--- title: "Disease Care Isn't Healthcare: The Truth About Canada's 'Free' System" entity: "blog" canonical_url: "https://www.elevatefunctionalhealth.ca/blog/diseasecare" markdown_url: "https://www.elevatefunctionalhealth.ca/llms/blog/diseasecare" lastmod: "2026-07-13T17:30:00.000Z" --- Canada's healthcare system is a hot topic in my world. Although I am very grateful for the healthcare we do have in Canada, it is far from perfect. Many years ago while I was playing rugby in Detroit, Michigan, I overheard two of my teammates, one Canadian and one American, discussing their respective country's healthcare systems. My Canadian teammate was bragging about our "free" system, while my American team, half-joking responded, "survival of the fittest!". Meaning, only the fittest survive in the American healthcare system. If you are able to get a good job that offers insurance, or pays well enough that you can pay out of pocket for the services you need, your gene pool survives. Those who are unable to do such do not survive. Darwinian theory of evolution. Although this sounds harsh, she wasn't completely wrong in her thinking and made a good argument. While I think Canada's system is superior to America's, it is FAR from perfect and, far from "free". We pay for our healthcare system through our taxes, so it is technically not free. But the biggest argument I have, and a lot of my patients have as well, is that the Canadian healthcare system is not actually a healthcare system. It is a disease care system. Conventional medicine is very helpful when you have a full-on disease or emergency. But what about when you do not have a disease? When you are told you're fine based on your blood work, yet you do not feel fine. Rarely do we go from being healthy to suddenly having a disease. There is an in-between. There is a road you ride on before arriving at disease. And it is on this road, where conventional medicine has very little, if not nothing to offer. On this road, naturopathic medicine shines. The problem is, this medicine is not free. And Canadians expect free. ### Let's Talk about Accessibility Naturopathic medicine may not be free, but often patients have at least some coverage through extended health insurance. This is helpful, however, I often tell my patients to think about this coverage as a bonus, as it often does not get them very far in the full treatment plan we have designed for them. And so they are left paying out of pocket. Which for some, is completely okay. For others, they just can't wrap their heads around it. We live in Canada after all, the land where healthcare is free! Wrong. Disease care is free. Or at least it seems that way until you actually break down the numbers. ### The Resources We don't Talk About Enough When we think about resources and cost, our minds often go straight to money/financial resources. We often don't think about time and energy as resources, but they are. Think about what it actually costs, in hours, to access the "free" system when something is genuinely wrong. There's the walk-in clinic visit where you wait two, sometimes three hours, only to be seen for eight minutes by a physician who has never met you before and will likely never see you again. There's the referral to a specialist that takes four to six months to even get an appointment, and when you finally sit down in that office, you have maybe fifteen minutes to explain a problem that's been building for years. There's the follow-up blood work that comes back "normal," the shrug, the "everything looks fine," and the drive home wondering why you don't feel fine at all if everything is supposedly fine. Multiply that by every symptom you've chased answers for, every phone call to book, rebook, and confirm appointments, every day off work you've had to justify to an employer, every hour spent in a waiting room reading three-year-old magazines instead of being at your kid's soccer game or finishing the project that's due Monday. That is not free. That is an enormous, invisible tax on your life, paid in the currency of time you will never get back. And then there's energy, which might be the most expensive resource of all, because it's the one that determines whether you have anything left to fight with. Chasing your own health answers inside a system that wasn't built to look for anything before it becomes a diagnosable disease takes energy. Advocating for yourself when a doctor tells you your labs are normal but your body is screaming otherwise takes energy. Researching your own symptoms at midnight, joining Facebook groups, comparing notes with other people who've been dismissed the same way you have, that takes energy. By the time many of my patients walk into my clinic, they're not just sick, or not-quite-sick; they're exhausted from the sheer labor of trying to be believed. And that exhaustion has a cost too, even if no invoice is ever printed for it. ### What Accessibility Actually Means When people hear the word "accessible" applied to healthcare, they almost always default to one meaning: affordable. Can I pay for it. That's the only lens most of us have been trained to look through, because that's the only lens conventional healthcare has ever asked us to consider. But accessibility is so much bigger than a dollar figure, and if we only measure it in dollars, we miss most of what actually makes care usable, or unusable, in a person's real life. Accessibility means being able to book an appointment within a reasonable window of time, not being told the next available slot is four months out, by which point the symptom you were worried about has either resolved on its own or gotten so much worse that you're now dealing with an entirely different, more complicated problem. Accessibility means walking into a clinic and being seen at your appointment time, not sitting in a waiting room for two hours watching your afternoon evaporate, wondering if you should have just cancelled and stayed at work. And maybe most importantly, accessibility means being genuinely listened to. Not glanced at. Not half-heard while a practitioner types notes and glances at the clock. Actually listened to, the way you'd want a close friend to listen when you're trying to explain something that matters to you. That last piece is the one conventional care struggles with most, not because physicians don't care, but because the system was never built with the time for it. A ten or fifteen minute appointment slot does not leave room for someone to explain that they've been tired in a way that doesn't feel like normal tired, or that their digestion has felt "off" for eight months in a way they can't quite articulate, or that they just don't feel like themselves and haven't