In the past sixty some years healthcare in the United States has been so distanced from each of us, so removed from our own hands, that self-care has come to be referred to as "self-medication" by many. Recounting a few of the reasons that Americans are turning away from the medical establishment, a spokesman for the Center for Science in the Public Interest wrote recently in a policy newsletter, ""Many Americans thus want to take control of their own health and engage in self-medication." Imagine that! Taking care of ourselves!

It was during my mother's visit after the birth of my first child--in a hospital birthing room in 1982--that I began to understand the power that we as individuals and as a society have surrendered. Mom told me that when she had given birth 30 years earlier, her obstetrician had strapped her to the bed flat on her back! Could there be a more unnatural position for giving birth? And you permitted this, Mom? I felt my blood pressure rise just listening to her story. She protested, but her questions and wishes had not been heard.

Now members of Mom's generation commonly start out the day with a handful of prescription drugs for their various aches and pains. The pills so upset the stomach that they chase the handful with yet another pill for stomach pain. Since the end of the 1990s, television advertising for pharmaceutical drugs is aimed directly at the consumer, and we are given the impression that drugs are the routine and expected course for treating ailments as simple and common as indigestion and headache. The aging population and television ad campaigns are two factors contributing to continually rising drug sales.

In 1999, Americans spent 14 percent of the Gross Domestic Product on healthcare costs; that was $1.2 trillion dollars.(1) This was 6 percent more than the nations with the second highest percentage of national expenditures, France and Canada, but both France and Canada have national health insurance programs for all, while more than 47 million Americans have no health coverage.

But a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (2) reported that four out of ten Americans use some form of healthcare outside the conventional medical establishment, what is now being called complementary and alternative (CAM) healthcare. Repeating his 1990 survey, David M. Eisenberg, M.D., and his colleagues at the Harvard Medical School found that in 1997 the number of office visits for CAM treatment had increased by 47 percent since 1990, to 629 million visits, more visits than to primary care physicians. And we're paying $27 billion annually for Natural Healing, most out of our own pockets!

The alternatives to treatment with pharmaceutical drugs is what is being sought. Gentler, safer means of achieving and maintaining health that do no harm and enable the individual to take responsibility for and care for her own body is what is being sought.

Perhaps the greatest loss in this bankrupt healthcare system is the loss of a sense of physical, and therefore spiritual, self. When we grow up with full reliance on the opinion/diagnosis of a physician after a 7-minute meeting, our self-confidence, ability, even conceptual capacity to listen to and attend to our own bodies is stunted. We pay far more attention to our auto engines than our own inner workings. If we hear a new noise in the auto, we check it out promptly. Yet if you have a jolt of pain or a new ache, how likely are you to pay immediate attention? Not very likely, unless you have a known chronic illness and know your body well.

The majority of individuals practicing natural medicine today either grew up with parents who for philosophical reasons engaged in medical self-care or they have experienced chronic diseases for which there are no drugs to prescribe. Those with chronic illnesses, if they have the will to survive and to thrive, go outside America's medical establishment and find healthcare from other cultures. Healthcare practiced in other cultures is often simpler, much less expensive, and without harmful side effects; America's new immigrants and women beyond America's borders can contribute to our collective efforts on this website. Most importantly, the individual learns to pay attention to and care for her own body. This process of self-care also leads to the tending to the spirit, which is a natural development from--and also a requirement of--self-care.

See also American Healthcare Statistics
Footnotes

1. George Lundberg, M.D. Severed Trust, (New York: Basic Books, 2000)
2. JAMA, Nov. 1998