Your friendly, neighbourhood herbalist.
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The ultimate purpose of this website is the promotion of consumer health rights. Emphasis will be placed on encouraging alternative health choices while at the same time discouraging Allopathic disease treatment ideas. This bias is necessary due to the disproportionate legal, governmental, and medical provider support given to the disease treatment industry while little, if any, support is given to alternative points of view in the promotion of health.
Those seeking practitioner-assisted holistic solutions to health problems should check Arcady Holistic.
Let's get our terminology clear, right off the bat: define basic terms.
OPINION bit
In the old days of medico suppression I used to tell people seeking Alternative-health information to go to their region's largest "real" health food store and ask them where to find the best, consumer-friendly services. However, here in Alberta I have discovered that business and corporate interests holds sway over a desire to aide interests of the chronically ill seeking help. Therefore I can no longer recommend a good health food store to go to for information.
People here (in Alberta) keep telling me how advanced Alberta is in the area of Alternative-health. I would disagree with this rather isolationist view. In other provinces people are much more informed due to the active role taken by health food stores to promote Alternative-health services (over simply flogging the products). For example, stores actively promote the establishment of in-house working Alternative-health clinics. Here, cookie-cut Naturopaths flogging not-very-natural products in a Complementary setting represents the limits of Alternative practice. The concept of nature-cure health has not yet evolved. Healers will tell you that there is no room for animal experimentation in natural medicine -- a concept the naturopaths have long since jettisoned in their mass rush to be doctor-wannabes.
I never recommend the medicos for treatment of mid to chronic health care. They are simply incapable of appreciating the art of healing. Phaedrus stated that "The number of rational hypotheses that can explain any given phenomenon is infinite." If true this is a catastrophic logical disproof of the general validity of all scientific method! [Thankyou to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance for this.] So next time you read that "evidence-based medicine" is superior just remind yourself that those who demand double-blind studies are simply stuck in their own dogmatic slumbers. Those that promote evidence-based medicine (such as the Integrative Health Institute of Calgary} seek only the enforcement of conformity. The art of healing, indeed, all art, is empirical in nature; it is not nihilistically scientific. Remember, the best way to SEE a forest is to look at it and live in it. The flora and fauna of a forest is not appreciated by analysing a single leaf ["they can't see the forest for the trees' leaves"].
Every once in a while somebody asks me to write an article for them. I always tell them that I don't like to produce vanilla articles. I hate reading the same regurgitated stuff over and over again, so I try to write stuff a tad more catchy.
Transmission, reproduction, and publication of these letters is granted to all.
Healer J. Mark Taylor, Medical Herbalist works at the Arcady Holistic clinic in Calgary.