How Much Is a Pound of Cure Worth?

When we talk about medicine and medical doctors, we are not denigrating them as adversaries of chiropractors or chiropractic care. It’s not a case of either one or the other. The two may go hand in hand, and often do,

Both are healing sciences, but the chief difference is that one is preventative in nature and purpose, more about bolstering our immunity and keeping disease away than treating disease that is already there.

‘Medicine is the best at treating the symptoms of disease after it’s already present We will all need it at some point in our lives and I am grateful that we have the best medical doctors in the world in our country,” says Dr. Brad Butler, Chief of Staff at the Oakland Spine & Rehabilitation Centers in Oakland and Wayne, NJ. “However, medicine is limited because it’s mainly centered on either early detection of disease or treating the disease after it’s already present.”

We are essentially prisoners in a high-priced healthcare system that is run primarily by medicine. The treatment of existing disease is a lot more expensive than preventing disease and adopting healthy lifestyles.

Prevention Best Option of All

There is a big push in medicine toward early detection, which is just another justification for drugs and surgery, chiropractic professionals believe. Finding disease early when it is most treatable is certainly better than dealing with it in an end-stage scenario. However, the best option of all is to prevent disease before it can happen.

A growing number of medical doctors are seeing the light by using preventive approaches in their practices, including educating patients on nutrition and healthy habits like exercising, refraining from tobacco use, moderation in alcohol consumption and overeating.

A big part of preventative medicine is to motivate the patient or individual to adopt the practices that would prevent diseases that might otherwise occur with continued poor lifestyle choices.

For example, as many as eighty percent of American adults suffer from back pain. Do you wait until the pain is so great that potent drugs and surgery are the only options?

Poor Richard (a.k.a. Benjamin Franklin) admonished us that “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” That pound of cure was costing each of us on average of $10,348 per person in 2016 for health care. The per capita cost for prescription drugs alone, as of the spring of 2018, was about $1,500, according to a study by the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).

If the medical doctors can see the toll this is taking it is truly a time for dramatic changes in health care.

—Call us today at (201) 651-9100 for an appointment at Oakland Spine & Physical Therapy…