The Allopathic Stranglehold

It is interesting, sitting amidst the whirlwind discussion of US health care, witnessing a dialogue that fails to climb out of the the sink hole on the reform road.

Disease is big business in the US. Our national failure to distinguish health care and medical care has us trapped in fallacious arguments -- with talking heads in the media across the country espousing on their ideas for "health" reform, such as the push for universal care -- which is simply to increase access to medical care -- without ever truly understanding the full scale or depth of the problems. The following are some of the most critical problems in our health care system:

A medical system and medical monopoly on care that prevents options -- and thinking -- outside of allopathic medicine.

A fee-for-service reimbursement system that allows physicians to over-prescibe services for profit purposes. This reimbursement system has persisted despite common sense, but was spawned, in part, by physician groups' fighting for autonomy after the introduction of the third party payer system.

A mixed market that prevents the development of a more democratic socialist type of universal care while also preventing the "laws" of capitalism from working. Consumers are unable to play their normal role in a capitalist system in US health care, partly because the AMA forbids publication of the relative value units (RVUs -- the costs attached to its codes) from being made public knowledge. We are thus unable to competitively shop for services, which would normally force those providing them to lower prices and/or become more efficient. The private market in health care has long enjoyed its status of being free from the dictates of consumer- oriented capitalism -- and it is foreseeable that we could change the reimbursement system while still preventing consumers from being able to influence price.

Our national obsession with pharmaceuticals. This is perhaps one of the most ghastly aspects of our current paradigm -- the susceptibility of the American public to believing that a pill can be a panacea -- or that drugs cure -- when quite often they are highly toxic, far more dangerous than natural health options, and far less efficacious when it comes to restoring health. DRUGS MANAGE SYMPTOMS of underlying imbalance in systems. Yet the power, money and influence the drug companies have gained since we repealed the law prohibiting them from advertising on TV has allowed these companies to spend the kind of money needed to convince the American public that they need more and more drugs. Meanwhile, we are polluting water tables across the country -- due to major over-medication of millions of people who would, in many cases, find real relief from methods that treat whole systems and underlying problems.

An underfunded and corrupt FDA. The FDA, an organization designed to protect the American public, is largely funded by drug companies. Its hands are tied due to funding issues, it is understaffed and overworked, and it is squarely entrenched in the allopathic mindset. It is by no means a neutral organization -- and at present, it is incapable of living up to its duties.

Moral hazard. Moral hazard occurs when patients take too little accountability for their own health, and/or they overuse health insurance due to a lack of knowledge about costs and a lack of responsibility for paying them. (MDs commit moral hazard as well, when they over -- prescribe due to greed or malpractice fears). Patient moral hazard is in part due to the allopathic paradigm that has convinced people they have no valid intuitive knowledge of their own bodies -- a paradigm that has shifted accountability, responsibility, and the power to heal -- into the hands of MDs. This psychological paradigm runs deep -- and secured itself in our history in the late 1800's, when the AMA systematically set out to destroy and discredit the homeopathic industry. Since then, the American people have largely distanced themselves from natural healing and an understanding of their own bodies -- instead choosing to believe that the "doctor knows best" -- when very, very often, this is NOT the case!

A profit-based, allopathic-obsessed system that actively prevents the adoption of low-cost efficacious healing modalities -- to the point of sending innocent people to jail and turning our backs on methods that work because they are not highly profitable and not instigated by those in the orthodoxy.

This last point is one of the most critical, and ties back to the first. Ultimately, whether the American public or Congress knows it or not, we are facing a clash of paradigms. I have worked for many years in the alternative/integrative health industry (which we now refer to as "natural medicine" or "natural health"), and witnessed many incredible things. I call it the "underground railroad" of health care in the US. Across the country providers and patients are working together to restore vital health, often after patients have been told there are no answers or they have no hope. There are tens of thousands of American citizens who know otherwise.

Yet, colleagues like my friend Dr. Nicholas Gonzalez in NYC nearly go to jail, lose their licenses, lose their reputations, and rack up millions in legal fees defending themselves -- all too often because they had the gall to "go off the deep end," and turn their backs on the orthodoxy of conventional medicine. Despite his sterling credentials, Dr. Gonzalez nearly lost everything because he discovered and began to offer an alternative cancer treatment. And, after years of fighting for his freedom and ability to practice, the NIH turned around and gave him a $2 million grant to test his treatment on patients! This is because he is one of the few people in the country seeing success in treating pancreatic cancer.

I have many stories similar to that of Dr. Gonzalez. But let me say this: I am as critical of the natural health field as I am of conventional medicine. Both sides of this fence have their strengths and weaknesses, their successes and failures, their places of integrity and places of greed, dishonesty, and a willful refusal to work toward a higher, common good. Natural medicine holds INCREDIBLE promise -- but the field itself is a terrible mess -- and despite the good number of people who are working for change -- it is characterized by a complete inability to come together to actually change our system.

All of this scratches the surface of what we face, and how and why we got here. When we fail to understand the psychology behind health care -- and how much this psychology has been shaped, even deliberately, by the self-interests of big industry, then we fail to grasp the problem to the degree that provides the power to generate real change.

