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 no matter the hour and then prescribe medications compounded by a pharmacist who not only knew you by name but also provided penny candies and cherry phosphate sodas at his own drugstore are long gone. For many of us, basic medical care today means we are either going to a public clinic or one attached to our HMO. Unfortunately, often our “care” is one-size-fits-all and limited to 15-minute sound bytes. We need to ask specific and often difficult questions, and perhaps even a second opinion, in order to make the most informed decisions. If a doctor is alienated during that process, perhaps it is time to change providers.

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. 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 within our health care system.

While conventional medicine certainly has its uses (when I needed abdominal surgery a couple of years ago, I was 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 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 then 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 flaw in this approach?

Diagnosing certainly has its place, but if you’re invested solely in treating symptoms, you aren’t really looking for a cause and/or prevention. The healthcare system (at least 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. 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 standardized protocols 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 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 causes in your personal case are understood, you can first explore avenues such as changing diet and lifestyle habits or taking supplements that will provide a more natural way to keep arteries and veins healthy, while pharmaceutical options should be the last option. When other protocols have not been helpful, at the very least it might mean that if and when you do resort to prescription drugs you will require a lower dose.

I believe, as the old saying goes, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”, so I feel it important 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 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 that’s the real name of the game.

Yours in health …

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