TRADITIONAL MEDICINE

So-called "traditional medicine" did not exist as we know it before the early
1920's. Also known as "allopathic” medicine, it is adversary based. It "wages
war" on bacteria, viruses and misunderstood processes in the body, and
sometimes even the body itself. It "fights" all perceived causes of disease,
including the body's very own defenses which may be attempting to deal with the
influence of negative nutrition-diets, food additives and other chemicals,
environmental pollution, toxic environments and attitudes. These primary
contributors to health challenges, using up and overwhelming the body’s
resources, have produced arthritis, cancer, heart disease, stroke, and other
degenerative disorders. Instead of correcting the damaging conditions of
negative nutrition and toxic pollution among other things, by replacing them
with health-supportive diets and environments, traditional science, technology
and the primary orientation of medicine is to counterattack the "enemy" with
any of three basic modalities:

1) Pharmaceutical Drugs

2) Surgery

3) Radiation.

Traditional Medicine, as practiced today, is conservatively estimated to kill
no less than 200,000 people per year in the United States alone due to drug
reactions and iatrogenic complications. By example, a recent study on breathing
machines indicated 15,000 hospital deaths a year alone because the ventilator
settings are set to high, and a study carried out at Cleveland General Hospital
suggests that about 5% of all hospital admissions may be iatrogenic. Nearly
half of these episodes were felt to be avoidable. (Archives of Internal
Medicine 146:1931, October, 1986.

Iatrogenic problems are conditions induced by physician intervention, medical
mistakes and accidents, or they are the side effects of prescribed drugs and
treatments which are, by their very nature, harmful. Many allopathic doctors
are taught or assume that these risks an acceptable component of modern
medicine. Thus, surgery seeks to remove the evidence of problems, and man-made chemical drugs manipulate the body's processes, suppressing or killing the
causes of symptoms. In fact, symptoms are the body's cry for help, calling
attention to an area that needs amending in order to produce health and well
being. But the symptom is not the problem. The problem is what caused the body
to produce the symptom to call attention to the problem. Instead of attending
to what is creating the symptom, Traditional Medicine interprets the body's
communications (symptoms) as evidence of the body's failing.

In the case of Cancer, the most widely used strategy is the use of chemothepy,
radiation, or surgery or combinations of them, yet none of these address the
cause of Cancer. The remaining evidence of their use indicates that all too
often the so called "cure" is more harmful than the disease itself. And if the
physician does not go alone with the dictates of the system and employs any
other strategy, even if it works, the well intentioned physician can loose
their medical license, their income and possibly their very freedom.

Of course, anyone who has suffered a trauma and sought medical help is grateful
to Traditional Medicine, and the impressive miracles of modern technology. But
surgery, drugs and radiation do not cure the cause of disease. Only the body
can cure. Because the body evolved on natural principles and follows them, it
inherently knows how to heal itself when supported in doing so. We only have to
look and see what it eventually becomes after beginning as a single cell, to
marvel at it's wisdom. The function of surgery, drugs and radiation, however,
is to suppress or manage symptoms, described by traditional practitioners as
"symptom management." Surgery typically involves high risk, and drugs and
radiation by their very nature cause harm, more commonly known as "side
effects." In almost all cases, man-made chemicals interfere with the body's
natural design function to correct unhealthy or dis-eased states, overriding
the natural design to suppress the communications the body is sending. There
are even drugs designed to overcome the body's defense systems built in to
protect the brain from dangerous intrusions, manipulating their way past the
blood-brain barrier in an effort to impose precisely what the body was designed
to oppose in preservation of it's well being.

Traditional Medicine is Un-Natural Medicine.

If one accepts that the body's design and it's potential for health is a
product of nature and nature's design, then Traditional Medicine is Unnatural
Medicine. This is the form of medicine that has overwhelmingly dictated medical
practices and enlisted the exclusive support of medical insurance companies,
the American Medical Association, legislators, government agencies such as the
Food and Drug Administration, pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, special
interest groups, and most of society persuaded by an array of marketing
techniques that is essentially akin to brain washing. There are ongoing
attempts to supress or eradicate almost all forms of natural healing using
intimidation, threats, peer pressure, legislation and by outright brute force.
Many a practitioner utilizing means other than "traditional" in their support
of healing have found themselves arrested, prosecuted, discredited and barred
from practice. Some have had their offices invaded by gun-carrying SWAT teams
or federal or state marshals, terrorizing doctors, patients and staff,
violating patient privacy and confidentiality, and confiscating the doctor’s
entire records of practice. In a free society espousing the best health care
system in the world, this is a travesty of epoch proportion and it is legal. In
fact, there is currently a growing attempt by multinational pharmaceutical
companies to spread their markets by influencing international law through the
World Health Organization, the United Nations and the United States Legislative
system. The strategies appear as subtle attempts to eventually bring all
healing modalities under government control including herbal, vitamin and
mineral supplementation categorizing them as prescribed drugs, unfortunately
putting them into the domain of the least qualified "health" professionals:
licensed medical doctors. In fact, the pharmeucitical drug orientation of
Traditional Medicine today so limits the most effective resources available to
the physician that the system invites mistakes, abuse and fraud. The ever
threatening litigious climate in the United States creates an incentive to
suppress the truth regarding the very subject.

