Everyone needs to make an effort to learn how to take care of their health so they will be less likely to become seriously ill.  Modern medicine does not spend enough time addressing the problem of how to help people take care of themselves properly and teach them how to keep themselves healthy.

A natural reason for illness is it motivates us to discover what we did to make ourselves sick.  Illness should be a motivator to help us learn how to avoid the suffering we experience when we don’t take care of ourselves properly.

Modern medicine favors treatments that mask symptoms of illness or alleviate/eliminate discomfort or remove organs that are no longer working properly.  For these reasons people are less likely to be motivated to discover how they may have caused their suffering, and correct it.

I believe many illnesses can be traced to improper diet, lack of rest and/or sleep, chronic fatigue over prolonged periods, dependence on stimulants, drugs or alcohol, and/or risky lifestyle behaviors.

It makes more sense to help people understand how their poor choices makes them ill than to medicate the symptoms of their faulty choices.

Regardless of how strong people may think they are, the body ultimately succumbs to bad food, too much refined sugar and refined salt, tobacco and whatever else they may be consuming that causes their body functions to become compromised.

The tragedy of the current health care bill is it largely overlooks the importance of the individual taking responsibility for the following:

1) Providing nourishing and well-balanced meals for oneself and any family members involved to reduce the incidence of illness.

2) Establishing a peaceful and quiet home environment that is conducive to getting enough rest and sleep.

3) Creating a living environment that is orderly, loving, supportive and well-balanced.

4) Emphasizing methods which strengthen the immune system rather that wear it down through stress, anxiety, etc.

5) Emphasizing health and wellness education that boosts prevention rather than just taking care of those who are already ill.

If this 5-fold plan were put in place, it would save Americans billions of dollars in health care costs, at much lower cost.

As Benjamin Franklin purportedly said, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”.  Early American society was greatly influenced by Ben Franklin’s thinking.  It helped Americans become strong and independent.

Today, we are willing to turn over our future and our children’s children’s futures to bureaucrats who would mortgage our future for a plan that simply makes the insurance companies wealthier, while shouldering us with the burden through higher taxes on income that is getting smaller and smaller for a majority of Americans.

This is sheer folly, and one more nail, being driven into the coffin that was America the Great, the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Of course emergency medicine will always play an important place in needed health care, but it is a small part of the whole health care crisis.  If we limit our support to emergency health care, we will be saving a lot of money and freeing up more for health care education and preventative care.

If Americans do not wake now at this critical time and do to what needs to be done, we will all be singing a dirge for the death of America, not her rebirth from the ashes that the flames of ignorance and folly have caused to deplete and devastate our once mighty nation.

The choice is ours.  We must make the right decision or face the dire consequences of our mistakes in the years to come.

-- Fred Pulver

www.macrobiotic.org

11-21-09