Who's your best doctor

I just discovered wellness.com, and I'm digging the blogs! I went back into my blog (Sept. '07) to offer my first post here. A bit long but hopefully worth your time.

From the Miami Herald this weekend came an article about "The Secret" that stirred me considerably. While you've all no doubt heard about this bestselling self-help book and DVD (which I haven't purchased and I like self-help stuff, but this one seems a little too slick), my purpose here has little to do with the book, but rather with a psychologist who was quoted in the article. "The Secret" has taken some of the old self-improvement mind techniques and presented them through various speakers in a way that is new and original to those that haven't yet discovered the classics where these concepts originate. Good for them.

The premise is if you want something badly enough, your very thoughts will attract it to you. A car, jewelry, a soul mate, a cure for your cancer. One of those techniques is visualization or to vividly picture in your mind the object of your desire. Are you wondering what all this has to do with my subject line? Stay with me.

Marta Manrique-Reichard, Ph.D. psychologist at the Baptist/South Miami Regional Cancer Program has doubts about "The Secret". She's troubled by the book's assertion that a woman's breast cancer was cured after she merely pictured it already cured. To quote Marta: "if you feel positive, does that get rid of the cancer? No. You get that through medical treatment."
Did you here that? Most would probably agree with her assertion. Most would agree that medical treatment is curing the diseases of our time. I'm not so sure.

While it's true that two of the three leading causes of death in the US, heart disease and stroke, are trending down, cancer death rates haven't improved since records were started in 1950. If you factor out lung cancer, which has seen a dramatic decline since people figured out that ingesting smoke may not be such a good thing, death rates from all other types of cancer have increased (from the Center for Disease Control website: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hus/hus06.pdf#summary).

Here's another cool statistic: from 1960 to 2004 the percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) spent on health care has risen from 5 to 16% the highest share of any developed country. That's $6,280 per person in the US or $1.9 trillion. Did you know that? I didn't. So maybe the medical community hasn't got it all figured out.

From his book "One Minute Wellness", Dr. Ben Lerner (he's another kook like me) describes our current approach to health care as "the mechanical model: an outside-in approach". "The mechanistic model of health care focuses on the diagnosis and treatment of disease. Modern medicine uses mechanistic thinking when it takes an outside-in approach to discovering where disease and symptoms come from and what to do to treat them ( i.e., the body has a tendency to break down like a machine, and when it does, we tinker with the mechanisms or remove or replace the parts altogether)."

Any of you had a tonsillectomy? Had tubes placed in your kid's ears? Known someone with a hip or knee replacement? That's modern medicine. The bottom line here is that the responsibility for healing is placed on something outside the body.

In contrast is the "inside-out dis-ease model. "The cause of health problems comes from the inside out due to the existence of "dis-ease" - a lack of normal function, balance, harmony, or "ease" in the body. It's the presence of dis-ease on the inside that creates an unhealthy environment for your cells to thrive and causes a disruption in vital health. You are no longer working according to intelligent design.

This allows bugs, cancers, heart disease, and other illnesses to overcome you - on the inside.
The cure for health issues is not to treat the symptoms or disease but to treat the cause. You don't look on sickness and disease as something your stuck with, (which too many people cave into citing bad genetics), but rather resulting from dis-ease, or lack of proper function and balance inside the body.

You do what you can to restore normal function and "ease" so that you can build resistance to germs and prevent illness. In this way, the responsibility for healing does not lie on something outside you, but within you.
Which brings me to my point. YOU are your own best doctor. Our creator installed all the necessary equipment and systems for a self-healing, self-sustaining organism. All we have to do is get out of the way. Or rather get all those things ( i.e. bad habits) out of the way.

We have to identify and correct all those things that interfere with our body's proper function and balance. No easy task, given the culture we live in. Only after eliminating that interference can we create an internal environment that not only gets rid of your symptoms and disease but also actually restores health.

Perhaps this is a paradigm shift for you or at least for many of the people you know. We could call this approach "wellness". And we could start moving and fueling our bodies like they're supposed to be. And maybe we could adopt this proactive approach to our health so we can fire our family doctor (or at least sit him or her on the bench). We can throw all the prescription medications we've relied on into the toilet. And because we feel and look so great, our neighbor's gonna ask what we're on. And we'll tell them: "We're on a mission. Would you like to join me?"
Chris