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MORE TEACHERS, NOT PHYSICIANS
The Answer to the Confused Health Care System Change
No new health care plan offered by our government will solve the problems of health in our country. Whatever the delivery system, whatever the payment plan, whatever happens to the pharmaceutical or insurance industries, no American will benefit from it. No new plan will benefit any of us because it will only continue to support a medical system which has never created health.
Modern medicine is based on late stage disease care that has nothing to do with preventing health or even curing disease. Physicians are not taught true prevention in medical school. They learn to mask symptoms, relieve pain, give emergency care, and perform surgery.
Physicians wait until the body breaks down and then we pay them to prolong life for a limited time. Sadly, there is no incentive for physicians to prevent disease because if everyone stays healthy, physicians trained in modern medicine are out of work. Their livelihood depends on keeping people ignorant about how to stay well.
Complicating this matter, insurance companies interfere with late stage disease care by dictating which care may be offered and by canceling policies so they can increase profit.The infighting over the new health care system doesn’t come from partisan ideology; it comes from lobbyists. In fact, all of our problems in government come from lobbyists. Just before leaving office, President Eisenhower warned of the military-industrial complex. His granddaughter, Susan Eisenhower, a journalist-turned-foreign policy analyst and president emeritus of The Eisenhower Institute, a Washington think tank, said that President Eisenhower originally wrote his speech to describe the military-industrial-Congressional complex, but changed the wording because he was having good relations with Congress at the time.
Bill Moyers quoted Eisenhower in a July 2009 WETA interview with Wendell Potter, former Vice President of Communications for CIGNA, one of the largest health insurers in the U.S. Mr. Potter said that every problem in passing a new health care system can be traced back to this relationship between Congress and the industries who lobby and pay for their reelection campaigns -- private insurance companies. We all know Congress listens to lobbyists, but Mr. Potter’s whistle-blowing against the HMO industry in the U.S. Senate in June 2009 is timely considering the magnitude of the looming health care problem, another upcoming wave of financial disaster we will all have to deal with one way or another. It finally brings Congressional payoffs stabbing into the public eye and ire.
Mr. Potter went on to say that industries of all kinds often write the new laws themselves, laws supporting their profits, and submit them to their Congressmen. Their influence is much more powerful than simply passing laws or contributing to the campaigns of those running for office. According to Mr. Potter -- someone with personal experience in these matters -- if a member of Congress does not cooperate with an industry, lobbyists often threaten members of Congress by telling them, “We can make it very difficult for you.” They will go on to threaten to cut off funding for that candidate, give funding to his opponent, and then create negative TV ads opposing him or her. When a Congressmen caves in, he is doing the will of industry rather than the will of the people who have elected them. This is why there is no democracy in the United States. Congress works for industry, not for the people who elect them and need them.
Economist Robert Reich, in another interview with Bill Moyers, said that capitalism is not the problem. The problem, he said, is “super capitalism”, which is unregulated capitalism. This is a special problem when human life is at stake as it is in the health insurance industry, an industry which, by all accounts, should be nonprofit. If profits go down, stockholders sell their stocks in that company, and this ensures that the CEOs of the health insurance industry engage in “recission”, canceling the policies of anyone they think will cost the company money. In many cases this recission costs the lives of the person who was once insured.
Pharmaceutical companies, who also want profits, are another industry opposed to a new system of health care. Unfortunately, finding a way to offer cheaper drugs is no solution, either, because harmaceuticals do not cure disease. More often they only mask the symptoms and have many side effects. It’s not uncommon to take a second drug to combat the symptoms of the first drug, and then a third and so on. The result is polypharmacy -- taking many drugs at once -- which can severely impair health or even kill the patient.
Pharmaceuticals have side-effects because they are synthesized, unnatural elements introduced to a natural environment -- the human physiology. They are actually often derived from medicinal plants. Each plant contains hundreds of compounds, all working together synergistically to create a specific healing effect on the body. Native tribes and Ayurvedic physicians of India alike learned the effects from medicinal plants and handed down that knowledge in oral traditions. The Ayurvedic tradition even has a system for creating combinations of herbs -- sometimes 40 or more herbs -- to create still more synergy. The process of treating these herbs can take six months to a year. The result is a more powerful herbal combination, often more potent than pharmaceuticals, but without the side-effects.
When profit-driven pharmaceutical companies find a plant with good effects, they isolate what they consider to be the most important compound and synthesize it. Unfortunately, whenever a compound is isolated from its natural environment where it is surrounded synergistically with its neighboring compounds, then the compound creates side-effects. It is no longer a product of nature. Likewise, we could extend this necessity to the environment outside of the plant. The potency of the plant is also influenced by the surrounding plants, the insects that carry carry pollen, the seasons, the amount of rainfall and sunlight, air purity, and even the time the plant is picked. The ancient Vaidyas, they physicians of India, would pick certain herbs only at certain times, and often under the full moon. They would search for perfection in plants, discarding any plants that were not fully developed, partly wilted, diseased, or which had cobwebs, cocoons, or insect bites. They then put the herb through the extended processes necessary to create potency and safety. This processing often takes six months or a year of manipulation.
“Natural” medicine today promotes the use of herbs, but with only limited knowledge about their power and side-effects. All of the four accredited naturopathy schools in the United States offer courses in herbology, but none of them teach Ayurveda or anything about the time-proven methods of Ayurveda which include diet, routine and the intricacy of the choice, combination, and preparation of herbal compounds. Naturopathic schools teach only the use of single herbs which, like pharmaceuticals, can also have serious side-effects.
Ayurvedic physicians, unlike today’s physicians, are true doctors. The word “doctor” actually comes from the Latin “docere” (DOE-ke-ray), meaning “teacher”. The original doctors were wise men -- not physicians -- who imparted their knowledge to others. Later, physicians, envious of the title, adopted it for themselves. Today the term has been stolen by physicians. Proper etiquette requires those with a Ph.D. to use the title only in the academic environment, with physicians considering themselves to be the “real” doctors. Unfortunately physicians are not teachers of health because they are not trained in preventing disease. Instead, they lie in wait for the disease to manifest at a late stage of development, often when it is too late to help the patient. If they keep us well, they don’t get paid. This is part of the corrupted political system we are governed by today owing to the greed of politicians and their ignorance about true prevention of disease. When disease progresses to a late stage, physicians can do little to assuage the growth of the disease and must resort to merely masking the symptoms with pharmaceuticals or by performing surgery.
The present Western medical idea of prevention means only more lab testing. This is also President Obama's pronouncement. Get your glucose tested, get your cholesterol levels tested, get your heart tested, get a mammogram, and get a colonoscopy every six months. These are merely methods for detecting the disease at a slightly earlier stage, often still too late to help the patient, and have nothing to do with preventing disease. The high tech methods used by physicians at these late stages can also be expensive, disease-causing, dangerous, and can even prove fatal.
Ayurvedic medicine’s powerful potential to prevent disease is the answer to the health care crisis. We don’t need more doctors and nurses, more hospitals, or a better payment plan for disease care. And we don't even need free "health care" as it is popularly conceived. We need more physicians and teachers who can educate everyone in how to stay well.
