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Feature Article: The State of Our Health Care System: It's a Mess!
I am always surprised by the exclamations I hear about natural medicine from people I encounter like "it really works!!" or "maybe it was all in my mind, but I think it really had an effect on me!" I think it is funny that people would put complete faith in a chemically synthesized or derived substance in the form of a prescription drug but are reticent to take a God-given one with a long history of healing. All the "research" on natural medicine has already been done. Natural medicine has been handed down through the ages, with many "experiments" and "cases" of real people using them to great and powerful effect. 

Unfortunately we as Americans have become so focused on the proof in the form of current scientific studies that we have denied the obvious:  results!! The truth is, you can get a study to say anything you want it to say. There are many poorly designed studies that set out to disprove something and therefore are able to. Furthermore, what the press chooses to tell us about a recent study may be at best partial information and at worst completely erroneous. See below where a medical doctor talks about some recently reported news on herbal supplements and the misinformation in it. 

The Chinese, Eastern Indians, Europeans and others use natural medicines to a much greater degree than we do in our current system.  Many developed countries like Great Britain, France and Canada have national health care systems. So why don't we know about and use these other ideas?  There are several possible answers:

1. The drug companies don't want us to know.
2. We think we are the most advanced nation in the world and thus are not learning what others have to teach us.
3. Our media does not provide us with appropriate, unbiased and accurate information.
4. Or, we are lazy and instead of taking charge of our health we just want someone, namely a doctor, to fix us. 

Western medicine's power is in its diagnostics and life-saving surgeries.  But I believe our doctors are missing two crucial steps:  1) the stage before diagnosis, i.e. prevention and 2) the stage after diagnosis, treatment with natural medicine first and then with drugs, if needed.  I firmly believe that natural medicine has a great role to play in these two stages, and there are more and more people coming around to this viewpoint.
 
I recently attended the Natural Products Association's annual meeting in Las Vegas (a totally natural place!) where I heard a number of interesting speakers talk about specific health problems and solutions as well as the problems with the American health care system today. Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee talked about his personal experience of losing 110 lbs and the resulting passion he has for making Americans healthier, particularly our children. Tieraone Low Dog, M.D., Director of Education for the University of Arizona's Integrative Medicine program, long-time herbalist, and winner of Time Magazine's "Innovator in Complimentary and Alternative Medicine Award", spoke about the unfounded fear that Americans and the medical community have of herbal medicine and the need for a more integrated approach. Michael Moore's recent movie "Sicko", still in some theaters, points out how our current privatized system of health care not only denies care to those who need it but also does so in the name of profit. Below I will discuss some relevant points from each of their discussions, or in Michael Moore's case, his film. 

Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee has embarked on a campaign for a healthier America base on his successful Healthy Arkansas model, which encourages Arkansans to exercise, eat healthier and quit smoking. The plan involves giving state employees health risk assessments with health goals to achieve and gives them lower health premiums in exchange for accomplishing these goals. He is encouraging the private sector to do the same. Mike's book, Quit Digging Your Grave With a Knife and Fork is a no-nonsense book about proper nutrition, taking charge of your health and ultimately, making yourself and this country more productive. 

Mike has started a "fruit in schools" program that makes fresh fruit available to underprivileged children in school, encouraging healthy eating habits. The program has spread steadily and he hopes for it to be a national program in the coming years. Bills have recently been introduced to Congress to start removing the junk food from our schools.  I can think how companies like Coke, Frito-Lay and others would be very against this. We as parents just need to be more for it. Children as young as 7 years old are now being diagnosed with diabetes in this country.  Mike made a comment in his speech that "if it wasn't food 100 years ago, it probably isn't food today". That eliminates Twinkies, Cheez Whiz, soft drinks, many dairy products, and on and on.

While this may seem extreme on the surface, if you think about it, we really do need to eliminate many of the processed foods we are eating.  We are the first generation of Americans that are not expected to live as long as their parents. Who among us does not know multiple 40-to 50-year olds being diagnosed with and even dying of the likes of cancer or heart disease? We were really the first generation to grow up eating all of the processed, pesticide laden and unnaturally raised food. Get the connection?  If you look at ingredient listing of your foods and you see multiple ingredients that don't sound like food, well THEY AREN'T!  One scary fact in all of this is that doctors, as part of their medical training, are not required to take any nutrition courses. That's correct, the basic foundation of all health, nutrition, is not part of most doctor's repertoire.   

