The current health care crisis in the United States is the result of compound errors. The first, not understanding that what we call health care is not health care at all. It is actually a disease management system that treats symptoms and ignores causes, which remain unknown to the 20th Century medical establishment. In other words, medicine is not about health, it is about disease, or the absence of health. Most often, if disease is cured at all, and it usually is not, health is not a result of the cure.

The idea that drugs, surgery and radiation cure disease is a false one, sold to the public by robber drug companies and medical bureaucrats. These people have no interest in controlling costs to the consumer but in maximizing profits and incomes. It is not about health but the business of disease. There is no incentive to cure anyone. The incentive is to cause complications and side effects that keep patients seeking treatment for a lifetime.

Toxemia is the chief cause of disease. Nutritional deficiencies are next. We are taking poisons and chemicals into our bodies through the air we breathe, the liquids we drink and the foods we eat. Science and technology have plunged us into a sea of poison. For every combination of poisons there are different symptoms of different disease. Modern doctors treat poisoning by prescribing expensive new poisons that create new diseases and symptoms. Privately, they just scratch their heads. Publicly, they insist that the right combination of poisons will solve our problems. We only need to take new medicines until we find the right combination or we die in the attempt to cure.

Governments decrease poisons like lead and mercury in our environment and with industry create a hundred new ones. It will take centuries to clean up our environment until we learn to live without all these poisons we are told make life better.

Toxins are often cumulative and reactive to other toxins. Hence we need to cleanse our bodies of accumulations on a regular basis. We can choose foods, herbs and dietary supplements that detoxify our bodies of many poisons or minimize the damage they cause. We can cleanse vital organs like our colons, livers, kidneys, gall bladders and blood using good information that is readily available in health literature.

We change the oil, fuel, filters, and fluids in our cars because they become contaminated and will cause problems if we don't adhere to factory scheduled maintenance procedures. Does it make less sense to do the same for our own bodies? If we won't do the maintenance ourselves, who will do it? In truth, there are health practices around the world, where the focus is detoxification and body maintenance. Look for information about cleansing and detoxification.

Cleansing can be an unpleasant experience, like medicine was in the first half of the last century, or like shoveling out the family outhouse before indoor plumbing. Once you have done it, you notice improvements in all kinds of health complaints and regular maintenance is much more pleasant. After major cleansing, dietary cleansing is both attractive and effective.

Unless we enjoy cleansing and we might, it makes sense to reduce our exposure to environmental poisons. Common sense tells us we are usually much less exposed if we do not live in cities, where poisons are much more highly concentrated. No matter where we choose to live, we can do a lot to reduce our exposure in our home environment.

We can buy effective filters to remove chlorine from our household water supply, for a relatively low cost. Because we bathe in hot water that opens our pores and breathe the steam from hot water, especially in showers, it is better to filter the entire supply than to simply clean our drinking water. No matter what public water utilities say, they are not to be trusted. They usually poison your water to protect you from bacteria and virus. Trading biological poisons for chemical poison is the height of foolishness. Filtration systems vary widely in price and the range of toxins they will remove from utility water. There are very good drinking water systems at a reasonable cost and fairly easy to maintain. Many health authorities claim distilled water is the best for drinking. Distillers are usually electric and require about 2500 watts per gallon. Solar distillers are available in various capacities and can be home built.

Rainwater is good for plants, laundry and household cleaning. Everyone should collect and store rainwater, which can also be used as an emergency drinking supply after proper filtering. Silver filters are more costly but kill living pathogens and only add small amounts of desirable silver to the water. Homemade colloidal silver, much cheaper than the commercial product, can be added to filtered rain water and left standing to provide safe water from rainwater. There are now excellent camp/survival filter systems at reasonable cost for rain, pond or stream water, even filtered gray water. This should be one of the first items in a home or mobile survival kit.

Ionizers do a good job of cleaning inside air and contribute to a sense of well being in humans and animals. They are reasonably priced and require little maintenance. Certain plant varieties also cleanse indoor air and add daytime oxygen. If you are building a tightly sealed house or sealing an older one for energy conservation or protection from chemical and biological contaminants, a houseful of plants is a good idea. Many plants can provide food as well as oxygen. Oxygen rich environments also appear to provide beneficial health effects. I believe New Age housing should be live-in greenhouses. I also believe a year's supply of nuts, grains and seeds should be stored under vacuum in the home, for emergency food.

I was recently contemplating the news that childhood obesity and overweight is an increasing health problem in America. Then in a little TV magazine piece, I heard a scientist say that overweight is a biological protection against famine. Fat people can more easily survive a year with scarce food and thin people die. Could America's weight problem be a soon needed survival tool and famine prediction? Still, I would prefer to have the food on hand than on body.

M.D.s and other "health" professionals are leaving establishment medicine for wholistic health practices. They are making amazing discoveries about natural health and the lack thereof. Many report the very latest health discoveries in monthly newsletters that you can subscribe to for about $40 per year. Many have also written books that can be had for free in public libraries. Investing in health news is much better than investing in fraudulent health insurance. People will catch on as private and public insurance programs fail, due to ineffective treatments at unreasonable prices.

Once we learn to protect our own health and that of those for whom we are responsible, we will only need professional help for trauma, and not always in that situation. There are for instance, natural substances we can keep in our medicine cabinets that stop internal hemorrhaging.

The great thing about self care is that we can learn it from professionals and we can learn it from each other. Just organizing the information alone will provide profitable work for many in this New Age.

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