Protecting the most profitable and only trillion dollar per year industry on
our planet, what we are seeing is a marketing strategy designed to expand and
maintain the influence and control of drug companies over the health and well
being of the general population of the planet. In the United States we observe
a blatant conflict of interest by the Food and Drug Administration in its
ongoing attempts to protect the drug industries and their development of new
drugs, while at the same time suppressing anything representing a natural
approach to addressing the same health problems. While the Food and Drug
Administration has a formidable task, it makes one ask just what is the FDA's
priority when it comes to peoples health, and what is the priority of the
legislators who create laws supporting such endeavors? As it turns out, most of
the medical experts in charge of these dangerous impositions, are the least
qualified to deal in matters of health. Their very education excludes even
minimal inquiry into what makes a person healthy. They specialize almost
entirely in disease and its management, and generally speaking, their own state
of health is an overwhelming testament to their own lack of expertise. In most
cases, their very education has become their greatest limitation to making a
difference. Laced with the most covert of superstitions, so called modern
medicine in the United States is responsible for almost four times more deaths
in one year than the total of all American troop fatalities in the entire 13
years of the Viet Nam war. The questions are; can the profit and survival
orientation of this type of medical system afford for people to be healthy and
are the people managing this type of system the people we want exercising
absolute control over our well being?

• ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE

Alternative Medicine is known by many names, but it is distinguished by its
attempt to follow natural principles established by nature to deal with
problems that arise in the body. It is less interested in finding patentable
solutions, and more interested in discovering how nature and health work as an
ecology so as to better respond to the individual and their needs. In this
endeavor, personal experience, patient feedback and empirical evidence are
taken seriously, with science one more advisor to be considered, part of a team
effort that includes the patient in their own healing. At its ideal best, it
does not separate the wholeness of who patients are, as if their minds,
emotions, spirits, bodies and body parts are all not connected. The focus is on
a "natural" state of health that includes the health of people's whole being.
This brand of healing is also referred to as "wholistic," or "holistic"
healing.

Alternative Medicine utilizes physical and nonphysical modalities, and
essentially, it tends to be nonadversarial. It relates to the body as a source
of intelligence that is the greatest ally in healing. Alternative Medicine is
as diverse as nature itself and may involve nutrition, nutrient
supplementation, yoga, herbs, homeopathy, hypnotherapy, self-hypnosis,
acupuncture, ayurveda, massage, energy work, faith healing, lifestyle change,
Macrobiotics, Naturopathy, Nutritional, Chiropractic, Oriental and Osteopathic
Medicine and many other methods that support people in creating lives more
consistent with health, healing and well being.

If one accepts that the body's design and its potential for health comes from
the design nature gave it with that potential for health designed in, then
Alternative Medicine is actually Natural Medicine.

COMING FULL CIRCLE

Today in the United States there are two forms of medicine:

• UNNATURAL ("Traditional" Medicine); and

• NATURAL ("Alternative" Medicine).

WIN-WIN

There is room for all practitioners to participate and contribute to health,
well being and healing. Each area of knowledge and expertise has something of
value to offer, and healing's potential is expanded by the synergy of all
methods joining in a common interest determined to serve a healing purpose. It
has a greater effect when people work together, rather than competing. Even if
their focus is diverse, their common intention to heal creates a sense of
community that is in itself healing. That alignment is consistent with how the
body operates, many parts serving the healthful interests of the whole, each
doing its share and contributing where its expertise is most valuable and
appropriate in achieving the healing success.

One of our goals at Lifestar is to help establish and implement this
synergistic relationship between ideas and people.

 

“Come to the edge”... he said.
They said “we are afraid”.
“Come to the edge”... he said
They came...he pushed, and they flew.

...Guillaume Apollinaire