Mike also pointed out that in the U.S. we spend 17% of our GDP, or roughly $2 trillion dollars, on sick care each year.  Most developed European countries spend about 10% of their GDP on health care. If we  reduced our spending to the level of our counterparts in Europe, we would save 700 billion dollars each year, or roughly 2X our annual deficit!! Even worse than that, less than 2% of what we spend is related to prevention.

In Mike's travels around the country, he has had the opportunity to talk to corporate leaders about these very issues. He recently learned from Starbucks' CEO that Starbucks spends more money on its' employees health care than on coffee beans!! Likewise, GM spends more on health care expenses than on steel.  Moving from a country focused on disease management to one focused on education and prevention would have a profound effect on the health and wallets of Americans. Since companies spend so much on health care for their employees, it takes away from the amount they have available for wage increases. If we as a nation spent less on health care, we might just end up with some of that money in our pockets. He advocates a system that gives individuals the knowledge to make proper choices AND the financial incentives to follow through on the knowledge.

The Natural Foods Merchandiser recently reported a study done by the Lewin Group which concluded that certain dietary supplements could offer health benefits as well as save $24 billion in health care expenses over the next five years.  Specifically, four different supplements or supplement pairings could achieve this as follows:

• Calcium and Vitamin D
  Researchers found that if those with Medicare benefits used appropriate doses of vitamin D and calcium, 776,000 hospitalizations for hip fractures could be avoided over five years, resulting in $16.1 billion in savings.
• Folic Acid
  If only 25% of child-bearing age women in the U.S. started folic acid supplementation on a regular basis, nearly 600 neural tube defects could be prevented.  The five year cost savings for this would be $1.5 billion.
• Omega-3 Fatty Acids
  With 1800 mg of omega-3 supplementation for those over 65 years old, about 374,000 coronary heart disease hospitalizations could be avoided at a savings of $3.2 billion.
• Lutein with Zeaxanthin
  Over 5 years, a daily intake of 6-10 mg of lutein w/zeaxanthin among those with age-related macular degeneration could help about 191,000 people avoid dependence on a nursing care facility for a savings of $3.6 billion.

While I believe this is just a sampling of the many things that can be prevented with proper supplement use, nutrition and exercise, it bears out the fact that easier and more cost effective solutions are available.

I had the privilege of hearing Dr. Tieraone Low Dog, M.D. give her views on the state of medicine today. Dr. Low Dog's philosophy is grounded in the concept that "science is foundation, medicine is art", recognizing that each individual case of a disease is unique and therefore no blanket approach for a disease can be applied to multiple people. She champions using both traditional (natural) and conventional (Western) medicine, to form an integrated plan designed for the individual and their own experience with a disease.

 Dr. Low Dog relayed information published in The Journal of American Medicine (JAMA) that makes me  wonder why our system has not been re-evaluated. In 2006 alone in the U.S there were:

• 106,000 deaths from the appropriate use of drugs
• 80,000 infections contracted in hospitals
• 12,000 unnecessary surgeries

Conversely, the number of deaths caused by herbal medicines was zero.
 
The U.S.'s infant mortality rate is the worst among the world's developed nations. The high levels of pesticides found in our children shows that our environment has gotten out of control and the food we eat is no longer safe.  The World Health Organization states that up to 80% of heart disease (the leading cause of death in the U.S.) and 30% of some cancers can be prevented by a healthy diet alone. Dr. Low Dog asserts that nutrition and exercise are the two basic building blocks for good health. When people ask her which of the two is more important, she said it is like asking which wing of a plane is more important - one cannot exist without the other.

She also pointed out how the media has ineffectively reported on recent studies that were done to the detriment of natural medicine. The faulty design of studies and more importantly, their objective of discrediting natural medicine's role in health, are giving the public the message that natural medicines a) don't work or b) are no better than placebo or c) are dangerous. The numbers reported above by JAMA, one of Western medicine's own publications, clearly do not bear this out in terms of safety. She gave an example of a study that was done using saw palmetto for benign prostatic hyperplasia (enlargement of the prostate gland) and how the study showed that it was ineffective. The study started out with patients with severe issues, not a group that an herbalist would even claim that saw palmetto could help. The results, therefore, were not successful and a misleading story appeared in the news indicating that saw palmetto is ineffective in treating this condition.