Category Archives: Health Insurance

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Chiropractic and “The Hero’s Journey” in Health Care

I My Journey in Chiropractic and the Healing Field

My professional journey in life began when I turned twenty-one and left the seminary to pursue a career in Chiropractic. The year was 1961. I graduated from Chiropractic college in 1963 and immediately moved south with my family and opened my first practice in Crowley, Louisiana, in the Winter of 1963-64. The Healing Field was ripe for a new paradigm of health care and I was eager to deliver it. 

Little did I know then that my journey through the field of health care was to be a journey of the profession I had joined that was already engaged in a political battle with its nemesis: the medical profession, the Guardian of the Threshold leading to licensure as a separate, distinct and independent profession with a vitalistic philosophy and a drugless healing science and art.

A Battle for Licensure and Freedom of Choice

 

I joined in the fight for licensure here in Louisiana, my home state — as well as the battle for patients’ “Freedom of Choice” in health care, a separate journey and battle led by a group of passionate Chiropractic patients with whom we shared a common cause and a common nemesis.

After several years of legislative efforts — and court battles to stop the arrest and jailing of chiropractors — we finally defeated our nemesis in 1974 when Louisiana became the last state in the Union to license Chiropractors. It also became the last state to grant patients the freedom and right to go to the doctor of their choice.

The victory was a partial one, however, as licensure was not the ultimate goal of the profession’s quest. The ultimate goal, the Elixir of Immortality, was access to health insurance, the Golden Goose, well guarded by the insurance industry: equality under the law with Medicine in the reimbursement for Chiropractic services. Licensure was only a means to this end — an end that, to this day, Medicine is bent on denying chiropractors by controlling how freely and deeply they are allowed to dip into the Golden Goose’s nesteggs. After all, health insurance was a creation of medical doctors as a way of insuring they got paid for their services. So it’s their game and they don’t want anyone else dipping into their fee-pool. Stiff restrictions and fine-bearing compliance laws have been put in place via HIPPA, making it costly and time-consuming for doctors to file and follow up with reimbursement claims. Documentation has become one of the dreaded aspects of modern day health care, seconded by the escalating cost of malpractice insurance in a litigious society to which healthcare providers dedicate their lives of service. So, the insurance industry has become a nemesis to both professions by determining the amount of the reimbursement for services rendered. 

All this to say the field of healthcare — a misnomer in itself — does not have the same lure of attraction it had when I entered it some fifty-six years ago. Medicine continues to be a nemesis to the Chiropractic profession — but only as long as chiropractors worship at the altar of the insurance industry and hold financial remuneration as their primary goal, their Elixir of Immortality.

There is a trade-off, however, in this pursuit for insurance equality alongside Medicine. That trade-off is the surrender of the very soul of Chiropractic, nourished by its philosophy, which honors the Innate Power of the human body to heal itself naturally and without the toxic and invasive intervention of drugs and surgery. A motto of the chiropractors, once held religiously, was “Chiropractic first—Medicine second—surgery last.”

Sadly, that trade-off was made by the bulk of the members of our beloved profession, along with all but a few of its colleges, who continue in the sacred philosophical tradition of our Beloved Founder and developer, Drs. D.D. and B.J. Palmer, respectively.  

A schism has rocked the profession at its very foundation, sending it down the same lost path Osteopathy took, as many chiropractors began to look and act more and more like medical doctors, prescribing diagnostic tests, and in some states even delivering babies, all the while abandoning “principled chiropractic” and the holistic model of natural health care to embrace the reductionistic medical model of relieving pain and treating symptoms, settling for acceptance by their medical colleagues as musculoskeletal specialists, an area of expertise in which chiropractors excel. I suppose the saying “men must do what men must do”– as well as women — applies here. Change is what it is, neither good or bad, right or wrong. 

