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PHOTOS: ROBIN THOMAS
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Natural Health
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Finding a way out of the prescriptions and pitfalls of the health care system. By Christopher and Dolores Lynn Nyerges
by Christopher and Dolores Lynn Nyerges
Everyone wants good health. But what exactly is it? Is good health merely the absence of disease? Is good health hereditary, something we are born with, or is it something that we create for ourselves, a way of life?
As MOTHER readers have discovered over the past 27 years, it is a serious mistake to accept the notion that health is something we simply obtain in exchange for visits to the medical doctor. But hundreds of billions of dollars of government Medicare and Medicaid given exclusively to traditional medical practitioners is legislating that if we seek solutions elsewhere, we will do it alone.
People in the United States are faced with a dilemma today. The State has given itself the power to mandate conventional medical care, in particular as it applies to children. At the same time, at least 80,000 deaths each year are attributed to poorly administered medical care, according to Harvard Medical School research cited in the enlightening book The Great White Lie by Walt Bogdanich (Simon & Schuster, 1991).
The essence of the MediCult, the modern cult of medicine, is the idea that patients are cured with drugs and/or surgery and that everything else is superfluous. It is a rare doctor who tells you about nutrition or any of the other alternative health procedures that have proven efficacious over countless centuries.
So what should we do? How do we steer our society towards a more enlightened future? The answer lies in small but critical decisions we make every day. We can either buy and prescribe what we need to be healthy or we can think of the root causes of our illnesses and help to cure them naturally. Ultimately, our daily decisions may prevent illness from latching on to us in the first place.
Let's start from the beginning. We'll assume that illnesses—the symptoms—are a result of very specific causes. Modern medicine focuses upon eliminating symp toms, and rarely upon identifying and altering the underlying causes of illness. A system of "healing" that is primarily focused upon elimination of symptoms provides us with a remarkably narrow perspective of health and healing. What we eat and drink, what we breathe, what we think about, and how we behave towards others—all of these integral components of our daily lives can and do have very physical ramifications.
J oseph Nemeth of Fort Collins, Colorado, made some noteworthy observations in the September 1989 Mensa Bulletin (Mensa is the international high IQ society). "Occasionally," he writes, "we need to be reminded how very peculiar and unbalanced our mainstream concept of medicine is. First, we are all mortal and will die regardless of the efforts of any practitioner of any brand of medicine. Second, we forget that no physician has ever healed anyone—the physician merely stabilizes the body or mind in a crisis, allowing the body or mind to heal itself. Because we hold the physician responsible for the healing, we split physicians into two camps—the real doctors and the quacks—and identify the former with medical conservatism and the latter with anything else. This leads to comments like 'raising false hopes,' in spite of the fact that all hopes are false in the long term, while in the short term hope itself may be the most important factor in healing."
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