New Trends in Health, Alternative

The public is choosing to look outside the pill box and become educated and inspired with evidence based science. Patients and their families are more informed today and are demanding that hospitals and physicians provide or, at least, allow access to other solutions.

Integrative "medicine" is where Complementary and Alternative practices (CAM) along with good nutrition are utilized with Conventional therapy. This is an exciting trend in healthcare and includes functional foods.

"Integrative" opens up a wide range of hopeful solutions to choose from, from real to fringe to fraud. Good nutrition and Glycoscience are growing in acceptance and practice because that are proven to be self-evident.

Scientific American (11/2012) in an article entitled, How Drug Company Money Is Undermining Science, reported how huge sums of money undermine medicine and how pharmaceutical companies shroud their deviancy in secret. Charles Seife, states in his article, "In the past few years the pharmaceutical industry has come up with many ways to funnel large sums of money - enough sometimes to put a child through college - into the pockets of independent medical researchers who are doing work that bears, directly or indirectly, on the drugs these firms are making and marketing."

A 2010 study published in the British Medical Journal, showed 87% of the researchers who gave the diabetes drug Avandia "favorable reviews" (although evidence indicated that it might increase the risk of heart attacks) had financial involvement with the manufacturer. When the FDA committee debated whether or not to pull Avandia from the market because of the heart attack risk, it was revealed that members of the committee, also, had received money from drug companies.

Billions of dollars in wasteful spending and development of harmful drugs have undermined real science and brought us to the economical cliff of the most expensive healthcare system in the world where 71 countries are ahead of US in overall quality of health. But, don't expect anybody to stop the scandals. Deceptions will increase. Your doctor may not be to blame, he or she was probably spoon fed education from the pharmaceutical industry. More than ever, the general public is helping educate medical professionals who aspire to better others as well as themselves.

A large percent of the public has lost confidence in the system and are beginning to understand that more money is made in treatment research than in finding cause and cure. The system continues to extend hope for a new discovery tomorrow but the public is not waiting. They know they must look out for themselves.

Stats from many surveys are "all over the place" but validate that the public is frustrated with traditional medicine. CAM and nutrition are growing in popularity. A 1997 survey found 13.7% of respondents in the US sought services of a medical doctor and an alternative medicine practitioner. A 2002 US adult survey indicated 74.6% had used some form of complementary and alternative medicine. In 2004, a survey of nearly 1,400 US hospitals found that more than one in four offered CAM therapies. A 2008 survey of US hospitals by Health Forum, a subsidiary of the American Hospital Association, found that more than 37% of responding hospitals indicated they offer one or more alternative medicine therapies, up from 26.5% in 2005. More than 70% of the hospitals offering CAM were in urban areas.

Dedicated scientists are making new discoveries outside the pill box which will benefit the human race. The future of medicine is in Glycoscience.

Glycoscience will go down three pathways:

1) Development of the Gold Standard in diagnostics for measuring and monitoring glycoprotein receptor sites on the surface of cells to determine quality and quantity and thereby understand the health condition of the individual and how long until they get cancer or another disease;

2) Synthesize vital sugars in the lab and incorporate them into expensive drugs to make superior drugs with less side effects; and

3) Consumption of vital sugars found in nature as food to improve glycosylation of glycoproteins to improve human health. Evidence is mounting that MIT was correct, "Glycoscience will change the way we live."