The range of herbal medicines we stock will be depleted this year if the companies that produce them can't afford to have all their tinctures and pills licenced, each licence costing in the region of £2000 a pop. Already we have heard that Black Cohosh, helpful to some people for controlling hot flushes, is for the chop, though to my amusement a customer came in for some yesterday - sent by her GP! BC has been accused of causing liver failure in at least one case which, when one reads how often NHS prescribed drugs kill people, doesn't seem too bad really.
It's undoubtedly the big drug companies that are responsible for the enthusiastic enforcement of this EU legislation and I can't believe there won't be an outcry when the results are finally noticed by the public. Of course by then it won't do any good. There has been a petition going for ages but we fear it's like the Iraq war, already a done deal.
I have to confess to have been sitting on the shelf along with the remedies but in the 'undecided' section for years because none of them are of any help to me when I have asthma badly. I'm eternally grateful to conventional medicine for the relief it brings me, even if there is a cost to be paid later. On the other hand nothing the doc can give me actually cures the condition or even gives remission, whereas acupuncture does bring long-term relief and homeopathy gave me a cortisone-free year when I was living in Brussels. My previously judicious measuring scales have been tipped in the last year however because I've suffered side-effects from medicine prescribed to bring my BP down when the usual ones were substitued by cheaper versions of foriegn manufacture. Then there are others I've been threatened with that sound even worse. For instance one warns it causes incontinence in a percentage of recipients. Well thanks, but no thanks. I have this nightmare now of being hospitalised or institutionalised and forced to take these the order of some careless consultant then being on the receiving end of bad-tempered, overworked nurses and, not knowing the reason , thinking it's all my poor body's fault.
And there's the whole statin thing. I'm told there was a programme about statins on Channel 4 recently - around the time I'd just succumbed to medical pressure and taken the beastly things for four days which was enough to bring on a headache the like of which I have never had before. It didn't go away, night or day, until I stopped taking the inoffensive-looking little white poppers. I read about a pilot who had had to give up flying, thereby losing his livelihood, because of the neuropathy brought on on by this medication. It's great that they work for some folk but for others they cause more problems than they alleviate. The drug companies continue to swear to their safety though their trials are of dubious reliability - small numbers, research done by chemists with shares in the drug company concerned and so on. It's enough to make one become a conspiracy theorist.
People will still be able to get their herbal medies over the Internet from the USA or non-EU countries, but we won't be able to sell them in the shop or order them in or we'll be burned as witches I suppose.
Because I know how my own psyche and soul work I am inclined to think that whatever people believe will heal them will heal them. This is as often disproved as proved of course, but I do know of at least two women who when told they had a cancer that 'must' be operated on and then bombarded by chemotherapy sturdily declared there is no 'must' about anything, there are always choices, and they went to homeopathic hospitals for injections of mistletoe which they claim make them feel revitalised - quite the opposite experience suffered by the poor souls who go down the allopathic route. These brave ladies, one into her eighties now, came out the other side of their treatments triumphantly in remission.
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