Ron Garner
See book keywords and concepts |
 Let us have a closer look at our western conventional medical care system and its history to understand how it developed into what it is today.
6 | CONVENTIONAL MEDICAL CARE
If the doctors of today do not become the nutritionists of tomorrow;.... the nutritionists of today will become the doctors of tomorrow.
Rockefeller Institute of Medical Research
HEALTHCARE OR DISEASE CARE?
Conventional medical care treats symptoms of disease. True healthcare works to correct the causes of disease. And, although the present allopathic system is often referred to as "traditional medicine," it is not. |
Gary Null and Amy McDonald
See book keywords and concepts |
 However, insurance companies are very reluctant to pay for this kind of medical care, even though many times specialists in environmental medicine can see patients and relieve symptoms that haven't been helped by all the other medical specialists. They pay for medical care that does not help and don't pay for care that does help. We must ask why. Insurance companies say environmental medicine is experimental and anecdotal. |
Rick Levy and Lou Aronica
See book keywords and concepts |
 If you have no access to appropriate medical care, then by all means, use the methods in this book to heal yourself. The methods are very powerful, in many cases powerful enough to stand alone as a cure. However, they are not designed to replace conventional medical care and should not be used in exchange for common sense. Please be smart. Use all the tools available to you, and you will be well.
PART ONE
Skill Building
Prelude to 2
Thought Directs the Energy Inside of You
This simple exercise will get you "in touch" with the way your mind can affect the energy in your body. |
Hyla Cass, M.D.
See book keywords and concepts |
 Use of insulin requires more strict self-monitoring and medical care, and is a treatment of last resort. Given insulin's risks, your medical team will try to make the most of the insulin your body can make, and will try to increase your cells' sensitivity to it, before prescribing it.
Even if you require insulin therapy, don't give up on weight loss, a healthful diet, supplements, and exercise. These measures are every bit as important to your health as they are to the person who is prediabetic, and you are much less likely to develop the devastating complications of diabetes. |
Devra Davis
See book keywords and concepts |
 In an age when public funding for medical care was paltry, the WFA carried out community studies confirming the need for public health programs and advocated group budgeting for hospitals.
The WFA also showed an impressive knack for attracting attention. One exhibit, created by members from the state of Georgia, featured a miniature graveyard with wooden tombstones proportional in size to the number of individuals dying from various causes. A tiny stone marked deaths from infantile paralysis, the subject of a million dollar yearly outpouring in public largesse. |
| These efforts sounded socialistic to some board members (as they probably were) and threatening to medical societies determined to hold on to their monopoly on medical care meted out in doctors' offices. After a particularly boisterous national convention in 1946, a decision was made "high up" in ACS to eliminate the irritant "as conveniently as possible." Within five years the Field Army was history, with some of its leaders being quietly absorbed into the ACS.
The WFA legacy remains part of the ACS and cancer fund-raising. |
Lester A. Mitscher and Victoria Toews
See book keywords and concepts |
 When researchers took a closer look at the statistics to determine the relative importance of factors that could affect health, such as access to medical care, smoking, genetic differences, and pollution, they concluded that there must be something in the diet to account for Asian health.
Even within Asian countries, diet seems to affect disease rates from region to region. Take, for example, the Shizuoka Prefecture of Japan. |
| Even after adjusting the statistics to account for factors that could affect health—such as access to medical care, smoking, genetic differences, and pollution—Asian countries still rank high in worldwide comparisons of longevity and health.
The Asian secret to a longer, healthier life appears to lie in dietary choices. Asian diets are well-known for what they don't contain: they are low in fat, meat, refined grains, and sugar. |
Devra Davis
See book keywords and concepts |
| The ability to get medical care of any kind declines for those who live in the rural South. Even in urban areas today, recent cuts in basic medical services mean that fewer women will receive Pap smears. Access to care for all working-class people remains imperiled as a result of ever-shrinking federal funding.
The situation in developing countries is much worse. Cervical cancer remains a death sentence in much of Africa, China and India. In the parts of the world where the most women live, the disease is not found in time for surgery and radiation. |
Michael Pollan
See book keywords and concepts |
 A ten-year study of heart disease mortality published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1998 strongly suggests that most of the decline in deaths from heart disease is due not to changes in lifestyle, such as diet, but to improvements in medical care. (Though cessation of smoking has been important.) For while during the period under analysis, heart attack deaths declined substantially, hospital admissions for heart attack did not. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
See article keywords and concepts |
 As jobs were lost overseas in the Information Technology, accounting and technical support industries, people thought, "Well, that's manageable, but no one will go overseas to have medical care." It turns out they were wrong. People will go overseas to get better medical care or a better value on surgical procedures, and the popularity of medical tourism is proving that.
