How does holistic health care measure up to conventional Western medicine?

With the current turmoil over health care reform, Americans are now resigned to the decisions of Congress, the Senate and the President, who take a great deal of time to reach a consensus on what plan might form a workable solution to the lack of affordable health care options. The lack of options directly affects our health, indeed, at times, becoming a matter of life or death.

What is puzzling, in this supposed health care reform, is the absence, or extreme cutbacks in funding, for a natural approach, using nutritional, herbal and other well-documented, successful corrective therapies. The conventional Western approach to medicine seeks to identify the symptoms of your disease and apply medications which will suppress those symptoms.

Therein lies the rub. Holistic health care seeks to treat the root cause of your condition, eliminating the causes of your condition and thus, rid you of the symptoms and restore you to health.

For example, let’s say you suffer from osteoarthritis pain. You have pain that is sufficient to require pain medication, on a daily basis. From the traditional Western allopathic perspective, a prescription for pain meds is all that can be done to help allay your pain.

On the other hand, from the holistic health care perspective, perhaps you suffer from vitamin and mineral deficiencies which are causing much of the pain.

Osteoarthritis is a condition that mainly affects people over 50. While your doctor may say, “It’s simply a result of a lifetime of wear and tear on the bones and joints”, it seems too coincidental that people over 50 also incrementally lose the ability to readily absorb vitamin B-12. Deficiencies of vitamin B-12 are directly related to muscle pain and stiffness, as well as fatigue and a host of other symptoms.

Some older people also do not get adequate exposure to sunlight, finding it difficult to move around enough to get their natural vitamin D. Deficiencies of vitamin D have been demonstrated to be directly related to bone pain.

The allopathic physician seldom tests blood levels of nutrients, thus missing an opportunity to help solve the real problem. The holistic health care practitioner has a different approach, addressing not only the symptoms, but the level of health in your entire body.

The holistic health care practitioner may prescribe remedial nutrient doses to get you back to normal blood levels, remedying the cause of the pain, to a point where you do not need to take, or require a lower dose of pain medication. Which approach makes more sense to you?

While the government is working on its health care reform package, they certainly should consider the merits of holistic health care, with its ‘can-do’ focus, rather than emphasizing the spiraling costs of health care. Perhaps our population would be more healthy and require fewer expensive medicines. So far as I can tell, the health care reform issue really seems to be one of cost.

Do a little checking for yourself. See how many serious and debilitating conditions are negatively affected by a lack of nutrients. Check out herbal medicines as well. Holistic health care may be one of our best options.

Holistic Nutrition Therapy Holistic Health Care, osteoarthritis pain