by: Deb Bromley

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
overprescribing 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


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.comfor more information.