Live Naturally Well

When it comes to health in the US, we’re doing a pretty poor job. Despite having the most doctors, best medical schools, the most research and even spending more money than any other country on health care, we continually rank last among other industrialized countries. There is one area of health care where the US exceeds and that is emergency/trauma/crisis care, and if you happen to get shot, the best place you want to be is in an emergency room in the US. However, this only accounts for 1% of health problems in the US. It is the other 99% where we are failing. Heart disease, cancer, diabetes, infectious disease, autoimmune conditions, etc. continue to rise. And now we are seeing iatrogenic complications on the rise as well, meaning health complications due to the medical treatment itself.

Along with having the most doctors and spending the most money on health care, the US also has the distinction of being the most medicated country in the world. Americans consume 68% of all of the drugs in the world and half of all Americans take at least one prescription drug on a daily basis. Americans spent $374 billion on prescription drugs last year, up 13% from the year before. And this is a continuing trend. The pharmaceutical industry is the most profitable industry in the world and, unfortunately, it therefore directly influences and affects U.S (and global) health care policy. The combined profits for the ten drug companies in the Fortune 500 ($35.9 billion) were more than the profits for all the other 490 businesses combined ($33.7 billion). The scary part is that 80% of the average pharmaceutical industry’s budget is used for marketing. Now this is not all to say that some drugs are not necessary and even life saving in instances, however, the ease at which we use and distribute prescription drugs is beyond excessive.

So what has gone wrong? Why are U.S health care costs rising faster than any other country even as our overall health declines?

The problem is our model of health care and our basic beliefs about what health is and what we need to do to achieve it. Under our present model, “health” is defined by how a person feels, whether they have symptoms or not. The objective then becomes to eliminate the symptoms. This is the basis for allopathic medicine. One of our goals as natural, or alternative, health care providers is to change the way people think about health. It is interesting to note that there is not a single medical or science textbook or encyclopaedia in the world that defines health based on symptoms or how a person feels. Dorland’s Medical Dictionary defines health as “a condition of optimum physical, social, mental and spiritual well being – not merely the absence of disease or infirmities”. Even Webster’s Medical Dictionary says health is “the state of being sound in body or mind, and not simply freedom from physical disease and pain”. Health is all about function and how well the body’s communicates with itself to keep itself well. This is the basis for holistic medicine. Unfortunately, there are many people out there that have not heard health presented this way and this is a predominant motivator for our Naturally Well event.

Our goal is to help change the way our community thinks about health. We want to provide a different avenue for people to get healthy, one that they may not have ever heard about before; something that goes beyond drugs and surgery and simply covering up symptoms. We want to educate people about the benefits of natural and holistic health care modalities that help them not only get well but stay well. We want people to change the pharmaceutical mindset of our culture that relies on a pill for every ache, illness or disease. Our hope is that the Naturally Well events will help make this change by allowing people to really learn about what it is we actually do and how we can make a difference in their lives.