OpEdNews - Diary: Week of Historic Senate Hearings on Integrative Medicine May Open New Doors

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March 15, 2009 at 00:41:38 Permalink
Week of Historic Senate Hearings on Integrative Medicine May Open New Doors

Diary Entry by Kathryn Smith (about the author)

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There is a bill currently on the Senate floor appropriating large funds for healthcare and which would include funding for preventive and alternative health care. Obama is urging that it be legislated by the end of this year.

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While scanning the Healthy.net webpage, where one can read articles by authorities in the alternative health field, I came across a piece of wonderful news.

http://www.healthy.net/scr/news.asp?Id=10045

In this meeting, the Senator (whose name I could not see on the plaque, sorry) who introduced the bill talked about our "dysfunctional" health care system. He mentioned that a colleague in the Senate had recovered using alternative health care. He also said that the proposed bill would end the "discrimination" against Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) practitioners, with Federal funds to pay for such care. "This will save us money" the Senator continually repeated. Because, as has become known even among certain health insurance companies, an ounce of prevention is indeed worth a pound of cure.

As a certified herbal practitioner, I can tell you for sure that herbalism and alternative health care are no longer about the former Old Wives Tales. A new and exciting movement in herbalism has begun, orginating in Europe but now in America too, in which chemical constituents have been isolated from herbs, clinical tests are being done, double blind studies are ongoing and drug-herb interactions are being logged. The popular herb St Johnswort has more than one thousand studies to its name, while others similarly have a long and detailed scientific track record behind them. The largest and best book of drug-herb interactions is 960 pages long:

www.us.elsevierhealth.com/product.jsp?isbn=9780323029643

Doctors, pharmacists and herbal practitioners may check drug-herb interactions here, while reading scientific facts about herbs:

www.herbmed.org

Herbal studies may be read on the US Government medical database web pages: www.pubmed.gov

So in other words, it's all about science nowadays. Interestingly enough, the science also is largely supporting the so-called Old Wives Tales, while debunking only a few of them.

I've also seen cancer patients who were told that "science could not help them", who recovered using alternative medical care under superbly expert doctor's guidance. One such patient had been given only a few weeks to live and not only was cured, but even has not relapsed for eighteen years.

This is thanks to the strategy of building up the immune system, thus enabling it to keep any stray cancer cells in check. That's quite a contrast from the traditional method of killing cancer cells with radiation and chemotherapy (and many healthy cells along with them, thus weakening the already diseased body). Please note that not all cancer and other patients have such dramatic results with natural medical intervention, but the point is also that alternative medical care has much more capabilities to its credit than for prevention alone. In fact, where cancer and other ailments are concerned, alternative medicine can have very far-reaching and powerful effects, under expert professional guidance. It also picks up on conditions which ordinarily may fall through the cracks of mainstream testing and diagnostic methods.

For example, in Traditional Chinese Medicine (or acupuncture), tongue readings can foresee symptoms as early as ten years before they develop. The reason is simple: Chinese diagnostic methods are based on reading of constitutional tendencies, not merely symptoms themselves. The toneuge-reading method is also amazingly accurate, showing dietary changes within a two-day period and other subtle facts which conventional tests would not detect. Thus, by understanding a person's unique tendencies, in Traditional Chinese Medicine one can treat them before symptoms ever come to full flower. Tada! Mission accomplished.

I am not writing here to suggest that alternative medicine is the only way to go nor am I trying to say that it should be any person's favored choice. I think there are benefits to alternative and mainstream medicine alike, and each fills in gaps for the other. That's the beauty of it.

I am however, trying to say that it's time that Americans had their free choice of affordable health care in any category they so choose. After all, isn't freedom what the United States of America is supposed to be about?

Please pass word widely and ask for public signatures to come in, write letters to the editor publicizing this important debate, and spread word widely on the Internet by posting to blogs, sending out emails, etc.

One concern was registered by a fellow Opednews correspondent who suggested that this could be a way the Feds are trying to seize control of the exploding natural medicine industry. Given previous patterns, unfortunately this person could be right. However, another fellow Opednews person also suggested that getting the States to certify alternative health practitioners could be a way to keep such power out of the hands of the Feds.

Input, suggestions anybody?

I am still of the hope that this could only end up for the general good of all.

Take action -- click here to contact your local newspaper or congress people:
Please spread word widely in letters to the editor and write your Senators!

Click here to see the most recent messages sent to congressional reps and local newspapers

This quote summarizes the nature of my concerns and the content of personal experiences which stir my activism:

"Necessity is the plea for every infringement on human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves". --Paul (more...)

The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author
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