Here in Asheville, we have an incredible wealth of traditional healers, yet because of health-care constraints most of us cannot even afford to have what should be seen as “well-being care.” Insurance will not cover anything outside the box. And that affects all of us.
We can't get health care nationally because it has been cited as too expensive — but dying is not. Cutting off a breast is always covered. But trying to find a way to stay out of the surgical unit is seen as not profitable?
What is wrong with this picture? What is wrong with our culture that being ill is coveted? Our fear-based nation is pervasive — fear of being well and fear of being not covered. Imagine the options that can truly be realized by being covered by integrative offerings that make us wholly well, vs. medical insurance that uses Western medicine that only treats the symptom?
We know all the arguments, but it really comes down to the powerful lobbying of the American Medical Association. If the lobby arbitrarily decides a plan cannot make a cent, it's deemed unnecessary or inaccessible.
Doesn't this make for an angry populace? If we cannot have the option to get the kind of health care that causes us — picture this — to thrive, do we truly have to sit back and watch death and disease? Is this what we want for the future?
Why are we allowing these powerful lobbyists to tell us what choices we have?
How can we resolve this here in Asheville, or for that matter nationally?
I, for one, want the option to see alternative practitioners, but at this point, since it would have to be out of pocket, I would then also decide not to eat or pay rent or electricity.
Not a choice. Not an option. Why aren't we in the street?
— Ariel Harris
Candler
Most “alternative” medicine is crackpot. It kills people. In almost all cases of cancer i.e. cutting off the breast, surgery, chemotherapy or radiation is going to be necessary to live. The time wasted with “holistic” cures is just more time for cancers to metastasize. Now if you have been diagnosed with a slow growth cancer such as prostate cancer, you very well might have some time to explore options but with something such as breast, skin or primary organ cancers, it is imperative you act quickly and not kill yourself with a quack.