When Martin Walker published his fifth book in 1993 - Dirty Medicine:
Science, big business and the assault on natural health care, it sent shock
waves through the natural healthcare industry. He set up Slingshot
Publications to publish this book and others for writers having
difficulties getting their books published by mainstream publishing houses.
Louise Mclean talks to Martin about his books, his views and his writing. 

LM:  Many people believe there is presently a worldwide move through Codex
Alimentarius to outlaw natural therapies and remedies. The first phase of
these has been implemented through the EU Food Supplements Directive, with
the Herbal and Medicines Directives to follow. In your book Dirty Medicine
you outlined some of the strategies used by the pharmaceutical industry to
discredit alternative medicine. What do you think is going on at the moment?

MW:  When I was writing Dirty Medicine from 1988 to1993, I don’t think I
realised the importance of the attack on vitamins and mineral supplements.
It’s only recently that I’ve understood that the people attached to the
Campaign Against Health Fraud (CAHF - now called HealthWatch) in the UK,
the American National Council Against Health Fraud (NCAHF) and Quackbusters
in America were only the first wave of a more organised, powerful and
centralised attempt to destroy vitamin and mineral supplements. I tended at
that time to view the people I was writing about as rather quirky
individuals who were in favour of professional medicine, biased towards
scientific medicine and the pharmaceutical companies, but not as people
supported by multinational agencies involved in a continuous conflict over
supplements and holistic health therapies. 

Of course now that the plan has been unveiled, I can see that the
organisation of CAHF and NCAHF was the first stage in the battle. The
techniques they were using - the character assassination of alternative
practitioners and researchers, the commissioning and planting of press
stories, the linking up with more formal agencies like the FDA and the MCA,
raiding premises, striking people off professional registers, bringing
people before disciplinary board hearings, conducting bogus scientific
trials, the undeclared work with large corporations. All these things were
linked to a kind of regulatory ground clearing exercise. Now, a legislative
battle is taking place on a different level and involving whole groupings
of countries.

LM:  The pharmaceutical cartel are losing money worldwide to natural health
care. They don’t really want people to get better by themselves when they
could be taking pharmaceutical medicine.

MW:  The chemical and pharmaceutical companies would like to retain
hegemony over the social structure of health and medicine. It isn´t that
they want to do away with vitamins and food supplements, it´s that they
want to control production and distribution of these things to maximise
profit. The fact that they are campaigning to end self administration of
vitamins, minerals and food supplements would not stop them from putting
them in food, for instance. They want to control pre-packaged distribution
of vitamins and if they could put them in foods, shirts, lipsticks or
patches or whatever, they will do that. They also want to end the confusion
that has arisen between nutrition and medicine and they want to end any
evident connection between nutrition and health so that in the public
perception, health is dependent upon professional medicine and
pharmaceutical products.

LM:  Tell me more about the other books Slingshot has published or is going
to publish?

MW;  When I published Dirty Medicine in 1993 I set up Slingshot
Publications and it was my intention to publish my own books. Dirty
Medicine went out of print in 1998 after selling 7, 000 copies mainly by
mail order. 

In 1998 I published a small booklet about Loic Le Ribault, an important
French forensic scientist, mercilessly denigrated by the French State and
by medical interests because he discovered the use of organic silica as a
medicine for arthritis. I wrote a short booklet about him and he has since
published his own series of books about his struggles, culminating in the
recent publication of The Cost of A Discovery (available from LLR-G5 Ltd.,
C/o Ross Post Office, Castlebar, County Mayo, Republic of Ireland).

Around 1999 or so, I thought that I would actually like to publish other
people’s work as well. In December 2002 Slingshot published A Cat in Hell’s
Chance, a campaigners view of the battle to close Hill Grove Farm in
Oxfordshire, which bred cats for vivisection. During its production I came
to understand more than I had previously about the link between vivisection
and medicine and therefore people’s health. There are no good aspects of
vivisection or chemical testing and they have to absolutely abolished, they
cannot be reformed. SHAC, the campaign against Huntington Life Sciences is
the way forward, attacking companies and the industry on every front
possible and trying to cut off their financial backing and destroy their
economic infrastructure.

