The evolution of health care - Part 1

It is interesting to consider a very brief and simplified overview of the way health care has evolved through the millennia. In ancient times it was the wise men of the tribe, the witch doctors, who provided the ancient wisdoms and had the most dramatic effects on the health of the tribe. They healed the body and the spirit, often in dramatic ways. However, it was the women, working away quietly in the background, who came to understand the benefits of different foods, herbs, and other plant and animal substances, as well as remedies in the treatment of day-to-day health problems. Over the centuries the witch doctors evolved and subdivided into the church leaders on the one hand and the medical or drug doctors on the other, the latter being deemed, rightly or wrongly, to involve technical, scientific, and appropriate activities for men and to be worthy of respect. The women's role with nutrition and herbs evolved into nutrition and domestic science on the one hand, and health care using natural remedies on the other; both were considered 'soft' subjects, suitable, in a politically incorrect age of macho superiority, for women. This in part explains the placing of drug medicine in the universities and the CAM therapies on the outer edge in collages that are only gradually becoming recognized within the educational system.

The evolution of health care - Part 2

How Modern Medicine Contrasts with Naturopathy

Modern medicine, the MDS approach, offers little in the way of prevention. Although it has had some notable successes with some of the blood cancers, it has achieved relatively little in the treatment of solid-tumor cancers, when the hype and smudging of statistics is set aside.

Some sobering figures come from a recently published book. the cost of cancer drugs, worldwide, is 40 billion dollars per year, second only to medications for heart problems, but rising at double the annual growth rate. This is despite the fact that 'in most (nonblood cancers) chemotherapy is remarkably ineffective.'

A study of American and Australian data has shown that the survival rate is 63 percent, but that chemotherapy contributes only 2 percent to this. It showed zero effect on multiple myeloma, softtissue sarcomas, melanoma of the skin, and cancers of the bladder, kidney, pancreas, prostate, and uterus.

Two examples are given; lung cancer kills 150.000 Americans a year and costs 40.000 dollars per person, and treatment extends a person's life on average by two months (plus the cost of the side effects, which can be brutal). For metastatic breast cancer the figure was 360.000 dollars per person.

the economics are disturbing on another front. The authors state that oncologists are among the highest-paid doctors; their salaries are increasing faster than those of any other specialists, and more than 50 percent of their income comes from selling cancer drugs. Yet, 'the age-adjusted mortality rate for cancer is essentially unchanged over the past half-century.' This is in spite of the huge increase in funding and research during that same time.

In another report chemotherapy has been shown to increase the five-year survival rate by only 2.3 percent (Australian figures) or 2.1 percent (U.S. figures)

In contrast to the CAM approach, the MDS system;

• First, does do harm - there is no medical drug that does not have some harmful side, or toxic effect.
• Largely ignores nutrition and the possibility of nutrient deficiencies, even though that is the fuel on which the body runs
• Almost never incur ports any detox strategy in its treatment programs, and often incurases the body's toxic load, even though many of these toxins are carcinogens.
• Focuses on the symptom, not the whole body; hence we have specialists who focus only on the digestive tract, the heart, the kidneys, and so on.
• Frequently suppresses symptoms without correcting the underlying cause. Examples include the use of drugs to lower blood pressure, block pain, block inflammation, or suppress a temperature without correcting the cause. In fact a temperature is an essential part of boosting the immune system so that it can deal with the problem.