A new smear test

Perhaps it’s because we’ve now reached a reasonable size, or maybe it’s because we seem to have more influence these days. It may even be because word has got out that we’re heading a new movement to safeguard alternative medicine and its therapies against a raft of EU directives.

Whatever the reason, we’ve noticed the smear campaign against us has started.

In the last couple of weeks, we’ve heard that we have ‘sold out’ to a leading vitamin manufacturer, that our information cannot be trusted because our sources are unreliable, and that we shouldn’t be offering vitamins and healthcare products at a discount to our subscribers.

While we can’t be sure why the smears have suddenly started, we can be certain that they will intensify. Worse will undoubtedly follow, and you may start hearing a few whispers about us.

So, before you do, we would like to take this opportunity to set the record straight.

In the first place, we have not ‘sold out’ to anyone – be it a nutritional company, a drug conglomerate, a government body or anything else you can think of.

The whole of our raison d’être is our editorial independence, and this would be compromised if we became too close to any one organisation. In fact, the products of the company mentioned in the rumour were trashed in the last issue of our sister publication PROOF!. Indeed, if you examine PROOF!, you’ll see that, at one point or another, each and every quality supplier has received a pasting from us for one its products.

The smear against us for offering vitamins and other products at a discount completely baffles us. Several other publications have brokered similar deals with the same suppliers – and kept the 15 per cent discount for themselves that we pass on to you. We get nothing from the deal other than the pleasure of giving you the chance to obtain expensive products at a slightly reduced rate.

The third smear – that our sources are unreliable – was first used by the government’s Department of Health when we were sending out information about the risks of the MMR vaccine. Unfortunately for the government, if the claim is true, all of medicine should pack up and go home. Our sources are the same as theirs – the leading medical journals, properly controlled scientific studies, government agencies and the like.

Such tactics are favoured by the current government, which prefers spin over substance, as witnessed in their smear campaign against the Paddington rail-crash survivor recently. As a result, we all know about their Excalibur database, that digs the dirt on anyone who dares question Prime Minister Blair and his team.

As we get more involved in the Health Freedom Movement, the campaign we have started to safeguard alternative medicine in this country, we can expect to feel the sharp blade of Excalibur against us.

So, again, may we strike the first blow, albeit a defensive one?

We are not allied to any political party, Lynne McTaggart and Bryan Hubbard are happily married, we don’t take illicit drugs, we don’t indulge in deviant sexual behaviour, and we’re not a front for a paedophile ring.

We all live in difficult times that require a need for all of you to be more sophisticated in your reading of what is offered to you. No longer is it enough to hear a reasonable and logical argument fairly put, and to consider ideas on those merits alone.

Nowadays, an argument is devalued if the person putting it to you is a Tory, or gay, or whatever. (Even if he is none of those things, such accusations should see him off and, so, no attempt is needed to answer the actual argument.)

We hope you will remember this as the smoke fills your eyes.