Elissa Meininger is a health policy analyst specializing in the history and politics of natural healing arts. In the mid-1980s, she almost died of mercury poisoning from dental fillings. Back then, dentists often lost their licenses if they discussed the dangers of “silver” amalgam fillings with their patients.
MDs, to this day, are not trained to diagnose mercury poisoning and when she had to go outside standard medical care to find help, she asked herself a simple question, “How come I can’t get proper health care at a reasonable price?”
That question has prompted her to dig deep into the history and politics of the American health care system. Not just an armchair researcher, she’s been in the trenches all this time protecting and promoting medical and health choice.
In 1990, in preparation for an FDA hearing on the safety of mercury fillings, she conducted the first national survey among fellow amalgam poisoning victims. She asked questions about where they finally got the answers they needed to get well AND what kinds of costly and inappropriate care they received because MDs practicing standard allopathic medicine had no training in how to diagnose or treat their many health problems.
In 1994, she became the principle architect of changes in Oklahoma medical laws to protect MDs who want to offer homeopathic, nutritional, herbal and other non-allopathic medical services.
Key to these changes was to clarify that allopathic medicine is a distinct medical art and non-allopathic practices were not subject to regulation by the allopathic medical board.
That same year, she received the Citizen Activist Award from Citizens For Health for her leadership in passage of the Dietary Supplement Health & Education Act of 1994. DSHEA as the new law was called, came about because the FDA had published its desire to remove dietary supplements from the market because they represented a “disincentive” for drug research.
She provided testimony for a U.S. Senate Hearing on the Access to Medical Treatment Act of 1995, prepared a paper for the White House Commission on Complementary and Alternative Medicine, served as Interim Chair of the National Reform Party’s Health Issues Committee, wrote dozens of articles for NewsWithViews.com, served as Vice President of Friends of Freedom International (a Canadian-based organization concerned with the UN’s Codex Alimentarius Commission’s interest in lowering dosage level of dietary supplements), and served as health policy analyst on Superhealth radio show.
She has contributed content for all three editions of the best selling book, Death by Modern Medicine, by Carolyn Dean MD/ND. In this regard, they added a new chapter at the end of the third edition called Future of Thought, to begin the discussion about the paradigm shift already underway thanks to quantum physics, its influence on the New Thought Movement and the practice of non-allopathic medicine.
Her quest to find out how to improve the American medical system has taken her as far away as Dubai where a multi-model medical system thrives and is a world class medical tourism destination.