It is laudable for Dr. Brian Rotenberg to advocate “a more realistic attitude toward medical necessity” (“What should be covered by publicly funded health care?” Western News, May 12) about rising demands despite shrinking resources. However, the best way for OHIP to avoid bankruptcy is to shift away from our disease-maintenance mentality by rewarding true health and encouraging health freedom.
Tax-sponsored payments are currently funneled only to ‘approved’ protocols and practitioners, and to the pharmaceutical providers of sanctioned remedies and devices, perpetuating increased costs to the taxpayer and a powerful cartel riding comfortably on the status quo. If OHIP covered the costs of chiropractors, homeopaths, naturopaths, acupuncturists and other non-mainstream health professionals (how is it eye and ear doctors and dentists also are not considered mainstream necessities to health? – much sickness results to people who can’t afford their services), and also the costs of natural supplements and ‘alternative’ therapies, and if, at the same time, the truth about the efficacy of such treatments were not suppressed and vitality and health were promoted, the system would perhaps recover from the financial disaster it now faces.
It is hard to stop the mega money machine so many have been hypnotized to believe is the only allowable way, but crediting taxes back to people who do not need hospitalization nor expensive medications would be a positive step toward solvency of the system. New definitions of medical necessity would require re-educating the medical community and the populace plus departing from the profit motive of our current sickness care procedures.
For example, think of the savings of not prescribing, for a viral infection, an expensive full course of antibiotics (which is useless against virus and concomitantly destroys the patient’s life-supporting gut microbiome for more than a year), and, instead, recommending that the patient pick up anti-microbial colloidal silver or specific herbals at a health food store.
However, arrogant government and health agencies, and their endorsed providers, bent on profits over people, believe (and enforce) that theirs is the only way, in the face of thousands of deaths every year from properly taken prescribed drugs, and the proven inefficacy of most vaccines. This sickness-perpetuating profit mentality carries over into related health damaging issues (for another time) such as genetically modified food chain, soil impairment, and water supply pollution.
If we keep doing what we’re doing, we’ll keep getting what we’ve got.
Henry Meredith
Don Wright Faculty of Music