Natural medicines must be part of pharmacare

Re: National pharmacare’s time has come, say MPs — April 18

Any national pharmacare plan has to include coverage for natural medicines and not just for ones that are man-made or “synthesized” in a laboratory.

A failure to do so would place that large segment of the population that prefers and seeks out natural healing methods at a disadvantage because through their taxes they would be paying into a plan which they might use only as a last resort, if at all.

Essentially, it would subsidize the pharmaceutical industry at the expense of the providers and users of more natural medications. And to my mind, this is unjust.

In my opinion, natural medications are superior to man-made ones because we are part of nature, not separate from it. The human constitution and biochemistry evolved over thousands of years within the matrix of the natural world and our bodies have adapted to it.

Synthetics simply don’t have identical molecules, formulations and chemical compounds as found in nature’s repertoire of naturally occurring chemicals that have been interacting and evolving with humans over countless years as food, water, and ambient air.

This is why natural medicines used properly don’t produce the adverse reactions and devastating side-effects common to pharmaceutical drugs which the body can’t “relate” to.

Werner Broschinski

Princeton