Health care fails everyone, not just seniors

Monday, November 10, 2003 by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...) Tags: bad medicine, medical racket, health care system

This study concludes that seniors only receive needed medical care half of the time. So if ten seniors need treatment, only five get it. That's interesting, but it needs to be expanded to all age groups. Because in reality, I'd say that 90% of all patients don't get quality medical care at all. What do they get instead? Drugs.

Real medical care would involve communicating with patients. Few doctors even go that far, spending as little as 60 seconds actually talking with a patient before making a diagnosis, prescribing pills, and booting them out the door.

I once visited a knee specialist who spent no more than twenty seconds with me, asked one question, touched one place on my knee and then went on to misdiagnose the obvious symptoms.

By and large, our Western medical system offers terrible health care. An improvement would involve working to educate the patient about what they can do to reverse serious problems with their diet, exercise, levels of stress, exposure to toxins and so on.

Yet when was the last time a doctor ever consulted you on your diet? Have you ever visited a doctor who told you to stop eating hydrogenated oils, known to cause heart disease? Has a single doctor ever told you to stop eating refined sugar? Probably not.

See, modern medicine isn't modern, and it's not even really medicine. It's a drug racket. See a patient, pop a pill. Send 'em to the pharmacy where another round of mistakes will be made. And even if they manage to read the doctor's handwriting correctly (which is fouled up nearly 10% of the time, according to studies), and the pharmacist manages to fill your prescription correctly (many prescriptions have errors), you're faced with the fact that the drug itself might damage your liver, harm your nervous system, cause gastrointenstinal bleeding, or create other serious side effects. There are 2.2 million people harmed each year by side effects from perscription drugs, according to research published by JAMA.

Our medical system is broken. Big Medicine doesn't work for people, and it's not just the elderly. What we need is a return to basics: doctors who communicate, a focus on prevention, nutrition education, and a national program of fitness and exercise to get people on their feet and off their couches. If your doctor helps you in these areas, you're very, very fortunate. Spread the word and bring your doctor more business!