The discussion of healthcare continues in the headlines in the US on a daily basis. Not only were healthcare discussions a likely reason for many voters to participate in the the recent election of President Trump, healthcare costs continue to rise at an alarming rate. Truth is, no matter who you voted for in the election, everyone can agree that healthcare costs are out of control.Something needs to change, but what?
Here’s an idea:
Healthcare needs to take a big step into preventative care. Not only is it ethically correct, it is good for our nation as a whole. Do not get confused, I am not talking about early detection. Preventative measures means true prevention. It means taking healthy steps BEFORE any signs of ill-health. Prevention doesn’t look for disease and ill-health, it helps you avoid these things, by focusing on steps that do not interfere with an already healthy body.
Some examples of prevention for healthcare:
Eating organic, healthy foods.
Drinking clean, natural water.
Exercise for health.
Chiropractic care to remove subluxations to the nerve system.
Massage to relax the muscles and mind.
Meditation techniques.
Healthy, natural sleep.
If healthcare truly wants to change in order to offer a high quality of life to those within our nation, we NEED to support the things that actually have shown to improve our quality of life.
The type of paradigms I would like to discuss are health paradigms. It is the term that can be attributed to your general view of your and likely your family’s healthcare. Your health paradigm can be determined by the decisions that you make. For instance, if you choose to eat organic produce, exercise 3 times a week, got to a chiropractor whether in pain or not, and avoid smoking then I get a good idea of what your health paradigm is: “prevention is key”. However, if your grocery basket is filled with Cheetos, your idea of exercise is taking out the trash, and you visit your chiropractor when your “back goes out”, I assume your health paradigm is: “symptoms-based” or “sick-care”.
Maybe it is time to take inventory of our own health paradigm.
If our choices are lack-luster, maybe it is time to re-focus on what health paradigms we have been operating from. If your health paradigm is one of wellness, prevention, limitless potential, then great job! If not, let’s tighten up our underlying paradigm, and see that the choices we make come a little more on purpose, versus reactionary.
A common conversation today is on insurance, specifically: health insurance. Health insurance is misunderstood so commonly because the term is incorrect to begin with. If health insurance companies were truly insuring your health, then more energy would be given to funding pre-unhealthy states of their members.
For instance, an insurance company would help pay for healthier food options, or pay for a trainer at your health club. To the contrary, what we see now is an insurance company that will pay for tubes in a child’s ears due to ear infections, however will not pay for conservative chiropractic care which has shown some great results with ear infections in children. Check out the research: Research: 93% of ear infections improve in children with chiropractic care
It would be interesting to see the business model of a true “health insurance” company develop. An insurance company that would pay for chiropractic services, nutrition, organic food choices could be a discount to the plan, etc.
Maybe health insurance needs a new name..sick insurance.
However, the content of the article did surprise me. What conventional medicine continues to miss is that fighting disease is the wrong paradigm to begin with:
“We’re not finding enough of the really lethal cancers, and we’re finding too many of the slow-moving ones that probably don’t need to be found,” says Laura Esserman, a breast-cancer surgeon at the University of California, San Francisco.
What Ms Esserman, and many other in her profession, fail to grasp is this: We do not need to “find more cancer” to destroy. What would be more beneficial to all involved would be to prevent the cancer in the first place.
Another point of this article that did not surprise me:
Small, localized prostate cancers are so ubiquitous in older men that the risk is roughly equal to a man’s age: a 70-year-old has a 70% chance of harboring the disease. Yet the average lifetime risk of dying of prostate cancer is less than 3% according to the American Cancer Society.
Just because you have cancer does not mean it will negatively impact your health. Your immune system is constantly taking care of cancerous cells throughout your body. Those with a healthy immune system (which means you practice preventative measures more often), have a much better chance of a healthy life, even with a cancer diagnosis!
You see it all the time…someone on the side of the road, with a gas can walking away from their car. It’s obvious what happened, yet inevitably it will happen to all of us. Sometimes the obvious things are the ones that are missed the most. We get “caught up” in whatever we need to do, and we push it just a little bit further.
Health care is no different. We realize what the right decision may be, yet we tend to push it just a little longer. It’s a lot easier to pull over at a gas station, than it is to walk to one 2 miles away.
