An Ounce of Prevention

March 2nd, 2008 at 05:13pm Under CAM+ Food & Nutrition

The days of the kindly old family doctor who would come to your house whenever called and prescribe medications compounded by your local pharmacist (who likely knew you by name and also dispensed penny candy from the case) are long gone. For many of us, we are either going to a public clinic or attached to an HMO for our basic medical care. That care is, for the most part, cookie-cutter and limited to 15-minute sound bytes.

To blindly place our trust solely within the realm of conventional medicine is often a poor choice. We all know of and can attest to unfortunate results from not exploring alternative options. We need to ask specific and often difficult questions in order to make the most informed decisions, and if a doctor is alienated during that process, perhaps he/she is the wrong doctor.

But neither should we trust only in alternative methods … delaying proven treatments have also resulted in serious consequences. It’s clear there is room for both conventional and alternative treatments in our health care.

While conventional medicine certainly has its uses (I recently had abdominal surgery and am thankful for my competent surgeon), many doctors openly admit to treating disease or illness “symptomatically” rather than holistically. It’s not their fault … it’s how they are trained by our medical schools.

“What’s wrong with that?” you ask. Well, nothing on the face of it … an illness can usually be identified by its symptoms. The doctor will then hand you a prescription for a best-guess medication to treat that symptom and tell you to come back in two weeks if you don’t improve. And if that drug doesn’t work, they’ll prescribe another. So they are basically telling you to get sicker before they can help you!

To me, there seems to be a fundamental flaw in this concept, and that is: Understanding and interpreting symptoms has its place, but if you’re invested in only treating the symptoms, you aren’t really looking for a cause and/or prevention. The medical establishment (at least here in the U.S.) may give lip service to prevention of illness and disease, but in reality they’re saying to just trust them to eventually figure it out. In the meantime, you are also supposed to believe that they know what they’re doing … after all, you are only the patient. And as they plod through their protocols you may get worse before you get better.

This is how folks end up taking a whole sack full of prescription drugs. Take for example, high blood pressure. Wouldn’t it make more sense to first look at the possible causes as to why an individual has developed high blood pressure in the first place? (These things seldom happen overnight). Once the reasons are understood, you can explore avenues such as changing diet and lifestyle habits, eating certain foods, or taking supplements that will more naturally keep the arteries and veins elastic and healthy.

I believe, as the old saying goes, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”, so I feel it important that we do all we can to help our body take care of itself. It has a remarkable capacity for self-healing and regeneration, given half the chance, and that help doesn’t always come in the form of a prescription drug with a myriad of negative side effects (and a high price tag).

But then the medical establishment (and the drug companies they service) couldn’t keep prescribing more drugs and tests, could they? And that’s the real name of the game.

Yours in health …

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