Do You Really Want to Be Healthy?

There is an old saying, “Everybody wants to go to heaven but nobody wants to die to get there.” A similar statement could be made concerning health. In almost any survey taken asking people what they wanted most out of life, good health is one of the top three things on the list. The only two things that ever top it are happiness and good family relationships. Yet how many of us allow other less important things to keep us from attaining maximum health. Like happiness, health does not come by luck. It is true that hereditary factors are important to good health but most people can be healthy in spite of hereditary weakness. Conversely, hereditary strengths will not overcome a failure to take care of yourself.

Most people who come into a chiropractic office indicate a desire to be healthy. Unfortunately, they often do not realize that it will take some effort on their part. The average person’s experience with medicine has led them to believe that they will be made healthy by what the doctor does to them or what he gives them. They can just sit back, do nothing or at most, remember to take their medication every four hours. While this approach may be relatively effective in the treatment of disease, it has virtually nothing to do with health. For the most part, disease treatment is a passive activity. Health maintenance or health restoration is largely an active endeavor. Therein lies the problem. Sitting back and doing nothing will not promote or maintain health. Hoping or wishing for it will not make it happen. It must be actively pursued. A choice must be made. Good, nutritious, health-promoting food is available, but then so is junk food. You must make the decision as to what kind you are going to eat and then make the extra effort to get it. Exercise is not a passive activity. You cannot get it by just watching Jane Fonda videos.

Chiropractic is not a passive activity either. While it is true the patient lies on the table and relaxes, it is the body that makes the adjustment. The chiropractor introduces a force to the spine and the body’s muscles actively move the bone to exactly where it belongs. Further, the benefits of chiropractic care occur after the adjustment, like exercise and eating, they are far reaching and unlike treatments, they are not designed for short-term, immediate effects. It is true you may feel good after eating a good meal or after a good work out. You may also feel good right after a chiropractic adjustment, but the real benefits are the long-term ones. When the body is working better it can actively promote health and well being and add years to life.

There is another aspect that makes chiropractic care an active approach. The patient must make the commitment to care. The chiropractor cannot give you a bottle of adjustments and say, “Take one every Monday, Wednesday and Friday for the next six weeks.”

The patient must make the willful decision to come in, be regular and follow the program. The chiropractor cannot follow you around or take you by the hand.

Do you really want to be healthy? Sadly, too many people do not want to pay the price which is time, money and effort.  Happiness does not come by accident. Fame and fortune are not a matter of luck. Similarly, you cannot expect to have good health unless you do those things necessary to attain it. Every individual has to establish his or her priorities.  Is watching television more important than exercising for your health? Is saving money by eating poor quality food more important to you than spending the few dollars for good food? Is doing whatever you do that interferes with regular adjustments more important than your health? Only you can answer these questions and how you decide on these and other relative questions could very well determine your health, your happiness and your life. Do you really want to be healthy?

The Best Insurance Is To See Your Chiropractor And Have A Healthy Lifestyle

This is a quote from Medicare guidelines, Section 2251.3:

“A treatment plan that seeks to prevent disease, promote health, and prolong and enhance the quality of life; or therapy that is performed to maintain or prevent deterioration of a chronic condition is deemed, NOT medically necessary”…

Socialized Medicine

Did you ever notice how certain issues seem to not have an answer because the people involved are looking for the answers in all the wrong places?  Recently, there was a discussion on the television between a congressman from the state of Vermont and a spokesman for the pharmaceutical companies.  The congressman was a socialist.  (That is not my opinion, this man actually identifies himself as a socialist).  He was decrying the profits being made by the drug industry and the rising costs of medicine in this country.  As the American population of baby boomers begins to reach their later years with an even slightly increased life-span, the rising costs of drugs has become a significant problem.  Government programs like Medicare cannot seem to pick up the slack.  People on fixed and low incomes, those who are least able to afford it often seem to be the ones who need drugs the most.  The representative from Vermont was calling for price controls and more governmental control over the pharmaceutical industry.  In true socialistic fashion, he was extolling the virtues of socialized medicine in Canada where the government actually subsidizes the cost of medications.  He even went so far as to suggest that the state of Vermont buy drugs in Canada for resale in the state because they can be purchased cheaper than in the US.  The fact is that socialized medicine has been a failure wherever it has been tried, including Canada, and the last thing Canada needs is to help subsidize the pharmaceutical needs of the people of Vermont.  The idea is ludicrous.

