About THE HEALTH FORUM
The Health Forum is a place where health issues are openly discussed – without any attempt to downplay or cover up any pertinent information.
The primary objective of the Health Forum is to promote greater knowledge and better understanding of health issues, not to protect various interest groups – such as business, government and international organisations – whose policies, practices and products may be detrimental to personal and public health.
Here, you will find important information that can help you make wise decisions in your quest for personal health and well-being. Such information could cover, for example, the beneficial properties of various foods, herbs and nutritional supplements, or the harmful side effects of pharmaceutical drugs, vaccination and invasive medical treatments like chemotherapy and radiation therapy.
You will also find more in-depth discussions of various health issues, to help you make better sense of the great amount of information that is today freely available. Many people are confused because they are constantly presented with contradictory statements – milk is good, milk is bad / nutritional supplements are useless, nutritional supplements are necessary / vaccination protects against disease, vaccination causes more harm than the disease itself… and so on.
To wade through this confusion, very often we need more than just information. It helps if we also understand the historical background, as well as the business and political forces at work, behind these contradictory statements.
Beyond personal health, this forum will also examine issues that affect public health, such as the chlorination and fluoridation of tap water, fogging against mosquitoes, compulsory vaccination for babies, and so on.
The Health Forum thus aims to be more than the average health website or blog. It aspires to become a forum where health issues are actively and openly discussed.
The Health Forum was started in November 2009 by three individuals who care deeply about health:
- Richard Seah is a writer and former journalist who reads widely on health topics. He grew up weak and sickly and his proudest achievement is that he has not seen a doctor, nor taken any pharmaceutical drug, not even an antibiotic, pain killer or cough syrup, ever since he discovered natural health in 1985. He self-published The Good Life, a newsletter on natural health, from 1989 to 1996. He studied macrobiotics and was president of the Macrobiotics Society during the mid-1990s. He also co-founded the macrobiotic and organic foods store, Brown Rice Paradise.
- James Ong is Co-Founder and Managing Director of VitaKids Pte Ltd (2002) and Pink of Health Pte Ltd (2008), now serving more than 10,000 customers throughout Singapore, Southeast Asia and beyond. He is a Management Committee Member of the Health Supplements Industry Association of Singapore (HSIAS) and Medical Sub-Committee Member of 365 Cancer Prevention Society. James is also a member of the Life Extension Foundation (USA) and Health Sciences Institute (USA). He, too, has not taken a single antibiotic or pharmaceutical drug since discovering natural health eight years ago (except for one occasion where an anti-fungal drug was taken to combat a serious fungal infection).
- John Yeo is the father of an autistic child. His search for a solution to his daughter’s condition has led him to study, among other things, Traditional Chinese Medicine and Acupuncture, Nutrition, Homeopathy and the Biomedical Approach to Autism. John is a trained DAN! (Defeat Autism Now!) practitioner. He started The Autism Clinic and Autism Recovery Centre, where he currently consults. He was also a co-founder of Brown Rice Paradise.
The three of us established The Health Forum because we feel a strong need for it. Our intention is not to have our individual points of view dominate this forum. And we certainly do not have a collective point of view that we wish to propagate (unlike, for example, the Vegetarian Society that promotes vegetarianism). While we agree on many things, we also have our differences of opinions. We simply want to get this forum going and have agreed to share the load of maintaining it and keeping it active.
So we like to take this opportunity to invite our friends and fellow healthcare professionals – any interested parties with valid points to share – to contribute to The Health Forum and add to its discussion. We welcome you as guest writers, or to leave comments on existing articles.
The Health Forum is started and based in Singapore. So naturally, a major part of the discussion here will focus on Singaporean health issues. At the same time, we recognise that the Internet has no national boundaries and that you may be reading this from anywhere in the world. So where possible, we will make our discussions more universal than local.
We cannot emphasise enough that The Health Forum is a forum – a place for discussion. This is not the typical website or blog where you might visit for information, entertainment or gossip… and then leave. Do join in the discussion if you can. Comments will be moderated to keep out the usual spam, vulgarities, hatred remarks, defamations, etc. But as far as possible, we will let you have your say, as long as you contribute meaningfully to the discussion and do not abuse this forum for your own vested interests.
In particular, we would like to build a database of case studies of people who believe that they, or their family members, have been harmed by products and medical treatments that are generally touted to be safe – such as drugs, vaccination, chlorinated / fluoridated water, mobile phones and so on.
If you have good reasons to believe that you have been harmed by something that is widely accepted, please tell us about it. We ask only that you provide a genuine name and a means of contact to facilitate further investigations if necessary. We will, of course, protect your privacy.
Welcome, then, to The Health Forum. We hope you have an engaging time here, that you will gain from your visit and, once again, that you will share your knowledge, thoughts and experiences so that others may also gain from your sharing.