One of the things that has always been of interest to me is the
generational continuity of ideas, especially political ideas. So I thought
it would be a good idea to publish some of the original texts which had a
great impact on people. I offered to reprint an English language edition of
Hans Ruesch´s ground-breaking and seminal anti-vivisection book Slaughter
of the Innocent . This book has just come out.

Although it was first published over 20 years ago in 1979, it still gives
you a sense of direction today. It was very difficult to do, we had to
create an electronic manuscript for it which meant copying every page with
data recognition technology. Then it all had to be typeset again in the
original form, so that there was continuity of the references. 

LM:  Despite the fact that testing on a tiny mouse or rat cannot have any
real bearing on how a drug will affect a human and can lead to adverse
reactions when given to humans, there are apparently more animals being
experimented on today than ever before, even though New Labour promised in
their manifesto to cut down. 

MW;  The New Labour government has reneged on its anti-vivisectionist
vote-catching rhetoric because they are so heavily indebted to and
entrenched with the pharmaceutical multinationals. They can’t back down
from the position the chemical and pharmaceutical companies demand and that
is why millions of animals continue to be slaughtered every year. 

Testing of chemicals on animals is growing in Britain and America. When it
comes to the questioning of a particular chemical, which has been known to
be carcinogenic for a long time, the solution that has occurred to the
chemical companies is to get full scale massive animal testing trials for
that chemical. This means that they can put off making decisions for at
least 5 or 6 years, which gives them another 5 or 6 years’ profit and
another 5 or 6 years’ unaccountable deaths, while we wait for these massive
animal slaughtering exercises to be carried out. Then of course there is
another 5 or 6 years in implementing any reforming regulations. 

LM:  Buying time?

MW:  If the tests prove to be unequivocally against the chemical, no doubt
the chemical companies will come up with bizarre arguments such as: ‘Oh
well, you can’t rely on animal testing, can you? It’s not the same as human
physiology’. Which is what they have said in the past. Then you get another
5 years of: ‘How can we test chemicals on humans?’ or ‘How can we collate
anecdotal stories of the effect of chemicals on humans?’ and ‘Let’s have a
think about this and find some way of doing it’. Then there’s another 5
years and it just goes on indefinitely. 

LM:  Talking of chemicals, I believe you wrote a paper about the
epidemiologist, Sir Richard Doll and his work on the (lack of a) link
between cancer and the vinyl chloride industry, while he was a consultant
for Monsanto, at that time one of the major producers of vinyl chloride?

MW:  I don´t want to go into the details of that particular paper, its one
of two papers I wrote over the last couple of years about the contemporary
role of medical epidemiologists. I am very interested in writing about the
connection between the life of the professional and those larger agencies
in society which have power and which determine power and the direction of
society. One of the best works on asbestos for example, is the book by
Geoffrey Tweedale, called From Magic Mineral to Killer Dust. It isn’t just
about the company that manufactured asbestos or about the scientists who
agreed the toxic and regulatory levels for asbestos fibre. It’s about a
whole nexus of social, scientific and economic factors. In important
writings about health, one has got to take account of a whole series of
social and political ideas, not just write about one particular avenue. 

There is a real problem with much contemporary writing about health, in
that it is over-simplistic, written by people who are trying to push a
particular theory or aspect of health. Sociologically or in relation to
campaigns, such books are useless because they don’t take into account the
whole of the social structure that surrounds that illness or therapy.

LM:  Can you tell us about companies and organisations that are set up to
allay the fears of the public on health and environmental issues but are
really working for the benefit of chemical and pharmaceutical industries?