Unfortunately, as bad as his argument was, the spokesman for the capitalist side, the drug industry, was not presenting a good argument.  His solution was that people should buy private insurance to cover the cost of medications.  That is an easy answer for a guy who makes a six-figure income but a good percentage of the working public cannot afford any insurance. And if the working public cannot afford insurance, how can he expect people who are on fixed income to buy additional insurance to cover medications? With stupid arguments like that, it is no wonder this country is accepting socialism on a wholesale level.  If we are made to believe that a minimum wage is a right, education is a right, a certain income is a right and it is the job of government to insure these rights, then it is easy to argue that living is also a right and we are entitled to have someone pay for our medications.  (The assumption being you cannot live without drugs which may or may not be correct for certain people).

            They say that there is no right answer to a wrong question.  Similarly there is no right answer to a wrong situation.  The congressman assumes people are going to need more and more drugs to be healthy and are going to be priced out of it by profit-conscious drug companies.  The drug companies assume that the economy will grow and people will be able to afford the drugs or to buy insurance which will spread out the cost of the drugs among the population.  Perhaps the solution is to look elsewhere for the answer to people’s health problems.  Drugs have not made the people of this country any healthier, just better able to live with their lack of health.  Maybe we need to begin to do the things necessary to keep ourselves healthier.  Why is it that a husband and wife can live together for 60 years and he spends four or five hundred dollars a month on medication and she needs none.  Let us look to what makes people healthy and more important, what keeps people healthy.  The answer is not in a pill.  The idea that there is a single, one-shot answer like a miracle drug is what has gotten us into this mess.  It sure is not going to get us out whether socialized medicine pays the bills for it or we pay for it ourselves.

The answer is in doing those things, all the things necessary to make us healthier.  Things like eating better, exercising more, and yes, getting checked and adjusted when necessary by a chiropractor on a regular lifetime basis.  We also need to stop doing the things that keep us from being healthy.  There is a great deal of work to be done in the area of health and it is never going to be done unless we start looking for the answer in the right places.

The Fountain of Youth

You would think that the idea of a fountain of youth would have ended with Ponce` de Leon's failure to locate it in Florida, but every few years, someone comes up with an idea, a drug, or a gimmick which can assure people eternal youth.  A recent article entitled “Enzyme May be Fountain of Youth” has once again spurred interest.  Of course, the headline is only designed to grab peoples’ attention.  There is no secret to perpetual youth.  The researchers admit that findings “won’t make people any younger or allow them to live forever.”  By the time you finish reading the article you realize that the researchers are really not promising anything.

What they have found is that a cell divides about 70 times over a lifetime.  Each time it divides, the protective end of the chromosome, called a telomere, is shortened.  Eventually it is too short to protect the cell and the cell dies.  The researchers believe that by inserting a gene into the cell this shortening will not occur.

There are other substances, vitamins, herbs and “natural ingredients” that are supposed to keep you younger.  Most of it is just Madison Avenue hype.  No one is going to discover anything that will enable you to live forever.  We all know that.  What they are saying or should be saying is that these substances may enable you to live a better quality of life and perhaps even live a little longer.  But then that is nothing new.  We have known for years that doing the things necessary to be healthy will increase your chances of living a longer, more productive and healthier life.  You may not always have the stamina of an 18 year old but you will be better off than you would if you did not do those health enhancing things.

When it comes to chiropractic, we have to be the most honest people in the scientific community.  We do not offer a fountain of youth.  We do not promise cures for disease, we do not even promise that you will be healthy or live longer.  No one can make those kinds of promises.  What we can and do promise is that if we can correct the vertebral subluxations in your spine and keep them corrected as much of the time as possible that you will lead a healthier more productive life than you would if you were walking around with subluxations interfering with the proper function of your nerve system.  How much healthier? Sorry, we cannot even make a guess.  Perhaps it will be imperceptible.  Perhaps it will make all the difference in the world, more than anything else you do in your life.  We have no way of knowing.  But the fact that your body will work better is based upon logic and common sense.  Proper function depends upon the nerve system. If there is an interference in the nerve system, the organs and parts supplied by those nerves will not function as they were intended to.  If those parts are vital organs or if they produce necessary chemicals, then the entire body will be affected.  In fact, any breakdown of function anywhere in the body has a universal detrimental affect on the entire body, for each part of the body is dependent upon every other part and all parts contribute to the whole.  So while the Spanish explorer’s idea of a single fountain that would affect the whole body was non-existent, the fact is that what we do to our body both good and bad does affect the entire organism.

You will hear many claims for many products in the years to come, miracle cures, instant relief and fountains of youth.  For some there may even be seemingly dramatic results.  But for most of us, the thing to do is to realize there is no easy way to a full productive healthy life.  We can wander through life like a modern-day Ponce` de Leon looking for the magical elixir of life or we can recognize that a healthy fulfilling life depends on what we do in the way of taking care of our body and doing what is best for it.  The latter approach seems to me to be the one that makes the most sense.

The Dangers of Bottled Water

Recently on the evening news there was a promo for a news item on the dangers of drinking bottled water.  You know the kind of short blurbs that keep you watching an otherwise negative and unenjoyable program until you get to the segment that you want.  I watched because I really wanted to know the dangers of bottled water.  Might it be that some dangerous chemical was leaking into natural spring water?  It did not seem like there could be too many things wrong with bottled water.  It has no cholesterol, it is not addicting and 85% of our body is made up of it.  Well, they finally got to the bottled water segment and the danger that it was causing.  It seems that the five-billion-dollar industry is starting to cause a greater incidence of tooth decay, as children are drinking bottled water instead of municipal water which in most places in this country has fluoride added to it.  During a brief interview with representatives from the American Dental Association a number of interesting issues arose.

            The assumption is that this is creating a real danger, however, dental cavities are not exactly a life-threatening malady.  Whether the increase is significant and whether it is a result of bottled water is open to discussion.  But notice that the answer to the problem is not better oral hygiene which involves brushing regularly, avoiding between-meal snacks and doing other things that are important to maintain good health for the entire body.  The answer to this problem according to the medically-oriented community is to put a strong chemical, actually a poison, into the body in an effort to make the teeth stronger.  That represents a philosophy that addresses the expedient or temporary solution at the sacrifice of what is right.  A wrong thing (putting sodium fluoride in the water) done in a wrong way (outside-in) cannot have a right result (a healthier body).  It may temporarily reduce cavities in children but it will not make them healthier.  On the contrary, it has to have a negative effect on their bodies.  Further, our children need to be taught good oral hygiene and the other aspects of health rather that thinking a drug or chemical can be a substitute.  The major problem with health today is the idea that every health problem has a quick fix in the form of a drug or surgery or even a vitamin.  Too often the nutrition industry is prone to promote quick cures through food supplements.  Herbs, vitamins and fluoride just perpetuate that myth.

            Perhaps the greatest irony, actually bordering on stupidity, was the response by the bottled-water industry.  A spokesman said in effect, “Okay, if tooth decay is a problem, we can remedy that.  We’ll just add fluoride to our bottled water.”  Hey, wait a minute!  Isn’t the whole idea of drinking bottled water avoiding all the garbage the water company knowingly or unknowingly is pumping out of the spigot in your kitchen sink?  Why pay all that money for water that is going to have the same thing in it.  But you know what?  The average American will buy fluoridated bottled water because they believe that is what is best for them. The medical/dental profession has missed the real idea of what health is all about.  A bottled-water industry that is really only interested in selling products and does not care whether it is pure or not (you have to wonder if they are so quick to agree to put fluoride in their bottled water how concerned they are with the purity of it in the first place).  Lastly, we, as consumers, have a public that really do not understand the need for avoiding harmful substances and keeping the body healthy.

            People are drastically in need of some clear thinking when it comes to matters of health. More and more it appears that with few exceptions only the chiropractic profession has that perspective.

The major problem with health today is the idea that every health problem has a quick fix in the form of a drug or surgery or even a vitamin.

The Uniqueness of You

There is a new system of identification that, according to some authorities, will make P.I.N. numbers, passwords, and other forms of identification obsolete.  Its called Biometric Identification.  Everyone is familiar with the most commonly used form of this type of identification--fingerprints.  However, there are others, some that are even more accurate than a fingerprint.  Face technology looks at a scan of the entire face utilizing 50 points around the nose, mouth, eyes, brow and jaw.  The weakness of the system is, of course, identical twins, but growing a beard or putting on weight will also alter the facial structure.  The hand, like the face, is another identification system.  It has unique geometric shapes and sizes.  Most of us are familiar with voice prints and, of course, DNA, although the latter is not practical at this time to be used at an ATM or at the supermarket.

