Melançon Enterprises • a multidivision multinational since 1980

On 7/5/07, Jim-NYS wrote to the Ida B. Wells Media Justice Center (of the US Social Forum) list:

> Anyone with info, ideas, thoughts on the key needs of Healthcare in the
> U.S.. as it relates to servicing communities of color, is invited to share
> such information with me.

A broader perspective, a bit beyond what you asked for, is excerpted below. When you consider that one of the crimes of U.S.-style slavery was ripping people from the land they and their ancestors *knew* and that many immigrants likewise have cultures knowledgeable about local cures, but find themselves in a culture profoundly alienated from nature, the call (from a European-American pagan perspective) for a "revival and resurgence of a science that understands the world as alive" has particular relevance to the health of people of color, too.

Here is Sean Donahue in a very recent article:

Modern Western allopathic medicine -- a system that seeks to suppress the symptoms of disease rather than to support the body's systems, and that treats the individual in isolation -- arose from a mechanistic view of the universe that gained favor among a growing middle class in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Its is the product of the same world view that gave rise to capitalism and the privatization of the commons and drove genocide against the peoples of the Americas, the enslavement of millions of Africans, and the often brutal suppression of the knowledge, wisdom, and religion of Europe's poor, rural majority.

...

Herbal medicine and midwifery also gave people more power over their own lives. Most rural people had some basic knowledge of the plants needed to cure common ailments -- and could grow or gather these
plants themselves. That, of course, remains true in many places today.

...

Wouldn't it make more sense to work to promote a decentralized system where local practitioners worked with people to help them find, cultivate, and use the plants they could use to promote their own
bodies' natural healing processes? A system which recognized the deep connection between the health of our bodies and the health of the deserts and forests and fields that are home to the plants we use for
food and medicine? A system that acknowledged that we can't reduce the living world to a system of interlocking parts?

Full article by Sean Donahue ( http://www.seandonahue.org/ ) here:
What Kind of Health Care Will Be Universalized?

benjamin

~ In living, loving memory: http://melanconent.com/john-melancon-life ~

p.s. I'm in Massachusetts, home of private-health-care-by-law, so rapid answers and organization on this issue are much more than academic to me!