As individuals, how we choose to support causes, complementary medicine in particular, may literally save our lives.

As eloquently discussed by Dorothy Rowe Ph.D. (see page 9), we typically take on many beliefs from our parents, peers and family as we are growing up. Most people are well-schooled in beliefs about justice and goodness and think that doctors and health professionals have our best interests at heart. It is usually only when we run into tragedy, illness, side effects of prescribed drugs, botched up treatment, etc., that we encounter the existence of alternatives to mainstream practices, and we realize that there is no God-given blueprint for health treatments.

At some point in our lives we discover that there exist serious disagreements regarding the efficacy of many treatment approaches (see book review, pages 7-8) and decide to choose something other than mainstream medical treatment.

This issue of Positive Health features inspiring individual stories which illustrate how people have chosen to incorporate their beliefs regarding health choices into their daily lives. Celia Harper (see page 12) has transformed her musician's career, put on hold by a repetitive strain injury, into a life-enriching endeavour in which she and her colleagues perform live music for cancer patients in hospices and treatment centres. Vera Peiffer (see page 15) has chosen to help people cope with the stresses of their lives through positive thinking.

Nicola Bradbury (see page 23) overcame her medical prognosis of being confined to a wheelchair following a motorway accident, and used her father's death from cancer to help transform cancer patients' lives through the development of a holistic integrated cancer support therapeutic programme which has achieved considerable therapeutic success, even with patients given a terminal prognosis.

Elaine Bruce (see page 31) recounts the considerable historical development of the Living Foods programme, initiated by Dr Ann Wigmore, who saved herself from gangrenous amputation of both legs by shunning her previously typical American diet and adopting the more traditional diet of her grandmother from Lithuania, of vegetables, seeds, grains and raw greens.

Pat Reeves (see page 44) has survived three heart attacks and as many cancer recurrences, and has still managed to train and compete in Powerlifting, and become a practitioner of Nutritional and Functional Medicine by adopting a dietary and nutritional programme wholly embracing Living Foods, as well as allied practices which nourish her body, mind and spirit.

Each of these individuals has overcome enormous obstacles to achieve their own good health and life work, which can act as an inspiration to each of us when we or our families are struck by ill-health.

Unfortunately, I have come to realize following many unpleasant experiences over several decades, such as the banning of organic germanium in 1989, that simply acting alone as an individual may not be enough to really support a cause in which one believes. The war that conventional medicine has waged against alternative, particularly cancer therapies has gone on during the entire twentieth century. It is not for nothing that so many of the alternative cancer clinics have been driven out of the US to Mexico and beyond. Please read with great interest Dr Jane Buckle's extract (see page 42) in which she details how promising and clinically effective cancer treatments such as hydrazine sulphate and saw palmetto are rubbished, while treatments such as expensive, painful and ineffective bone marrow transplants, which don't extend survival, contribute $1 billion toward the annual cost of leukaemia treatment in the US.

Beata Bishop described some of the powers of the multinational globals in Issue 67 (see Issue 67 page 14). These days we are now in a global situation where huge multinational conglomerates with virtually unlimited resources appear to be ranged against the rather small entities which make up the majority of complementary medicine enterprises. In 1994, all herbs in the UK only narrowly escaped EU full medicines licensing as conventional drugs; and, as discussed in previous Letters to the Editor (see Issue 64, page 45), vitamins and mineral supplements may be subject to an EU 'harmonizaton' Directive which will serve to restrict vitamin and mineral supplements to virtually useless amounts.

If you really want to be able to freely follow a healthy lifestyle and buy vitamin, mineral, herbal and other supplements which you believe will support your health, don't sit idly by and wait for your doctor to prescribe them; become an active supporter for whichever group(s) you believe offer you the best choice for optimum health.