More IPT Patients

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When more patients demand IPT, it will become available to them.

Medicine, like government, is ultimately for the people. If they are sick, they want the best treatment possible. If enough of them demand a change in the medical system, they will get it, no matter how powerful the financial, political, and professional inertias that resist the change.

If enough people want IPT to be tested and available, they will get it. If enough people ask questions about IPT, the answers will be delivered to them.

What cancer patient would refuse a slight modification in chemotherapy treatment that got better results with no major side effects?

What arthritis sufferer would refuse the chance to try a couple of treatments and have a chance of experiencing relief of symptoms for several years?

What patient with paralysis would refuse a simple, quick, inexpensive treatment that might allow him to walk again?

What patient with a life-threatening chronic infection would refuse a simple method that could improve the effectiveness and delivery of antiviral and antibiotic drugs and perhaps clear the infection entirely?

If IPT treatments were readily available from their personal doctors, and accepted for payment by insurance companies, most likely patients would not refuse them. They would demand them.

Look at these examples of the power of the patients:

1. Drug companies in the US are advertising directly to consumers because if a patient requests a specific drug by name, the doctor will prescribe that product something like 80 percent of the time.

2. Patients in the US are independently spending billions of dollars of their own money going to alternative health practitioners. So, slowly but surely, medical schools are starting to teach alternative medicine, the NIH is sponsoring more alternative medical research, and insurance companies are starting to pay for alternative procedures because they often save money that way.

3. Patients in the US have been complaining about the reimbursement policies of HMOs (health maintenance organizations). Movie audiences throughout the US spontaneously cheered while watching As Good As It Gets when a character openly rebelled against an HMO. Suddenly a patients' bill of rights is a political issue, and HMOs are changing their policies.

4. Activism and lobbying by AIDS patients and their friends has resulted in a share of the US medical research budget that is much larger than the percentage of deaths caused by the disease.

The same thing can happen for IPT.

A few patients are now willing to travel to find a rare IPT doctor, and will gladly pay out of their own pocket. These are the early adopters. Most patients, however, will choose standard treatment from their local doctor, and will have to wait until IPT is better tested and more widely acknowledged. Most will wait until it appears in newspapers or on TV. But if a lot of patients start asking their doctors about IPT, some of those doctors will start looking into it, and some of them will seek IPT training and certification. If patients write about IPT to their elected representatives, some of them will research it, and a few might propose legislation to support IPT research. If patients demand that IPT be covered by health insurance, some companies will investigate IPT and find that it could save them a lot of money, not to mention providing better results for their customers.

And all this from just one patient at a time getting interested in IPT and talking about it.

If you know someone who is suffering from a disease that might be better treated with IPT, you can send them (or their family) an email about IPTQ.org.