to
erase ME and subsume it into a whole category of illnesses
which they have termed Chronic Fatigue. What was once a very
specific illness, with very specific signs and aetiology, has
now been incorporated into a massive group of symptoms with
one set of treatments being given to all sufferers. A
moratorium has been called on diagnostic testing so that there
is going to be no further research, in Britain anyway, into
what actually caused ME or what ME is. One of the treatments
now prescribed for CFS is graded exercise therapy to get
people fit and out of their fatigue.
Surely that would make them more
tired?
If you are suffering from fatigue, and especially if you are
one of the 25% immobilized sufferers, in considerable pain,
why would you want to get involved in graded exercise? Some
psychiatrists say that fatigue is all in the mind and the
patient has got to be able to conquer it. They prescribe GE
along with ‘cognitive behavior therapy’. The idea is to get
the patient to understand their symptoms, to get rid of false
illness beliefs.
What about the drugs they prescribe?
Both these therapies go along with the prescription of
anti-depressant drugs.
Which are very addictive.
And they don’t solve the problem. What the psychiatrists say
is that depression and the psychiatric condition are primary
in these cases. Other people say yes, of course if you’ve got
an illness like ME, you’re going to be depressed, you can’t
get out of bed, you can’t do the things you used to, you may
be in considerable pain and you have probably had to stop
work.
However, SKEWED is not a book about ME or Chronic Fatigue
Syndrome, about their causes or even about their treatment.
I’ve tried to trace the arguments used by psychiatric doctors
since World War II – they believe that people who suffer from
ME and certain chemically induced illnesses are suffering from
mental rather than physical illness. I’ve tried to suggest
where this argument comes from, how it has been used since the
1950s by chemical companies and the government to dismiss
anybody who has an illness which isn’t easily identifiable,
doesn’t have a characteristic symptomatology and doesn’t have
any clear treatment. The last thing the chemical companies in
Britain or America want to do is admit such a thing as
chemical illness because it means a massive liability. SKEWED
deals with ME, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Multiple Chemical
Sensitivity and Gulf War Syndrome. It uses them all as
examples of how the psychiatric argument is used to cloak any
research into organic aetiology.
Can you tell me more about your plans
for Slingshot?
We are concentrating at the moment on getting an Associate
Membership scheme working, where people pay £50 to receive all
the books published by Slingshot over the first year they
join, in the following year they get a year’s books at perhaps
half the membership price, somewhere around £25. If we could
get a good turnover and large enrolment of Associate Members,
we would be well on the way to financing the books. The
message of the books are the important thing.
I would be grateful if anybody can help Slingshot to
distribute these books, get more Associate Members or help
with publicity. We just want to produce books which are
integral to campaigns, that can be sold on the ground to
people involved or interested in these campaigns. We try to
sell our books either by mail order or by campaigning groups
in the community. We are trying very hard to create a
situation whereby we can offload hundreds of books to
organizations at very low prices, so that they can then sell
them at cover price to make money for their campaigns. I want
this to be an organic thing that gets books to people cheaply.
We don’t have significant problems selling our books but we
are always undercapitalized when going to the printers with a
new book. Obviously we are never going to be a multinational
with significant amounts of money in reserve but if we could
find some way of being assured of borrowing up-front printing
costs of each book it would be a great relief.
Although you have a major interest in
politics, I believe your true profession was
that of an artist?
I have been involved in politics since I was at Hornsey
College of Art in 1968. I try to keep the ‘art’ side of things
going. For many years I designed and printed political posters
and for the last five years or so I have been doing ceramics,
mainly tile design, which I am very committed to.
I’m of the generation of 1968. I was expelled from Hornsey for
my part in the occupation of the college during those months
around May 68, when occupations and demonstrations swept
through Europe. Then, politics was so organic, so much
ingrained in our lives. For my generation of activists,
politics was a part of everything you did. I did political
posters as a part of a poster collective in the seventies, and
between 1974 and 1994, I was consistently part of community
campaigns of different kinds.
Between the 60’s and the 80’s, politics appeared relatively
straightforward. Then for a variety of reasons, the climate
changed. In my case, the vacuum began to be filled with
questions about health. Even though sometimes I’m tempted to
think this isn’t real politics, it is. Even in the 1960s, the
politics of mental, sexual and physical health was at the
forefront of the agenda.
I’ve always wanted my writing to grow out of my actions. I
think the struggle to understand your own health is part of
the struggle to understand your own identity in a complex
world. It’s to do with an ongoing internal movement to find a
way of living that is in tune with the environment that you
want to live in.
People tend not to link the older forms of politics with newer
ideas. Current ideas in relation to nutrition are a good
example of this. Nothing is more political than the production
and consumption of food. People should be as expansively
political about attacking multinational food companies, about
setting up food cooperatives, about boxed deliveries of
organic food, about setting up well women clinics in their
areas, as they are about campaigning, say, against the arms
trade .
People are constantly treating what they consider to be newer
ideas about nutrition or health therapies as personal, rather
than political. Of course the two things are intimately
involved. We need a political collective or a community
response to ideas about health. Our thinking, for instance,
should not just be against drugs, it should be for good
nutrition. It should be against pharmaceutical drugs but for
new health care practices based in the community.
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.