On August 31st, 2001 I lost my beloved mother to a pulmonary embolism. It happened as I was driving her from San Diego to Portland in a moving van. She had been largely immobilized when a pin in her ankle that was supposed to be permanent had come out. She got out of the van and stepping down dislodged a blood clot in her ankle which lodged in her lung. She always had a cabinet full of prescriptions and she had seen her doctor the day before. I was surprised to find out that she died of the third leading cause of death in the country. She was such an ideal candidate it was amazing her doctor had not prescribed an anti-coagulant. After all her mother died of a stroke. She always told me to stop wiggling my leg but I found out when I worked on cardiac care equipment that I was just reflexively working my venous pump and I always told people to deal with it.
Mom had other problems, like a misdiagnosis of a broken back after a car accident that left her stuck on the couch for a year. Dad always told me doctors buried their mistakes. I have such an inherent distrust of doctors and pharmaceuticals that when I needed medical attention I went to a naturopath and basically interrogated her. During a discussion about blood pressure I informed her I was very much against ever being catheterized unless it was a last resort as 1% of these procedures lead to accidental ventral tears and death. My doctor was impressed I knew this but the truth is I saw it happen once and I never got over the answer the lab tech gave me… The man would be dead in three days.
I was very fortunate. Several years back I had such high blood pressure I probably would have been dead in a few months from one of several possible fatal conditions. My dentist refused to clean my teeth. My doctor refused to treat me and instead sent me to the emergency room where I arrived so freaked out my blood pressure was something over 240/120. I forget. I was practically in shock. I took a couple of pills and was text book, but as my doctor wanted to find the cause rather than just whack the symptom with drugs I was given a light prescription. The doctor in the ER told me I should not remain on such light drugs without results. I proceeded to go through a year of everything my naturopathic doctor could think of. That included nutrient pushes and drips, allergy treatment, diagnosis of masked depression and targeted amino acid therapy and hormone therapy. Eventually it went to evaluating my personal stress at home. I won’t go into all the detail. I did however discover NAET treatment for allergies which is natural, permanent and insurance companies hate it because it is less profitable than ongoing treatment and drugs.
So my bottom line is I inherently distrust allopathic medicine because of their incestuous relationship with big pharma. I distrust big pharma because they rely on creating drugs with all kinds of side effects based on herbal remedies for the sole purpose of getting a patent which allows them a government granted monopoly. Then of course we have laws to break up monopolies because they are anti competitive. However who I really don’t trust is the government who restricts interstate insurance sales when in fact the constitution gave the federal government powers to prevent states from hampering interstate commerce.
Clearly I am not your poster boy for the status quo in medical care. That said I will qualify all my distrust with the adage power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Nobody accrues power like government, thus I trust them least of any solution as a rule. I see my naturopath regularly and will not be seeing an allopathic doctor unless it is a matter of last resort or I have been broken up in an accident and need to be put back together. That said I am totally against what Washington is proposing because it has nothing to do with health care and everything to do with power.
The obvious solution for the current problems is to deregulate insurance companies so that any state that offered better pricing could attract business and competition. Insurance companies enjoy state run monopolies now. Insurance should be untied from employers and 100% portable. So much for pre-existing conditions, which BTW the Democrat idea here is a Trojan horse designed to explode insurance costs and eventually bankrupt insurance companies once they regulate cost. People should be involved in cost. I pay out of pocket and I was spending at most $400 a month to see the doctor, but usually $100 or less before supplements. Several states have restricted frivolous lawsuits and the size of certain awards. Doctors can pay $100,000-$250,000 a year for malpractice insurance and add 20% of their testing and costs in defensive medicine.
While these are common sense things I was impressed with a recent show by John Stossel on this… In fact I would say he is a revelation in sanity everyone should try to argue with. I heard recently most of the cost of pharmaceuticals was actually advertising and promotion. They give doctors a lot of money to push drugs and why are they advertising on TV telling us to ask our doctor if we should have this drug? Excuse me? I go to my doctor and expect she will know if there is a need for me to take a drug and what the hell drug I need. Thankfully she practically apologizes while explaining if she has to prescribe a drug.
Stossel made the case against the FDA. The point is that it costs a fortune to get a drug or procedure approved. He showed promising medical research that didn’t have the last $100,000,000 to get the job done. Am I the only one who thinks that companies today would develop and market products regardless of whether they could get a patent? I think it should require proof that you can’t develop your idea without patent protection to get one. If that were the case, and there were no agency justifying huge costs we would have an entirely different world. Costs would drop, products and research would explode and standards and practices groups would be making information available.
I don’t claim to have all the answers, but one thing I am sure of. Getting answers from the top people in the field makes more sense than from politicians or some faceless corporate entity. I’m thankful I have great health care. I am unhappy I can’t buy a major medical high deductible policy because the feds enable states to be busy bodies. To me it has become simple. Whatever is more oriented to freedom and choice is where I am going to be happiest.