Most people are well aware that an estimated 45 million
Americans currently do not have healthcare, but is the crisis simply the lack
of health insurance or even the cost of health insurance? Is there a
bigger underlying problem at the root of our healthcare system?
Although the U.S. claims to have the most advanced medicine in the world,
government health statistics and peer-reviewed journals are painting a
different picture -- that allopathic medicine often causes more harm than
good.

People in general have always felt they could trust doctors and the
medical profession, but according to the Journal of the American Medical
Association in July 2000, iatrogenic death, also known as death from
physician error or death from medical treatment, was the third leading
cause of death in America and rising, responsible for at least 250,000
deaths per year. Those statistics are considered conservative by many, as
the reported numbers only include in-hospital deaths, not injury or
disability, and do not include external iatrogenic deaths such as those
resulting from nursing home and other private facility treatments, and
adverse effects of prescriptions. One recent study estimated the total
unnecessary deaths from iatrogenic causes at approximately 800,000 per
year at a cost of $282 billion per year, which would make death from
American medicine the leading cause of death in our country.

Currently, at least 2 out of 3 Americans use medications, 32 million
Americans are taking three or more medications daily, and commercials and
advertisements for pharmaceutical drugs have saturated the marketplace.
Although our population is aging, exorbitantly expensive drugs are
being marketed and dispensed to younger and younger patients, including
many children who years ago would never have been given or needed
medication, for everything from ADHD to asthma to bipolar disease and diabetes. Clearly, the state of health in this country is not improving even
though there are an increasing number of medications and treatments.
Between 2003 and 2010, the number of prescriptions are expected to increase substantially by 47%. In recent years, numerous drugs previously
deemed safe by the FDA have been recalled because of their toxicity, after
the original drug approvals were actually funded by the invested
pharmaceutical companies themselves.

According to the media, thanks to advances in U.S. drugs and medical
procedures, Americans are living longer statistically, but they are
living longer sicker, with a lower quality of life, and often dependent on
multiple expensive synthetic medications that do not cure or address the
underlying causes, but only suppress symptoms, often with a plethora of
dangerous side effects to the tune of billions of dollars for the drug
industry. Considering that the U.S. is supposed to have the most
advanced technology in the world and the best health care system, it is at
odds that we spend the most on healthcare, yet are the most obese and
most afflicted with illness outside of the AIDS epidemic in some third
world countries.

Unless you have an acute emergency that requires emergency room care,
being admitted to a hospital environment may also be more dangerous to
your health than staying out. In 2003, epidemiologists reported in the
New England Journal of Medicine that hospital-acquired infections have
risen steadily in recent decades, with blood and tissue infections
known as sepsis almost tripling from 1979 to 2000. Nearly two million
patients in the U.S. get an infection while in the hospital each year, and
of those patients over 90,000 die per year, up dramatically from just
13,300 in 1992. Statistics show that approximately 56% of the
population has been unnecessarily treated, or mistreated, by the medical
industry.

Additionally, as a result of the overuse of pharmaceutical drugs and
antibiotics in our bodies and environment, our immune systems have become significantly weakened, allowing antibiotic-resistant strains of
disease-causing bacteria to proliferate, leaving us more susceptible to
further disease. Not surprisingly, incidences of diseases have been growing
at epidemic levels according to the CDC. Now diseases once thought
conquered, such as tuberculosis, gonorrhea, malaria, and childhood ear
infections are much harder to successfully treat than they were decades
ago. Drugs do not cure. They only suppress the symptoms that your body
needs to express, while they ignore the underlying root cause. Side
effects of synthetic and chemical drugs, which even if they are partly
derived from nature have been perverted to make them patentable and
profitable, are not healthy or natural, and usually cause more harm than any
perceived benefit of the medication.

Where "physician errors" are concerned, these may not be entirely the
fault of the doctors, as they are forced to operate within the
constraints of their profession or risk losing their license, but doctors have
become pawns and spokesmen for the drug companies, and the best interest of the patient has become secondary. In the name of profit, physicians are also under great pressure from hospitals to service patients as quickly as possible, like an assembly line, increasing the likelihood of
error.

In conclusion, increases in healthcare costs are not just the result of
frivolous law suits, but are primarily the result of a profit-oriented
industry that encourages practices that lead to unnecessary and harmful
procedures being performed, lethal adverse drug reactions, infections,
expensive legitimate lawsuits, in-hospital and physician errors,
antibiotic resistance due to over prescribing of antibiotics and drugs, and
the hundreds of thousands of subsequent unnecessary deaths and injuries.
Many people do not realize that there are healthier natural options,
and anything unnatural or invasive we are exposed to is likely to cause
either immediate or cumulative damage over time.

For more information on how to help your body heal itself naturally
without chemicals, information on drug side effects, and harmful
disease-causing chemicals in the foods you eat and your environment and how to
avoid them, please visit the NatureGem web site at
http://www.naturegem.com.

comments: About the Author:
Deb Bromley is a science and technology researcher and the President of
NatureGem Nontoxic Living, an organization devoted to promoting
awareness of toxins in our food and environment that can cause disease, and
providing access to nutrition information, natural remedies, and
alternative health resources. Please visit http://www.naturegem.com for more
information.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------