MW;  Up until the end of the’80s, if a company wanted to deflect public
criticism, in the area of health, it would set up its own propaganda arm,
creating an institute or some kind of lobby organisation that was probably
part of a PR company. Towards the mid-1990s, a lot of critics, commentators
and journalists began to see these organisations for what they were. You
couldn’t just run a fake institute that published good news about your
industry without somebody finding out the financial links between the
industry and that institute. 

So in the mid-1980s, a number of companies came into being which were
problem solving companies. A part of these companies’ briefs entailed
finding technical, scientific or mechanical solutions to industry or
company problems. Another part of their work however, involved solving
problems of ‘consumer perception’ faced by a particular industry, company
or product. So if the waste disposal industry had a problem with the public
perception of Dioxin, for example, then the ’problem solving’ company would
take this on.

Their role is clearly similar to the one taken by PR companies in the past.
The difference is that their approach is more integrated. These companies
have their own epidemiologists, their own scientists, their own smaller
agency companies. They have managed to integrate all of these areas into
government structures as well. They receive government grants for various
projects and are represented on peer review panels, etc. They carry on a
more authoritative and aggressive protection of harmful products and a more
determined attack on consumer and citizens’ lobbies. These organisations
are much more dangerous in terms of their defence of bad health products
because you can’t track them down easily.

LM:  Lets move on to another Slingshot book due out next year,‘The
Gatekeepers’, which deals with alternative cancer healers. 

MW:  The Gatekeepers is a book which I started by accident. When I finished
Dirty Medicine, I was doing a lot of research into chemicals and cancer and
I came across a particular naturopath, who had been a cancer healer in
England. I followed and researched his work and looked at his methods in
some detail. I found that the British Ministry of Health as it was then and
the organs of orthodox medicine, had waged a campaign against him. I had
only previously read about American cancer therapists and the way the
American government, American industry and American professional medicine
had attacked them. 

I studied the work of this naturopath and uncovered the things that
happened to him. I went on to look at others and decided to write The
Gatekeepers, about the struggle between natural cancer curers, orthodox
medicine and the British government from 1850 to the present day. It’s not
a book about alternative cancer cures or a book about cancer. It’s a book
about the power of professional medicine - dirty tricks and strategies that
are used by people in power to deny other people a competitive place in the
market. It deals with just three or four people and looks at their cases in
depth, as individuals and therapists in an attempt to describe them in
rounded terms and not just at their cancer cures.

I’ve tried to look at these people, at their therapies and philosophy as an
aspect of their life and then I’ve looked at the people who are attacking
them in the same way - although it’s quite difficult. For instance in the
case of this particular naturopath, somebody in the Ministry of Health set
the police on him. It’s difficult to understand the consciousness of police
officers trying to track down and bring to trial an alternative medical
practitioner. We can understand the police arresting a criminal doing
obvious harm to property or to a person but we are not quite sure how to
describe the social environment of a police officer involved in a campaign
on behalf of the State against an alternative medical practitioner. 

LM:  This obviously has something to do with the common view about
medicine, the honesty of the medical profession and the implied lack of
competence of ´untrained´ practitioners. There is clearly a view, very
often projected in the press, that whereas doctors have only one motive
which is to cure people, alternative practitioners have pecuniary motives
and can be responsible for harming people. 

MW:  Yes, this is clearly the case when you think about it and of course
there is the contact with the pharmaceutical industry which affects much
professional medicine. The Gatekeepers is going to be an interesting book
to finish because I’ve been working on it now for nearly 10 years on and
off. I spent 2 years in 2001 and 2002 trying to help look after my mother
who died of cancer and that brought me into conflict with a lot of things I
questioned in the NHS. 

I have tried to introduce personal anecdotal narrative into the book
because I became very involved in my investigation into the naturopath. I
wanted as well to write about the process of investigating because I think
it is important to people. Writers as a professional body tend to keep
their methodologies to themselves. We should really try to explain how we
research a subject and put information together, just so the reader can
more fully understand where we are coming from. In The Gatekeepers, I talk
about my investigations, and how you look at people and their past. 

