“Unless we put Medical Freedom into the Constitution, the time will come when medicine will organize into an undercover dictatorship... to restrict the art of healing to one class of men, and deny equal privilege to others, will be to constitute the Bastille of Medical Science. All such laws are un-American and despotic and have no place in a Republic.”

Dr. Benjamin Rush, signatory of the Declaration of Independence



As we try to wrap up this so-called health care debate, the following questions loom in my mind: why are we such a sick nation? Why are our health care costs so staggeringly high? And why can’t we take care of all of our grandmothers, mothers, daughters, sons, fathers and grandfathers with quality, humane healthcare? Our medical system has, at best, become the third leading cause of death (JAMA 2000). It depends on which statistics you look at and from when. I won’t continue quoting statistics outlining the problems, I think we are all well aware of the problems. I do want to take a look at the core issue that everyone seems to be missing and hint at a direction of resolution. The recent ongoing “health care” debate is really not a health care debate at all. It would be more accurately characterized as a “disease care” debate. It is a discussion about how we manage diseases within our current system. So, we can say it is about disease management.

Under our current system, disease management is being done by profit motivated companies: namely, big pharma, health insurance companies and, by association, the AMA (and the revolving door FDA) and all that it oversees. Many of these are publicly traded companies, which by law must seek to maximize profits for their shareholders.

Where does the incentive “lie”? Maybe you can see where I’m going with this... Huge publicly traded companies must seek to maximize profits based on treating the diseases of their customers. That means the diseases of people end up as asset/income entries on the balance sheets of the companies entrusted to treat them. The more expensive the treatment and the higher the profit and the longer the treatment/profits stream in, the better. If you would like some investment advice, I think I can point you in the right direction. I don’t have room in this article to explain all of this in detail, but I can assure you there is a long, patently deceitful history. We must ask the question: how do any of us make decisions?

We must have information to make decisions. Now we are getting to the “heart” of the matter. If we have unreliable and incorrect information about our health care options, I say we are literally “ill”-informed. If we have reliable accurate information, I propose that we are “well”-informed. The state of our individual and collective health can be tied directly to information we are accepting as true. This leads to the only logical conclusion: that there is a problem with the information that we are accepting as collective fact and basing our collective health/disease care system upon. The driving incentive for the disease management system is to continue to have diseases that create high profits to keep the shareholders (public or not) happy. There are many thousands of holistic health practitioners throughout this country that know all too well what the solutions to all of this are. The tables must be completely turned in order to easily provide real health care for all. Allow the people who understand natural health principles that focus on prevention and non-invasive, effi cient, low cost, effective methods to take the lead. Have them begin by retraining the doctors in these methods and make interventional drugs and surgery a secondary option to the primary holistic approaches. Maybe in ten years the two could be working together very nicely and in twenty... who knows, they might just blend together to make a perfect mix. There are no bad people in this, just a really bad system. Let’s do the right thing and begin changing it now by becoming educated and making “well”-informed choices.

David Louis DeFebo, a holistic health professional, attended the health care forum referred to in the above article. You can read his comments about it at www.HealThySelf.me.