What it could mean long term is a further deterioration of the U.S. healthcare system. |
Dr. Sharon Moalem
See book keywords and concepts |
 That understanding ought to inform everything from research in the laboratory to medical care in the doctor's office to life in our homes. Today, the most widely prescribed therapy for high cholesterol is a class of drugs called statins. Although they are considered generally "safe" drugs, over time, statins can cause serious side effects, including liver damage. If you knew that you might be able to reduce your excess cholesterol by getting enough sunlight to convert it to vitamin D, wouldn't you rather hit the tanning salon before starting a lifetime of Lipitor? That's food for thought. |
Too Profitable to CureBrent Hoadley, Ph.D.
See book keywords and concepts |
| This iatrogenic death was levied against "long time diabetes" rather than the more accurate "poor medical care" that we witnessed.
The pharmaceutical corporations provide the mechanisms for the primary cause of iatrogenic deaths attributed to doctors and others within the medical community. Collateral damage now begins at the very institutions we have been taught to rely on for truth and unbiased research.
Educating Physicians
The government allows pharmaceutical corporations to put money into all facets of our educational institutions — teaching, research, and outreach programs. |
Tori Hudson, N.D.
See book keywords and concepts |
 Most women who have symptoms do not seek medical care but instead self-treat, making this an ideal arena for natural self-care.
Some 150 symptoms have been ascribed to PMS—most commonly feelings of anxiousness (premenstrual tension was the first name given to this syndrome), irritability, and anger or moods vacillating unpredictably among the three. Some women feel predominantly sad or self-deprecating, others simply fatigued and lethargic. Physical changes include bloating, breast tenderness, food cravings, headache, and gastric upset. |
Ray D. Strand
See book keywords and concepts |
 We physicians must realize that we are primarily responsible for the major shift of medical care to alternative health-care providers. We frustrate our patients into making alternative decisions. After all, the overwhelming majority of patients do see their physicians first. Most physicians now appreciate the benefits of a healthy diet and a modest exercise program. But these same physicians do so without fully appreciating or understanding the consequences of oxidative stress. |
| TWO Living Too Short; Dying Too Long
AS WE ROUNDED THE CORNER INTO THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY, physicians and medical researchers took special note of the state of health and medical care in the United States and the industrialized world. Looking back over a century gone by, the comparisons of diseases are remarkable. In the early 1900s people primarily died of infectious diseases. The four leading causes of death in the U.S. back then were pneumonia, tuberculosis, diphtheria, and influenza, and people had a life expectancy of a little more than forty-three years. |
Tori Hudson, N.D.
See book keywords and concepts |
| Among women self-presenting to PMS clinics for medical care, fully 75 percent had another diagnosis that contributed significantly to their symptoms—major depressive or other mood disorders being most prominent.6 About 10 percent had early menopausal symptoms, 10 percent were affected by hormonal contraceptives, and about 5 percent each were found to have eating disorders or substance abuse issues predominating. Anyone who considers her PMS to be significantly bothersome might be wise to check with her practitioner should her efforts with self-care fail. |
Charles Barber
See book keywords and concepts |
 For socially minded psychiatrists, letting the patients into the community was an act of liberation from the oppression of institution and the hierarchies of medical care. For their part, state governments were only too happy to divest themselves of the expense of running massive networks of long-term care facilities. For all the high expectations and lofty rhetoric, the reality was that the effectiveness of the drugs was overestimated and the necessity of appropriate community support for patients was underestimated or ignored. The goal of John F. |
Devra Davis
See book keywords and concepts |
| Incidence also was the best predictor of future demands for medical care. Yet Doll and Peto had not looked at incidence at all, nor had they included the growing rates of cancer in blacks. Instead, they had considered the other end of the process: causes of death and only in whites. We both knew that at the time, four out of every five cancer deaths occurred in people over sixty-five. Why, then, did Doll and Peto restrict their work to deaths that occurred in whites under sixty-five? |
Roberta Bivins
See book keywords and concepts |
 Hospitals, still in the late nineteenth century regarded by many as places of last resort in medical care (and thus serving mainly the poor), became the central institution of medical practice and education, and prominent research sites. But medical research found a home too in industry, in universities, and in governmental organizations of various types, ranging from public health laboratories to military installations. The twentieth century also witnessed the rise of third-party payers and, particularly in Western Europe, national health services. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
See article keywords and concepts |
 SiCKO" profiles a number of Americans with insurance who have been denied needed care by their insurance companies, describes how the insurance-based healthcare system is structured to keep it that way, and provides examples of other industrialized nations where insurance companies do not stand in the way of medical care.