The most technical biometric identification to be used is the iris of the eye.  While a fingerprint has only 40 measurable characteristics, the iris of the eye has 266.  Even if a third of the information is mismatched, it can still make a positive identification.  We are truly unique individuals.

Just as there is a uniqueness about our face, our iris and our fingerprint, there is also a uniqueness about the inside workings of our body.  No two people are alike as far as physiological needs.  One person’s insulin needs are different than another person’s.  Even the exact quality of the insulin is a little different.  Two people may eat the exact same meal but the digestive juices necessary to break down that meal and make it useful to the body are totally different.  Every person’s blood chemistry is slightly different.  Our caloric intake needs vary from person to person and within the same person from day to day.  There are literally millions of different measurable characteristics within human beings.  How could any doctor know all these needs for any one person let alone for all his patients?  The fact is that he cannot.  The worst that can happen with biometric identification is a case of mistaken identity.  The worse that can happen with a mistake in knowing what a person’s internal, chemical needs are is death, and that happens thousands of times a year.  We simply cannot know the unique biochemical needs of the body.  That is why medicine is not a science but an art.  It is making educated guesses on a daily basis regarding people’s health.

Unlike medical science, the chiropractor does not attempt to conform a person to a standard or norm which is really unknown to the doctor.  Chiropractors recognize that the body has a self-regulating, self-normalizing mechanism to it, what we call an innate intelligence.  It is this self-regulating principle that has stored these millions upon millions of unique characteristics and needs and can meet those needs on a moment-by-moment basis.  The problem with biometric identification is that it cannot adapt if you put on some weight or change the features of your face.  The innate intelligence of the body, however, can adapt to changes in your body as well as changes in the environment.  To accomplish this adaptation a communication system is necessary.  That system in human beings is the nerve system.  If it should be interfered with, due to vertebral subluxation (a bone misaligned putting pressure on the nerves) then that which is uniquely you cannot be expressed.  The objective of the chiropractor is the correction of these subluxations.

Preventing Disease

The prevention of disease seems to be of major concern to many people these days. The public is beginning to exercise to prevent heart problems and cut down on cholesterol to prevent cardiovascular disease. They are quitting their smoking habits to prevent cancer, and on and on. Prevention of disease, however, perpetuates a very serious misconception concerning disease, that is that it has a single cause. If a lack of vitamin C was the cause of the common cold, taking vitamin C would prevent it. While resistance is dependent upon vitamin C, it also depends upon a number of other factors. That is why three children in a family can all drink their orange juice and two will get a cold and one will not. Resistance depends upon how well the body is working, how well it can utilize vitamin C, the amount of rest a person gets and, of course, the frequency of coming in contact with the virus. There are probably a dozen other factors as well, many of which we do not even know and some, like genetics, we cannot control.

If exercise prevented heart attacks, Jim Fixx, the guru of running, would not have had a fatal heart attack on one of his daily runs. There are people who smoke two packs of cigarettes a day for thirty years and do not get lung cancer. Conversely, there are people who never smoke a cigarette and die of lung cancer.

Here is the point. There is only one thing that is truly effective in preventing disease, that is staying healthy! The more things you do to promote your good health, the greater the likelihood of not ending up with a disease. Exercise is important, but it is only one piece of the health picture. Vitamin C and all the other aspects of good nutrition are another piece. Avoiding poisons like cigarette smoke is another. The more aspects of health that you address, the greater your probability of being healthy and the greater your chances of preventing disease.

Of course, maintaining the integrity of your nervous system is a vital part of health. That is where chiropractic comes in. You must correct vertebral subluxations because they interfere with the proper function of the nerve system. Besides directly improving the nerve supply, the removing of subluxations also indirectly affects the other aspects of good health. If there is interference in your nervous system, you may not be able to properly utilize good nutrition or get the maximum benefits from exercise and rest. Your body will be less resistant to the poisons you cannot help but be exposed to, like second-hand cigarette smoke. If you want to prevent disease, the proper attitude is not just doing certain things to prevent certain diseases. That is a futile approach. There are just too many diseases. The proper approach is to do those things necessary to be healthy. Perhaps if everybody was doing everything necessary to promote and maintain health, we would not have to worry about preventing disease. That seems to be the most intelligent idea.

The proper approach to health is to do those things necessary to be healthy