I think this is an important topic for RasTafarI people to hopefully prevent serious personal or family consequences. Many and likely most RasTafarI people, including Iself, prefer natural remedies over Western medicine and its associated side effects. I think for many things, this is a good approach, but people need to be more reasonable and realistic with this approach, and realize when they should turn to western medicine. Western medicine is not all good, but it is also not all bad, humans have received many benefits because of it, and we now survive and recover from diseases and injuries that would have previously killed or severely harmed us. And while there are known, effective natural remedies for many things, the remedies are not effective for everything, and sometimes western medicine is significantly better or the only presently known remedy that actually works.
I read a story in the news recently. It is not about RasTafarI people but about a family who rejects western medicine. A few years ago, a child in Alberta, Canada died from meningitis because his parents refused to take him to a hospital. The parents own a nutritional supplements company that sells herbal remedies and vitamins, and reject Western medicine because of bad experiences they say they had with it.
A friend who was a nurse told them that it looked like their child had meningitis and that they should take him to a doctor, but they decided to continue to treat him themselves.
On the day of his death, they called a Naturopath Medical clinic asking for a treatment for meningitis, and the person at the clinic suggested that they take the child to a doctor. They replied that a nurse had already seen him and asked the clinic what remedy they would suggest. Then they drove their child to the clinic to pick up a tincture of echinacea, but the child's body was too stiff to put him in his car seat, so they put a mattress in the back of their vehicle to take him to the naturopath. That evening, their child stopped breathing and they finally took him to a hospital, but at that point it was too late and the child died a few days later.
The parents were told that their child likely had meningitis, which is an infection in the fluid around the brain. With meningitis, even if it didn't kill the child, the pressure on the brain from the infected fluid could have given the child permanent brain damage. But they were so stubborn and ignorant in their ways that this knowledge wasn't enough to make them decide to take their son to the hospital. And what is even worse, and more stubborn and ignorant, is that on the day their child died, he was too stiff to get into his car seat while trying to take him to the naturopath clinic, and even that wasn't enough for those ignorant parents to decide to take their poor child to the hospital.
They opposed western medicine because of bad experiences they say they had with it, but I suspect that the bad experience they had without western medicine was much worse then the bad experience they had with it.
Reasonable and realistic. Two concepts that many people don't grasp, and really need to learn to grasp, if not for their own well-being, for the well-being of their children.
|
|