Consumer dollars are showing that an ever-increasing number of North Americans are choosing to complement the still dominant allopathic form of medicine with a variety of ‘alternative’ forms.
In my practice, the majority of my patients are beginning to question the primarily ‘band-aid’ outcomes of their visits to their GP’s and conventional medical specialists. A first visit complaint of ‘generalized fatigue’, funneled into the existing system, will often result in a prescription for an anti-depressant; the prescription of NSAID’s for chronic headaches often lead to a prescription for a strong antacid. In worse cases, people are sent away because there is nothing in their symptoms that warrants a true ‘diagnosis’; therefore, there are no pills to prescribe. These patients often return in a few months with more severe symptoms, a diagnosable condition, and a treatment protocol of strong painkillers, steroids, chemotherapy, or even surgery.
What if we were to reverse the system? Let’s make Alternative Medicine primary! Let’s have our Medicare system first pay for several visits to the alternative medical practitioner of the patient’s choice, and if treatment is unsuccessful, they are THEN referred to their GP for further diagnosis.
Experience in my practice shows that rarely am I unable to bring my patient’s symptoms under control and their systems back to balance. It is even more rare that the patient suffers any exacerbation of their symptoms or that any new symptoms are developed as a result of my treatments. This is much more than we can say for the track record of pharmaceutical drugs.
Inside this new system, it is easy to predict that severe medical conditions (outside incidents of major accidental trauma) would be caught early and often reversed. Patients would cease developing the common and stated side effects of their pharmaceuticals, would then require no new drug to combat this new side effect, and so on. Sick days at work would decrease, major disease would become less prevalent, ultimately saving taxpayers all of the money they are currently funneling into the deep pockets of a few pharmaceutical company CEO’s.
I like the sounds of the new system, personally. According to the surge in consumer dollars going to ‘alternative medical treatments’, it seems the trend agrees!