Healthcare in the 21st Century continued

Alternative Medicine …

Today, what we know of as complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) has roots going back 5,000 years to Chinese (Traditional Chinese Medicine/TCM), Indian (Ayurvedic medicine) and similar healing traditions. For thousands of years, these diverse medical traditions held a belief in the energy of the body and the need for harmony between mind, body and spirit. Doctor’s simply facilitated the healing process by identifying and removing obstacles.

In Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), the human being is viewed as a garden, with roots running deep and unseen. A practitioner of TCM seeks to understand the symptoms that brought you into the clinic, but much more so, she wants to know how you’ve been tending your own garden.

What have you been eating, thinking, and feeling? Are you pre-occupied while you eat? Do emotions or thinking prevent you from sleeping? Are you getting fresh air and exercise? Are you laughing and enjoying good company? Do you tend to worry, to be fearful or angry? Do you have family members with similar issues? Do you attend church or meditate, or believe in something larger than yourself?

Traditional Chinese Medicine, Ayurveda, and Homeopathy all continue to operate from the ancient truth that we are multi-faceted beings, and that when something reaches the physical plane and creates a symptom, to just look at the symptom and do something expedient to remove that symptom does not remove the cause.

TCM offers many "Confucius Says" statements. One that’s important to our discussion of healthcare into the 21st century is "Same cause, many diseases; same disease, many causes." What this means, is that there is no prescription pad offering "Keflex®" medication for everyone who comes in with chest congestion. What all this means is that a 10 minute HMO visit will rarely even come close to properly healing a medical problem.

DID YOU KNOW … ? 20 million American women suffer with Human Papilloma Virus (HPV). A naturally occurring substance called "ellagic acid", most abundant in red raspberries, has been found to be extremely effective in treating the HPV virus.

A government controlled single payer system is hardly the point. Defining the goal (vibrant good health for all) and building an efficient healthcare system around that goal is the point. Curtailing exploitation is the point. Fresh healthy local organic produce, brimming with nutrients, is the point. Prevention is the point, and universal access to unbiased holistic education is the key.

Consider These Facts ... The quest to establish and maintain an effective healthcare system has now grown into an extremely complex task, with conflicting interests everywhere you turn. Our environment, and food supply, is tainted with harmful chemicals and has been so for many decades. Hormones and antibiotics in beef, chicken, eggs and milk upset our own delicate hormonal balance. While coronary by-pass surgery is now a $75 billion industry, heart disease is reversible. Mercury fillings poison our brains and bodies.

Amalgam Fillings …

Mercury is known to be one of the most potent and deadly neurotoxins on the planet. Mercury is accepted as highly toxic everywhere … except when it’s placed inside your mouth! WHY IS THIS A CONTROVERSY? Many of us are concerned about the presence of toxic mercury in tuna and many other fish (caused by coal-fired power plants), and the use of mercury in vaccines is highly suspect as the root cause behind the current autism epidemic. So, why aren’t we outraged by the fact that every year American dentists place approximately 30 tons of mercury into our mouths? When mercury amalgam fillings were first introduced in 1833, many dentists were outraged at the suggestion of installing such a highly toxic metal in their patients' mouths. Controversy over amalgam use surfaced again in 1926 and into the 1930's when a German physician, Dr. Alfred Stock, showed that mercury escaped from fillings in the form of a dangerous vapor that could cause significant medical damage. During this Second Amalgam War, the American Dental Association vigorously defended amalgam and its widespread use was continued. In 1986, pressure from mounting clinical evidence forced the ADA to finally publicly concede that mercury vapor does escape from amalgam fillings into the patient’s mouth. Yet in 1986 it changed its code of ethics, making it unethical for a dentist to recommend removal of amalgams because of mercury.

The ADA has actually made it unethical for your dentist to keep you, the consumer, informed of a potential serious health risk, or to recommend a procedure that could possibly improve your emotional and physical health.

The ADA holds the patent on mercury amalgams. Some enlightened dentists have even been accused of unethical behavior for recommending amalgam removal, in what has become a modern day ’witch hunt’.

Tens of millions of Americans suffer from depression, Attention Deficit, Alzheimer’s Disease, memory loss and other neurological and unexplained physical disorders. Could these have anything to do with mercury toxicity? Aluminum was implicated in Alzheimer’s disease 30 years ago. Many doctors will tell you no. Some doctors will fall back on statement like ’standard care’ and ’evidence-based medicine’, while the real underlying causes fall on deaf ears. What do you think?

Finding Authoritative Unbiased Healthcare Information On the Web … Digging for comprehensive and unbiased healthcare facts on the web is no small task. Go to Google and search for "depression" or "A.D.D." Drug companies dominate the top ten search results. Many of these drugs have serious side effects – some of them clearly life threatening!!!

What About WebMD.com? While WebMD is filled with practical and useful data, it hardly tells the whole story. WebMD was founded by Big Pharma and is largely supported by myriad drug advertisements. Enough said?