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In a Globe and Mail article, August 15, 2007 titled: ‘What Canadians should learn from the U.S. health care disaster’, Arnold S. Rahlmans M.D. a professor emeritus of medicine and of social medicine at Harvard Medical School, and a former editor of The New England Journal of Medicine, concludes that “Canadians should not follow Americans down the path to greater privatization.”

Why should Canada follow a failed health-care system that cannot be sustained in the U.S.? Canada has had research done that could even save more money and be more effective than ‘Orthodox Medicine’ but bows to short term thinking and the vested interests of Medicine- Big Pharma and Medical Associations/Journals which are connected at the hips.

What the health-care authorities need is an overall ‘quality of care’, ‘cost effectiveness’ committee with lay representation to offset the vested interests and ask the right questions about why inferior ‘medical, surgical, prescription drug treatments’ are paid for? And very effective and in many cases more effective, less expensive higher quality but non-medical approaches are ignored.

For instance the Manga Report on the treatment of low back pain proved that Chiropractic adjustments were better and less expensive than prescriptions drugs. Guess who sponsored this study? The Ontario Government, that’s who, and guess who deleted Chiropractic fees from the Ontario Health Insurance Plan (OHIP)? The current Ontario provincial government deleted this useful non-invasive treatment to save $100 million dollars a year; unfortunately it was estimated that increased emergency room visits would eat up these savings and actually increase costs.

Stop the insanity and try a totally different approach.

There is research that shows that taking ‘medically treatment resistant patients’ (in other words- failures of ‘Medicine’), that have been treated ineffectively with multiple prescriptions and treating them with diet and nutrition improved patients quality of life dramatically, returned most to work and reduced the need of drugs by 50-100%. Treating patients in this manner could save billions of dollars. Unfortunately the governments (see above paragraph) are not interested and the vested interests, even in Canada, and the private insurance companies for industry are not interested.

Insanity is described as doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results. Medicine is incredibly valuable for acute treatments; however the majority of family physicians patient population has chronic illnesses. These patients, as research has shown, will respond better and less expensively to a non-medical approach for which these physicians lack expertise and training. When your physician’s prescription drugs fail they’ll try different drugs or send you to a specialist who’ll try different drugs.- This is insanity and a totally different approach should be tried.

Governments in Canada, (in other words tax payers) continue to pay for a failed ’sick-care’ system rather than a ‘wellness-care’ based system. Medicine’s approach is to block symptoms rather than treat the underlying cause (usually nutritionally/immune system based deficiencies/impairment).

Take the finger out of the Dam and fix the Damn thing properly!

Think of Medicine as the little Dutch boy with his finger in the dyke using more and more fingers (drugs) and toes (more drugs) to plug the holes (treat the symptoms, many caused by the drugs themselves). It doesn’t make any sense, fix the dyke. Fix the patient with better nutrition, diet and herbs. There are doctors that specialize in taking the elderly off the multiple prescriptions they have been given, now if they would only use better nutrition on them.

I am not anti-drugs, if they are needed so be it, but there are some better strategies and they will hopefully come when the present paradigm (or model) of medicine collapses from the weight of its own arrogance. If governments reimbursed and insurance companies (payers) covered Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) and nutritional and herbal supplements their costs would go down and the quality of patient care would go up.

Governments and Medicine and Insurance Companies will say- ‘There aren’t any studies.’ Then do them! That’s no excuse and is lazy and biased. There are over 4000 studies in the Cochrane Library on CAM treatments.

Improved Patient results-What a concept?

Governments and insurance companies blindly feel free to pay for Cancer Chemotherapy prescriptions even though the U.S. Federal Government General Accounting Office states that “For the majority of the cancers we examined, the actual improvements (in survival) have been small or have been overestimated by the published rates…” Checking further into the data Dr. G. Morgan found that for 85% of Cancers the success rate is a whopping 2% better than ‘NO TREATMENT’. (See my post- Cytotoxic Chemotherapy Cancer Clinker, April 20, 2007)

Any other business except the pharmaceutical industry would be embarrassed by these results. There have been numerous cases of drugs achieving 5-10% improvement, over placebo or an inexpensive older drug, and trumpeted as the greatest thing since sliced bread while the governments and insurance company’s trip over themselves to pay for these so-called ‘proven treatments’ and decline CAM therapies as supposedly unproven.

If they only funded the firearms that worked 5-10% of the time Police would go on strike. Why not fund firefighter equipment that is useless as well. Health care politicians and bureaucrats treat Medicine like a ‘holy cow’; otherwise they wouldn’t put up with these failures by funding them. They disdainfully look down their noses at CAM, which is growing substantially even though patients pay out of pocket, because of word of mouth about its success. Interestingly the higher the education, the more patients use CAM.

An appropriate comment from Winston Churchill should have payers look at their strategy and Medicine’s ‘Pharmaceuticals only’ approach: “However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.”

So, Professor Arnold S. Rahlman is right when he says that Canada should not adopt the unsustainable, expensive, inefficient and inequitable U.S. health care model. He should also go one step farther and state that the failures (’Disasters’) of Medicine, and there are many (think of literal ‘poison pills’ pulled from the market), should be turned over to wellness practitioners instead of ‘Sicko’ practitioners.

The Soviet Union collapsed when the top leaders realized ‘It isn’t working’. Well Medicine- ‘It isn’t working’.

To sum up, I’ll slightly alter another famous quote from Winston Churchill. ‘Never have so many (patients, government/taxpayers, insurance companies) paid so much (prescription drugs) for so little results (results of only 2-5 or 10% success in many cases)!’

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About the author

Dennis Cutforth is a researcher and writer with over 35 years experience in health-care sales, marketing and research in pharmaceuticals and natural health. Dennis will cut through all the propaganda and give you the real facts about what really works to make you healthier and happier. Visit his Blog at Better Life Blog.