Letters to the Editor

Townsend Letter for Doctors and Patients, August, 2001

We have also been fortunate in that Dr. John Crocker, our family physician at GHC has been generously supportive in all our efforts, even though GHC as an entity would not cover the cost of my stay at Dr. Burzynski's clinic to obtain the treatment which GHC itself could not provide.

Dr. Crocker's open-minded attitude however, helps reinforce our conviction that conventional medicine's resistance to alternative medicine must eventually crumble. The latter's more appropriate label of "complementary medicine" will, we believe, become recognized to the extent that it will be added to the list of services offered by lIMO's. Personally, of course, we would like Seattle's GHC to lead the way in this regard. Only then, we believe, could the medical protection they offer be considered truly comprehensive.

Supplemental to this improvement, we forecast that complementary medicine would promptly become the HMO's most popular service, and that the HMO in total would become considerably more cost-effective.

2) At first glance the second "side effect" of our total cancer experience might seem at odds with the first. Thoughtful introspection, however, suggests this notion to be misleading.

Take our personal case-history as a 'for instance'. I first joined GHC when I came to Seattle at the beginning of 1966. Our membership presently costs us some $450/month, plus co-payments and drugs.

Assuming an average monthly cost of $300 throughout these years, we have thus paid some $150,000 in total membership dues and ancillary costs. We have considered the medical care provided by GHC to be of excellent quality, and of course it has been comforting to know it was there whenever needed.

In reality, however, we have been fortunate in not having been beset by major medical problems, and our "dues" have exceeded the cost of the services we have used. These latter have involved a couple of childbirths, (both Cesarean), plus annual check-ups and, of course, blood pressure reviews and medication. Our real-need medical costs have probably averaged no more than $50/month.

Then came cancer. Our first major medical disaster and expense! GHC's battery of anti-cancer weapons include surgery, hormone treatment, radiation, and chemotherapy. It's a fair guess that going this conventional way would have cost GHC, (thence Medicare), a total of some $100,000 or so.

We chose to avoid the side-effects of these treatments, and their questionable success at knocking cancer out for keeps, and turned instead to Dr. Burzynski. Twenty years of much higher success and no side effects, his high reputation among authorities like Dr. Julian Whitaker, the fact he has been besieged by the bureaucracy and lied about and denigrated by part of the medical establishment (notably Radiation Oncologists), we felt, all pointed to his being the doctor with the most to offer.

GHC could neither provide his therapy nor pay for its cost, we learned, and thus we would have to pay its cost ourselves. Neither did Medicare offer any financial assistance, therefore, our total medical care package for the past 35 years will have cost us a total of some $200,000.