The campaign will highlight the need for reforms that prevent insurance companies from denying care, and send a strong signal to politicians in Congress, state capitals, and the presidential race who are promoting insurance-based reforms. |
Peter h. Fraser and Harry Massey
See book keywords and concepts |
 The time had come to get serious about seeking medical care. Over the next several years, Harry made the rounds of physicians and specialists, but he was never given a definitive diagnosis, and none of the treatments or pharmaceuticals he was given helped for very long. At one point, his doctors thought he might have pancreatic cancer, but, thankfully, he didn't. No one seemed to know how to help him, and the continual cycle of hope and disappointment was among the greatest frustrations of this period. |
Ron Garner
See book keywords and concepts |
| I am not saying that modern medical care has no place. On the contrary, when we are in a crisis such as a traumatic injury, heart attack, or severe allergic reaction, we have some of the finest lifesaving care, procedures, technology, and medicine in the world available to us. My own life was saved by penicillin when I had blood poisoning at the age of 13. However, for our general health and to avoid developing diseases, we need to become informed and accept personal responsibility for our own health. We need to understand that disease is a process and not a "happening. |
| Conventional medical care treats symptoms of disease. True healthcare works to correct the causes of disease. And, although the present allopathic system is often referred to as "traditional medicine," it is not. True traditional medicine is healthcare that uses natural methods, foods, and herbs, and has been practiced since the beginning of civilization. Today's medical system, which is barely a century old, attempts to treat disease with chemicals, surgery, and radiation technologies. It is not health care. It is disease care. |
J. Douglas Bremner
See book keywords and concepts |
 About 20% of patients using OTC inhalers have severe asthma that needs medical care. Unfortunately, many asthma patients delay professional medical treatment in favor of using their OTC inhalers, often because they lack health insurance, to the point where it may be too late. OTC inhalers can increase heart rate and should not be used by patients with heart or thyroid disease. Over the last twenty years, thirteen deaths, mostly cardiovascular, have been reported to be associated with the use of OTC inhalers. |
Gerald E. Markle and Frances B. McCrea
See book keywords and concepts |
 First, patients and family members insist on "high technology" medical care, eschewing "conservative management" as "obsolescent." In this thinking, the cardiologist has cast aside scientific medicine and medical ethics, and has become an unlikely pawn of the patient. Ultimately, as we have claimed previously, such explanations improperly blame the patient for the doctor's inadequacies. Second, cardiologists simply do not believe the results of statistical studies. What they see from their own patients is what forms their conclusions. Moreover, stenting does relieve symptoms. Ergo, it works. |
Devra Davis
See book keywords and concepts |
| He contended that in order for the most fit to prevail, the weak had to be denied medical care and the ability to pass on their defective genes. British Social Darwinist John Hay craft echoed these ideas, suggesting that tuberculosis and leprosy be deemed "racial friends" because they chiefly attacked those who weren't meant to survive. In 1904 Plotz and Haycraft joined forces to create the Society for Racial Hygiene and established a journal, the Archives of Racial and Social Biology. |
Marshall Editions
See book keywords and concepts |
 JT^^' Conventional medical care during pregnancy involves the early vTl identification of risk factors, and educating and counseling women on necessary diet and lifestyle modifications. Fetal growth is also measured >y regularly, and the reproductive system is assessed to identify any I" abnormalities. The following histories are taken: medical history, focusing on any existing illnesses; obstetric history, identifying risk factors in any previous pregnancies; and family and genetic history. Toxin exposure is also evaluated. |
Devra Davis
See book keywords and concepts |
| Morgenstern provided medical care to the arsenal workers in Building 117. Most were young men and women from the surrounding farms, some still teenagers. Their job, for which they received no particular training, was to produce poison gas, place it into steel vats set in caves that were dug into the local mountains, and take care that nothing and nobody slipped up while doing so. These were good-paying military jobs for hard-working men and women who otherwise had few opportunities in the rural, Jim Crow South. |
Roberta Bivins
See book keywords and concepts |
| Although this category resists incorporation and assimilation with biomedicine, and therefore escapes a lower status in the biomedical hierarchy of knowledge, it also hinders acceptance into the institutions of medical orthodoxy—the loci of most medical care in contemporary society.
So where do the medical systems of other cultures fit onto this spectrum? Until the late eighteenth century, all medicine was largely subjective—rooted in the patient's experience of his or her illness, and in the healer's experience recognizing and treating similar constellations of symptoms and circumstance. |
Email this page to a friend