An idea that has come into focus for me recently, is to do with the
intrusion of the State and medicine into the life of the family. I want to
write more about this. The State and the medical profession these days seem
to be taking great leaps and bounds into the previously accepted private
area of the family. Ironically a direction which the British Conservative
establishment was accusing communists, socialists and Labour followers of
in the early part of the last century.

LM:  Are you referring to situations like the Shaken Baby Syndrome and MMR
court cases? 

MW:  Yes, and for example the HIV baby test case about whether the baby
should be tested for HIV. And of course the whole trend in North America of
legislating for pre-birth or even pre-pregnancy testing for possible
hereditary illnesses. At the end of this continuum there is the
overshadowing question of legislating for various kinds of genetic testing.

There are examples too in another of my books, SKEWED, regarding ME and
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Cases are described where psychiatrists put
children with ME in closed mental hospital facilities. In some cases the
parents are arrested and in one case imprisoned because they were said to
be inflicting false illness beliefs on their children. Some of the mothers
were accused of having Munchausen’s Syndrome by Proxy. 

It appears that we are entering an area where abuse becomes defined by
doctors, not simply in criminal terms or in terms of violence or even
mental cruelty but on the grounds that the parent disagrees with orthodox
medicine. This is going in the wrong direction and appears to be part of a
much larger plan for the medical profession, science and pharmaceutical
interests to gain a greater hegemony over the family.

LM:  Let’s talk about your book ‘Skewed’. Nowadays many people are becoming
ill from ‘hidden’ causes such as air pollution, pesticides in food,
prescription drugs, vaccinations, radiation from mobile phones and
computers. They become tired and weak. This book deals with the fact that
these people, who are diagnosed with ME or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, are
frequently referred to psychiatrists. Since no concrete physical diagnosis
can be found, these sufferers are told that ‘it is all in their minds’,
that it’s psychosomatic.

MW:  Skewed came out at the end of October 2003 and it’s a book about the
way that a small group of psychiatrists have tried to control and redefine
the illness of ME. 

What this particular group of psychiatrists have done is to erase ME and
subsume it into a whole category of illnesses which they have termed
Chronic Fatigue. What was once a very specific illness, with very specific
signs and aetiology, has now been incorporated into a massive group of
symptoms with one set of treatments being given to all sufferers. A
moratorium has been called on diagnostic testing so that there is going to
be no further research, in Britain anyway, into what actually caused ME or
what ME is. One of the treatments now prescribed for CFS is graded exercise
therapy to get people fit and out of their fatigue. 

LM:  Surely that would make them tireder? 

MW:  If you are suffering from fatigue, and especially if you are one of
the 25% immobilised sufferers, in considerable pain, why would you want to
get involved in graded exercise? Some psychiatrists say that fatigue is all
in the mind and the patient has got to be able to conquer it. They
prescribe GE along with ‘cognitive behaviour therapy’. The idea is to get
the patient to understand their symptoms, to get rid of false illness
beliefs. 

LM:  What about the drugs they prescribe?

MW:  Both these therapies go along with the prescription of anti-depressant
drugs.

LM:  Which are very addictive.

MW:  And they don’t solve the problem. What the psychiatrists say is that
depression and the psychiatric condition are primary in these cases. Other
people say yes, of course if you’ve got an illness like ME, you’re going to
be depressed, you can’t get out of bed, you can’t do the things you used
to, you may be in considerable pain and you have probably had to stop work. 

