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About Prevention and Wellness |
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Contrary to what many in the medical profession would like us to believe “modern” Western medicine is not truly interested nor directed at preventing illness. Actually the medical profession has had little interest in both prevention and curing illness. While many talk about Prevention and curing illness few practitioners actually do this. There have always been small groups of people (some of whom have been physicians) who work with others to prevent and cure illness, most of our medical establishment is more often directed at treating and controlling symptoms. While the two may on first glance seem to be the same, they are not. In fact, they are very different. The end result of not preventing or curing illness is the rapid increase in the number and severity of chronic health conditions and considerable loss in quality of life we are seeing all around us today.
Take for example Johann Schimmelweiz, an obscure 19th Century Austrian Physician and Obstetrician. Schimmelweiz made the astute observation that if physicians would merely wash theirs hands between deliveries and examinations, the risk of childbed fever, one of the leading causes of death in the world at that time could be significantly reduced. Tens of thousands, even millions, of lives could be saved. When Schimmelweiz made his observations known to his physician colleagues, they laughed at him. The more he pursued trying to get his fellow physicians to wash their hands, the greater the reaction against him. Eventually, he was thrown out of medicine, and put into a mental institution for his beliefs.
Today, few physicians, surgeons or obstetricians would perform surgery, examine a patient or deliver a baby without washing or scrubbing their hands or wearing latex gloves to protect both their patient and themselves from infection. Still, today most physicians have little understanding of the real cause of disease and most physicians are still unwilling to recognize that most of the illnesses they treat could well have been prevented long before their patient even became ill.
Compared to many other industries, the medical profession still lags way behind in their willingness to prevent problems from occurring before they wreak havoc on their hosts. In recent years recognition of the high cost of injury has brought prevention into focus in the auto manufacturing industry with seat belts, crashes bags, safety glass, crush zones. The airline industry is another area where prevention has become important. Yet, in medicine physicians still watch and often do or say little while their patients move progressively from reasonably good health toward chronically illness while they simply adjust dosages and try new drugs that neither prevent nor cure the cause of their patients’ illness. In doing so they are surely allowing these illnesses to steadily progress and ultimately ravage their patients.
Today the average physician, equates prevention to periodic immunization, implementation of sewer systems and sanitation, treating symptoms and telling their patients to lose weight and reduce their blood pressure. Immunization has been one area of medicine where there has been a clear intention to ways of preventing viral and bacterial diseases by giving vaccines to increase the body immunity to infection. There is no question sanitation has also saved millions of lives as well. In the past 100 years we have literally eliminated yellow fever, dengue, polio, small pox, diphtheria, pertussis from the raging killers they once were. While this is an admirable form of prevention and has reduced untold suffering, it is not enough nor the only way we can prevent illness.
If you want to keep yourself healthy, you cannot count on the medical profession to either do it for you nor to provide you the means by which it can be done. If you want to grow old and be healthy, if you want to grow old and live a high quality or life, you must find help on your own, you must find medical experts dedicated to prevention and curing illness, not maintaining it and allowing the creation of chronic disease and decay.
This means that if you want to live longer and be healthier you must find the answers for yourself. You can rely neither on the medical profession nor on your own personal doctor. The medical profession is not directed at solving medical problems but rather treating them with medications and surgery. While we might like to think of the medical profession as a system dedicated to healing us, the truth is that it is a system of “Interventive medicine.” That is, you must first become broken or sick before they will even try to “fix” you. The current system has little interest in preventing the creation of your health problems yet, once you become sick then, and only then, can the full resources of the current medical profession can be brought to bear for you. While this interventive system may be great for fixing you once you are broken and they are terrific in saving your life if it is threatened BUT they generally do little or nothing, once saved, to keep you from getting sicker and developing chronic life robbing medical conditions.
In a sense they the principle the medical profession operates under is making sure tat the barn door is closed and locked after the horses have left. While we certainly agree that if and when you become sick it is important to stop and even reverse the illness process, our health care system should be designed to keep you from getting sick in the first place, rather than waiting for you to get sick, and then trying to pull you out of the fire.
Good prevention has little to do with you taking medications nor having to end up surgery. It is about systematically and appropriately changing your negative habits, improving your life style, improving your diet and optimizing your nutrition, exercising more often, thinking and feeling better. It often includes problem solving and when necessary, being in therapy to deal with the forces that exist within you that work against your being healthy and well.
Prevention and Wellness Have Everything to Do With:
• Obtaining appropriate healthy nutrition based on your own specific needs
• Creating a safe and wholesome living situation
• Proper exercise and stretching
• Positive thinking, elimination of lies, and unresolved conflicts
• Stress reduction
• Creating and maintaining mental, emotional and spiritual harmony and balance
• Working at a job or career that supports yours and your family lifestyle and well-being
• Creating a healthy supportive system of relationships, love and nurturing
• An emotionally healthy spiritual view of life, living in an intelligent Universe
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Prevention and Wellness 