Month: August 2013

Isn’t it strange that most of the time we watch the news regarding government funding, there rarely seems to be anything positive in the decisions being made for the average citizen?  it seems that more and more the topics being discussed usually include some sort of cutbacks.

I always say to my husband, there is not usually any good news on the news; I find it sometimes a mere foreshadowing of some gloom to come.  The Americans cry out at the state of their health-care and often compare it to our Canadian O.H.I.P. system.  Albeit, we as Canadians, are quite lucky to have such a health care system, but like most systems these days, it is quite evident that we continually feel the pinch of cutbacks with each passing year.  It seems as though more and more tests and prescription drugs are being eliminated from  formerly covered expenses.

As a holistic person, I do my best to try and live by ‘clean eating’ and I maintain my health by taking natural supplements which have sustained me and kept me in long remissions through the years while living with Crohn’s disease.

Health Canada has been slowly taking many supplements off the shelves of our health stores; supplements that many people like myself have come to depend on for better quality of life, for many years.  Not necessarily for health warnings per se more so because a lot of beaurocratic red tape.  It seems the process of approval for many supplements has been going through a ‘re-vamp’ for quite a few years now.  When they decided that all supplements required a NPN number, the supplier of such supplements had to re-submit forms for these numbers for items that had already been on shelves for years.  Newer supplements suppliers submitting forms could literally be in a wait line for years because of the backlog to implement the system,  This process can take some years until all submissions get to their review. In many cases, products are being taken off the shelves in the interim.  There is a lot of controversy about this because of a lot of hearsay about whether or not the system is relying on qualified checks on such products or if it is leaning back to the pharmaceutical companies, because that is where the money is.

This lag in the review process of course gives people like me, who rely on such products, not many alternatives,  I feel as though doing this to people who choose to live ‘naturally’, without pharmaceuticals, are being pushed against a wall.  I just think that we should all be able to make informed choices based on truthful information and not be media-hyped or government urged to have to rely on pharmaceuticals as an ‘only’ alternative,  I just want Health Canada to start looking at us citizens with human compassion and not as statistics about the almighty dollar.

Unfortunately, the world is becoming to greedy, in a desperate attempt to ‘one up’ one another, leaving human compassion sometimes to the wayside.  For now it’s just an inconvenience, but I am grateful to be able to still obtain my long-time remedies from the U.S.

DGKaye©2013