When I first attended Chiropractic school, I was beginning the process of questioning just what was wrong with health and healthcare. The biggest problem that I see is the faulty assumption that medicine equals healthcare.
It doesn’t.
Medicine is the study and practice of keeping people alive, that is, saving them from injury, illness and disease that is likely to kill them. Medicine is really great at this. If I am bleeding out from a severed artery, just had a heart attack or a broken limb, or need antibiotics because an infection is ravaging my body and I’m failing too rapidly to recover, then I will turn to medicine.
But in delivering health, medicine had failed me for most of my life. When I had asthma, the solution was to suppress it with drugs. Indeed, those drugs probably kept me alive when I had no other options. When my knees hurt and I wanted to play soccer, I took ibuprofen to let me do that. That’s the medicinal approach.
So why isn’t it healthcare?
Because health is not simply the absence of a disease or symptom. Health is about so much more than that. And because sometimes health means having a symptom. Frankly medicine doesn’t know what to do with you when you have no symptoms. And if you’re having a perfectly appropriate symptom that is not life threatening, taking away that symptom will degrade your health. So medicine is not health care. It’s life-saving care. It’s symptom suppressing care.
How is Chiropractic different?
First of all, not all Chiropractic is different. Some of it is very focused on symptoms, on musculoskeletal pain, or joint dysfunction. True health lies beyond even these concepts, and must include a holographic or holistic model of health, that encompasses every aspect of your life. Every single action, every single decision, can and will have an impact on your health, moving you towards wellness or towards illness.
Receiving a chiropractic adjustment puts people in the driver’s seat, helping them to become more aware of what is going on in their body, their mind, their heart, their emotions, and their whole life. That makes them more informed, and more able to make choices to guide them where they want to go. They can become warriors on their own path of healing, more conscious of the journey, and not simply along for the ride.
Personally, my chiropractors and mentors are people who follow this model of care. As a result, I am someone now who takes charge of his health, his life, and feels empowered in it. How many of you can say the same? And if you can’t, don’t you think it’s time to do so? How much freedom would that grant you?
The asthma that plagued me since I was five years old is gone. I eliminated it through diet, exercise, chiropractic, and meditation. The knees? Believe it or not, the same practices. These efforts worked because they were holistic, holographic, and I felt the impacts through my body and my entire life.
Take charge of your health. Take charge of your life.