During August, 2002, in an email from Dr. Mercola, there was such a message
that
(because I've been saying this for some time) ties-in with my personal and
family
member experiences, including a lot of MBA ONLINE customers -- and that is
that "YOU MUST BEGIN TO TAKE CARE OF YOUR OWN HEALTH"
Why? Because no one else is going to do it for you.
The Mercola web site is at:
http://www.mercola.com/2002/aug/21/medical_system.htm
You
can check it out yourself. For simplicity and convenience, however,
I have
placed important portions of the message (not all of it) below:
The American Health System is Nearing Collapse aug 2002 Mercola web site
[The article was written by "others" and comments are by Dr. Mercola]
"We are living in the most amazing era of medicine in human history.
We all know that
all is not well with American medicine. We are dealing with a system of
healthcare delivery that is, at its root, dysfunctional.
The problem (the crisis) is the system by which care is delivered, which has simply
not matured at the same pace as the technologies and treatments now available.
I've traveled all over the country. I've traveled to Spain and Germany. I've been to Canada.
I've discussed healthcare with some of the leading policymakers and caregivers in the world.
Sadly, I have to report that in Western society broadly, the various systems of care
are eroding with ever-greater rapidity.
I've come to one central conclusion: The way we provide care is in jeopardy of collapse.
It's clouded by regulatory
burdens that are confusing, duplicative and extremely time-consuming.
Physicians and nurses almost have to obtain advanced degrees in business administration, accounting and jurisprudence just to run their offices from day
to day.
Patients have to fill out endless forms; get transferred from place to place;
worry about what insurance will pay for what treatment and at what cost.
We have to fundamentally change the current healthcare delivery system in our country.
The myriad rules, regulations and restrictions that make obtaining good healthcare
difficult, if not impossible, have to be reviewed carefully and, when necessary,
jettisoned like useless ballast.
But there's another area of reform that must - I repeat, must - be among the highest
priorities we can develop: malpractice reform. America is experiencing a medical
malpractice insurance coverage crisis that is increasing the cost of healthcare,
decreasing access to doctors and hospitals for many patients and lowering
the overall quality of care provided to patients."
Tommy G. Thompson is U.S. secretary of health and human services.
This is excerpted and condensed from his remarks July 18 in
Chicago to the American Medical Association
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
DR. MERCOLA'S COMMENT:
I believe my journalist friend Nick Regush summarized the problem quite nicely earlier this year:
"There is no way to be nice about this. There is no point in raising false hopes.
There is no treatment or vaccine in sight.
There is no miracle breakthrough on the horizon.
Medicine, as we know it, is dying. It is entering a terminal phase.
What began as an acute illness reached the chronic stage about a decade ago
and its progression towards death has been remarkably swift and well beyond
anything anyone could have predicted.
The disease is caused by conflict of interest, tainted research, greed for big bucks,
pretentious doctors and scientists, lying, cheating, invasion by the morally bankrupt
marketing automatons of the drug industry, derelict politicians and federal and state
regulators - all seasoned with huge doses of self-importance and foul odor."
As the article above documents, and as many of us have predicted,
the traditional system is ready to collapse.
I do not share this to be the purveyor of bad news, but to announce that a new day is dawning.
As many of you
are already aware, the drugs and surgery the existing medical
establishment has foisted on you are not the solution to better health, but merely
their methods of making more money off of you by treating only diseases -
diseases their paradigm helped to foster in the first place.
Consider that:
Retail pharmacies filled 3 billion prescriptions in the U.S. in 2000.
We are currently spending 1.4 trillion dollars for healthcare in the US, or 14% of our
current overall budget. That is projected to double in the next 8 years to 3 trillion
dollars, a staggering 17% of our total national output.
Folks, those are figures in trillions, not billions.
Three trillion dollars is 3,000 billion dollars.
"The consequences of this shift of resources will be enormous for companies, workers
and
the government. It will mean a massive transfer of the nation's income, including profits,
wages and tax dollars, to disease-oriented traditional medical care.
"Employees will face an increasingly stark situation: the more money they receive in
on-the-job benefits, the less they'll receive in wages, pensions, or vacation time."
- From Business Week August 26, 2002 p 144.
The sad tragedy is that we are spending all of this money on disease management focused
on drugs and surgery and our return on this investment is profoundly poor.
Business Week further comments:
"Perhaps one-third of all medical spending-some $600 billion dollars-may be unnecessary, out-of-date, or even
dangerous treatments."
The recent articles below, each of which discusses $3 billion dollar wastes
of your money, evidence this.
We are not achieving the high levels of health that we could be.
Increasing amounts of people do not have the
energy they need to get through the day,
while millions of others are suffering with painful crippling diseases because
they have violated basic health principles.
Many of you know that my goal is to facilitate the transformation of the current system
that is on the verge of collapse. The approaches I have described in over 20,000
pages on Mercola.com over the last five years offer the solution to this crisis.
We can solve well over 90% of the all chronic diseases with simple, inexpensive natural therapies.
Following the eating plan and radically reducing grain and sugar intake while optimizing omega 6:3 fat ratio will
likely reduce over 50% of the health problems Americans currently experience.
I know this is true because I have successfully treated many thousands of patients
from all over the country with these techniques.
Mercola.com is already an outstanding health resource for you.
But beginning this autumn and slated for completion at the end of the year, we will
launch powerful new technology offering you a simple, one-stop method of obtaining
the knowledge and advice to solve nearly any health care problem without
expensive drugs, vitamin supplements, or surgeries.
My approach in providing you this solution is two-phased.
The first involves establishing all the information
necessary to solve your problems.
This has been a massive undertaking stretching over several years, but we are
nearing completion, and much of this expertise is already available to you on Mercola.com.
Our
refinements will include making all this wisdom even easier to access - literally putting
the research and knowledge of many experts right at your fingertips.
In the second phase, targeted for completion in the near future, Mercola.com will offer
you the world's most sophisticated database of natural medicine healthcare practitioners.
You, the user community, will rate them.
[I think we've covered most of the important portions of the messages]
************************
Now it may be time for me to tell you:
Page accessed
times.
Up-dated October, 2002.
