Monday, October 6, 2008

Raw Food & Natural Healing - Buy it or not?

After looking around on CNN.com at some of the recent health news, I stumbled across an article: Woman goes raw, loses more than half herself.  I was reminded of the Hippocrates Health Institute, where my sister was employed for a while after graduating college.  I went to visit her in the earlier part of the decade, and was witness to alternative healing methods (including the promotion of the raw diet -- when you checked into the resort, you only received one cooked meal a week).  The combination of organic, enzyme-enriched foods as well as magnetic therapy, exercise, juice-fasting & cleansing, detox (...and the list goes on), has saved the lives of those who have been told by medical professionals, that there is nothing left that medicine can do for their health.  While these methods may currently be more expensive than the everyday individual can afford, this type of sustainable lifestyle appear to prove to be more beneficial than some expensive medical processes that you can get under insurance coverage.

I'm wondering if health insurance will every broaden its horizons into this type of healing that promotes health through alternative formats  (which in turn could prevent a lot of common health issues that we see related to poor nutrition).  I would hope that the observations of these alternative forms of healing, would be proof that they are effective; and in return, give consumers the option of being able to undertake these forms with some type of insurance that makes them affordable.  Programs, like the one at the Hippocrates Health Institute, educate individuals about how to make this lifestyle sustainable.  This sustainability seems like it would be less costly in the long-run, in preventing many health issues that cause frequent visits to the hospitals (that we recently discussed have been cutting down their max capacities) and hike up insurance costs.  Thoughts anyone???

My Shameless Plug: For those of you who are interested in the raw and vegan lifestyle, my sister co-authored a book that is both educational in this type of living as well as provides some tasty recipes. You can buy it on Amazon at the following URL: 

It comes HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!!! 

1 comment:

Shaudi Bazzaz said...

Our professor for health policy, Tetine Sentell, brought up a story the other day about her in-laws going vegan in order to improve their health because the cost of care was getting too expensive. She said they have lost weight and experiences great health results, reducing their health care cost. As a vegan I really do believe that being conscience of what we put in our bodies now will influnce the health outcomes to come. The push to high deductilbe insurance plans with health savings accounts is one method to increase capacity to supplement alternative health living choices. The HSA dollars can be used by the individual to cover a much broader definition of health care spending.
Also, I am so going to order your sister's book! That is beyond cool. We need to plan a vegan potluck :)