Realistically speaking, symptoms are the worst measuring stick to use to determine your health. Sure, healthy people feel good. Actually, truly healthy people feel great. But people who believe they are healthy simply because they have no current severe ache or pain often find they have disease, and drop dead without warning.
Assuming that the absence of disease equals health is like assuming that people who do not divorce have perfect relationships. But if health is not the absence of disease, then what is the goal?
The real definition of health, according to Dorland’s Medical Dictionary: “Health is a state of optimum physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.”
With a true understanding about health, you can then define real wellness. Real wellness has the goal of achieving true health and not just obtaining absence or early detection of sickness.
Despite the immense challenges it has faced, the wellness industry has recognized a real need in the lives of the American people: the need to take ownership of their own health and well-being. How people do that will determine whether the wellness industry has truly met that need or only offered a smoke screen as an alternative to what economist Paul Zane Pilzer calls the “sickness business” of traditional medicine.
When wellness is just the next trendy program in the History of Wellness, it will have the same failed results as medicine—the same failed results it’s been getting.
“People become customers [of the sickness business] only when they are stricken by and react to a specific condition or complaint,” Pilzer writes in The Wellness Revolution. “The [real] wellness business is proactive. People voluntarily become customers to feel healthier, to reduce the effects of aging, and to avoid becoming customers of the sickness business.”
Since health is not the absence of anything but the presence of well-being, real wellness doesn’t work merely to eliminate but to build; to build the body’s inherent vitality and to restore balance and ease from the inside out. It’s called Maximized Living; something for which there is no alternative.
Alternative Medicine Isn’t Real Wellness/Maximized Living
Alternative medicine and weight-loss programs fail here as well. Most of what are called “alternative therapies” treat symptoms and illnesses with natural remedies. The good news is that it’s unlikely you’ll die from a bad side effect, but it’s still an outside-in, mechanical, disease-treating model. It doesn’t work, no matter what the treatment.
Similarly, weight loss and many bodybuilding and fitness programs focus on outside appearance rather than also focusing on health.
To experience real wellness, complementary or alternative medicine isn’t the answer if the approach is the same as with regular medicine. For building health, it’s best to not use anything with the word medicine in it.
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Health
bodybuilding, wellness, Alternative Medicine