One of the primary flaws with President Obamas new Health Care Law is that it did not take into account the people in this country who already have health care and would rather be treated outside of the American Medical Associations clinical medicine model. Will this new law force my new insurance provider to pay for my traditional African cleansing ceremonies and cowrie shell readings?
There is no such thing as universal care outside the loving arms of God. Even earlier to this law many Americans migrated out of the clinical health care model of the AMA and began investing their time and money in the holistic health care sector. This is done out of experience with the clinical model and with the holistic approach which served them better. The concern that this will lead to a medical school hegemony is genuine if a bit phobic.
The irony of an African American president bringing this issue to the people can not be overlooked. For thousands of years Africans did not have this medical care but yet to this day many African Americans are here before us giving a testimony to a health care practices that however meager in comparative scientific terms served its purpose. An African American woman of fifty five years of age wakes at three in the morning to go to work four days a week working ten hour days. This woman smokes tobacco and other natural products everyday, both her parents are alive she has two healthy children now self sustaining adults. Comparatively, using myself as a baseline, a man forty years of age who would struggle to keep that schedule, lost both parents and two brother by age thirty eight through natural causes, riddled with illness starting with A for asthma and a litany of other health issues that can be listed alphabetically down to perhaps P. It seems only natural that one would seek out African inspired medical practices does it not? If in fact the Africans are dare we say genetically superior to have sustained on earth longer than any other man certainly there is a wisdom in seeking medical treatment carried down through the generations by them.
Although that comparison above is not an average, inductively there are probably many more cases similar to it. African Americans have never had the best health care system catering to them even though they resided here in America but they somehow manage to dominate the athletic arenas, how is that possible? Here again, most would clamor to genetics to settle the case and they would be correct to some degree but what can be said of the African Americans can be said of other people like the Chinese who dominate fields in their own right, are genetically dissimilar to African Americans but did not avail themselves of American medicine for millenniums either, exactly how badly do we need this particular brand of health care and more importantly do we all want it and if not why must we all pay for it? Contrarily, only in the last ten years or so has acupuncture, an ancient Chinese medical practice become an acceptable form of treatment in the United States and many professional women between the age of twenty two to twenty eight are practicing yoga as a response to stress which most likely was not a regime prescribed by their general practitioner.
Compounding these anomalous realities in the face of empirical science the average American doctor knows little about his patients diets, what it is they eat, they seldom even ask. Yet holistic stragetists like naturopathic (a word I had to add to the dictionary of this software) physicians Dr. James D'Adamo and Dr. Peter D'Adamo, father and son respectively have set successful courses through the monitoring of nutrition to which I owe my life but for some reason are not suggested or integrated into the AMA clinical model and subsequently many like myself have become philosophical refugees living behind the clinical model for holistic approaches, yet I have heard no discussion on this reality from President Obama.
Further our philosophical differences will set us apart on who we would like to treat us, in the end it has to be remembered that the patient seeks out the doctor and yes I would much rather like to see the Chinese model carried out where the doctor seek out the patient and seek to maximize their present health but only if I am being sought out and treated by a natruopathologist. However, in the American Medical Association a majority of the doctors probably share a perception of mankind shaped more by Clarence Day then Jesus Christ who was Himself a Doctor. To this end I refuse to accept medical treatment from any one who perceives man to be an animal, I am a human being, I require human care.
From the Tuskegee experiments to the eugenics movement which began in American not Germany, African Americans came out on the losing end of medicine in the United States and summarily are weary of it evinced by the low rate of doctor visits taken by African American men statistically. Although this may not be the only cause or a preponderance of the reality it is certainly a legitimate claim, not by any means a hollow one.
