Not Alternative, But Mainstream
By RAJGOPAL NIDAMBOOR
The alternative, complementary, or holistic, approach to health uses the best of natural therapies such as acupuncture, ayurveda, herbal remedies, homeopathy, meditation, yoga etc.,
Many of these therapies are now scientifically documented; this will make them not only relevant and effective, but also cost-effective, which they already are.
If we are to make healthcare affordable and available, all of us should attend to the elemental causes of health and illness. This will enable us to provide the stimuli for healthy ways of living rather than just “recompense” for medications/drugs and surgery.
As Deepak Chopra , Dean Ornish , Rustum Roy and Andrew Weil write in The Wall Street Journal ,“Today, heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and obesity account for 75 per cent of healthcare costs and expenses. The fact is: they are all largely preventable and even reversible by changing diet and lifestyle. “
New scientific studies suggest that our bodies have an incredible ability to begin healing, much more quickly than we had once realised. If only we address lifestyle issues that often cause chronic diseases the better! Yes, recent studies explain that alternative medicine can make a powerful difference to our health and well-being. It can bring about harmonious transformation, quickly, safely, and effectively [also, inexpensively].
Medicine need not progress only through technological advance, or introduction of new wonder drugs to be replaced by the more wonderful, nay “bitter,” drugs of tomorrow. Even simple choices related to our lifestyle -- what we eat, how we manage stress, whether we smoke, or drink alcohol, or how much exercise we get, aside from the quality of our relationships -- can be just as powerful as drugs and surgery. They often are -- most often, they are even more powerful and effective than powerful [conventional] medicines.
Alternative therapies prove the emergent power of simple, low-tech, and low-cost measures -- not fancied, expensive therapy. They approach treatment with plant-based, or natural, medicines, balanced nutritional diets, yoga, meditation and psycho-social support. This form of treatment can stop, or even reverse, the progression of coronary heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure [hypertension], cancer, obesity, and other major diseases.
Yet, the irony is: our healthcare system is glued to be more of a disease-care system, not preventative-care system.
Conventional medicine begins to treat disease after it has occurred, or is entrenched. Alternative medicine looks at the possibility much in advance.
A randomised controlled trial published in The New England Journal Of Medicine [April 2007] found that angioplasties and stents do not prolong life, or even prevent heart attacks in stable patients -- i.e., 95 per cent of those who receive them. Coronary bypass surgery prolongs life in less than three per cent of patients who go through the procedure. Believe it or not, insurance companies pay billions for surgical procedures like angioplasty and bypass surgery -- procedures that are usually risky, invasive, expensive and largely futile.
They pay very little -- or, no money at all -- for alternative medical approaches, such as Dr Dean Ornish’s Reversing Heart Disease -- that have been proven to reverse and also prevent most chronic diseases that account for almost 75 per cent of healthcare costs.
Take this, as Chopra et al, point out, again. The INTERHEART Study, published in The Lancet [September 2004], followed 30,000 men and women on six continents and found that changing one’s lifestyle could prevent at least 90 per cent of all heart disease. This is not all. Chronic pain is one of the major sources of worker's compensation claims costs; yet studies show that it is often responsive to homeopathy, acupuncture and certain traditional treatments, with no side-effects, when compared to pharmaceutical preparations.
To quote Chopra et al, “When you eat a healthier diet, quit smoking, exercise, meditate and have more love in your life, then your brain receives more blood and oxygen. You think more clearly, have more energy, need less sleep. Your brain may grow so many new neurons that it could get measurably bigger in only a few months. Your face gets more blood flow, so your skin glows more and wrinkles less. Your heart gets more blood flow, so you have more stamina and can even begin to reverse heart disease. For many people, these are choices worth making -- not just to live longer, but also to live better.”
Interestingly, alternative/complementary approaches such as homeopathy and ayurveda, one of the most ancient and “completest” of medical sciences, already have extensive knowledge of individual differences built into their diagnostic and therapeutic systems. We must expect these natural modes of analysis becoming “seamlessly” integrated into conventional care, along with parallel psychological assessments
What does this signify? That conventional and alternative/complementary medicine will both challenge and learn from each other.
Isn’t it just about time that we all moved past the debate of alternative medicine versus conventional medicine, and focus on what works for us, what doesn't, for any of us, or for some of us, and under what-- given, or not given -- situation?
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