Thursday, October 13, 2011

Medical Freedom ? at Health Freedom sites

If you do a google or a bing search for 'health freedom', you might notice that the top 50 hits or more are not about health freedom.  They are about medical freedom.

What's the difference?

http://www.healthfreedomusa.org - is actually the Natural Solutions Foundation, mission: "to support advanced healthcare and health & food freedom" They use the word health, but almost every sentence really means 'medicine'.

http://www.charterofhealthfreedom.org/ - "the Charter of Health Freedom is proposed legislation that gives Natural Health Products and Traditional Medicines their own Act."  It's about medicine, not about health.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_freedom_movement - "The term health freedom movement is used to describe a loose coalition of organizations, consumers, activists, alternative medicine practitioners and producers of products around the world who are campaigning for unhindered freedom of choice in healthcare. The movement is critical of the pharmaceutical industry and medical regulators, and uses the term "health freedom" as a catch phrase to convey its message."  It's but medicine they are talking about, not health.

http://www.healthfreedom.ws/ -  "Health Freedom Publisher's mission is to promote the availability of complementary and alternative health information resources".  Of course they mean 'complementary and alternative medical information resources.

Why is this?  Why don't 'health freedom' sites speak about health, as opposed to 'medicine'?

For hundreds, perhaps thousands of years, we have looked at health through a medical lens.  When we see a health problem (a medical problem) we try to find a treatment cure.  Then we try to find the cause, so we can prevent the problem in the future. Our medical systems have developed very sophisticated techniques to accomplish these goals.

But looking at 'health', through a 'medical lens', obscures information about health. It's as if we have a magnifying glass, or a microscope that is designed to finds illness.  Health is always in the background - so far away that we need a telescope, or a different lens entirely to actually see health.



Tracy is the author of two book about healthicine: