Why We Need an Alternative Viewpoint in Healthcare

For a growing number of people, conventional (allopathic) medicine has proven to be inadequate for their healthcare needs.  (Note the Vioxx debacle and the alarming rise in the incidence of diabetes and other chronic health problems.)  But, for many, answers have been found in alternative healthcare modalities.  For this reason, it's important that these alternative viewpoints have a voice, and the freedom to practice.

But this freedom and voice is not guaranteed.

It is true: America is a land of unparalleled freedom.  We're free to think what we want and do what we want — until it comes to healthcare.  This is the one area where, to a very large and increasing extent, only one view point — only one philosophy, as it were — is allowed unrestricted voice.  And when that dominant voice — the voice that shuts out all others — is also the leading cause of death in America, we have a serious problem on our hands.

Conventional medicine's failure

My own story points out the need for an alternative to the conventional healthcare option.  There are many others.  The point is: conventional medicine has failed me.  It not only set the stage for my disability, it abused for years — until I found another way out.

A quick look: By the time I was a junior in high school (1970), I was severely disabled.  My problems started back in 1961, with the Sabin oral polio vaccine.  The doctors I saw simply didn't have a clue what was wrong; and I was alternately dismissed as a head-case or prescribed medication in an effort to control my symptoms.

I won't go into all the details of that here (you can read about it in my story); the point is: my experience has changed the way I look at health and healthcare.  The best that medical science could do merely left me toxic and nearly dead.  But nothing was ever done about what was actually wrong with me.

I needed an alternative path.

Hope in alternative healthcare

I very quickly learned that I couldn't depend on conventional medicine for my healthcare needs.  But God was gracious, and led me to those who offered an alternative to the status quo, and enabled me to regain a measure of the health I once knew.

I'm not alone in this: for everywhere I go, I meet others who have seen the (almost utter) bankruptcy of the medical profession to address their health concerns, and have dug out life-restoring — if not life-saving — information on their own, from alternative perspectives.

It's not "us"-or-"them", but cooperation

I will readily admit that medical science is an amazing thing, and that some of the advances — the things doctors are able do today — are of enormous benefit.  There are a great many circumstances in which I'd want to have doctors standing by.

But the fact still remains that conventional medicine, as currently practiced, causes as much suffering as it alleviates.  And the dominance it has over our thinking about healthcare — and the power of its lobby to stifle alternate views — leaves millions of people feeling that there's no legitimate alternative to the drugs and surgery model.  The way they feel on their medications is the best they're going to get.  They know they feel terrible; and they know the drugs are slowly — in some cases, not so slowly — killing them; but what alternative do they have?

We need the freedom to tell them.