Heralds of Vibrational Healing

Chiropractic was born on September 18, 1895, through the heart and hands of a magnetic healer by the name of Daniel D. Palmer in What Cheer, Iowa. That places it at the fountainhead of vibrational healing and what today is being called “energy medicine.” Daniel Palmer had a large vision of his new healing art becoming more an energetic than a physical remedy for all of mankind’s diseases — or dis-eases, as his son, BJ, spelled it in order to describe illness as a lack of ease. This vision became the Palmers’ quest, their Elixir of Immortality. Their belief in the innate healing power of the body, along with the discovery of the spinal adjustment, led them to the central principle of natural healing: Remove the interference to the unfettered flow and expression of life energy and let the body heal itself. They took the “whole man” into consideration to determine the cause of dis-ease, along with the solution. That cause was seen as being “quantitative” as well as “qualitative”– physical, mental, emotional, or spiritual — or a combination thereof. In other words, they looked for the cause of dis-ease in higher levels than just the physical and chemical. They sought the cause of the cause of dis-ease. The obvious solution and cure, then, was to correct or remove the cause, the interference, and the manifest symptoms would simply no longer be necessary to signal a need for change — change in lifestyle and/or mental and emotional stress and attitude. The symptoms would then simply abate naturally. 

This was and is the essence of the Holistic model of healthcare, an entirely new and different model from the medical reductionistic model of disease management — both being essential in the healthcare arena; the ideal being for both to work together for the benefit of the patients they serve. 

Evolution of Health Care

As health care itself evolved, our professional journey merged into a collective and global journey of the Human Species in search for the Elixir of Immortality in the field of health-and-wellness care.  Building and maintaining a healthy physique has become the focus of health-and-wellness centers throughout the land. “Functional Medicine” is the latest buzz word among chiropractors who are exploring the benefits of nutrition in restoring function to failing organs, tissues and glands. “Clinical Nutrition” has come into the holistic model here in the West, as the cause of more and more diseases was found to be related to poor dietary habits and an “Empty Harvest,” as Dr. Bernard Jensen describes our commercially grown fruits and vegetables in his book by the same name. Depleted soil can only render foods deficient in vital nutrients, resulting in missing cogs in the nutrient chain, thereby creating an interference to the flow of vital life force in and through the body. This is a modality that I have found to be indispensable in my practice.

Acupuncture and several other techniques, such as BioEnergetic Synchronization (BEST), have also emerged as energy-based healing methodologies to take their places in Western Holistic Medicine.  Eastern healing traditions have long been harbingers of holistic healing and many of their traditions have found their way into our healthcare systems. Practices such as meditation and yoga have become popular, and gyms are popping up everywhere.

This revolution in health-and-wellness care has drawn the attention of the Guardian of the Threshold, the FDA and the AMA, as chiropractic boards began expanding their scope of practice to include procedures that heretofore have been the exclusive domain of Medicine.  With the emergence of Applied Clinical Nutrition, Contact Reflex Analysis (muscle testing) and Functional Endocrinology, such conditions as diabetes, hypertension, coronary heart disease, and even autoimmune disease are being treated and reversed by chiropractors and other alternative practitioners, much to the objection of medical licensing boards. Law suits have been filed and fines levied.

This is not stopping the evolution of health care, however. People have awakened and started to assume responsibility for their health, a responsibility that had been placed with trust in the willing and able hands of Modern Medicine — which unfortunately has cornered the market on the treatment of disease, especially of Diabetes, Coronary Heart Disease, Cancer, and other autoimmune diseases. 

“Keepers of the Flame”

“Alternative healthcare” made its debut in the last half of the twentieth century carrying the torch of holistic healing into the New Age of Aquarius. Holistic practitioners began popping up throughout the healing field. The words Attunement and Sound Healing entered our vocabulary as energy healing modalities. I was introduce to a model of Attunement in the late nineteen-sixties that works with the energy fields around the endocrine glands, as well as with the Chakra energy centers of the Eastern tradition and Reiki. I later incorporated Sound Healing into my attunement service. The consciousness of humanity has begun to shift to a higher frequency of awareness that has awakened a realization that we are spiritual beings having a human experience rather than physical beings having a spiritual experience.

This realization was actually dawning as early as the turn of the twentieth century when BJ Palmer published The Bigness of the Fellow Within in which he tells stories about the “Giant and the pigmy”– the inner spiritual Self and the outer mental self, or the “Innate Intelligence” and the “educated intelligence.” This realization lit up his mind and put a fire in his heart that burned passionately for several decades and was carried forward by those who came to the light of his shining and became inspired to bring forth a new paradigm of vibrational healing.

