Tuesday, May 29, 2007

Healthcare is Popular Topic

Seems like health care in America is a popular topic right now. Last month Jonathan Cohn, the senior editor for the New Republic, published his book "Sick: The Untold Story of America's Health Care Crisis-and The People Who Pay The Price". Michael Moore will release his latest docu-diatribe against the American medical establishment "Sicko" shortly. In June Regina Herzlinger, a Harvard Business School professor, adds her voice to the discussion with "Who Killed Health Care? America's $2 Trillion Medical Problem-and the Consumer-Driven Cure".

So far the subject of complementary and alternative therapies and how they're being blocked has been completely ignored. Texas just passed HB 2644 which will further restrict many types of CAM by requiring anyone who touches a client to have a massage license. While designed to help the fight on prostitution in Dallas it's effects will ripple across Reiki, NLP, PSYCH-K and many other modalities. So much for freedom of choice!

Friday, May 25, 2007

Holistic Chamber of Commerce

Made it to the D/FW Holistic Chamber of Commerce meeting last night. It may be impossible to make the breakfast meetings and challenging to make the luncheons but I'm pretty good at the evening get-togethers!
As usual an interesting discussion about the potential for my book to "raise the lake" of public awareness and acceptance of complementary and alternative therapies. Expectations are for it to sell well on both coasts but have an uphill challenge here in the South.
One of the folks told the story about how her pastor asked her for a private meeting. Seems that a few of the members of the church were concerned that she was practicing witchcraft ... because they don't understand what acupuncture is all about. In this day and age it's still considered something unnatural and foreign.
Hopefully my book will enlighten a few folks about complementary and alternative medicine!

Tuesday, May 22, 2007

Another Day, Another Drug Headline

Once again there is a front-page story about a dangerous drug on the market. This time it's for Avandia, the most popular drug for treating diabetes. Only problem is that it also can kill you since it has been shown to increase the risk for heart attacks 43%. It's so bad the New England Journal of Medicine posted the story on their website immediately instead of waiting for their next publication. The FDA approved it in 1999 and in 2005 the drug sold $3.1 billion worldwide.

Sunday, May 20, 2007

Texas Health Freedom Bill

TEXAS HEALTH FREEDOM BILL
May 19 - It looks like the Texas Health Freedom Act (#3056) has died in committee for this session. The good news is the anti-Health Freedom bills also died in the same committee so nothing changes at this point. I'd like to thank San Antonio Rep. Frank Corte, his able policy advisor Kathi Seay for their courage and leadership by introducing a model bill so that Texans would have been able to take advantage of the benefits of complementary and alternative therapies. Now that we know who supports the idea of patients having health freedom and who listens to the medical establishment we can plan better for next session!

Try, Try Again

OK, so it's taken several days for me to figure out a way to do a Blog on my new website for UnBreak Your Health. Since it's a FrontPage site there aren't a lot of options so I've opted to use Blogger.com. You'll simply close the blog page to return to the website this way.

Tuesday, May 15, 2007

FDA Policy Failure

FDA POLICY COSTS
May 15 - This week the FDA turned down two new experimental immunotherapy treatments for prostate cancer and a rare form of children's bone cancer because they were 1% short of the required level of performance. FDA rules require 95% effectiveness and the human trials were producing results of only 94%. Check out the editorial in the Monday, May 14th WALL STREET JOURNAL by Dr. Mark Thornton. Once again the bureaucrats running the FDA put rules by tiny minds ahead of the lives of real people. No wonder so many Americans have to go to Mexico, Europe or Asia to get the treatments they need today.