No incentive to cure us

Take your medicine. But which medicine should you really be taking?

With the passage of time I become more convinced than ever that medical centres and hospitals are no more than wholesale departments of pharmaceutical conglomerates. There is no incentive for them to cure us.

The pharmaceutical giants would go broke if their chemicals cured us; in my view they have a vested interest in our ill-health and abysmal lifestyles. The Chinese way is you pay your doctor when you are well and if sick you stop paying until you recover. The incentive is reversed.

Medical centres tend to be pill dispensers where little analysis is given to avoidance or cause. Commonsense suggests most ailments are avoidable and lifestyle related. If more resources were spent on illness avoidance you could probably reduce attendance by about 75 percent.

If that were to happen the biggest casualty would be the health services and the pharmaceuticals. The financial impact would be similar in effect to finding a way to replace oil with water.

My first brushes with life – and death – were when my sons’ were stricken by the notorious global child-killer whooping cough. One was twenty-months old and the younger ten months old. Our local practice simply offered advice by telephone. It amounted to what we were doing anyway; 24-hours tender loving care.

At my wits end I browsed books on the killer disease in bookshops and library. Several weeks on, driven to distraction and in fear for their lives I took my infants to what I would have earlier dismissed as a quack; an herbalist.

His attitude was; a pity you didn’t come to see me sooner. I gave the children the natural medicine he prescribed and can best describe it as the laying on of the hands. The cure was immediate and there were no side effects. Don’t mention the power of suggestion; the kids were too young to know what was going on. We were bowled over and relieved.

At the time I suffered from painful mouth ulcers. Both doctors and dentists had shrugged and prescribed over the counter expensive solutions, which were not a solution. Desperate to try anything I went to the same herbalist. The attitude was similar; why waste time on conventional healthcare?

He took a blood test, which gave him the results he expected. I was prescribed natural herbal medicine. My mouth ulcers, after years of irritation, stopped and never returned.

In later years I suffered considerable knee tissue discomfit. Climbing steps or an incline was a formidable undertaking. Conventional medicos could only shrug and suggest scans and possible surgery. When young they said it was part of growing up; now it was part of growing old.

Staying in Latvia I discovered that their philosophy is to use conventional medicine only when natural methods have failed.  I was prescribed a homeopathic (natural herbal) medicine. Within a day or so all discomfit had disappeared. Among other things I yesterday climbed to Krimulda Castle in Sigulda; daunting enough to discourage any teenager.

I suspect much of conventional medicine is overrated; a self-serving money-sucking industry dependent on us remaining in ill-health. By the way; I asked the herbalist, a former engineer, why he had become an enthusiastic herbalist practitioner.

Years earlier his wife had been diagnosed by the NHS with multiple sclerosis He was told she would be wheelchair-bound within 12-months, dead within 5 years. Distressed, he took her to an herbalist. Twelve years on she was happily doing her shopping; without a wheelchair.