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Time to Take Responsibility For Your Own Health
Here is the bottom line. Health is full of vested interest and  information can be easily selected to support a particular view. We need  to be questioning of the pronouncements of governments and experts.  They do not always know what is best for your health even if they are  well meaning.
The person primarily responsible for your health is  you. You are best placed to make decisions about your health based on  your own circumstances. There has been a tendency over the last 30 years  to see governments as having the primary responsibility for our health.  This is seen in calls for the government to “do something” about  problems like obesity and smoking to name but two.
Personally I do  not have a huge amount of faith in the recommendations of government  departments and some of the “experts” that they draw on. Regular readers  will be familiar with my view on the response to the advent of the H1N1  (swine flu) virus and how billions of dollars were wasted and needless  fear was generated. As it turned out many of the experts recommending  mass vaccination of the population had financial ties to manufacturers.
There  is now a push to vaccinate boys against the H.P.V. virus. This vaccine  has been approved for use in girls. Whilst it has been promoted as a  vaccine against cervical cancer, it is in reality a vaccine against four  strains of a virus, which is implicated in the development of cervical  cancer. The push for extending the use has come from the manufacturer  (as is their commercial right) but it is easy to whip up fear when one  plays the cancer card in any health story. At this point rational  assessment can go out the window.
Against this backdrop two  circulars from government health departments crossed my desk in the same  week. The first from the W.A. health department was about a plan to get  women who missed their third dose of H.P.V. vaccine to have it. The  dosage schedule was zero, two and six months.
This is from the  circular ” While the optimal schedule is to administer Gardasil * at 0,2  and 6 months, the Australian Chief Medical Officer has stated that  delayed administration especially of the third dose is expected to give  at least comparable and most likely superior immune responses…”
Run  that by me again! If delaying the dose gives a better response then how  can the current schedule be optimal? Or if the current schedule is  optimal then how cannot sticking to it give a better result? Go figure!
The  other interesting piece of advice came from the Federal Health  Department. A new campaign has been launched to encourage smokers to  quit. Readers of my website will have seen my article on how a major  analysis of over 800 studies showed that 70% of people quit with no aids  or assistance. It also highlighted that most studies co