No, not April Fool, it’s the first of May.
Bank holiday, an extra day off, a Royal Wedding, a Prince and a Princess… so much for people to watch on TV and in the news. Street parties and celebrations.
It would be difficult to find a better time to “slip a little something in for the weekend…” and rest assured very few people will notice…
Well then, how about a little inoffensive piece of legislation that will never do anyone any harm, like banning the use of herbal remedies. Who uses herbal remedies anyway? It’s a term that sounds so quaint and antiquated, like something you read on an old newspaper cutting in your great grandmother’s scrap book.
It’s the Twenty First Century now, we should all grow up and start behaving like Modern Adults. 21st Century Citizens and all that, and we all know that you don’t use “Herbal Remedies”.
You go to your Drug Store, Chemist or supermarket and buy proper medicine, created in pristine, clean laboratory conditions, with no nasty “natural” “dirty” bits that probably creep or crawl into anything not made in test tubes and glass bottles. We really have come a long way since people did things like that. Right?
Well don’t worry because all the kind, caring pharmaceutical companies and drugs manufacturers have been heroic enough to stand up for your health and mine, because they really care about us, and to stop the damage Herbal Remedies could do to us, they have just banned hundreds of them…
Now products have to meet “safety, quality and manufacturing standards, and come with information outlining possible side effects.”
This ruling puts as many obstacles as it can in the way of herbal remedy manufacturers, and even individuals wishing to use product directly from nature’s pharmacy. The big multi-national pharmaceutical companies have the resources to bypass these obstacles, but small and medium sized businesses will be forced to close.
Herbal remedies have been used by qualified practitioners for hundreds and even thousands of years, and the effects and side-effects of them have been observed and documented. They are part of the wisdom of mankind.
Yes, herbal remedies can have negative side effects if used incorrectly. When something does go wrong it is likely to hit the headlines and receive massive press coverage.
However, natural herbal remedies have far less negative effects than most of the “modern” synthetic un-natural drugs, and far less coverage is given to these negative effects. Billions of dollars of profit make it worthwhile for giant multinational pharmaceutical companies to lobby continuously to create a positive image for their products and to build a negative one of “natural remedies” which are not controlled by them, and therefore stand in the way of their profits.
What they do not publicise is that they are promoting many drugs which do huge amounts of damage, are often prescribed unnecessarily, and in most cases have only a few years of observed side-effects, run in their “clinical trials”, unlike many of the “herbal remedies” which have been studied for centuries by healers.
And yet this law or European Directive has been brought in because they suggest they are worried about the “side-effects” of “herbal remedies”.