Thinking back to when I was a small child, I can identify with Michelle Stirling-Anosh as a kid growing up in this country.
She describes it in her article of Nov. 26, Far too many non-emergency problems showing up in emergency wards. “Mom was the doctor in the house,” she writes, “food and rest were the medicine.”
My siblings and I were hardly ever sick. For one thing, home schooling, because of distance from school, tended to save us from exposure to illness and I do recall those usually commonsense home remedies apparently being effective.
One time I put a caustic substance we used for de-boning calves on my wrist, ( I had seen the hired man using it.) Home remedy to the rescue! I wore an application of baking soda for a while. In fact, I never saw a doctor until I was expecting my first child.
Stirling-Anosh states that the ER cannot solve the broader social issues and she adds it could offer intervention. A few years ago, I visited a friend, in her nineties, in the hospital, who had broken her leg. Young health workers were attempting the bring the “whole patient” so to speak, into the treatment.
But in this instance, the intervention seemed more like interfering. For this policy to be administered professionally, would require another layer of study and funding and Stirling-Anosh points out the government cuts to funding for mental health and addictions, “dumping these manyfold problems on the cops on the beat, the paramedics, the citizens and a handful of small charities that are overwhelmed.”
There is a free public reading room in downtown Red Deer. There you may find the Bible and Christian Science periodicals with reports of healing. The last 100 pages of the textbook, Science and Health With a Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy, tell of those healed just by reading the book.
My yearnings for our health care system may be summed up in he words of St. John — Beloved, I wish above all things that thou mayest prosper and be in health even as thy soul prospereth. III, John, 1:2
Cecile Hanna
Red Deer