Medicine has its uses, that’s for certain. But one thing that it cannot do is deliver wellness. It’s not that medicine is a bad thing. It’s incredibly useful for what it is. It saves lives every day. Unfortunately, it also ruins lives by trying to do wellness care when it just isn’t set up to do it. From a financial metaphor, medicine is like getting out of debt, sometimes extreme debt. Wellness care builds up your savings and investments to help you weather future storms.
It comes down to philosophy. The philosophy of medicine is that if someone doesn’t have some kind of detectable symptom, then they are healthy, and there isn’t anything to do. Even their preventive medicine, which masquerades as wellness care, depends upon early detection of symptoms, or, failing that, creating symptoms by using numbers.
If someone has high cholesterol, medicine approaches that with a drug to lower that number. But what does that number mean? And how did it get there? If someone has high blood sugar, medicine approaches that with a drug to lower that number. But what does it mean, and how did it get there? If someone has inflammation in a joint, we give them a drug to do something about it, and if that fails, the answer is usually surgery. Some of these scenarios are symptomatic, and some are based on numbers, but the response is the same. Give them a drug, control the symptom, or lower the number. And in some cases, that does save lives.
But it’s not wellness.
Wellness, by it’s very nature, is proactive. Health is not to be found in a drug or a surgery, but that it wells up from within when there is nothing in the way. This is the chiropractic philosophy of health, which sees it as not merely the absence of symptoms, but optimal function. Would you rather be pain free, or feel vibrantly alive and excited about that life? This philosophy honors what it is to be alive, and treats the body as a temple, not a vehicle with interchangeable parts that needs to be controlled or subjugated. Not only that, but sometimes symptoms are essential for restoring health.
Given that expansive understanding of health, covering up a symptom isn’t honoring the body, but denying it of its ability to inform us of what it needs. Medicine is reductive, looking at individual body parts as pieces of the whole, that can be cut out and replaced if need be. But to the chiropractor, the body is alive, and can heal from anything given enough time and the opportunity to do so.
If someone has high cholesterol, the chiropractor will adjust them. That sounds crazy, right? How does that cure high cholesterol? It doesn’t! But it allows the body to function optimally. Is there still high cholesterol? Then there is a reason for it. But what? Well, since we know that higher numbers of cholesterol appear in cases of higher inflammation systemically, then it behooves us to look at the person’s lifestyle and figure out what’s causing that. It’s typically nutritional. Eating in a way to lower inflammation, and working with stress levels can make a bigger difference. And there are a host of other “side” effects that come from working with nutrition and lifestyle. Lowering inflammation levels will reduce arthritis pain, clear the mind of fog, reduce hunger, lower blood sugar, reduce the effects of other diseases, and make life better all around.
That is wellness care. And with me, it starts with chiropractic.
Live a Brilliant Life, you deserve it!