An Ounce of Prevention

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

Once upon a time, your family doctor would come to your house no matter what hour, then prescribe medications compounded by a pharmacist who not only knew you by name but also sold penny candy and cherry phosphate sodas at his own drugstore. Those days are long gone.

For many of us, basic medical care today means either a public clinic or one provided by our HMO. Unfortunately, that “care” is often one-size-fits-all and limited to 15-minute sound bytes, not enough time to ask specific questions or make difficult decisions. And what if we’re elderly, or even know what questions to ask? Or perhaps what’s needed is a second opinion in order to make the most informed decisions. Whatever our situation, we hope we will be “heard”. If a doctor is alienated during that process, perhaps it is time to change providers … but what if we can’t? And even more common these days, what if we have no provider at all?

To blindly place our trust solely within the realm of conventional medicine is often a poor choice … we all know of unfortunate results from not exploring alternative options. But neither should we trust only in alternative methods … delaying proven treatments have also earned serious consequences. It’s clear there is room for both conventional and alternative treatments within our current (and future) health care system.

While conventional medicine certainly has its place (when I needed surgery a couple of years ago, I was very thankful for a competent surgeon), most doctors openly admit to treating disease or illness symptomatically rather than holistically. It’s not their fault … it’s how they are trained by the medical schools. They treat the effects, not the cause.

“What’s wrong with that?” you ask. Well, nothing on the face of it … an illness can usually be identified by symptoms. The doctor will hand you a prescription for a best-guess medication 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! Am I the only one who sees the flaws in this approach?

Diagnosing certainly has its place, but if you’re invested solely in treating symptoms, then you aren’t really looking for a cause and/or prevention. The healthcare system (at least here in the U.S.) may give lip service to prevention of illness and disease, but in reality they’re just following a set of protocols. You’re supposed to trust them to eventually figure it out, and if they can’t figure it out, they may deny you have an issue and say it’s all in your head. In the meantime, you are only the patient. As a result, while they plod through their checklists with you as their guinea pig, 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 better sense as a first choice to look at the possible causes as to why a particular individual has developed high blood pressure in the first place? These things seldom happen overnight and are not going to be fixed overnight.

Once the cause(s) are understood, rather than a knee-jerk grab for the prescription pad, it seems the first and best choice should be to explore avenues like changing diet and lifestyle. Along with that, add some supplements for a more natural way to keep arteries strong and healthy. According to the latest research, there is increasing empirical evidence for supplements such as Omega-3 providing major benefits for heart health.

My feeling is the worst choice would be to jump directly to drugs, some of which have pretty nasty side effects. If other protocols don’t provide complete relief, then at the very least it might mean that if you do have to resort to prescription drugs, you might require a lower dose.

I believe, as the old saying goes, that “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”, so it’s important to provide ways to help our body take care of itself. Given the chance, it has a remarkable capacity for healing and regeneration, and that 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) couldn’t keep pushing more and more drugs, could they? And isn’t that the real name of the game?

Yours in health …

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