for a while and they don't know why. Naturopathic appointments are built differently. They're built long, specifically so that there is room for the whole story, not just the symptom that fits neatly into a checkbox. And this is where I want to be honest with you about something I notice constantly in my own practice: when patients push back on cost, it is almost never about the IV therapy. It is almost never about the prolotherapy injections. Those services, the ones with visible, tangible "doing" happening in the room, rarely get questioned. What gets questioned, again and again, is the consult fee. The conversation. The listening. Which is fascinating to me, because the consult is, by a wide margin, the most valuable and most labor-intensive part of what I do. An IV takes me a few minutes to prepare and administer, and once it's running, my brain is free. Prolotherapy is a skilled procedure, but it is contained; I do it, it's done, I move on. A consult is different. A consult means I am actively listening, cross-referencing your history with your bloodwork with your symptoms with your lifestyle with the six other things you mentioned in passing that might actually be the key to the whole picture. It means research after you've left, sometimes hours of it, digging into your specific case, reading recent studies on the exact combination of factors you presented with, building a treatment plan that is actually yours and not a generic template. It means holding your entire case in my head between appointments, thinking about you on my drive home, adjusting the plan before I've even seen you again. That is not less valuable than an IV bag. That is, in almost every case, more valuable. It is simply invisible, because you can't see thinking the way you can see a needle. ### What You're Actually Paying For Let's talk numbers for a second, because I think this is where the "it's so expensive" argument tends to fall apart once you actually look at it honestly. Most of us don't blink at spending 150 to 200 dollars a month on things we've decided are non-negotiable: a gym membership we use sporadically, a subscription box, dinners out, a streaming service bundle we forgot we even signed up for. We don't think twice about a 6 dollar coffee most mornings, which adds up to well over 150 dollars a month, money spent without a second thought because it's routine, because it's small, because it doesn't feel like a decision every time we tap the card. And yet when it comes to investing in a health plan built specifically around your body, your bloodwork, your history, and your goals, suddenly the conversation shifts to whether it's worth it. So what are you actually paying for when you invest in naturopathic care? You're paying for time, real, unhurried time, in an appointment that isn't rationed down to the minute. You're paying for a practitioner who is going to sit with your case outside of the appointment, researching, cross-referencing, thinking, long after you've left the room. You're paying for a treatment plan that is built around you specifically, not a flowchart designed for the average person with your symptom. You're paying for continuity, the same practitioner tracking your progress over months, adjusting as your body responds, rather than starting from scratch with a new face every time you walk into a walk-in clinic. And you're paying to be met on that in-between road we talked about earlier, the one before disease, where conventional medicine has nothing to offer you except a shrug and a "let's wait and see." Compare that to the hidden cost of staying in the disease care system while you wait for something to become bad enough to qualify for help. There's the cost of the sick days you take because you're too exhausted to function, the cost of the specialist visit eight months from now, the cost of the medication you'll eventually be prescribed to manage a condition that might have been caught and reversed on the road before it became a destination. There's the cost of feeling unwell for years, of adjusting your life around symptoms instead of resolving them, of simply accepting "this is just how I feel now" as your new normal because no one ever had the time to ask why. That cost doesn't show up on an invoice, but it is real, and it is often far higher than the cost of the care that could have prevented it. This is the reframe I want every reader walking away with: naturopathic medicine isn't an added expense on top of your healthcare. It is the healthcare piece that's been missing the entire time, the part that actually deals with health rather than waiting for disease . ### Coming Back to Detroit I think about that conversation on the rugby pitch more than you'd expect for something that happened years ago. My Canadian teammate, proud of her free healthcare. My American teammate, half-joking about survival of the fittest. Both of them were partially right, and both of them were missing the same thing. Because the truth is, neither system was built to ask why you don't feel well before you're sick enough to have a name for it. American healthcare will bankrupt you chasing an answer. Canadian healthcare will make you wait months for an answer, if it bothers to look for one at all. Both are excellent at disease care. Neither is genuinely healthcare, not in the way that word should mean: care for your health, not just the absence of it, not just the moment things fall apart. That's the gap naturopathic medicine exists to close. Not instead of the system you already have access to, but standing in the space that system was never designed to occupy, the long road before disease, where something is off but nothing has a name yet, where you deserve to be heard for longer than eight minutes, where the plan is built around your body instead of the average body, and where someone is actually thinking about your case after you've walked out the door. So no, it isn't free. It was never going to be. But paid for in appointments that take the time to actually listen, in a practitioner who does the thinking on your behalf long after the visit ends, in answers you don't have to wait half a year for, it might be the best money you spend on yourself all year. And when you pair that kind of care with a team working alongside each other rather than in isolation, chiropractic, physiotherapy, massage, TCM, all rowing in the same direction as your treatment plan, that's a whole different conversation, one I'll save for next time. Because at the end of the day, health isn't free. But neither is staying unwell. [Click here to book online](https://elevatefunctionalhealth.janeapp.com/) or call/text 403-860-3444 if you are ready to receive world-class HEALTHcare.