Many of us will have seen claims on the internet that ‘big pharma’ is preventing the use of natural treatments by forcing the medical profession to buy their expensive drugs rather than prescribe herbal remedies and such like.

While the online world is notoriously more aggressive than the ‘real world’, this view is often reflected among people at large.

Interestingly, the very first clinical trial is considered to be that carried out by James Lind to try and treat the effects of scurvy in sailors. It was based on using what Lind had available to him – namely types of food – and concluded that oranges and lemons gave the best results.

I think what many people don’t realise is that the whole clinical trials industry was founded on using natural ingredients, then developed into discovering what it is about those ingredients that is the active element, in order to reproduce it on a mass scale.