Natural Pain Relief and Alternative Healthcare MATTERS (Continued)

My Overview of Alternative Health in General

One part of my speech in May 2007 included a sumup of my take on alternative medicine. I include it here.

I'd like to spend a little time expounding on my theory about how alternative medicine, that treats the whole body, and focuses on preventing problems in the first place, is the medicine of the twenty-first century—whereas conventional, symptom-oriented allopathic (aka orthodox) medicine that is reactive and palliative, prescribing medications that too often just mask symptoms and are not curative, is the medicine of the twentieth century—the last century.

Now of course, as I say that, I have to add the caveat that if, for example, I'm in an automobile accident and have sustained broken limbs, I don't want anything but trauma and triage medicine in my immediate future. I certainly don't want somebody handing me supplements or offering to massage me as I lie there broken and in pain—I want emergency medicine—STAT! So, in my scenario for the future, there is always going to be a role for mainstream medicine in crisis situations. Where conventional medicine falls down is when it is used for chronic problems and the alternative, complementary wellness approaches get bypassed in its favor.

Mainstream medicine is quite simply NOT helpful for too many people. Back in the late eighties and the nineties, when I was the editor at a direct mail publishing house specializing in alternative health books, I used to tell people that establishment medicine was making us RICH because so many people were turning to us after being let down, or actually mistreated, by the give-em-a pill, shove-em-out-the door approach.

By now, most of you probably understand what is meant by alternative medicine, the non-surgical, non-drug approach that focuses on preventing problems before they happen. When they do happen, as they very well can, this approach treats the body as a whole functioning unit instead of just dividing it into what I think of as segmented carapaces, sending a pill to this division for one thing, and another pill to another segment for something else.

Back when I was still in thrall to conventional medicine, with all its pills, it started occurring to me that, quite possibly, all the pills I was ingesting were meeting up and clashing in my system, and my doctor's assurances that each pill went where it was supposed to go, with no intersecting, did not convince me. The vivid mental picture I conceived, of all the pills going to war in my gut and exploding as they confronted each other, overwhelmed his statements and is probably one of the first, early visualizations that pulled me away from mainstream medicine. Slowly at first, but then picking up speed after I read a book on megavitamin therapy, I began taking more and more vitamins and stopped taking prescription drugs. And I felt better, a lot better, with more energy and fewer illnesses—the colds that used to completely flatten me every winter occurred less frequently and with far less severity.

Then came the musculoskeletal problems that sidelined me. Being, as I've said, a person who considers problems as opportunities for solutions, I was drawn to the idea of finding solutions to my pain problems that worked. If one thing didn't help, I'd try another, and on and on until I hit on something that was effective. This is similar to what a doctor who is a good detective does to get to the root of a problem. Except conventional doctors too often stop investigating when they get to a pill they can prescribe.

Let me just do a sidebar here on the misuse of the word traditional in connection with conventional medical practice. That is not traditional medicine. The true traditional medicine is that medicine practiced worldwide for thousands of years before drugs and expensive testing came to the fore early in the twentieth century, and replaced true traditional medicine, unquestioningly, for a while. Fortunately for human health, however, that trajectory is spluttering, and the thrust is now towards prevention and effective remedies of yore as one allopathic treatment, or one medicine after another, is found wanting and more often than not harmful. This negative reaction is so common, in fact, there's even a Medicare code number for the term iatrogenic, which means doctor-induced illness, and by extension, drug-induced illness.

I'm not just an intellectual proponent of focusing on wellness instead of illness, with its too-frequent, symptom-driven solutions, I'm a real enthusiast—a FAN. I put my money where my mouth is, as it were, and I practice what I preach. One way this manifests is in my being completely drug-free at a time in America when just about everyone is being recruited by the big pharmaceutical companies—big pharma—to line up for their medication. These drug companies are even busy making up new ailments so they can sell more drugs to treat these made-up conditions. I cite as one example the absurd restless leg syndrome, a problem brought to the fore to sell a drug, with the usual, daunting laundry list of side effects intoned in a sugary voice-over, the mildest of which is drowsiness, but which also includes nausea, feeling faint or dizzy, being susceptible to alcohol, or experiencing increased gambling, sexual, or other intense urges. HUH? As in causing excessive risk-taking behavior? That's truly nuts. And the real joke here is, this so-called problem condition can be easily and naturally remedied by exercise and the inexpensive, harmless mineral magnesium. This over-reliance on big pharma's products comes at a time in my own chronological, if not biological, age when many, if not most, of my peers are regularly running to the medicine chest to gulp down their daily dosages from the little pill containers lined up on their shelves.

One of the nice things about not having any medications in my system is not having any residual side effects to deal with—no dry mouth or feeling logy, not quite myself—I'm all there. (I can remember a medication I took back in the old days that had me feeling like I was walking beside myself—not a cozy feeling.)

To round out the focus here, let me reiterate how I firmly believe, barring accidents and trauma medicine, or necessary surgery, that the alternative therapies and remedies, which help prevent illness and treat the whole body, are the path people will ultimately take in the twenty-first century. And the allopathic-medicine mentality that merely masks symptoms and makes stabbing passes at segmented areas of the body will come to be considered last century's failed solution.