Iain Maclean Herbalist

21/05/2026

18/05/2026

After recent trips to east and Southeast Asia what becomes glaringly obvious when you return to Australia is how inflamed and sickly Australians on the whole look, particularly those of European descent. You just don’t see it in Asian countries. I had my childhood in Australia in the 1970-80’s , we were healthy and fit on the whole. How do you reverse or even change this trajectory that hasn’t been going on for not that long. Industrialised food, sugar that lead to inflammation and then pharmaceuticals to quell the problem. Sure it makes lots of profit for the food and pharma industries, but shouldn’t politicians and authorities be looking after their constituents, keeping them out of the so called health system. At what point does someone in authority start to make decisions that point Australians in a healthy direction? It almost seems that this mountain is too high to climb?

14/05/2026

Insights from Dr. R. F. Rabe during the great flu pandemic of 1918-19.

(In truth, to obtain the greatest success with homeopathy, physicians must apply the practical rules with meticulous exactness, and should therefore be able to prescribe any of the more than 500 remedies at their disposal. Comment by Dr. Saine).

Dr. R. F. Rabe wrote in a 1918 editorial in the "Homoeopathic Recorder": “Bryonia should not therefore be given when Phosphorus is required, and vice versa. The physician who boasts of seeing sixty to eighty cases a day is not able to prescribe correctly or successfully. The thing can’t be done! It may be good business, but it is very poor science. To prescribe successfully for the pneumonia patient requires that the physician sit down quietly at the bedside and calmly contemplate the case from every side and angle. We homeopaths are compelled to treat patients, not diseases and the recognition of the symptom image is by no means always easy. He who is not dominated in his actions by law and principle is likely to be easily stampeded, so that his therapeutics become a jumble of unrelated and antagonistic reme-dial measures.”

Dr. Rabe further described an example of excellence in prescribing: “The most frequently required remedies, both for the influenza and� pneumonia, have been Bryonia, Eupatorium perfoliatum, Gelsemium, Phosphorus, �Rhus tox, Ferrum phosphoricum, and Iodium. The indications for these are �well known to us all. Of course, other remedies have also been indicated. Among others, we saw a bronchopneumonia which had begun upon and� rapidly spread from the right side. The ten-year old patient was doing nicely �on Phosphorus when, without discoverable cause, a sudden extension of the� disease to uninvolved lung tissue took place with a sharp rise of temperature. Ferrum phosphoricum took the sharp edge off the violence, but did not check the �process. A mahogany-red right cheek (upon which the child had not been �lying, thank you) was sufficient to arouse our Sherlock Holmesian sense of �the mysterious. Judicious diplomatic sparring revealed the fact that our �little patient objected to having her feet warmly covered. This trinity of� symptoms, flushed right cheek, wants feet cool, right-sided pulmonary complaints, was quite sufficient to serve as the foundation for our therapeutic tool. Of course, Sanguinaria canadensis was given every 3 hours, and in the ridiculous �200th. Within twelve hours, the temperature dropped to normal and remained �there. Gentle reader, we defy any old school man to perform the same stunt! �It can't be done. �Neither can it be done by the routine prescriber, to whom pneumonia� spells Aconite, Bryonia, Phosphorus and Antimonium tartaricum. Successful prescribing is an art, and to� master the art means more than a superficial knowledge of a few headliner �keynotes in large type. Treat the patient, not the disease!”

13/05/2026

Reduce the influence and power of allopathy and increase the influence and power of naturopathy and empiric medicine, promoting a true preventative medical system. Allopathy in its present form is unable to create or develop a truly preventative health care system due to its dependance on the drug industry and its philosophical bent. Defenders of the conventional system claim iatrogenesis or harm caused by medical treatment or systems is unintentional, and not a business model that creates patients to further the income and profit of the pharmaceutical industry. Profit and income are the bedrock of allopathy.

The limits of reductionist medicine,
pharmaceutical influence,
overconfidence in new technologies,
and the importance of humility, informed consent, and long-term safety monitoring.

Examples of major iatrogenic harms associated with conventional medicine include drug side effects, medical procedures, hospital-acquired infections, and public health failures. Some became major historical lessons that changed regulation and safety practices.

Here are notable examples:

Thalidomide
Prescribed in the late 1950s and early 1960s for nausea and sleep problems in pregnancy. It caused severe congenital malformations in thousands of children, leading to major reforms in drug testing and regulation.

Diethylstilbestrol (DES)
Given to pregnant women for miscarriage prevention. Later linked to cancers and reproductive abnormalities in daughters exposed in utero.

Hospital-acquired infections
Including MRSA and antibiotic-resistant organisms spread in hospitals. These remain a major global healthcare problem.

Opioid overprescribing crisis
Aggressive prescribing of prescription opioids for chronic pain contributed to widespread dependence, addiction, and overdose deaths, especially in the United States. Pharmaceutical marketing and prescribing culture were heavily criticized.

Overuse of antibiotics
Antibiotics transformed medicine, but excessive use contributed to antimicrobial resistance — now considered a major global health threat.

Rofecoxib
Withdrawn after evidence linked it to increased cardiovascular risk.

Clozapine and other psychiatric medications
Some psychiatric drugs have caused serious side effects including metabolic syndrome, tardive dyskinesia, dependency syndromes, or withdrawal complications.

Lobotomy era
Psychosurgery such as frontal lobotomy was once widely accepted for psychiatric illness before its severe harms became clear.

Excessive radiation exposure
Early medical radiology and some cancer treatments exposed patients and clinicians to harmful radiation before safety standards improved.