There are practical, entrenched systemic issues to deal with at hand. And then there are our illusions -- and our need to create a new dialogue, one that allows us to break free of our narrow understanding of health and healing, to see the full range of tools and options we have at our disposal, and to discover how we might best make use of them to create a healthy health care system.

Tangerine

WHAT is health care? And who gets to define it?

The US Senate Finance Committee is meeting behind closed doors to hash out a plan to reform health care. The current debate between Congressional Democrats and Republicans is a debate centered on partisan lines and defined by the demands of those with the greatest access -- not you or me, not the thousands of Americans drowning in medical bills, but by corporate LOBBYISTS.

I love our President. I still think he is the best thing that's happened to this country in a long time. He is just one man - and no, he is not capable of transforming a toxic political system, a broken health care system or a wobbling economy overnight - so be patient folks. Nevertheless, he is largely on the wrong track with health care reform.

So, how do we slow down a juggernaut that is blinded by the primacy of allopathic medicine and over-fueled by politics and special interests -- an underinformed, ill-advised race to piecemeal, corporate-defined care?

Make no mistake - this is not a transformation of our system. It is a desperate, if valiantly motivated lunge to try to increase access to the most expensive and often least efficacious paradigm of care. And, since medicine is the most expensive option, all these desperate attempts to figure out how to reduce costs become a bandaid on a gaping wound.

It is not only our health care system that needs healing. It is congress too, and our entire political process. Politics is inevitably toxic when self-interested parties continually have the greatest access to forming the policies that affect the entire country.

Nothing will change overnight. But we need our Senators, Congressmen and women, our President and those he has tasked to understand health care's problems to rise above the toxicity that politics has become. To take a stand and say no to corporate special interests. We also need our congressmen and women to stop being mired in a political game of constant power plays -- overly worried about raising money, re-election, and their own constituents -- at the expense of the future of the country at large. The American public is tired of partisanship, ideology and ill-begotten, pork-ridden, poorly designed policy. Between partisanship and lobbyists, our policies are falling far short of what they need to be. Who will be brave enough to change the way things are done? We all deserve better - even those on the hill who are mired in "just the way things are". It is up to each of you - to each of us - to change the world in which we live, and we can't change it if we can't change how decisions are made in our political system. This fact is evidenced in your actions around health care reform.

So first, successful health care reform requires overcoming the fallacy of believing that health is medicine. It requires that the American public, Congress and the Obama administration fully understand that by design, medicine is a system that intervenes after we are already sick. It is a system that primarily manages symptoms of underlying illness.

Health care reform requires that we decide as a society whether we want health care that includes medicine as part of the pie or as the whole pie. It then means that we decide whether health care is a right or a luxury, and if it IS a right, then to WHAT do we have a right? This means deciding what and how we ration - and what each of us is responsible for on our own.

Health care reform means that we, as a country, understand that every sector, every stakeholder has played a role in making our system sick, and that every one of us is accountable for creating a functioning and affordable system. This means overcoming the huge lack of integrity on the part of drug companies and the FDA. It means putting the American Medical Association in its place and it means that conventional physicians must accept the fact that they no longer control "what" care is or "who" is allowed to provide it - so if they aren't willing to open their minds about what health entails and requires then they better get used to a shrinking customer base.

Health care reform also means that the American public must be honest with itself that our predominant culture, habits and food production are not conducive to health. There is much to change on this front. Suffice it to say - we have too long been disconnected to the truth of WHAT health is, what it requires, and what it asks of each of us. We want a panacea in a pill and we are making ourselves and our planet sick because of it! Drugs are not health, and it is not up to the doctor to make us well. We are full participants in wellness and illness - whether by any action on our part or not - and learning to accept this fact and navigate it is a liberating and empowering process. The more we learn about ourselves and the interconnectedness of our spirits, hearts and bodies, the more power we have to define ourselves and decide how to be in the world, whether we are well or ill.

Health is integrity, honesty, heart, spirit, passion, love, and treating ourselves and each other well. Health is a socially just society in which we make sure we provide ample opportunity to all to live decent and meaningful lives. Health is getting over being so consumptive, and it is learning how to preserve and live with this planet, rather than destroy it. Until we do these things, we will continue to impinge upon our ability to FEEL healthy, because whether we are conscious of it or not, we are all a part of a larger, collective psyche, and what we do here MATTERS, both physically and energetically.

But bringing this back to health care reform, we must ask ourselves this simple question:

WHAT is health care?

At its foundation, it is the system we create to provide CARE for one another, to restore our ability to be well, to feel good, and to contribute to our society. While this definition is ubiquitous when it comes to actually conceiving a new system, it is a much-needed reminder of why we co-created health care in the first place. We want and need to be well, and we can't always do that on our own! So, we need to know -- what is our purpose? What can we agree upon? What are the best tools we have at our disposal now, and how do we take those and recreate a system that is genuinely about health? Because medicine is useful, but it is unaffordable at the same time that it is not enough.

We need to simultaneously dream bigger (and understand there is a world outside of the drugs and surgery paradigm) while better understanding the nature - and real failures -- of the current system. And then we need to build a bridge between the parts of our system that work now and a vision of a brighter, less costly, more efficacious system that just makes sense - because it is ABOUT your health.

Challenge #1: Distinguishing medical care from health care, getting through to Congress, and reigning in the lobbyists.

Tangerine

"One by one and all together"