A Healthier Choice
(Washington Post) Because of our increasingly deficient health care system, more people than ever are turning to alternative medicine. Some 40% of Americans now rely on optional forms of medical treatment, a sharp rise from the 34% reported six years ago by the New England Journal of Medicine. At the same time, public criticism is mounting over costly diagnostic testing and drug treatments that fail to consider the patient as a whole. Alternative advocates concede that conventional care excels in cases of trauma, infectious diseases, medical emergencies, and ailments that require complex surgical techniques. But many argue that standard treatments can’t prevent or manage new generations of bacteria strains, i.e., hard-to-treat diseases such as chronic fatigue syndrome which, they say, hint at major health care problems to come. Meanwhile, health care costs in the U.S. continue to soar. According to Future Medicine Publishing, treatment of chronic disease now accounts for about 85 percent of our national health care bill while only a tiny percentage of medical funding goes toward stopping these diseases before they start. The result is that American health consumers get less than people do in nations with similar living conditions.
"Perhaps the greatest evidence of the depth of the crisis is that we have come to accept such levels of chronic disease as normal, despite evidence that much of it is preventable," the late Surgeon General C. Everett Koop wrote in his Report on Nutrition and Health. The Centers for Disease Control concurred, noting that 54 percent of heart disease, 37 percent of cancer, 50 percent of cerebrovascular disease, and 49 percent of atherosclerosis is preventable. Dietary imbalances, Koop concluded, are the leading preventable contributors to premature death in the U.S.
Dr. Stuart Nunnally, who practices biological dentistry in Marble Falls, Texas, believes that problems in the mouth are overwhelmingly the root causes of disease. "This is a fact overlooked not only by mainstream doctors but mainstream dentists, " Dr. Nunnally said. "Traditionally we look for look for one symptom and we throw some drug at it to clear it up. The truth is we need to look at these things as being much more complex and must consider many options. Otherwise, we’re going to be running upstream." Board-certified cardiologist Dr. E Thomas Levy, also a lawyer, who practices at the Riordan Clinic in Wichita, Ks., believes that periodontal disease is associated with, or causes, coronary artery disease, diabetes and metabolic syndrome, high blood pressure, cerebral vascular disease and stroke, vascular disease in general, pulmonary arthritis, osteoporosis, inflammatory bowel disease, chronic kidney disease, autoimmune dais cancer and neurological disease. "This is staring us in the face," Levy said. "The mouth causes and/or contributes to virtually all degenerative diseases."
Unfortunately, charges won’t occur as long as society continues to glorify "heroic" surgical procedures and relies on the profusion of prescription tranquilizers, antidepressants, analgesics and anti-inflammatory agents that mask symptoms and entrap patients in a needless cycle of dependency.
The growing acceptance of alternative medicine represents a return to the principals that are central to understanding health and disease since ancient times. While modern physicians are increasingly open to incorporating alternative remedies into their own treatment protocols, much of the medical establishment — out of self-interest, ignorance, or arrogance — continues to thumb its nose at methodologies that haven’t been subjected to double blind studies, even those time tested for thousands of years by multiple generations of people across the world who have benefited from them.
