Universal Health Care should include wellness [View All]

I am a firm believer in intergrative medicine (also called holistic medicine). In this type of medical practice, the MD looks at your general health, your health history, family health history, etc, and uses this to give you a diet to follow. The MD may also suggest supplements (vitamins and herbs) to help keep you healthy. If you have an acute or chronic illness, the doctor may start treatment not with drugs from the drug companies, but with other cutting edge therapies, including IVs of vitamins, herbs, etc, always keeping in mind that drugs will be used if other things don't work.

Why do I bring this up? Because at Healing Night meeting this week, the doctor who gave the talk mentioned the fact the most MDs have traditionally been taught not to use vitamin/diets for therapy and for wellness. They are sometimes even told that vitamins are "dangerous", and tend to ignore important research that has been done on vitamins and their role in health (example: a recent JAMA article on Vitamin D).

Why are so many MDs against using vitamins, etc? Because they are indoctrinated to a great extent by the drug companies. As the doctor said at the meeting, the drug companies don't get big bucks if the MDs prescribe Vitamin D cream to help with psoriosis, or use a Vitamin C IV for Hepatitus C.

My only concern about universal health care is that the drug companies might use it to shut out holistic medical practitioners and make the sale of vitamins illegal so that everyone has to rely on their drugs, even when they aren't as effective as using supplements and vitamin therapy.