Column by Bill Bradberry — Having suffered and recovered from my fair share of illnesses and injuries over the years, I have come to believe that sometimes the treatment and the cure of my condition can seem to be far worse than whatever I may think is ailing me at the moment.

While watching, listening to and reading some pretty fierce political advertising recently, I was reminded of the good old days many years ago when my mother would line me, my siblings and my dad up in the kitchen to administer heaping tablespoons full of castor oil to each of us in her ongoing war against the common cold, the flu and any other bug that might have made its way anywhere close to our neighborhood. It was as though she had taken a solemn oath to defend us against whatever viruses, germs and hostile bacteria that might be lurking outside the storm doors during this time of the year.

Warm weather in January and February seemed to induce illnesses back in those days. We were not far removed from a time in our history when tens of thousands of people, especially the elderly and young children suffered and died from pneumonia and influenza which often started out looking like a common cold. Sniffles and a nagging cough were seen by some as signs of worse symptoms to come, so castor oil and a myriad of home remedies, some of them almost too nasty to tolerate, were likely the only defense many had against the ravages that might follow.

But to me, as a naive kid with little or no tolerance for bad taste, no amount of sugar or sweet juices could cover up what I considered to be the most repugnant thing I could swallow regardless of the potential benefit particularly when I was not displaying any outward signs that I was sick, in fact most of the time I was not sick at all, or at least I did not think I was, and neither did anyone else in the house appear to me to be sick at all.

No amount of protestation, complaint; no rationale, argument or reasoning ever persuaded mom to let me or any of the rest of us off the hook; we had to stand up, line up, open our mouths and swallow the medicine, no exceptions.

“I know you’re not sick now,” she’d proclaim, “and if I can help it, no one in this house is going to get sick. Now open up!”

On those rare occasions when the preventive medicine did not or could not protect us from evil we were served up some rather disgusting concoctions, some courtesy of the good doctors via the local pharmacy but came some straight out of the annals of good old fashioned home remedies passed down from decades old recipes created with what would definitely be considered as dangerous toxins today, ingredients such as turpentine which might make you even sicker if they did not kill you.

I can clearly recall that when I was growing up, some parents and grandparents in my community had been raised where heath care was not always readily available, let alone affordable, so many like their parents before them relied on home made remedies or mysterious compositions only available from old southern country stores. Some of those old brews worked better than what might have been available from the country doctors and pharmacists, or so they preferred to believe. I know people today who are my age and younger who still rely on their grandparent’s concoctions, and I sense that during these recessionary times when so many have lost their health care benefits, that many of those old remedies may be finding their way back to the medicine cabinets.

I can remember being rubbed down, or having my chest smeared in pungent creams, or my throat wrapped with substances that were intended to clear my lungs, unstuffy my nose, ease my cough and in the process, ward off enemies, bugs and for that matter friends a foe alike. Some of that stuff simply reeked, but it also appears to have done the trick ... I’m still breathing after all these years.

In this, the age of amazing medical breakthroughs, outrageously effective technology, instant communications, delivery systems and unparalleled access to health care for more people on the planet than ever before, other than money and ignorance, there probably is no real good reason why so many people still cannot get the basic medicines and most fundamentally necessary help when they need it yet, here we sit only a short distance from the two year old devastation that wrecked major portions of Haiti unable, it seems, to effectively move forward.

At the same time, according to some sources, including the World Health Organization notwithstanding the incredible progress the world has made in my lifetime, huge global health care issues still loom larger than life in some places. Consider this:

• More than one billion people lack access to any health care at all

• More than 7.5 million children under five years old die from malnutrition and preventable diseases every year

• At least 6.7 million people died of infectious diseases in 2008

• There are at least 9.4 million new cases of Tuberculosis  per year killing an average of 1.7 million

• Nearly 200, 000 people, mostly children died from measles last year in spite of the fact that immunization cost less than one dollar

n Over the next hour, no less than 1,500 people, mostly children will die from mostly preventable infectious diseases.

I suppose the good news is that, as a whole we have made some very substantial progress toward finding cures and remedies for just about all that fundamentally ails us; the bad news, if you choose to call it that, and I do, is that we have not quite figured out how to get the medicine where it is most needed, YET!

Contact Bill Bradberry at bill.bradberry@yahoo.com.