Monday, March 2, 2009

Crossroads of History

Last Thursday (February 26, 2009) was an important day in the history of health care in America. Four of the nation’s most highly respected proponents of natural and integrative medicine argued before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee about how Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) must be incorporated into our current conventional health care system if we're to have any hope of fixing the system. To learn more about the testimony of Drs. Mehmet Oz, Dean Ornish, Andrew Weil, and Mark Hyman you can go to Senate Hearings.

Sen. Tom Harkin had some wonderful opening remarks at the hearing. "It is fashionable, these days, to quote Abraham Lincoln. So I would like to quote form his 1862 address to Congress - words that should inspire us as we craft health care reform legislation. Lincoln said, 'The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty ... As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.'" Later he put the situation more succinctly: "It is time to end the discrimination against alternative health care practices."

The process of changing health care in America is not going to be a quick and easy situation but rather a long, bloody and difficult process to give birth to a better health care system.

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