The Future of U.S. Healthcare?

I wish I didn’t have to say this/believed it in my heart, but healthcare in the USA is so impossible/expensive that I predict people are either going to move to another country or hurt themselves by switching to natural medicine and not being educated enough to make the right decisions about how to heal themselves.

I hope that with The Barefoot Aya I can help people with the little, every day things, like, “How can you cure/prevent UTIs (cranberry juice is a myth)? How can I increase my iron levels with food? Why is my hair falling out/what can help it grow?”

The little things….

I love researching and I love healing myself. It all started in 2010 when my horrible knife stab-like stomach pains that doctors didn’t believe me about for YEARS were diagnosed as IBS.

I found out it’s a blanket term for “something is wrong with your digestive system, but we don’t know what… at least not yet” and I found out with the help of a gastroenterologist that I was intolerant of high fructose corn syrup, aspartame, monosodium glutamate, and Red Dye #40. Kaboom. Knife pains gone. No more going to the bathroom every hour. No more choosing not to eat because my stomach hurt so bad. It took about a year for my stomach lining to fully heal after years and years of damage due to neglect by my doctor. My perspective on the medical field, which I had loved and honored so dearly since I was 5 years old, had completely changed.

Medicine is better now, it keeps getting better, but it’s becoming more and more expensive. Years later, in college, I had headaches that kept recurring. They kept getting worse and worse and worse until I had migraines every month and headaches every single day.

Well, the Advil didn’t work for the migraines and they kept getting worse. I found out by accident that it was celiac disease that was causing brain inflammation. No more gluten = no more headaches.

I am SO grateful. I am so happy that I turned down the opportunity to attend med school in order to educate the public, in order to write this blog, make documentaries, and try my best to make the world a better place.

With affordable options dwindling for US-based healthcare and fewer doctors even taking health insurance because it’s too expensive for them, I fear that my blog will become even more of a necessary resource for people. I don’t want that to happen. I’d rather it be supplementary, for people who are interested in alternative options and don’t want to do the research themselves. I’m not a doctor. I was almost a doctor. I only wanted to be a doctor for the first 19 or so years of my life, but this is better for me. This makes me feel more whole. I feel better working for myself instead of within a broken system…. but I’m not a doctor and I don’t want this blog to become a main resource for healthcare when other options are no longer available.

Many of my colleagues from college, pre-med classes, and even pre-med camp (when I was in high school) chose to go through and attend med school. They chose to put their freedom and many hours of sleep on the line to serve the public and hopefully make the world a better place from within, one patient at a time. They are fantastic listeners. They’re curious, open-minded, and incredibly intelligent.

I know a lot of people who read my blog don’t trust doctors, whether because of something that happened to them, a loved one, something that happened to me, or something they saw in the news – I don’t know. I think you’re all right. Don’t trust doctors. Why would you? But don’t lose all faith…. I know some pretty incredible ones out there. This upcoming generation of medical doctors will be the ones who can help us overcome this crisis. I have faith.