Even though this is a blog about radical change in the workplace, there are so many areas where radical change is essential. I am acutely aware that simply expressing opinion can be polarizing. With these words flooding my mind for years, I have to believe that they have a purpose yet to be discovered. If you find yourself on the other side of my opinion, I give you my word I will work hard to find you right if you give me that same privilege.
For generations, our parents and their parents relied upon experts to advise them in areas they didn't consider themselves to have any expertise in, whether it was medical, legal, or financial advice. What is now becoming clearer to me, is that the legal system isn't about justice, it's about following the letter of the law. The financial system isn't about helping the consumer build and preserve financial foundations, it's about preserving the bottom line to look good for the shareholder.
And the medical system isn't about healing people and preventing illness, it's about perpetuating just enough illness to justify over prescription of medications. It is here where I get caught in anger, feeling helpless and frustrated.
Here is my rant.
If the medical system were truly devoted to healing, the emphasis would be on prevention. Our health care system would be supportive of the oldest most ancient healing arts, like homeopathy, botanical medicine, naturopathy and osteopathy. Instead, allopathic doctors call natural medicine quakery and say it lacks scientific proof. We see a system vested in keeping people ill in order to perpetuate their need of expensive drugs, creating billions of dollars of profits for multinational pharmaceutical corporations. These pharmaceuticals are being prescribed daily, and daily it is being revealed that while they may resolve the presenting issue, they also create a multitude of complicated side affects that it's virtually impossible to detect which caused what first.
For generations, our parents and their parents relied upon experts to advise them in areas they didn't consider themselves to have any expertise in, whether it was medical, legal, or financial advice. What is now becoming clearer to me, is that the legal system isn't about justice, it's about following the letter of the law. The financial system isn't about helping the consumer build and preserve financial foundations, it's about preserving the bottom line to look good for the shareholder.
And the medical system isn't about healing people and preventing illness, it's about perpetuating just enough illness to justify over prescription of medications. It is here where I get caught in anger, feeling helpless and frustrated.
Here is my rant.
If the medical system were truly devoted to healing, the emphasis would be on prevention. Our health care system would be supportive of the oldest most ancient healing arts, like homeopathy, botanical medicine, naturopathy and osteopathy. Instead, allopathic doctors call natural medicine quakery and say it lacks scientific proof. We see a system vested in keeping people ill in order to perpetuate their need of expensive drugs, creating billions of dollars of profits for multinational pharmaceutical corporations. These pharmaceuticals are being prescribed daily, and daily it is being revealed that while they may resolve the presenting issue, they also create a multitude of complicated side affects that it's virtually impossible to detect which caused what first.
To quote Dr. Carolyn Dean, MD ND & Trueman Tuck, Rights Advocate, DEATH BY MODERN MEDICINE:
"We must always remember that allopathy is a medical model born of the industrial age and with Big Pharma less than 100 years old. To suggest that the oldest and most used healing arts in the world are secondary to allopathy is not only insulting but inaccurate as well. Traditional methods of restoring and maintaining maximum health, by virtue of their track record of safety and success, take second place to no other medical model."
At her physician's urging, and in order to save my life, my mother took DES (diethylstilbestrol), a synthetic female hormone (estrogen), while she was pregnant with me in order to prevent miscarriage. The drug was withdrawn in 1975, after its dangers to mothers and their unborn children became apparent.
A study of 5,000 women known to have been exposed to DES in the womb conducted by the National Cancer Institute, compared medical histories with a similar number of women who were not exposed to the drug. The study determined that DES daughters had an increased risk of breast cancer of 40%, but for those women over the age of 40, the increased risk was 250%. (source: http://www.lawyersandsettlements.com/articles/00284/des_miscarriage_cancer.html)
"Experts say, the long-term side effects of DES surfacing some 30 years after the drug was discontinued, should serve as a potent reminder of the potential harmful consequences of over-zealous drug promotion and distribution." August 20, 2006, Evelyn Pringle
I watched my mother, age 50, take her prescribed Atavan, an anti-anxiety substance when my father died after a 2-month illness. She took that drug for over 35 years with very little supervision by her physician who also prescribed her numerous other medications for high blood pressure, anti-constipation, anti-depressants, aspirin for her heart, anti-inflammatories for her joints, and more. Because her physician could not spend more than 15 minutes with her in person, I wonder how much time he spent researching the impact of taking all these prescriptions together and what will be revealed in the coming years. My mother was very obedient and reverent towards the medical profession, as many of her generation were. They were taught that doctors know best and that they are the experts on the human body. With that kind of predilection, how could she not listen to her doctor.
However, it is my belief that the multitude of unsupervised drugs, in combination with her daily intake of one alcoholic drink a day, caused her to have several mini-strokes that her family doctor never detected because of a system so stressed from treating illnesses. My mother was always a difficult person even at the best of times, so it was easy and convenient for my brothers and I (and her doctor) to chalk up her increasingly erratic behavior to just how she was. We later came to discover that she had suffered numerous mini-strokes and the impact of those mini-strokes had ravaged the frontal lobes of her brain, affecting her short term memory and judgment centers.
How could we, as a society, have left healing and compassion and the individual so far behind that it is now easier to ignore challenging behavior than dig underneath to understand it's core cause.
There are no easy answers. What I do know is that before we can build new, we need to understand the old and what we did to get here for we are all responsible for where we are now. My rant is my way of understanding myself in hopes that healing is not far behind.
Written By Annie Gelfand
© Copyright 2010 Tammy Anne Gelfand.
All Rights Reserved.
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