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Tap Eastern Medicine to improve our public health
AS I WRECK THIS CHAIR By William M. Esposo
The Philippine Star 2009-04-14
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Even those who can afford it are still staggered by the cost of medical care. The top two television networks appeal daily for donations from Good Samaritans on behalf of poor folks who cannot afford urgently needed medical attention.
However, there is a big untapped resource that could fill the gap and provide our people proven effective medical care at a price even the poor can afford. This is the 5,000-year-old Eastern Medicine.
Former Manila Councilor Bernie Ang introduced me and some of our closest friends over a year ago to one of the top practitioners here of Eastern Medicine. My wife and our other friends now go regularly to this Chinese doctor.
Unfortunately, I can no longer avail of this Chinese doctor’s service because of my kidney transplant protocol. Eastern Medicine boosts your immune system to cure your illnesses but to one with a kidney transplant (under immuno-suppression) that would translate to a kidney rejection.
I cannot also publicly share this Chinese doctor’s name and clinic address. He has been subjected several times to extortion by some law enforcement officers. These extortionists, who are supposed to be officers of the law, do not realize that this Chinese doctor has many powerful patients.
When we met him for the first time, there was an American woman among the patients waiting to be called. We were told that the lady was the No. 2 prosecutor of New York City who was given six months to live due to lung cancer. One of her doctors in New York advised her to see this Chinese doctor as he could be her last hope. She did and that was six years ago when she was given six months to live.
What will amaze you is how this doctor will diagnose your ailment — by just taking your pulse and looking at your tongue. He correctly described the ailments of my wife and our other friends without any of them telling him their medical problem.
Many of those who visited him for the first time could not believe that they could be diagnosed just by taking their pulse and looking at their tongue, and so they went to see a doctor of Western Medicine who ended up conducting expensive tests and confirming what the Chinese doctor diagnosed. To top it all, he even does better than Western Medicine in that he gets to the root of the problem.
My friend brought his son because Western doctors could not pinpoint why the lad suffered three episodes of epilepsy attacks. The Chinese doctor easily pinpointed the problem — a congenital heart problem that triggers epilepsy when one sleeps after taking a big meal. It was confirmed that the three epilepsy episodes all happened after the lad consumed a glutton’s supper and slept with an overly stuffed tummy!
My wife learned that she was not really a diabetic but that her sugar management problem was the result of a thyroid imbalance (and not due to defective pancreas as is the case with diabetes). She now has a better control of her blood sugar and has not encountered those life threatening episodes of hypoglycemia.
A retired CEO of a major property development corporation could no longer wear short sleeved shirts because of embarrassing marks of psoriasis. No Western doctor could remedy the problem and so he went with our friends to the Chinese doctor. He now feels more comfortable this summer wearing short sleeved shirts.
I personally talked to a professor who was already undergoing hemodialysis for chronic kidneys and was cured by this Chinese doctor. He felt that his life was fading fast, the cost of hemodialysis too expensive and that he had nothing to lose if he tried Eastern Medicine. Now, this professor has regained his kidney functions, needs no more dialysis treatments and is back to mountain climbing.
The chairman of one of the top three hospitals in Metro Manila sees this Chinese doctor. I was told that he is exploring ways to open an Eastern Medicine Department in their hospital in partnership with this Chinese doctor.
Eastern Medicine is not given a chance to thrive in our country because our medical thinking is too slanted towards the Western model. Expect the Western Medicine practitioners to feel threatened and find all the reasons to lobby and scuttle any prospects of recognizing and licensing practitioners of Eastern Medicine.
Of course, there is a need to set the proper standards before licensing doctors of Eastern Medicine, otherwise we will attract all sorts of fakes who will take advantage. In setting the proper standards, we must question the qualifications of Western doctors to determine the qualifications of Eastern doctors.
In comparing Western and Eastern Medicine, Al Stone wrote: “Both Western and Chinese systems have their place. Some believe that the greatest strength of Western Medicine is in its trauma care and therapies for acute problems, while Chinese medicine excels in the areas of chronic problems and preventive medicine.”
“What Western medicine tends to diagnose and treat is the effect that the disease state has on the body itself. The practitioner of Oriental Medicine diagnoses and acts upon the energy that creates the disease state,” Stone added.
Let’s give our poor people a chance to get good health care. Let’s promote Eastern Medicine as an alternative.
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