HONEST MEDICINE: My Dream for the Future

The Integrative Health Care Solution -- A 2-Part Series

♣ Part 1 -- For Tom Daschle and Barack Obama: Advocating the Integrative Healthcare Solution -- discusses WHY so many experts are now saying that best answer to our healthcare system is Integrative Healthcare, which is a combination of conventional and alternative medicine.

♣ Part 2: Seven of Honest Medicine's Articles / Audios Advocating Integrative Healthcare

 

Julia Schopick’s “Anecdotal” Medical Treatment Series: Eight Articles, So Far

 

I refer to the following eight articles as the beginning of my "Anecdotal" Medical Treatment Series. It is my intention to turn it into a book. Included in the book will be lots of information that is critical of the pharmaceutical industry, as well as of the very expensive clinical trial system -- both of which I believe play a huge role in keeping important treatments like the ones I describe here from being prescribed by American doctors.

 

1) ♦ Silverlon and Surgery: Our Search for Healing -- (Published in the National Brain Tumor Foundation’s Newsletter, SEARCH, Winter, 2003, Issue #54, as their cover article), I wrote this article in an effort to let the world know about Silverlon, so that other brain tumor patients wouldn't have to suffer the way my husband Tim did, when his suture line wouldn't close for eight months following his 2001 brain surgery. (Silverlon is the inexpensive, FDA-approved product that finally healed Tim's skin, which had become infected, and was leaking cranial fluid.)

Unfortunately, by the time I found Silverlon for him, Tim was already severely brain injured, as a result of the numerous "standard of care" surgeries his doctors had performed, in a vain effort to achieve the same result that Silverlon achieved almost instantaneously!

THE RESULT? As far as I know, Silverlon is still not being used in hospitals on post-operative brain tumor patients, like Tim, with non-healing head wounds. In these cases, doctors continue to operate on their patients' skin -- often over and over again, until the skin closes.

Why do they refuse to try something different? Because, they say, without “the studies,” Silverlon will continue to be an “anecdotal” treatment.

2) ♦ Four Lifesaving Medical Treatments: Not So “Anecdotal,” After All!

Here, I tell "The Rest of the Silverlon Story," about how my husbands’ doctors -- and the many other doctors who read our story -- were not at all eager to learn anything about how Silverlon saved Tim’s life. They preferred to just dismiss the product, and our success with it, as being “anecdotal.”

I decided that there must be other treatments that -- like Silverlon -- were saving lives, but that, also like Silverlon, doctors were NOT recommending to their patients.

I was right!

For Tom Daschle and Barack Obama: Part 2: Seven of Honest Medicine's Articles / Audios Advocating Integrative Healthcare

I have long advocated, through HonestMedicine.com, the careful combining of conventional and alternative modalities. My point has always been that a sensible medical system would treat patients with carefully chosen, unique combinations of treatments -- both conventional and “alternative” -- that will work best for their particular conditions; and that often, a treatment is ignored, because it is not “standard of care” –- meaning, essentially, that it is not generally accepted by a majority of doctors.

This attitude has always struck me as limited, and I often think, as do many others, that doctors’ are literally “blinded” by the results of pharmaceutically funded “studies,” that are often “rigged” by Big Pharma, so that they will produce the “right,” pro-Pharma results. (Please see "Is It Possible Some Doctors Still Don’t 'Get' the Extent of Big Pharma’s Financial Ties to 'Standard of Care' Research?")

I am posting seven of my pro-Integrative Healthcare articles here. Most have appeared previously on HonestMedicine.com; two are articles I wrote for Alternative and Complementary Therapies Magazine, a professional publication for integrative medical/health practitioners; and two are book reviews: one for HonestMedicine.com; the other, for Amazon.com.

For Tom Daschle and Barack Obama: Part 1: Advocating the Integrative Healthcare Solution

Healthcare Reform is in the air. Tom Daschle’s “house parties” have met, and people are posting their ideas all over the Internet. There’s lots of discussion on websites such as www.change.org and www.health.org. And on www.change.org, people are voting for their favorite issues; several relate to healthcare.

Many of us are very hopeful that, when all is said and done, we will finally have Integrative Healthcare, with a combination of conventional medicine and so-called “alternative” medicine – what Dr. Ronald Hoffman has called “Intelligent Medicine.”

In her December 31st Huffington Post column, “Resolving to Care: Integrative Health Care Reform,”  health writer/advocate Alison Rose Levy wrote that hopefully, “the coming healthcare reform under the Obama administration will improve quality and lower costs by accessing a wide range of Integrative Healthcare modalities,” and that adopting Integrative Healthcare would signal “an end to the long gravy train ride for pharmaceutical companies, insurance companies, and conventional practices based more on the profit motive than on caring.”