As the fire began to cool in their hearts and the light began to dim in their minds, the torch was set aside in lieu or a “more scientific” approach to Chiropractic. Now the torch has been given to others to carry forward, along with a new paradigm of health care which honors once again the innate healing powers of the body. We’ve come full cycle back, or forward, to our humble beginnings as magnetic healers, only now calling ourselves “Holistic Healers” and “Energy Workers.” A few colleges still teach principled chiropractic and a small but passionate number of chiropractors still carry the flame in their hearts and in their clinics. The Torch has not been entirely dropped.

The table has been turned

Alternative health care has now become Medicine’s nemesis as more and more doctors are returning to school and abandoning the reductionistic model in lieu of the holistic model of true health care. Physicians of all disciplines are attending seminars to educate and certify themselves in clinical nutrition, herbal medicine and other modalities emerging with the holistic paradigm. It’s what the people want and are asking for, and the people have the final say in such personal matters as their health. And the irony of it all is that health insurance doesn’t generally cover alternative health care, a forty-plus-billion-dollar industry. 

The wave has been set in motion and it will dissolve the monopolistic stronghold Medicine has assumed over health care.  It will ultimately be defeated by its nemesis and be forced to vacate its self-appointed role as the Guardian of the Threshold to the health care arena.  Licensing boards will not be able to stem the tide of this revolution as doctors and non-medical practitioners in the field of healthcare dare to take on the reversal and cure of diseases only Medicine has held the legal right to treat symptomatically. 

It’s a new day . . . thank God! And I am glad to have lived long enough to see it and be a part of its dawning. God bless our doctors, especially our surgeons, whose hearts are in the right place of compassion for the sick and suffering and have only a prescription pad and a scalpel between them and their patients.  The vast world of Mother Nature’s Cornucopia of natural medicines lies open and ready to heal all our ills. 

Thank you for sharing my thoughts. Do feel free to share yours. 

Here’s to your health and healing,

Anthony Palombo, DC

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Living Medicines Vs Pharmaceuticals, part 2: Healing Herbs

“When you use a living medicine and get well, you feel that the world is alive and aware and wants to help you. People often talk about saving the Earth, but how many times have you experienced the Earth saving you?”

Healing Herbs
Stephen BuhnerI find it interesting that toxic plants often move into damaged landscapes. Some specimens are harmful to cattle or sheep who graze the land. Others interfere with industrial agriculture or threaten people. They all have the same purpose: stopping the source of the damage so that the landscape can regenerate itself. —Stephen Buhner

My Chorale PicTo heal means to make whole again that which has been fractured or fragmented. What Stephen Buhner describes above about “toxic plants” moving in where landscapes have been damaged speaks to the intelligence of healing herbs. These botanical plants have a living, functioning intelligence. As part of our Mother Earth from which our physical bodies arise, their energetic fields are connected to our energetic fields by way of which they speak to us. When we give them our attention, ask them the right questions, and then listen to their answers — which may come in the form of an attraction toward them, or even an aversion — they reach out to help us with their healing essences.

We’ve all had the experience, when out in Nature, of being attracted toward certain plants and flowers. Could that attraction and repelling be telling us something about the gift of healing being offered to us by the plants and flowers?  Of course, some plants warn us to stay away from them, such as poison ivy or poison oak, if we have an allergic condition.

I love the way Stephen Buhner goes about introducing his clients to herbs in this interview by Akshay Ahuja in the December, 2014 issue of The SUN magazine.

Ahuja: How do you go about treating patients as an herbalist? 

Buhner: It’s a relationship, not a technique. My clients often feel lost and alone in their suffering. They need human companionship and also a sense of companionship with the living world. If I can, I’ll take them into the woods and introduce them to the plant that will be helping them. 

In my book “The Lost Language of Plants” I tell the story of a twenty-eight-year-old woman who was going through a messy divorce. Her periods were extremely irregular, with heavy cramping and bleeding, and her hands were always cold. I could see that her whole body was closed off, curled in on itself. Her fingernails were chewed back deeply, as if she were eating herself alive. 

I told her there was a plant I thought she should meet. We went for a walk through a pine forest, and when she saw the plant at the edge of a stream, a kind of force drew the woman and the plant together. The plant was Angelica, which has been used for thousands of years to help treat menstrual cramping. She spent a long time with it, then said a prayer and asked for help, and then we went to look for just the right Angelica. When we found it, she dug up the root, which has a beautiful smell. On the walk back she held it close to her. She was already carrying herself differently. The healing had started. 

