Where are the conservative champions of health freedom?

The human body was made to be healthy; it wants to be healthy. When it hurts or misbehaves, it is telling its owner that it needs to be treated differently. 

Confronted with a body showing sickness, conventional medicine will generally default to some course or other of poisoning or cutting or burning (antibiotics, surgery, or radiation). Quick and dirty. 

Alternative/holistic medicine will try to figure out why the body is out of order, and will adjust, nourish, or calm (chiropractic, nutrition, various forms of emotional freedom techniques). Slow and healing. 

Guess which costs more? Guess which works better? I suppose the answer depends on who you talk to.

The pharmaceutical companies will give you one answer. Their profits depend on people getting more prescriptions for more ailments.

But people who are raising kids on a single income and frequently without health insurance are likely to give you a different answer. They’re the ones who nurse their babies for many months, use herbs and homeopathic remedies, treat their kids with carefully-monitored diets, and use midwives instead of OB-GYNs.   They resort to conventional medicine for the major problems, but the routine ones they handle with little conventional medical intervention.  They just want to be left alone to solve their own health problems.  That's why they're called the Health Freedom Movement.

If more people lived like that, the nation might not have the health crisis it has right now.   It seems that this kind of behavior (taking personal responsibility for one's health) ought to be encouraged, not discouraged.

But Ted Kennedy wants to discourage it.  He is sponsoring S. 1082, which would expand the FDA's authority to ban nutritional supplements.

 Fact: at least one-third of all Americans now use some form of alternative therapy. That’s a lot of citizens spending their own money (insurance doesn’t reimburse for much alternative care) for something they value. Since it’s their own money they’re spending,  market principles apply: if they don’t get results they want, they’re not going to keep buying.

Homeschoolers have rejected the benevolent dictatorship of the public education establishment. They have won the right to control what goes into their children’s heads. Perhaps more super-Trads than super-Libs are doing it, but they’re following a sound libertarian principle. 

Parents who have learned how to keep their kids healthy without seeing a doctor every week have, in essence, rejected the benevolent dictatorship of the conventional medicine establishment. They are thinking for themselves, researching for themselves, and acting for themselves. Can’t get more libertarian than that, can you? 

Where are the conservative champions of health freedom?

Comments

[John Williams]

I am trying to be charitable to you. Does science or reason enter into your thought processes on health issues at all?
I invite you to investigate homeopathic "remedies" by reading about how the "medicine" is created. The process involves diluting the supposed cure to the point that there may not even be a single molecule left of the substance that is supposed to cure you of your illness. The practitioners say that the more you dilute it, the stronger it is. Somehow magically the water retains a memory of the "curative" substance. This is bereft of common sense and is nothing but a con.

Some herbal remedies work and some do not. I suggest that herbal remedies that are proven dangerous should be banned. Please don't tell me natural herbs cannot be dangerous, hemlock is a natural herb.
Midwives who practice in your home are dangerous if things go wrong. A dangerous birth far from the hospital endangers the mother and the child. Since we do not know which births are likely to be dangerous, this practice should be discouraged. I lost a child because of a birth injury, I know what I am talking about. Why add danger to an already dangerous time of life?
People spend all kinds of money on things that do not work. The teeming marketplace has always had things that purport to work and yet do not. The placebo effect is responsible for lots of "cures".
I think it is the height of responsibility for government to protect people from dangerous alternative medicine. You would not allow heroin to be sold to people would you? It is supposedly a great pain killer but the dangers are just too great.
At least heroin works as a pain killer. Maybe end stage cancer patients could benefit from it but for the dangers involved, most people think it is just not worth it.
Homeopathy does not benefit anyone because it is all a lie that enriches the makers and cheats the poor and uninformed. I can get my water a lot cheaper by drinking from the tap. Buying it in a bottle as a supposed cure is just flimflammery.

John