Patriotism is Taking Better Care of Your Health
A Health Conscious U.S. Citizen Gives Some Thoughts on our Nation’s Health Crisis
by Kimberly Hartke
If the U.S. Supreme Court rejects the Health Care Reform Act today, or even if it doesn’t, these are the changes I would like to see made in our nation’s approach to health and well-being of our people.
Increase Health Freedom
1) Allow supplements to be labeled with the health benefits to be derived from taking them. Who doesn’t have a cupboard full of bottles, and a total lack of recall of why you should take them? Follow the work of the National Health Freedom Action to see how you can advocate for natural health supplements.
2) Allow permanent patents on pharmaceuticals—maybe if we give pharmaceutical companies ownership over their discoveries in perpetuity, they would not be so threatened by the natural supplement industry. Perhaps prices would come down, because they are not trying to gouge people while they can. Plus, what incentive do they have to spend R&D money, only to have their discoveries given over to their competitors?
2) Lift the bans on non-toxic approaches to treating cancer and other serious diseases.
3) Stop using our police and courts to force parents to give their children cancer treatments, when the family has decided that they are not in their child’s best interest.
3) Stop giving palliative cancer treatments in cases where there is no benefit. A little known fact is that cancer professionals will give expensive chemotherapy to patients when they know for a fact that the cancer is untreatable. The doctors are just going through the motions to give the patient “hope”. As chemotherapy is painful, and destroys the patient’s immune system, at $20,000.00 a dose, this is cruel and unusual punishment. I believe it also violates the doctor’s sworn oath to “Do No Harm.”
Give Consumers the Right to Know
1) Allow optional GMO Free Labeling on food products to allow consumers to shop wisely, as we move toward mandatory labeling of genetically modified ingredients on all new products or product reformulations. Arm yourself with knowledge of the dangers to human and animal health on the Institute for Responsible Technology website. They offer a NO GMO Shopping Guide so you know which foods are currently GMO free!
2) Defund the USDA Office of Nutrition Policy and Promotion, which uses its controversial dietary guidelines to control food policy and medical advice given to the consumer on diet. The program gives power to huge food manufacturers at the expense of those who actually produce food, like farmers and ranchers.
3) Teach the research of Dr. Weston A. Price in all schools. Allow access to the Weston A. Price websites, westonaprice.org and realmilk.com from government computers, schools and libraries (we have reason to believe the U.S. government restricts access to these websites).
4) Doctors please educate patients about drug side effects. And, when a patient is on a drug, and experiencing symptoms, check for side affects first, before prescribing medication to address new symptoms. How does a 43 year old get on 18 drugs? Doctors are prescribing medications to deal with side effects of other drugs!
5) The medical community needs to disclose to the public the money they make from dispensing pharmaceuticals. The free trips, the Big Pharma payola, and over-prescribing of drugs, are big reasons our health care expenses are off the rails.
Shift our Focus to Prevention and Away from Sick Care
1) Increase our collective immunity, by lifting the Federal ban on interstate transportation of farm fresh milk (for human consumption), and by states allowing consumers to make farm-direct purchases of unprocessed dairy foods. Sign a petition or learn more about the raw milk issue on the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund website.
2) Make good nutrition and exercise the priority. Bring back school PE programs and get those soda and snack machines and pre-fab meals out of our schools. Put a real chef and school gardens in place.
3) Let’s get moms and dad’s excited about home meals and cooking again. Give those fast food meals a rest and teach your children how to cook by your example.
4) American’s need to take more personal responsibility for their health and cease abdicating responsibility to paid professionals. What goes in your mouth will determine your health outcomes! Garbage in = Garbage out!
5) Remove the limits of what can be contributed to a health savings account (HSA). Why should health insurers be able to require bigger investments per month in premiums than a self-insurer is allowed to contribute to their own account?
6) As Dr. James Granger says in his new book, WE HAVE GOT IT ALL WRONG!: Our Failed “Sick-Care System”
Kimberly Hartke is a health and wellness blogger, featured on Realfoodmedia.com. She is the publicist for nutrition education non-profit, The Weston A. Price Foundation. Subscribe to their informative quarterly journal, by visiting their website, www.westonaprice.org.
We need to stop lobbying the government and start educating the people. I am still confused as to why we lobby the government to fix a mess that the government created.
Government is good at one thing: It knows how to break your legs, hand you a crutch, and say, “See, if it weren’t for the government, you wouldn’t be able to walk.”
great post. i did a similar blog post http://escapetheherdblog.blogspot.com/2011/07/self-sufficient-healthcare.html
bottom line is, everyone needs to take more responsibility for their own health and that of their family. educate yourself and take care of yourself.
What reasons do you have to believe that the government restricts access to WestonAPrice.com or RealMilk.com?
How about paying out of pocket for doctor’s appointments and only letting insurance cover catastrophic illnesses, like when I was a kid forty years ago?
And stop making us patients subsidize the expensive hospital equipment, most of which add no value. Medical professionals often prescribe these tests, many of which are invasive and not without side effects, to recoup their investment in the expensive machinery.
My husband went to the emergency room for pain and was given three different CAT scans. The next week we read that CAT scans are poorly calibrated and a study showed that most give off dangerous amounts of radiation. Three in one day was a very poor choice for his health. And guess what the diagnosis was? There was none. They never did figure out why he was in such intense pain. The pain went away by itself. The only good they did was give him pain medication that day.
B- A WAPF member reported to our HQ that the sites were inaccessible from a school computer. I would love if others who use a government computer could check and see if they can access our website. I could be wrong about this, if this was an isolated incident.
I worked in school gardens in inner city DC for many many years, and we need to do more than get parents “excited.” Most of the parents I worked with had never cooked in their lives, and subsisted on pre-fab boxed, microwavable or fast food meals since childhood. One grandma (70+) asked me what a squash was, as she had never seen one before. Nor had she ever eaten any fruit except apples and bananas. Most of the kids I worked with thought apples were made in a factory and most had never even seen broccoli. We’ve lost at least a whole generation of very basic knowledge about how to eat.
i pretty much concur with everything in the blog above. However, allowing unlimited patents would yield a monopoly of sorts and price gouging.
I would suggest banning GMO “products” altogether.
Health care reform is not a reform in my eyes as long as it has allopathic care at the forefront and is pharmaceutical based. Giving more people access to “sick care” is only going to mean more profits for the pharmaceutical cartel.
Kimberly, I loved this so much I shared it on Twitter and my blog and personal FB pages! Plus, Dawn, oh wow. I am shocked by those stories! Squash is not what I would consider exotic by any means. Wow. It is so hard to believe what people think of as food!