She took a tincture made from the root, and within a month her period had normalized.

HERBS GROW WHERE THEY ARE MOST NEEDED

We are more connected to our immediate environment than we may be aware. I am convinced that many of the viruses and bacterial infections we encounter are an integral part of our local habitat — unless they are transported by travelers from other parts of the world, as was the case with the Ebola virus.  It’s common knowledge as well that for every disease and ailment there’s a plant remedy in the botanical world. I would be curious to know what kind of herbs are growing in that part of Africa where the Ebola virus erupted. I am equally as curious to know what kind of herbs grow abundantly in my neck of the woods. Buhner addresses this subject in the interview:

Ahuja: Many of the plants in Herbal Antibiotics aren’t native to North America, Do you think people should look first to the plants around them for medicine?

Buhner: The book was written to offer alternatives to people who might die of a resistant infection, so I wanted to list anything they could reliably use in that circumstance. Still, many natural antibiotics do grow in the United States. I live in the Southwestern desert, and Bidens grows all around our house. It’s invasive. Sida grows along the Gulf Coast, and some Sida species grow in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. They’re all considered invasive. In fact, the most potent medicines for emerging infections tend to be invasive botanicals that people are busy trying to eradicate.

These invasive plants don’t move into a region for no reason. Take, for example, the berberine-containing plant Phellodendron. Berberine-containing plants are used to treat parasites and infections from yeast, fungi, bacteria, and viruses. Goldenseal was probably the most potent berberine plant in the U.S. until it was harvested to near extinction in the late 1800s. Phellodendron, which is a massive tree,is invasive in exactly the same range that goldenseal was removed from. And if you cut just one branch, you’ve got enough berberine
plant to last a year.

I’ve found that if people are ill, the plants they need are almost always growing in their vicinity. I’ve watched plant populations change around me in places I’ve lived for thirty-some years, and they seem to shift in response to changes in my own disease complexes. This sounds airy-fairy to the Western reductive mind-set, but people have been commenting on it since Hippocrates. Plant populations rise and fall according to the needs of the ecosystem in which they grow, and that includes the animal life there, which includes us.

Ahuja: Yet we act to remove invasive plants from ecosystems.

Buhner: Yes, these plants are seen as alien invaders…. It‘s not understood that dandelion and burdock and a host of other common plants are non-natives that moved in and established a balance with local ecosystems, or that many of the plants targeted for eradication happen to be effective against the exact diseases that local people are contracting. Japanese knotweed is invasive all up and down the East Coast, and its root is the most specific medicine there is for the treatment of Lyme disease. There‘s a Lonicera species – a honeysuckle that reduces mosquito egg–laying wherever it grows. The mosquitoes that it discourages happen to carry dengue fever and a number of other viruses that cause encephalitis – inflammation of the brain. And it turns out that the plant is also a treatment for inflammation in the central nervous system.When plants move into an ecosystem, they do so because the ecosystem has been disrupted. The problem is that people don‘t ask, Why is this plant here?

Buhner offers suggestions on treating specific health conditions which I thought my readers would find helpful.

Aruja: My father is around sixty. I don‘t think he could imagine being without his daily blood-pressure pills. What are some alternative treatments for his condition? 

Buhner: Regular fasting will lower blood pressure and keep it low. Certain kinds of simple, focused meditation will lower it. And many herbs, such as hawthorn and garlic, will do the same.

Ahuja: Have you worked much with cancer? 

Buhner: I haven‘t. The only type I have regularly treated is skin cancer, usually on the face. I learned the use of a traditional herb for it from a Mexican curandera many years ago. The root of Swertia radiata – also known as monument plant or green gentian – is finely powdered, then mixed with Vaseline (nothing else will do) and applied to the cancer. It‘s left covered for three days. Once the bandage is removed, the cancer generally comes with it or lifts off with minimal effort. I have never had that treatment fail. It is easy, efficient, and noninvasive. . . . 

I apologize for the lengthy excerpts, but I wanted to share with you the spirit and energy of the interview as well as the content, which sometimes direct quotes best convey.  We will explore some of the more specific uses of healing herbs in the next post. Until then, here’s to your health and haling . . . naturally!