However, SKEWED is not a book about ME or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, about
their causes or even about their treatment. I’ve tried to trace the
arguments used by psychiatric doctors since World War II – they believe
that people who suffer from ME and certain chemically induced illnesses are
suffering from mental rather than physical illness. I’ve tried to suggest
where this argument comes from, how it has been used since the 1950s by
chemical companies and the government to dismiss anybody who has an illness
which isn’t easily identifiable, doesn’t have a characteristic
symptomatology and doesn’t have any clear treatment. The last thing the
chemical companies in Britain or America want to do is admit such a thing
as chemical illness because it means a massive liability. SKEWED deals with
ME, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Multiple Chemical Sensitivity and Gulf War
Syndrome. It uses them all as examples of how the psychiatric argument is
used to cloak any research into organic aetiology.

LM:  Can you tell me more about your plans for Slingshot? 

MW:  We are concentrating at the moment on getting an Associate Membership
scheme working, where people pay £50 to receive all the books published by
Slingshot over the first year they join, in the following year they get a
year’s books at perhaps half the membership price, somewhere around £25. If
we could get a good turnover and large enrolment of Associate Members, we
would be well on the way to financing the books. The message of the books
are the important thing. 

I would be grateful if anybody can help Slingshot to distribute these
books, get more Associate Members or help with publicity. We just want to
produce books which are integral to campaigns, that can be sold on the
ground to people involved or interested in these campaigns. We try to sell
our books either by mail order or by campaigning groups in the community.
We are trying very hard to create a situation whereby we can offload
hundreds of books to organisations at very low prices, so that they can
then sell them at cover price to make money for their campaigns. I want
this to be an organic thing that gets books to people cheaply. We don’t
have significant problems selling our books but we are always
undercapitalised when going to the printers with a new book. Obviously we
are never going to be a multinational with significant amounts of money in
reserve but if we could find some way of being assured of borrowing
up-front printing costs of each book it would be a great relief.

LM:  Although you have a major interest in politics, I believe your true
profession was that of an artist?

MW:  I have been involved in politics since I was at Hornsey College of Art
in 1968. I try to keep the ‘art’ side of things going. For many years I
designed and printed political posters and for the last five years or so I
have been doing ceramics, mainly tile design, which I am very committed to.

I’m of the generation of 1968. I was expelled from Hornsey for my part in
the occupation of the college during those months around May 68, when
occupations and demonstrations swept through Europe. Then, politics was so
organic, so much ingrained in our lives. For my generation of activists,
politics was a part of everything you did. I did political posters as a
part of a poster collective in the seventies, and between 1974 and 1994, I
was consistently part of community campaigns of different kinds.

Between the 60’s and the 80’s, politics appeared relatively
straightforward. Then for a variety of reasons, the climate changed. In my
case, the vacuum began to be filled with questions about health. Even
though sometimes I’m tempted to think this isn’t real politics, it is. Even
in the 1960s, the politics of mental, sexual and physical health was at the
forefront of the agenda.

I’ve always wanted my writing to grow out of my actions. I think the
struggle to understand your own health is part of the struggle to
understand your own identity in a complex world. It’s to do with an ongoing
internal movement to find a way of living that is in tune with the
environment that you want to live in. 

People tend not to link the older forms of politics with newer ideas.
Current ideas in relation to nutrition are a good example of this. Nothing
is more political than the production and consumption of food. People
should be as expansively political about attacking multinational food
companies, about setting up food cooperatives, about boxed deliveries of
organic food, about setting up well women clinics in their areas, as they
are about campaigning, say, against the arms trade . 

People are constantly treating what they consider to be newer ideas about
nutrition or health therapies as personal, rather than political. Of course
the two things are intimately involved. We need a political collective or a
community response to ideas about health. Our thinking, for instance,
should not just be against drugs, it should be for good nutrition. It
should be against pharmaceutical drugs but for new health care practices
based in the community.

To order Martin Walker's books, please write to Slingshot Publications, BM
BOX 8314, London WC1N 3XX or email him at fraka@arrakis.es

Louise Mclean is a qualified homeopath and editor of Zeus Information Service.

An edited version of this interview first appeared in Positive Health March
2004.
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