The Health Care Crisis and Solutions
We have a health care crisis in this country. Everybody knows it. As a firm believer in the healing power of nature and the fact that I don’t believe that we were put on this planet to be dependant upon toxic medications, drugs, pills or surgery’s to cut off body parts or organs the moment they start mal- functioning. Perhaps they are not working properly because they have been lacking the biochemical elements they needed to perform their function in the first place. I have taken the liberty to list some of the basic elements of the crisis and a possible solution which most people haven’t thought about, and which certainly has not been given appropriate respect and research it deserves.
The Crisis
Costs are spiraling. Millions of people are losing medical insurance, and thus, health care coverage. Health care costs represent a major and growing portion of the increasing national debt of North America. We seem to be fighting a losing war against a variety of different diseases. Of course, I acknowledge the many battles which modern medicine has won, but we are not winning the war.
Heart disease, cancer, arthritis, AIDS, diabetes, asthma, Alzheimer’s disease… The incidence of these and other chronic diseases seems to get worse every year. Disease-causing bacteria are showing resistance to our antibiotics. Viruses are causing more diseases of increasing severity. More people seem to be having allergic and hypersensitivity reactions to toxins, and toxins are nearly everywhere.
So, supposed you get sick, you go to your physician and often, the medical treatments have side effects to rival or surpass the disease. Latrogenesis (medically induced illness) accounts for nearly 1/3 of hospitalizations. The November 27, 1991 issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association, JAMA, reported the incidence of ADE (Adverse Drug Events), as being responsible for 30% of all hospitalized patients. The report states these ADE’s are fatal for 60,000 to 140,000 patients each year.
A report in The New England Journal of Medicine, March 12, 1981, stated that 36% of patients at a teaching hospital suffered from iatrogenic illness. Further, 2% of these patients died. If we extend this to all teaching hospitals, perhaps 700,000 people die each year from drug, doctor, and hospital induced problems. This includes the effects of such procedures as cardiac catheterization and coronary bypass surgery.
The Solutions
The area of holistic or natural medicine has been ignored and spurned by the medical establishment. Although holistic therapies have, in my opinion, great potential for alleviating the crisis, these holistic approaches have usually been dismissed by the medical establishment as invalid and unscientific. Although these approaches can often be called unscientific in the sense that relatively few have been confirmed by double-blind studies, this is often due to the fact that funds are not available for research into simple, cheap, unpatentable remedies. However, if a therapy or therapeutic approach is successful, the results usually speak for themselves clinically.
Many accepted medical treatments are derived from natural substances (e.g. plants), whose use became established before either mechanisms of action were known or double blind studies were performed. Yet this did not detract from the validity of these drugs as therapeutic agents. Two examples of such widely used drugs are aspirin and digitalis.
Once upon a time, medical professionals did not accept claims of health food proponents, usually with the statement, “there is no evidence to support that claim” and/or “there is no theoretical basis for why it should work.” However, now many years later, most of the claims made by natural health practitioners have been substantiated, and more benefits of natural foods, vitamins, and herbs are being discovered every day.
Indeed, a revolution is occurring in which we are beginning to discover the amazing pharmacopoeia of “phytochemicals” within our normal foods, as well as; in botanicals which have been used traditionally all over the world by medicine men and women. If we utilize these new approaches of natural healing, we can create better health and lower medical costs by not being sick and by getting well faster.
Conclusion
Most medical and biological therapies have been serious disappointments for chronic diseases. After decades of work from brilliant scientists, there is always another unexpected obstacle around the bend that leads to toxic side effects and reduced therapeutic value from substances like interferon or interleukin. The reason for these frustrating results is our arrogance. We assume that we fully understand the interdependent and complex machinery of the human body. Yet we have only a vague grasp of how to optimally support the mind and body. We dump billions of pounds of known lethal poisons in our air, food and water supply, then subject ourselves to unprecedented levels of psychological distress, then fill our stomachs with nutritionally bankrupt food. When our health fails, we cut off the defective part or try some dramatic, invasive, expensive therapy that will combat the disease. Somehow, we ignore the obvious and easy answers. The solution to many health problems revolves around nourishing our own internal healing ability—the “life forces” within.
~Something to think about?
