Allowing Natural Therapies to be Used

[Guest guest]

As the new Obama administration gears up to take over the Food & Drug

Administration and the other Health related agencies of the federal government,

there is a window of opportunity to bring to the attention of the future health

policymakers what safer more natural alternative therapies can offer. As you

can imagine, the traditional power interests of the Pharmaceutical Industry,

the Medical Societies and the Hospitals will be pressing to assure their

continued flow of funds to the same places they are wasted today. What we have

to do is show the health policy transition team that one of the best ways to

achieve THEIR GOAL of decreasing healthcare costs is to allow wider use of

alternative treatments for what are now considered hard to treat medical

conditions.

A campaign toward this end is being spearheaded by the American Association

for Health Freedom http://www.healthfreedom.net

For background on this FDA campaign

http://www.healthfreedom.net/index.php?option=com_content & task=view & id=500 & Itemi\

d=312

To take action sending a form letter to decisionmakers.

http://www.reformfda.org

Dr. V. , MD, editor of Nutrition & Healing, has written an

excellent article in the January 2009 issue " Why Medicare is going broke and

you're footing the bill. "

He details the story of a kidney dialyses patient who avoided most of the

pitfalls by following a nutritious diet, exercising and taking vitamins,

minerals and botanicals. But after a few years his blood serum calcium level was

too high and his parathyroid hormone was too high. His kidney specialist told

him that eventually he might have to have his parathyroid removed, but in the

meantime he was told to take a relatively new drug called Sensipar to

control the excess parathyroid secretion.

Before taking the prescription he saw Dr. who suggested that the

problem may be caused by inability of the kidneys to produce fully activated

1,25

OH vitamin D, and may be solved by prescribing 1,25 OH vitamin D, which is

available by prescription only, under the name Rocaltrol, with a generic 1,25 OH

vitamin D called Calcitrol.

The Sensipar had a cost of $14.17 per pill, whereas Rocaltrol had a cost of

$2.33 per pill ans the Calcitrol had a cost of $2.01 per pill.. After making

this comparison Dr. reviewd the patients prior history of taking 5,000

IU of vitamin D precursor that the patient's kidneys used to convert to 1,25

OH vitamin D in the past. If he tried increasing the dosage to 10,000 IU this

might be enough to reduce the parathyroid excess at least for a while and

after that didn't work he could switch to the prescription form of already

fully activated form of 1,25 OH vitamin D.

Total sales of Sensipar for 2007 was $463 million, If Vitamin D at .08 per

pill were substituted at 10,000 IU or even 15,000 IU it would have come to

from $5.23 million to $7.82 million for a saving of over $450 million.

Under current FDA regulations Sensipar has FDA approval for treatment of

secondary hyperparathyroidism in dialyses patients and Vitamin D does not.

The FDA should not be used to force a monopoly price on consumers, a price

ultimately paid by all taxpayers. Doctors should be allowed to use their own

logical thought process to prescribe the safest and usually cheaper therapy.

This illustration is only a minor segment of the dysfunctional health care

system.

The really big savings can be seen if we were to allow patients to

substitute a full series of Chelation Therapy sessions for Heart Disease as a

substitute for the very high cost Coronary Bypass procedure that is not very

effective.

arnold