Health And Wellness: The Shift From Managing Illness To Promoting Health
Wellness is a concept that has become popular in the last couple of years. It involves a complete sense of wellbeing, not just physically but mentally and emotionally as well.
Wellness is a voluntary seeking out of ways to give one a higher quality of life and focuses on staying well and not waiting for disease to manifest before you make lifestyle changes. If you do have health problems, wellness care focuses on finding and eliminating the cause of disease and not just treating disease symptoms alone.
We can sum it up like this. Wellness is:
• not having or being at risk of disease
• an active process of becoming aware of and making choices toward a healthy and fulfilling life.
• a choice: a decision you make to move toward optimal health
• a way of life: a balanced lifestyle you design to achieve your highest potential for well-being
• a process: an understanding that there is no end point, but health and happiness are possible in each and every moment
• the integration of body, mind, and soul: an awareness that the choices we make in one area affect all others
In pursuit of wellness, we begin to believe it is better to:
• be physically fit than to be out of shape
• consume food and beverages that enhance our health rather than impair it.
• avoid all toxins which compromise our health and well-being
• be proactive with our health and use the medical system appropriately
Sickness care versus wellness self-care
Previously it was common not to worry about becoming sick. We all knew that the so called “health system” was there to fix us up. But we are becoming more aware that our health is our own responsibility and not someone else’s.
Besides there is not a doctor, surgical procedure, treatment or drug that can build us a strong, healthy, robust, disease resistant body. Only we can do that.
In the pursuit of wellness, even if we do become sick, while it is desirable to eliminate symptoms when they appear, in most cases it is way more important to treat the cause.
On the other hand the ‘sickness industry’ is the conventional surgery and synthetic pharmaceutical drugs business. It tries to treat disease and sickness after it appears.
You are only a customer for this system when you are ill. Is this something we want – do we want a system that manages sickness rather than promoting health?
Personally I have a “wellness” doctor. One who I see once a year and have a range of blood tests to see if everything (hormones, vitamin levels, blood sugar levels etc) is in the right ranges to keep me well.
The difference between the two systems is easily explained:
Sickness care – re-actively treats the symptoms of disease after they occur
Wellness care – proactively prevents poor health and disease and slows the aging process
Keeping wellness and health is more important than wealth and its secret is in our lifestyle. My eBook “Just Say No To Cancer” has all the tools and strategies to help you achieve true wellness. Just go back to the home page of this website to find out all about it.