Anthony Palombo, DC

Visit my HealingTones.org blog for inspiring articles on various topics. Current theme is “Golden Age and Golden Race.”

Also visit Laurence Layne’s Herb Shop online at HerbShop.HealingWatersClinic.com for great information about herbs along with easy ordering of products.

Credits: The picture above is by Roger Davies and is used in the article in The SUN which I am referencing.

CAUTION: Herbs are powerful natural medicines and should not be used indiscriminately. None of the above information should be construed to diagnose or treat any disease nor to preclude sensible medical care and professional supervision. Medi-Herb and Standard Process products are only available through licensed physicians and certified healthcare professionals and should only be used under the supervision of an certified herbalist or healthcare practitioner.

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The Affordable “Disease Care” Law

Tony's picture 2 from Peggy THE AFFORDABLE “DISEASE CARE” LAW

With all the fuss going on over “Obamacare,” I’ve just got to get up on my soapbox for this blog post.

While listening to some of the political talking points and patients’ viewpoints on the current health care crisis a few days ago on television, one woman with MS decried the fact that her drugs alone cost her $4400 a month, and I thought: “Oh My God! This is what we’re getting ourselves into with this so-called Affordable Health Care program!” — a misnomer if there ever was one.  It would be more accurate to call it “Affordable Disease Care,” because that’s what it provides: care for those who have diseases, for whatever the reasons and causes, mostly related to unhealthy lifestyles, poverty, and environmental pollution. 

Just for a perspective on how this pans out where the rubber meets the road: it will take 44 of us paying our minimum $115 monthly Affordable Health Care premiums to pay for this woman’s drugs — drugs that do not even “cure” her MS and restore her health, but that merely treat the symptoms of her disease so that she can go on living a lifestyle that has resulted — and continues to result — in MS.  Now, you tell me what’s wrong with this picture.

But, then, that’s why so-called “health insurance” was invented in the first place — by a group of hospitals during the depression, by the way:

It was during the Depression that hospitals banded together to offer prepaid coverage to citizens. Prepaid hospital coverage was a way for hospitals to avoid the financial failure that befell the banking industry. The approach worked so well that doctors followed suit a few years later and Blue Cross Blue Shield organizations were born. Little did anyone know that the seeds for runaway costs eighty years later had been planted. (THE HISTORY OF HEALTH CARE COSTS AND HEALTH INSURANCE — A Wisconsin Primer by LINDA GORMAN, PH.D.)

Read the article. It’s very enlightening. The primary motive was to make sure hospitals and doctors got paid for their services to the sick — not to the healthy.  So it really should be called “sick care insurance.”  And they won’t let any of us real health care professionals in on their racket. Well, after fighting for inclusion and insurance equality, licensed chiropractors are allowed to dip into the money pool, but only to treat backaches and neck injuries along with disorders related to misaligned spinal vertebrae (known as a “subluxation complex”) — in other words, muscular-skeletal disorders. Diseases can only be treated by an MD and then only with drugs and surgery. Natural medicines, like herbs and therapeutic supplements, are not allowed. An MD’s scope of practice is limited to disease care. Therefore, natural medicines that contribute to health are not covered by any insurance policies that I’m aware of, certainly not by Medicare. Medicare will not pay for chiropractic maintenance care either. The chiropractor, in order to get a relatively puny amount of compensation from Medicare, has to say that the monthly spinal adjustment some of us like to have just to maintain our health is for a “new injury,” even though it isn’t.  You see, one has to be a little bit dishonest in order to play the game. 

Oh, yes, the system can be manipulated and is on a daily basis.  It’s a racket on both sides of the playing field.  We even call it the “health care arena.” It’s all a big and expensive game for which the spectators pay premium dollars every month — plus a co-payment — in order to be allowed into the arena.  Of course, they have to have a treatable disease in order to actually get out on the field and get passed around like a football while the doctor-players dip their hands into the insurance pool each time they pass or run the ball.

IT’S A COLLUSION AND UNHOLY ALLIANCE  

Do you actually believe that medical science will ever find a “cure” for all the diseases they’ve invented in order to have a legitimate reason to play in the healthcare “field” — another game term — and collect a fee from the spectators’ pool of insurance monies — not to mention running the risk of cutting off the billions of research dollars it gets in government grants to find a cure for cancer and alzheimer’s ?  Not on your life.

