I am Antti Heikkilä, a Finnish orthopaedic surgeon and traumatology specialist.
I no longer operate on patients but instead try to treat pain without surgery or drugs. I also publish books as a way of getting information out there to help people decide for themselves. Rasalas is the name of the publishing company set up by my wife Maarit and myself to publish books from all over the world that are in line with our own views. There is a great deal of wisdom on this earth that lies in the shadow of the mainstream. Put simply, our publishing company's aim is to support independent thought. My own work as a doctor is based on the principle that people should not be passive objects manipulated by the outside world but should instead form the active focus of their own lives.
The media's biggest financial sponsors are the pharmaceutical and food industries, which is why the media only publishes news that supports the interests of these sponsors. Alternative treatments are belittled even though they often prove to be more effective and safer than the accepted official treatments. In the same way, we have been told to believe in the benefits of ready-made foods in comparison with traditional foodstuffs.
The aim of this website is to share ideas and opinions and to distribute research material on health matters which are not reported in the media.
In the late 1970s, I specialized in providing surgical treatment for back problems and back injuries. But despite advances in medical treatment and diagnosis, back pain still remains a mystery.
Life can teach us a lot. One day when I was on emergency duty at a hospital, a male patient arrived bent double with back pain. The treatment of back pain involving cramps was - and still is - a tough challenge for medical science, as the condition cannot be readily relieved using conventional treatment methods.
When the pain still persisted the following day, the patient asked hesitantly whether he might attend one of the sessions being given by a healing preacher - sessions in which people would appear to faint and then reportedly recover from all manner of illnesses. As I had nothing else to offer, I felt it at least could not do any harm. The patient returned the following day, bolt upright and in full health. Though he wasn't religious, he did feel faint and fell backwards during the preacher's sermon. The same thing happened to another patient later on. For me, this was a personal shock, as nothing I had learnt allowed me to understand such an experience. It was only much later that I realized how this was possible. We all have within ourselves the power to make ourselves better or to make ourselves ill. It is all in the mind. Such occurrences are only treated as miracles if you have a blinkered view of life. In the real world, there are plenty of phenomena that cannot be studied using scientific instruments. And we all have inside us the capacity to do anything - good or bad. There is no need to go anywhere to faint when we ourselves have the inner power to make ourselves ill or, alternatively, to heal ourselves.
This experience took me on a long personal journey of discovery. I decided to find out all I could about traditional and folk healers, people who treat patients using simple techniques with their bare hands - and with good results. I told my supervisor at the clinic about the experience of the back pain sufferer, but all I got was an amused look and a change of subject. I realized that I had reached a crossroads and had to choose which direction to take. One road would be an easy career well respected by others and the other a difficult, lonely, even dangerous one, but at the same time one that is challenging and extremely interesting.
I chose the latter, and it has turned out to be quite an adventure, as I have had to search for information from sources all over the world. The road has taken me to the United States, Britain, Israel, India, Russia, Ukraine and Norway, as well as many places in Finland.
To understand pain, you need to accept that each of us is an indivisible entity of mind and body. Pain represents a real challenge for science, as the scientific approach is founded on the assumption that everything can be studied using objective methods. Indeed, the very premises of science prevent pain from being fully understood: as far as science is concerned, pain is not really real but just a load of hooey, to coin a phrase. This is because there is still no reliable method for measuring and studying pain. The treatment of pain also says a lot about how distant modern medicine has become from the everyday life of ordinary people.
I am no idealist or dreamer; I am a practical realist with both feet firmly on the ground. Suffering will not go away by theorizing, and treatment should, I believe, always make use of the most effective methods available. Having said that, the cure should not be worse than the cause, a principle which today seems all too easily forgotten. Moreover, however captivating or appealing a new idea or approach may be, if it does not work in practice or if it increases suffering, it is worthless.
When I came to choose this profession, I vowed that I would try to reduce suffering and would not act as God or try to convince patients that they can buy themselves a tailor-made future, as appears to be the case in the medical profession today. My adventure has helped me to view the profession from the outside. Sometimes I cannot help but smile when I see how many things in medical science are in fact highly dubious if not sheer superstition, shrouded beneath pseudo-scientific language. The prestigious medical journal The Lancet recently came to a similar conclusion, stating that only 15% of all medical treatments are scientifically justified. I believe that medical science in its current form will not be around too much longer, for the simple reason that it will become too expensive for humanity to maintain.
I have given myself the challenge of helping patients without resorting to drugs and surgery. I am not actually opposed to drugs or surgery: they have their place, and in many cases there is no substitute for them. But in today's world they are clearly over-used. As a surgeon myself, I can say that surgery to relieve pain is tantamount to quackery. Pain is a symptom, and you cannot operate on a symptom. Surgery is only justified if there is a condition or illness present which can be significantly alleviated by surgical means.
Society has unfortunately become medicalized. Medicine has become big business, and as such is obliged to produce profits for its investors. Medicine has also begun to generate an increasing number of negative impacts. In the United States, for instance, medical science and all its problems is ranked third (or even first, according to some) among causes of death. Finland is hardly likely to differ much in this regard from anywhere else in the world.
Suffering can be alleviated by working closely with patients but also by distributing information, allowing people to decide freely for themselves. The media lives off pharmaceutical and food industry advertising, and only publishes news that supports the interests of its sponsors. Rarely, if ever, are we told of the adverse effects of treatments or about drug-free alternatives. The aim of this website is to supply information that the media will not publish. Far from being hokum, drug-free alternatives are, more often than not, supported by research. Only when an array of different information is available will we be able to say there is a choice, though one might think that this would be taken for granted in a democratic society. We should not be placing our lives in the hands of experts -they should be serving us.