Blood contamination scandals
In several countries, contaminated blood products transmitted HIV and hepatitis to patients in the 1970s and 1980s.

Mesh implant complications
Some pelvic mesh implants caused chronic pain, erosion, and disability, leading to lawsuits and tighter regulation.

Hormone replacement therapy overuse
Earlier widespread assumptions about benefits of hormone therapy for postmenopausal women were later revised after risks became clearer in some populations.

Polypharmacy in the elderly
Multiple interacting medications can produce falls, cognitive impairment, bleeding, kidney injury, and hospitalizations.

Unnecessary surgery and overtreatment
There are longstanding concerns about overdiagnosis and procedures performed with limited benefit in some contexts.

Historical medical experimentation abuses
Examples include the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, where treatment was withheld from Black men with syphilis without informed consent.

Artificial inoculation and there are likely others.

So, where to from here? It's up to the public that seek out medical treatment and the politicians that support allopathy and disregard naturopathy. I make a prediction this won't happen anytime soon and health budgets will continue to rise costing us the community much financially and emotionally as well.

Industrial medicine is here to stay sadly.

30/04/2026

It’s all connected.

Your emotional well-being is just as important as your physical body. The decisions you make to heal your heart and your emotional body are just as important as the food you eat and the water you drink. There is usually an unhealed emotional wound connected to every big diagnosis and until the patient is ready to integrate their life and accept the trauma, disease continues to proliferate in their body.

This is the part that most people get wrong when it comes to their health and this truth is one reason why the allopathic model keeps people stuck in their system without relief.
By simply looking at test results and the physical state of your body, they miss anything that is emotional or energetic.

Healing your trauma is a lot more work than simply taking a pill and it’s understandable why so many people avoid this part of their journey.

No one wants to relive their pain.

No one wants to retrace any steps that were traumatic.

But if you want to heal, you have to take this into consideration.

It is up to all of us to take control over our health and part of that process is taking ownership over our lives.

I cover topics like this on my YouTube channel, click below to subscribe now.

https://ow.ly/7VLS50YQIn2

30/04/2026

Confirmation bias is simply the tendency for individuals to favour information or data that support their beliefs. It is also the tendency for people to only seek out information that supports their a priori, or pre-existing, conclusions, and subsequently ignores evidence that might refute that pre-existing conclusion.

Thomas Kuhn and his cycle of scientific revolutions did warn us about this back in the 1960’s,

30/04/2026

The endocannabinoid system (ECS)evolved because organisms needed a flexible, fast-acting system to keep internal balance (homeostasis) under constantly changing conditions.

What the ECS actually is

The ECS is a signaling network made up of:

* Endocannabinoids (like anandamide and 2-AG)
* Receptors (mainly CB1 in the brain and CB2 in the immune system)
* Enzymes that make and break these molecules

It exists not just in humans, but across a wide range of animals—suggesting it’s ancient and evolutionarily conserved.

Why it likely evolved

1. To maintain homeostasis

At its core, the ECS acts like a biological “dimmer switch.”

It fine-tunes processes like:

* Mood and stress response
* Pain perception
* Appetite and energy balance
* Immune activity
* Memory and learning

Instead of turning systems fully on/off, it modulates them—keeping things within optimal ranges.

2. To regulate brain activity efficiently

In the nervous system, endocannabinoids are unusual because they work backwards (retrograde signaling):

* A neuron fires
* It releases endocannabinoids
* These travel back to the previous neuron
* They reduce further signal release

This helps prevent:

* Overexcitation (which can lead to seizures or neurotoxicity)
* Runaway stress responses

So evolutionarily, the ECS acts as a brake system for neural circuits.

3. To coordinate stress and survival responses

From an evolutionary standpoint, survival depends on responding to threats—but not overreacting.

The ECS helps:

* Shut off stress responses after danger passes
* Regulate fear learning (important for avoiding future threats)
* Balance inflammation during injury or infection

Without this, organisms would burn too much energy or damage themselves with chronic stress or inflammation.

4. To integrate multiple body systems

One of the ECS’s key advantages is that it connects:

* Brain ↔ immune system
* Metabolism ↔ behavior
* Pain ↔ emotion

This kind of cross-system integration is highly valuable evolutionarily because it allows coordinated responses (e.g., injury → pain → rest → healing).

5. Why cannabis interacts with it

The plant Cannabis sativa produces compounds (like THC) that mimic our own endocannabinoids.

* Plants evolved cannabinoids for their own defense (UV protection, pests, etc.)
* Animals already had receptors that those molecules happen to bind to

Big-picture evolutionary view

The ECS is best understood as a global regulatory system that evolved because:

* Biological systems need constant fine-tuning
* Environments are unpredictable
* Survival depends on balance, not extremes

In that sense, it’s similar to other core regulatory systems like:

* The autonomic nervous system
* Hormonal (endocrine) signaling

A deeper interpretation

Some researchers frame the ECS as part of a broader principle in biology: maintaining order in the face of entropy (negentropy).

Rather than being tied to any one function, it:

* Stabilizes dynamic systems
* Buffers against shocks (stress, injury, emotional trauma)
* Enables adaptability

Increasing endocannabinoids in the body by, for example, exercise may well be beneficial.

29/04/2026

Sugar…

16 likes, 4 comments. "The Sugar Lie: How the Sugar Industry Fooled the World | ENDEVR Documentary"

27/04/2026

Winter on the way, fresh herbs for maintaining good immune health, garlic, ginger, chilli, we are what we eat

24/04/2026

Ginkgo, a living fossil as Charles Darwin described due to being ancient is a great tree to plant in cities like Tokyo to absorb the pollution that these cities create