In case you have forgotten, the “government” is US, you and me, whether we’re paying an insurance premium or not. Our tax dollars go towards keeping this game in play — along with all the dollars collected in countless marches against breast cancer, diabetes and every other disease we can think of that lets us believe we are doing something by paying to walk in order to end disease on the planet.

WAKE UP PEOPLE! IT WILL NEVER HAPPEN!

For one thing, it would collapse the nation’s economy. Yes, I’m being deliberately facetious and critical. But,then, critical thinking is what we all need to exercise these days if we are to affect real changes in health care.  First, let’s call it what it is: disease care. Then let’s start demanding that insurance companies start including honest and real health care in their coverage.  I’ve heard that the state of Washington has been requiring insurance companies to pay for alternative health care for several years now. I don’t know how their doing with their law or even if it is still being enforced. Any of my readers know?

Now, let me get real here.  After all, we live in a less-than-perfect world. Disease is a fact of life as life is now lived by humans on the planet, and I am truly thankful we have developed coping methods and technology to help us traverse the toxic and dangerous terrain we have created on the surface of our planetary home among the stars. We simply could not make it without the help of our wonderful and dedicated ER doctors and nurses who get us through traumatic crises we would otherwise not likely survive. Every time I think of my by-pass operation of 2003 I thank God for the blessed surgeon who held my heart in his hands and grafted new veins and arteries into it so that I could live to see another day, another year, another decade now. God bless him and his team.

I tell my patients to be thankful for their doctors and the drugs they are taking to help them through their health crisis while they embark on a new path to health and wellness with alternative health care and lifestyle changes.  But they know and we all know that taking drugs is not the way to go in our health care. I certainly hope the young lady with MS finds her way to an alternative health care practitioner so that she can let go of her expensive drugs and toxic lifestyle.

HEALTHY ALTERNATIVES ARE ABUNDANTLY AVAILABLE 

We’ve got to find another way, and we have in fact made huge inroads into healthier lifestyles and natural healing technologies. Real health care is abundantly available today.  It’s just not covered by medical insurance, and I’m sure it won’t be covered by the Affordable Health Care Law. For now, we have to pay for it out of our own pockets. But, after all, isn’t my health my responsibility? It’s certainly not yours, nor the government’s, nor the insurance industry’s for that matter. Nor is it my doctors’ responsibility. It’s mine and mine alone. If we each took care of our own health, there would be no need for disease care insurance. 

A RADICAL SHIFT IN CONSCIOUSNESS IS UNDERWAY

What I am really talking about here is the need for a radical shift in the way we think about and go about the care of our health, of our precious and faithful bodies. It’s a change in consciousness that is required so that, as we each one awake and contribute into the mass consciousness our own enlightenment and perspective, we help blaze new paths to freedom from disease.

There is an awakening taking place in human consciousness and it will continue to expand and fill the collective human mind and heart with light and love for truth so that those in positions to offer collective leadership and assume responsibility for collective programs that facilitate whole-health care and healthy lifestyles will continue to have realizations that open up new and affordable ways of doing things on the planet. It’s already happening, as my wife and I were acknowledging at the dinner table just yesterday. It’s just happening “under the radar” of today’s media. It’s all over social media and the web. The new paradigm is now well in place. 

THERE’S NO MIND-MADE SOLUTION TO THE MIND-MADE PROBLEM

Is there a solution to the problem we’re facing with our current health care delivery system? I don’t see one. Every new solution seems to produce only more problems in this mind-made world. The ultimate solution is individual assumption of personal responsibility. Until that happens, we can, at best, create stepping stones and bridges to the other side, away from sick care and toward true health care. All it takes is a little interest and education.

I would make one suggestion, and that would be to put in place a requirement in our Affordable Health Care Law that, in order to engage the system, a person would have to show that he or she has first engaged a healthy lifestyle and is doing something to educate him/or herself about alternative health care and sound nutrition. Even then, it would only work in an honest world where people are awake to the way the natural world works in according to natural laws.

“NOTHING’S WRONG. EVERYTHING MATTERS.”

