Real health care reform is not going to happen through legislation; it’s already taking place as an awakening public educates itself. In this video Dr. Marcantel talks about the “paradigm shift” she has seen in the way patients view health care and interact with their doctors. Dr. Tina Marcantel is a naturopathic doctor in Gilbert, Arizona, who also serves the East Valley cities of Scottsdale, Tempe, Mesa, Chandler, Queen Creek, Apache Junction, and the greater Phoenix area.
Transcript:
There’s a paradigm shift that I see that’s going on. I see it as a sleeping giant that’s being awakened. People are at the end of their rope with health care. They know their body, they trust what their symptoms are, yet a lot of the time people are just being put on more and more medications. I’m not against medications–we can Band-Aid things and we can use medication as needed, but we want to get to the root cause.
People are realizing that, “I have to do something. I have to find out what’s going on with my body.” So people are educating themselves: they’re going on the Internet, they’re reading books, they’re listening to speakers on television like Dr. Oz or Dr. Christane Northrup. They’re listening to all this and they’re getting information and they’re starting to take personal responsibility for their health.
Patients are questioning doctors now, they’re questioning specialists, and they’re not taking “no” for an answer–or another drug for an answer–all the time. They are wanting to look outside of the box and get to the root causes of their problems. I have so much respect and admiration for the courage that I’m seeing now in patients that are saying, “I trust my body, I trust what’s going on, I don’t need to be, necessarily, on another drug. I’m going to search, I’m going to read, I’m going to learn.”
That, in itself, coupled with the doctor/patient relationship, is so exciting to me because that person is becoming enlightened, awakened, more conscious of taking responsibility for their health: “What do I need to do to get healthier, not only in my body but in my mind and my emotions and my spirit? I’m a whole being here and I’ve got different facets of myself that need to be healed.”
It is an awakening that I see in the United States. I’ve been in medicine for about thirty years and it’s so exciting to see this happening. When we allow the patient to be partners with us in medicine we can help them even better because they are going to provide the clues we need to help them in the healing process.
Healing may or may not happen overnight. It’s a process and we learn through it and what I see is that those people who have a little more difficulty in reaching the healing they want to achieve can use that to go out and help other people that are in need. And that is even more exciting–they get educated, they know what happened to their body, they know what they went through and they can go out and educate others.
Read the related article “YOU Are the Real Health Care Reform Movement”
