On 5/23/07, PAT MATHEWS <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
As it is, I know a fair number of people who go to herbalists and other > alternative practitioners for a lot of their health care, partly because > of > all the hassle and expense involved in using the health care system My best friend's wife goes to an herbalist for what she calls "health support" and to a regular doctor for critical care issues. The herbalist practices traditional Chinese herbalism and regularly refers his patients to MDs if they have health problems that he thinks they are better equipped to handle. I think the two biggest problems with the standard health care system in the U.S. today are laziness and money. The laziness issue is that too many people eat unhealthy foods and live unhealthy lifestyles and then go complain to their doctors when they become unhealthy. They expect modern medicine to be able to fix any problem they happen to acquire along the way, instead of taking the responsibility and doing the work it takes to stay healthy. Our doctors and nurses -- and our health care dollars -- are taken up treating people who could have avoided their health problems by making healthier decisions. Reducing the number of people in the health care system would go a long way towards fixing the system. The money issue (part one) is that big health care companies are typically much more interested in making money than in actually helping people -- for example, I had a friend who had suffered pain from carpal tunnel syndrome for a number of years, and the medical establishment couldn't offer much to her except the eventuality of surgery. She was recently talking to a man we both know who had previously mentioned having carpal tunnel syndrome but who is now mostly without symptoms. She asked him how he did it, and he taught her a few relatively quick and simple exercises to stretch the long muscles in the forearms, and since she started doing those every day, her symptoms have cut back drastically. These exercises probably wouldn't work for everyone, but exercises like this aren't even taught as a possibility in most medical school programs. Many doctors would probably use some of these exercises if they knew that they exist and work. But the medical establishment as a whole has a vested interest in medical procedures that make lots of money for the doctors and guarantee lots of follow-up care. Again, I'm not faulting individual doctors (mostly), it's the system as a whole that is broken. And the worst part of the system is the pharmaceuticals industry. But that's a whole other e-mail. The money issue part two is insurance companies. I worked as a temp in an underwriting center for an insurance company -- in fact, it was while temping there that I met the former list participant who started me lurking here oh-so-many years ago -- and believe me, the industry is all about making money and minimizing risk. Insurance companies are not interested in helping people get the medical treatment they need. Insurance companies are interesting in getting the biggest dividends they can for their shareholders. So people start out unhealthy, get treated by doctors who are overburdened and were trained in a system that is more interested in propagating itself than in finding the best and least expensive way to get people healthy. Then they -- both the patients and the doctors -- get told by insurance companies what treatments they can and can't use, and then patients are prescribed medicines that cost them far much more than they should. And anyone that argues that medicines have to cost as much as they do in order to pay for research and development hasn't looked at the figures. I don't have the link handy and I have to get back to work so I don't have time to google it right now, but I saw an article within the past year or so that showed a breakdown of how a typical pharmaceuticals company spends its money, and if I recall correctly something like 15 percent of the money went to R&D and 20 percent went to shareholders in the form of dividends. That's dividends, money going to shareholders in addition to any money they might make due to the growth of the stock value. -- Mauro Diotallevi "Hey, Harry, you haven't done anything useful for a while -- you be the god of jello now." -- Patricia Wrede, 8/16/2006 on rasfc _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
