According to Peter Barry Chowka, a journalist who has written extensively on the alternative health industry, if you care about alternative health, you’d better not vote for Obama.
I’m copying his closing paragraphs below.
These are all assertions, of course — his beliefs. But if you care about being free to make decisions about your healthcare, his assertions should at least give you pause.
Think I’m kidding? Think this is theoretical?
The first thing they did when my late grandmother was admitted into a nursing home was forbid her from taking any supplements. They weren’t part of the program. They aren’t Medicare.
So they could dose her with antibiotics to try to treat her recurring urinary tract infections, but don’t bother mentioning D-mannose. D-mannose, a simple sugar, is the constituent in cranberry juice that naturally helps the body expel E. coli. But there’s no place for D-mannose in Medicare-based healthcare. So don’t bother even bringing it up. The docs, the nurses, they won’t have heard of it. They’ll be irritated that you disturbed them with your wild-eyed ideas. You found that on the Interweb? Go away!
How many other alt health treatments would they dismiss, because they’ve never heard of them? Because they aren’t written up in some pharma company’s literature? Because they aren’t cleared by the FDA?
As our founding fathers knew, centralizing too much power with the federal government doesn’t SOLVE problems, it CREATES problems.
In healthcare, we end up being forced to live with the consequences of ill-informed decisions (such as fluoride in our water) and lulled by the illusion of protections that are in fact non-existent (and so end up with melamine-tainted candy and power bars).
That’s why I don’t understand how any thinking person could support a stronger Washington. Honestly. It really seems, sometimes, like people are just offering themselves up to slaughter.
People who I’d think would know instinctively that we’re better off when we’re free as individuals to maneuver, to make our own choices, to separate ourselves from the crowd — these same people turn around and preach that a strong federal government will make everyone’s life so much easier.
I just don’t understand it.
No, our current healthcare system isn’t perfect. Even with this current system, we are sometimes pressed into choices that may not be ideal.
But you don’t make it better by giving even more control to politicians. You just don’t.
Here’s Chowka:
Until the early 1990s, before the government began an aggressive re-expansion of its role in American health care, alternative medicine was thriving. Part of the statist federal agenda was to rename and reconfigure alt med as “CAM” (complementary alternative medicine, or alt med light), and to integrate ancillary, secondary, non-threatening alt med light therapies into the dominant conventional, allopathic medical mainstream.
Helping this agenda along was a bone thrown to the original alt med community in the form of the creation of the National Institutes of Health’s Office of Alternative Medicine (OAM) in 1991, later expanded to the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) in 1998. These organizations, true to form, stifled creativity, channeled alt med’s thriving progress into bureaucratic quagmires, and ultimately made primary alternative therapies go out of fashion and become much less available.
And all of this took place before the federal government completely took over all of medicine – a prospect that may be imminent, and certainly will be if Obama is elected.
I have reported, commented on, and argued about these developments including the diminution of alternative medicine for years. In recent times, the audience of independent thinkers who are in touch with and informed by alternative medicine’s philosophical roots of independence and freedom has apparently diminished, as alt med/CAM players, proponents, and “stakeholders” have followed their self-interests toward the gilded cage of more government involvement and control.
It will be interesting to see what happens on November 4. If McCain, whose health care plans involve expanding free market choices and options, wins, we will be allowed four more years of relative freedom in health care. If Obama comes out on top, it is likely that we will have seen the last of the once strong and autonomous alternative medicine field as it is subsumed under statist government-run universal health care.
Amen.