Three Ways to Think About Health that No One Talks About

Most of our society is used to blaming our problems on our genetic make up, parents, or a system, especially when it comes to health.  The purpose of this post is to shift responsibility to and empower the individual in order for the individual to gain control of their health.  If the cause of your health problems was shifted to an outside influence then the solution would be outside of your self.  However, by you taking responsibility for your health, you are taking control over the cause of illness and the solution to it.  Taking responsibility does not mean blaming self or inflicting guilt on self for a current health condition, it means taking action towards wellness. 

One system of healthcare dictates that we must wait for illness to occur and for symptoms to appear in order to address health, meaning when the sickness occurs your doctor will get you to agree to do whatever it takes to get rid of it; but, the solution could be harmful, yet you make a decision that the benefit of the treatment outweighs the harmful side effects of that same treatment.  We call this Sick Care. 

Let’s take a simple example of treating an infection.  You go to a doctor, the doctor prescribes an antibiotic. If you are informed, you know that antibiotics will kill good bacteria as well as bad bacteria in your large intestine.  Also, repeated use of antibiotics will make bacteria immune to antibiotics. Doctors call these superbugs. However, at the moment, the benefit of the antibiotic is to kill the infection and you disregard the harmful side effects until you get another infection.

Another example could be appendicitis.  In this case, the doctor might advise you to take your appendix out, knowing that the appendix produces T-helper cells, which are an important part of your immune system.  You might be warned that unless the appendix is taken out, the infection could spread and you could die.  So a doctor might strongly suggest that the benefit of taking out your appendix will outweigh the harm.

There are many examples of sick care that we can give you and unfortunately there is an abundance of them, but most of our illnesses are due to our lifestyles.  Even the medical community recognizes that, so they have come up with a model of healthcare that encompasses detection and prevention.  We call this Prevention Care.  An example of that is breast cancer.  The medical community places an emphasis on mammograms and yearly check ups.  The logic behind that is that the earlier the illness is detected and diagnosed, the better chance of survival a patient will have.

The purpose of this post is to introduce Wellness Care.  Wellness Care means to be proactive about our health.  In Wellness Care, we are not running away from disease or solely preventing disease, we are running towards optimal health.  In this model of healthcare, we are not waiting for disease to occur in order to detect it early.  This model puts you, the individual, completely in control.  We have been led to believe that we are not in charge of our health.  We have been taught that our doctors are in charge of our health and this is why we pay our insurance companies and our physicians.  But the reality is that YOU are the only one in charge.  Do you know anyone whose family cares more about their health than they care about themselves?  People like that exist.  The fact that you are reading this blog is a sign that you are interested in taking charge and taking control of your health.  Congratulations!

Wellness Care starts with lifestyle.  It has more to do with knowledge of your physiology, psychology, emotional health, higher body functions and nutrition than anything else.  Once you know how to invest in your future self and how to improve your health then you have begun Wellness Care.  By improving health I mean that tomorrow you can be healthier than today.  One important question you want to ask your self is this.  If I behave exactly the same way for the next five years as I have in the last five years, what will my health be like?

Here is a bit of insight, by knowing more about your physiology, psychology, emotional health and higher body functions you will find yourself having different beliefs and convictions about your health.  Therefore, you will make different decisions based on new knowledge.  By making different decisions, you will take different actions.  If your knowledge stays the same as it has been for the last five years, chances are you will have the same beliefs, you will make the same decisions and will get the same results.

When you read future posts and you experience the amount of control you can have over your health, you will change your beliefs about many aspects of your health.  Your decisions will be different.  We present this blog to help you learn how to create different conditions in your life and take different actions.

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