Natural remedies

- 1 November 1990

(From the London Sunday Times Supplement)

Natural is a useful word if you want to sell health foods, but a dangerous one if you want to stay healthy.

Natural foods and remedies have no intrinsic advantages over unnatural ones—indeed they are often more dangerous. Nature isn’t a benevolent matriarch. Most people die of natural causes, and doctors spend a lot of time trying to repair bodies and minds that have been visited by a malevolent Mother Nature. The doctor’s job is to protect people from the ravages of an often hostile natural environment and, when protection fails, to try to repair the damage.

Naturally occurring smallpox was driven from the world by unnatural vaccination; natural bacteria that enter our bodies to cause infection are themselves destroyed by unnatural chemicals, injected through unnatural needles.

Doctors learn early on that Nature has no bias. It is neither for us nor against us. Natural laws can be defined as clearly—and work as inexorably—in the spread of an epidemic as in the birth of a healthy baby.