As an adult, you have the legal authority to exercise primary control over all your healthcare decisions. Here is the million-dollar question: do you exercise that control, or do you leave it to someone else? I am guessing most of us do not, even though we have every right to do so.
Healthcare providers are service providers. Patients are their customers. Despite the many flaws inherent in our healthcare system, the provider-patient relationship is one of its advantages. You and I pay for healthcare. Therefore, we reserve the legal right to determine how it is delivered. We make that determination by being careful about how we spend our healthcare dollars.
Unfortunately, private health insurance tends to take some of that control away by dictating rules under which subscribers access healthcare services. But none of us is forced to use health insurance. And even within the health insurance paradigm, we don’t necessarily have to accept a doctor’s diagnosis or a therapy he or she might recommend. We still have freedom to choose.
Western Medicine Doesn’t Have All the Answers
Personally, I value the fact that I have healthcare freedom. I think it is important that I be able to exercise primary control over all of my healthcare decisions. Why? Because Western medicine does not have all the answers. Our healthcare system says otherwise, but reality tells the true story.
For example, there are certain plant-based medicines that Western healthcare systems refuse to embrace. But those medicines still help millions of people around the world. What’s more, some of them have been in use for centuries – if not millennia.
In Utah, one particular plant-based medicine is only accessible by way of a state-issued Medical Card. Patients can visit pain clinics like KindlyMD for medical evaluations and card recommendations. Tens of thousands of Utah patients have already done so. And yet, despite plenty of anecdotal evidence suggesting the alternative medicine works for conditions like chronic pain and PTSD, our healthcare system remains largely unconvinced.
A Serious Lack of Knowledge
Many of the problems our healthcare system cannot seem to solve are rooted in a serious lack of knowledge. Don’t misunderstand. This is not a slight against healthcare providers, researchers, and medical facilities. It is simply an acknowledgement of some of nature’s basic fundamentals.
Despite all our knowledge, we have barely scratched the surface of human health. We know a lot less about biology and physiology than we care to admit. We are only kidding ourselves when we claim to be so scientifically advanced that we have the answers for everything.
Many in Western medicine refuse to believe that plant-based medicines work only because they do not understand the mechanisms behind them. Likewise for regenerative therapies like stem cell and PRP injections. But failing to understand the mechanism behind a particular therapy does not negate that therapy’s effectiveness.
We Need a More Open Mind
It seems to me that we need a more open mind in Western medicine. All of us would be better off if we stopped assuming that prescription drugs and invasive procedures were the only legitimate ways to treat injury and disease. Medications and surgeries aren’t even the half of it.
The practice of medicine existed long before there were prescription pads and surgical suites. And with the exception of the Middle Ages, people lived long and happy lives without invasive Western medicine. It is time that we got back to some of those old ways.
I am the primary decision maker when it comes to my healthcare. I intend to keep it that way, even if that means having to find a new doctor.
