Preventive health care: does it exist?
True preventive health care is non-existent for most Americans. That is because traditional medicine focuses on treating symptoms and that is not prevention. Our health care system works like the old barn door: it is left open and then the farmer tries to find out why the horses ran away.
Preventive or “alternative” medicine is available, but it is not the norm. You have to be informed enough, have an open mind and have enough money to get it. If you find a traditionally trained physician who integrates alternative medicine into their practice and still takes their insurance, you’re in luck.
Most of the time you will be out of luck because alternative practitioners are often fed up with the traditional system. Part of your complaint is dealing with the insurance providers who dictate what drugs the insurer will pay for. So doctors stop buying insurance. The result is that patients seeking alternative medicine must pay the full cost of care or do without it.
Our overburdened healthcare system is controlled by the insurance and pharmaceutical industries. The pharmaceutical industry has the “solution” (prescription drugs) to medical problems. It does not matter that prescription drugs generally do not cure a condition. Pharmaceutical companies are not interested in finding cures. A cured condition does not require medication. Don’t take advantage of it!
However, it is profitable to only control symptoms (high blood pressure, for example) with medication for years, or until the patient changes their lifestyle or passes away.
If you think about how long it takes to find a cure for cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, and other devastating diseases, you must conclude that something is wrong. We are the most technologically and scientifically advanced country on the planet and it still takes forever to find cures.
Take the amount of time and money spent over the years to find a cure for cancer. Yes, there are cures (which often turn into relapses), but treatments that poison the entire body in an effort to reach cancer and usually end up killing the patient are barbaric. There has to be a better way.
Look how long we’ve been flirting with Alzheimer’s disease. Research money provided by corporations and advocacy organizations continues to fund the same unproductive “plates and tangles” theory as the cause of AD.
At the same time, credible research on Alzheimer’s disease at universities (with the help of government funding, not usually the pharmaceutical industry) clearly shows that there is a likely answer to AD, but more research is needed to confirm the preliminary findings. . Why is this type of promising research not followed by those entities that claim to want to prevent or cure AD?
This brings me to a true story. The husband of a close friend, Mary, was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. In the initial stage, she had a little shaking in her hand, but what disturbed Mary the most was the evidence of cognitive impairment. Her husband, a math whiz, now had a hard time with simple arithmetic.
The doctor said that the medication was not yet indicated. He couldn’t offer anything to help with the cognitive problem. Mary asked if he knew of anything that might help.
I had recently seen research showing that the progression of Parkinson’s disease could be slowed by a staggering 44 percent by taking 1,200 mg. of CoQ10 per day. (The normal daily dose is 50 to 150 mg). The Life Extension Foundation protocol for treating Parkinson’s calls for up to 3,000 mg per day. There are no known side effects or contraindications for high doses of CoQ10.
Mary started her husband with 1,200 mg a day and about two weeks later increased the dose to 2,400 mg.
Within a month, her husband’s cognition almost returned to normal. It was lucky? Was it a “miracle” that it would have happened without CoQ10, or was it CoQ10 that produced the benefit? Will the improvement last?
Will we wait for Alzheimer’s advocates or the pharmaceutical industry to fund proper trials of CoQ10? We must not hold our breath. CoQ10 is not patentable.
When the traditional health care system fails, all we can do is take personal responsibility and act on our own behalf to the best of our ability.
Taking personal responsibility includes developing a prevention-oriented mindset – learning to stay well without relying on a health care system that talks a lot about prevention but doesn’t seem to know how to deliver it.