A friend penned those words in a poem. Disease is the body’s natural adaptation to the insults and injury brought on by an unnatural lifestyle. There’s nothing wrong with it. It keeps our species from extinction by helping us adapt to an increasingly toxic and anti-life environment. It is we with our toxic lifestyle who are out of harmony with Natural Law, and we reap the consequences and pay with our good health and very lives to maintain that disharmony. At the rate we are going, we may not be able to adapt fast enough and our species may yet go extinct unless we make radical changes soon.

Some people say alternative health care is expensive. No it isn’t. Sick care is what’s expensive, increasingly so. That’s why that hand-full of hospitals and doctors invented sick insurance back along the way. Their’s was a vision of things big and far. Real health care is affordable and far less costly than drugs and surgery. It’s safer, too. One simply has to get beyond the fear barrier and let go of one’s false sense of security and dependence on drugs. All insurance salesmen know that fear is the driving force that closes the sale in the absence of wisdom and informed decision making. That’s why I have never in my working years bought health insurance, nor professional liability insurance for that matter. I simply would not buy into a fear-based system. The only two so-called “malpractice” law suits ever filed against me in my early years of practice were suddenly dropped when the assailants found out I didn’t have liability insurance. And the only health care insurance I’ve ever owned and used is Chiropractic and wholistic health care. My heart by-pass surgery was a gift from God. Thank you, God, and Poudre Valley Hospital in Fort Collins, Colorado. For that matter, all doctors are gifts from God.

Now, of course, I have Medicare to cover any catastrophic health crises I may encounter in my ageing body. It was a blessing to have when I had a worn out knee replaced a few years ago. I take no medications. Nada. Instead, I take a handful of Mother Nature’s medicines of wholefood supplements every day prescribed by a colleague in Houston whom I visit regularly for my health care. I also exercise moderately and eat sensibly. Don’t need much food to maintain my level of activity anyway. “An apple a day keeps the doctor away.” Not too many of my clients even do that. I also sleep eight hours at night and do things I enjoy — like writing these blogs, reading a good novel, singing with the Masterworks Chorale, cooking, gardening and traveling with my wife and traveling partner. Above all, I find it essential to maintain a spiritual practice to nurture my Soul’s inner life, such as meditation and attunement. After all, physical substance is shaped, nourished and maintained by spiritual substance. “As above, so below. As within, so without.” A conscious working connection with Source within is essential to the health of the whole person.

ABUSE IS INEVITABLE

Abuse is inevitable in systems where billions of dollars are pouring in from the masses. Even Medicare is abused by doctors who know darn good and well that an old person is not going to benefit that much by a hip replacement. My own ageing mother was a case in point. She had hip replacement in her 80’s at the expense of the taxpayers but was too weak to go through rehab and never really walked well again after the surgery, which was, at best, but an expensive aspirin. Between a pace maker and joint replacement, Medicare paid out over thirty-thousand dollars to her doctors and the hospital before she finally used up all her physical substance just surviving to the over-ripe old age of 90. Did her doctors take advantage of Medicare? It appeared so to me. She could have easily been allowed to end her earthly journey honorably at 80 and avoid her last decade of medical disease management. It seems we do things nowadays just because we can and because it’s covered by insurance. What ever happened to allowing the natural process of dying as an honorable way of leaving this world? Does medicine have the right to interfere with that process? Does it have the right to a monopoly on health care, and now to a government subsidized protection plan for that monopoly? Because that’s exactly what the Affordable Health Care Law is. This law says that Americans must have sick care insurance or pay a penalty. Given the current dietary habits and lifestyles of most Americans, it’s really not a bad idea.

The insurance industry itself will eventually collapse, as all dishonest and abused systems must. I think it’s a telling sign that unless the young and healthy sign up for it, Obamacare will not be adequately funded by the people. Many young Americans are apparently opting for the penalty in lieu of the monthly premium. Makes good sense to me. We may yet be forced to return to embracing an honorable death as an alternative to a life of disease management. It is, as one health author put it some years back, “cheaper to die.” Of course, the best alternative by far is health and wellness care.

Well, that’s my contribution to the current conversation on health care. Just one doctor’s viewpoint. You’re welcome to share yours. Until my next post, here’s to your health and healing!

Anthony Palombo, D.C.

Visit my HealingTones.org blog for more thought-provoking articles on transformation and spiritual ascent.

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