Here in the United States, we have a disease-management system masquerading as a health care system. This system depends on expensive drugs and invasive surgeries instead of common sense health enhancing measures and less expensive treatment alternatives. Maximizing profits is the goal rather than helping people maintain or heal their health.

Increasing numbers of Americans are fed up with conventional medicine and are now abandoning this profit driven system in favor of complementary or alternative medicine (CAM).   

Following are some interesting facts relating to this trend:

•        Americans spend more on health care per capita than the next 10 biggest spenders combined: Japan, Germany, France, China, the U.K., Italy, Canada, Brazil, Spain, and Australia.
  
•         Despite the above, we rank dead last in terms of quality of care among industrialized countries, and Americans are far sicker and live shorter lives than people in other nations.
•         The most recent National Health Statistics Report combined data from nearly 89,000 adults to estimate the use of complementary health approaches in the US. Overall, 34 percent of US adults used a complementary health approach in 2012, and 5 percent used them as their sole source of medical care.
•         Past research has found that even more Americans -- up to 63 percent -- may use complementary and alternative medicine (CAM), while the rate is even higher among health care workers than it is among the general population.
•        In fact, 76 percent of health care workers use CAM, according to research in the journal Health Services Research. Even more revealing, health care providers, including doctors and nurses, were more than twice as likely to have used practitioner-based CAM, and nearly three times as likely to use self-treatment with CAM, during the prior year than support workers.
•         From time to time, medical experts reverse course on certain practices and procedures when science dictates a change in the standard of care. The Mayo Clinic tracked the frequency of these medical reversals over the past decade and found that in 146 reversals of previously established practices, treatments and procedures, 40 percent reversed the practice, compared to only 38 percent reaffirming it. The remaining 22 percent were inconclusive. This means that between 40 and 78 percent of the medical testing, treatments, and procedures you receive are of NO benefit to you—or are actually harmful—as determined by clinical studies.

Unfortunately, in conventional medicine the more invasive options -- drugs and surgery -- are used initially to treat the symptoms. When those don’t work or actually make the patient worse, they will then sometimes turn to CAM out of sheer desperation. Frequently, this is what ends up saving that person’s life. 

To their great benefit, more and more people are opting for CAM as their primary medical treatment mode.