Health Care - 香港更好大行動

Problem:

Our existing health care system, dominated by the western allopathic system of medicine, has failed to provide a cost-effective health care service for the people.

Reasons:

Allowing a limited-effective form of western allopathic medicine to dominate our health care services.

Western allopathic medicine (commonly referred to as “western medicine”) is very effective for the treatment of emergency and traumatic conditions such as broken bones, extensive burns, excessive bleeding, and some necessary surgeries. These conditions make up about 10 % of the health problems affecting people in a modern civilized society like Hong Kong. 80% of health problems are chronic and generally related to lifestyle, such as diabetes, hypertension, heart conditions, arthritis, auto-immune dysfunction, allergies, cancer, and emotional and mental ailments. These conditions are not amenable to western medicine. The last 10% of health problems are caused by the side effects of medical treatment. Even under the proper prescription and medical procedures, western medicine is now the No. 1 killer (783,936) in the United States, ahead of cardiovascular diseases (699,697 in 2001) and cancer (553,251). Even when the use of poisonous drugs, surgeries and radiation have caused devastating side-effects, western medicine considers these normal.

Western allopathic medicine has become the spokesman for all health-care knowledge.

Our textbooks often deify western medicine. We credit western medicine for eliminating infectious diseases in the past with vaccinations and miracle drugs when, in fact, it is the improvement in public hygiene such as the separation of drinking water from the sewage water, flush toilets, better living and working conditions, and a better food supply, that controls the spread and reduced the death toll of infectious diseases.

In order to control and monopolize the multi-billion-dollar health-care service, the medical-industrial complex has resorted to tricks including repressive laws and “junk science” financed by the pharmaceutical industry to suppress natural healing. This is because natural medicine is not patentable and therefore less profitable. There is more money in keeping people chronically ill than in offering a curative treatment. Laws are usually passed in the name of protecting the public when in reality they serve to protect the dominance and profits of the pharmaceutical industry.

Solution:

Open up health care to free competition so that the most cost-effective treatments for different health problems can be fully and freely utilized.

The best treatment for many chronic lifestyle diseases are not pharmaceutical drugs and surgery but traditional natural medicines including traditional Chinese medicine, chiropractic, naturopathy, homeopathy, herbs, food supplements, diet and exercise. Since western medicine cannot cure most of these chronic diseases, we should allow other, more effective medicines to be fully utilized. We are not saying western medicine is useless; it is valuable for acute, traumatic conditions. We simply should not let it dominate our medical system.

Demystify western allopathic medicine

Our education is based on the western allopathic model and instills an ideal of omnipotence in western allopathic medicine. The knee-jerk reaction of the average person is to see a doctor when sick. We need to instill confidence in our own body and learn to use the many other safe and effective systems of medicine available.

Encourage personal responsibility for health.

According to a WHO report, 60% of health problems are lifestyle related, and are better prevented and effectively managed through personal lifestyle changes.

Eliminate waste and abuse from third party payment systems.

Actions:

Adopt “Personal Health Provident Fund” Scheme.

This is a sum of money (e.g. HK$100,000) assigned to every Hong Kong citizen who can use it to pay for any kind of health care of their own choice. They will be required to pay back only according to their ability. Those who cannot pay will be fully supported by the taxpayer. When he or she dies without having fully spent the assigned money, the remains will be awarded to the family.

Amend the “Pharmacy and Poisons Ordinance” (Cap. 138)

According to the existing Pharmacy and Poisons Ordinance, a “medicine” is defined in section 2 as “any substance or mixture of substances … (c) altering, modifying, correcting or restoring any organic function, in human beings or in animals”. By this definition, any substance including food, water and many natural herbs and nutritional supplements are “medicine” and cannot be freely used to treat any disease without a “registered medical practitioner’s” (registered under the Medical Registration Ordinance, cap. 161) pre-ion. Since most of our practitioners are not trained in nutrition, natural herbs, etc., these safe and effective tools for health can be easily suppressed.

This is contrary to the Father of Medicine, Hippocrates’s teaching, “Food is our best medicine.” Similarly in traditional Chinese medicine, “Let Food be our Medicine and Medicine be our food.” This ordinance has made many natural food, herbs, and vitamins illegal to be used thus, driving up the health care cost and preventing many diseases from being properly treated.

The simple way to remedy the situation is to distinguish synthetic chemical drugs from natural healing tools by adding a simple exclusion clause, “…..any substance or mixture of substances, except food, natural herbs, nutritional supplements … for use in … (c) altering …”)

Amend “Undesirable Medical Advertisement Ordinance” (Cap. 231)

The existing ordinance forbids any public announcement for any product or services that can help over 95% of the health conditions listed in a medical text book. This is not because these products or services have no proven values. The ordinance simply forbids a public announcement, whether the claims are proven or not. The ordinance suppresses valuable health care information that can threaten the status quo of the medical establishment.

The simple way to remedy the bad ordinance is to add, “…. without any evidence…..”

The burden of proof should rest on the prosecutor.

Repeal Food Labeling Laws

It is difficult to quantify the nutrient contents of natural food. It is much easier to quantify the nutrient content of artificial food. The experience in other countries where such laws existed is that even important information such as genetically engineered food content is not required to be labeled because of the opposition from Big Food Industry. We will wind up having more artificial food than natural, organic food. Small food makers will be crushed by larger ones. The quality of food will further decline. This law is unnecessary as there are other, existing laws already protecting the public from unsafe food.

STOP THE FOLLOWING LAWS:

Health Supplement Laws

The tactic to suppress natural supplements and herbs here is to require food supplements to undergo tests similar to pharmaceutical drugs before health claims can be made. It costs hundreds of millions of dollars to perform such double blind tests; it would be prohibitively expensive for most manufacturers to do such tests, with the exception of the major pharmaceutical companies. Since natural supplements are non-patentable, the limited profit from the sales, with competitions from other suppliers, cannot justify the cost. It is also sometimes impossible to do placebo studies with natural foods. The aim of these laws is to make it difficult to use natural supplements to treat diseases and thus protect the profit and ensure the monopoly of the drug industry.

Medical Device Registration Ordinance

There is no evidence that countries with such an ordinance have better safety records in the usage of medical devices compared to those that do not. In the United States, medical treatment using registered medical devices still kill more people than before. It is a tactic to eliminate any device that can treat diseases safely and effectively and thus threaten the drug profit. One example of this is the Rife Frequency Generator that can successfully treat cancer.. Such laws are responsible for millions of unnecessary deaths from cancer in the United States.

Codex Alimentarius and Globalization

The real agenda behind the Codex Alimentarius is to limit the dosage of nutritional supplements to such a low level that they are no longer effective. The so-called standard will be forced upon all countries in the world under the auspice of globalization. The control will be world wide.

Our basic law must include Freedom of Choice in Health Care for patients and practitioners as our basic constitutional right.