What Is the Health Freedom Movement?

The Health Freedom Movement is not a formal institution or organization, but rather a coming together of individuals and organizations in a kind of loose coalition whose aim is to present people with the freedom to make different choice in terms of the medical treatment that they opt for.

The Health Freedom Movement is seen as a spontaneous reaction against the pharmaceutical industry as well as medical regulators and their perceived hegemony over the health care system.
Objective of the Health Freedom Movement
The National Health Freedom Action website has the catchy phrase Promoting Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness which pretty much encapsulates the ideology of this movement;
which doesn’t seek to exclude conventional medicine but rather shows a preference for alternative and natural therapies.
The objective of this movement is to make available for people, the access to food supplements, vitamins, herbal preparations, minerals and so on that will help to prevent disease from occurring.
The focus should be on prevention of disease rather than a subsequent allaying of symptoms. However the way that the current health care system is poised, people are permitted to become sick and then expensive medical solutions are offered. It is this basic problem that the movement seeks to redress.
There is the argument made by proponents of the health freedom movement that the powerful pharmaceutical lobby has a vested interest in preventing people’s access to better health through nutrition.
It is alleged that many studies that examine the effect of nutrition therapy are so designed that they are bound to fail so that claims made by natural therapists are diminished and do not stand up to scientific scrutiny.
The objective of the movement is to let people have better access to more accurate information about nutritional and preventive therapies.
Activities of the Health Freedom Movement
The movement seeks to improve people’s access to organic food, herbal and nutritional supplements and to reduce the hold that the pharmaceutical industry has over health care, strangulating other options.
Also there is the attempt to remove what amounts of censorship by the government as regards natural healing methods and modalities so that people can make more informed choices.

One of the other of the objectives that the Health Freedom Movement works towards is to let individuals achieve greater privacy and control over the information relating to their health. Proponents of the movement are opposed to the sharing of genetic information about a patient without their consent.
There is also an attempt to curb the mindless and indiscriminate vaccination of children without attempting to weigh possible negative consequences of the vaccine against the possible benefits.
The aim is to make people aware of potential risks and to increase the safety of vaccines as well as all other pharmaceutical formulations.
Some Health freedom movement campaigners also agitate for the legalization of substances such as marijuana. Though this is controversial, it is argued that marijuana does have therapeutic properties and its use should be legalized in the way that it has been in certain European nations.
The campaign for legalization of marijuana states that resources used to prosecute and incarcerate users of this substance can be put to better use to catch more serious criminals.