How Perceptions Can and Do Shape Your Health Choices
So much of the wellness industry is centered on what to do. “Take this magic pill,” “Try this new diet,” “Eat this new superfood.” Quite frankly, there’s a lot of noise in wellness, but not a lot of substance.
In my practice, I focus more on how to do it. I try to focus my articles on fitting wellness into our busy lives — in short, I want to help you learn to live well and cut through the white noise of the wellness industry — where there is a lot of misleading or vague information. My mission is to teach individuals like you how to live well, taking into account your unique health profile and your unique health concerns, and working in partnership to make change happen. Though I’m able to do that one-on-one with my private clients, I also want to bring some of those principles to you here at Zenfully Delicious.
The Simplicity of Wellness
The difficulty is that wellness is not always about the latest and greatest medical advance. As is true with nature, the most profound answers are simple.
The simplicity of wellness is that if you eat well, move well and think well, you’ll increase your capacity for health many times over. The difficulty of wellness is fitting these habits into the social and cultural aspects of American life. The mental part of wellness is also an overlooked and under-appreciated aspect of making wellness work. Many doctors have touched upon this aspect, but lose their credibility when they tell patients that “The pain is all in your head,” or “It’s all psychogenic.”
I come from the mindset that there’s a cause for everything, but sometimes the factors are too dynamic to trace back with 100% certainty. When you hear “psychogenic” or “idiopathic” – a red light should flash that you’re not getting the right answers you deserve.
Holistic practice deals inherently with an ounce of faith. Not spiritual faith per se, but having faith in the innate wisdom that if you give the body what it needs, it knows how to produce health. The details? They figure themselves out.
Be careful if you discredit wellness for lacking evidence. Most medical therapies do not lack “evidence” — but evidence is only as good as the questions you ask. Yes we can extend lives by months and even years, but what is the quality of the lives we are extending? Yes, we can make someone feel better, but are we doing so at the extent of progressing their disease or causing other problems that need to medically managed for life?
Just a simple glance at our health statistics to show that we have a lot of work to do.
Shifting Perceptions
The truth is that you cannot patent a walking trail. You cannot patent a vegetable or a fruit (unless you genetically modify its seed). And you cannot place a patent on motivating someone to meditate or practice deep breathing. In many cases we can understand the physiology and biochemistry behind an illness to a level never dreamed possible, but the treatments and action steps almost always stay the same.
Most pharmaceutical drugs released into the market are reformulated (and remarketed) versions of the same drugs – in some cases, the new drugs are associated with less side effects, but the efficacy is still symptom-based, and therefore limited.
The latest surgical techniques may increase the safety or scaleability of a certain procedure, but the clinical outcomes are still difficult to budge. In fact, the best science for surgical techniques is in choosing the right candidates for the surgery in the first place: Patients where nothing else has worked – or a conservative approach has been attempted.
We say we cure cancer when we allow a person to live with cancer beyond 5 years. We fudge the numbers by recognizing the cancer earlier. We extend the lives of those who experience a heart attack, and successfully manage their symptoms, but do not talk about the 50% of individuals whose first symptom was the heart attack itself or those that never made it to the hospital in the first place to receive the necessary treatment.
We don’t talk about the 130,000 deaths caused by adverse medical reactions to drugs properly prescribed, in the proper dosages each year. We take statin drugs to prevent heart attacks, but as we successfully lower cholesterol, we still have an equal chance of experiencing an adverse reaction from the drug as we have in actually preventing a heart attack from occurring.
Many would argue against me, but I believe we are reaching a ceiling in terms of how far medical technology can take us. We can treat infectious disease, save someone from a tragic car accident, and prolong lives when traumatic events occur such as a heart attack. There are some inconvenient truths to back surgeries and heart surgeries, and I’ll save you the details for another post. The real message I want to get across to you is that wellness and prevention are the wave of the future. It’s only our perceptions that limit us.
You are What You Think
The perceived difficulty of starting an exercise program,making a food change or taking time to think positively for 10-20 minutes a day determines whether we actually take action or not. How many times have you heard the phrase “You can lead a horse to water, but cannot make it drink?” When push comes to shove, the perceived pain of change needs to be less than the pain or discomfort you feel with your current lifestyle. Perceptions are incredibly important.
Unfortunately, too few have realized their full health potential in the first place to know how much better things could be. Few have committed to a clean, detoxifying diet for 3-4 weeks to really have a sense of how good they can actually feel. We have the greatest medical technology and pharmaceutical cocktails ever known to man, yet we still do not have the social technology and human distribution to scale these techniques where they are needed most.
For instance, we know how important exclusive breastfeeding is for infants, yet we have yet to create the cultural capacity for woman to breastfeed successfully in public or at their workplaces. We can invent breast pumps and produce more advanced baby formulas, but nothing substitutes for a mother’s breast milk, and we are in the dark ages when it comes to progressive solutions to public and workplace breastfeeding.
Psychologically, we are comforted by the idea of a fix-all pill. Why go through the hassle of exercising, eating well and meditating when we seem moments away from the latest medical breakthrough? In a way, it’s a kind of learned helplessness – knowing what you need to do, but waiting for a mythical cure-all to satisfy your needs instead.
What Can Wellness Do for You?
Imagine a day where your mind is crystal clear, and you cross item after item on your to-do list. You breeze through your day and before you know it, it’s 5:00pm and your energy is still as crisp as it was when you first woke up. You’re not reaching for the coffee, and instead invite friends over for dinner and fellowship. By 9:00pm you start feeling tired as you wind down with a book. You even take 10 minutes to write down everything you were grateful for that day, and lay out a working agenda for the next day. You have everything laid out that you need for tomorrow, and by 10:00pm you are peacefully asleep – awaking at 6:00am the next morning, ready to enjoy it all over again.
Wouldn’t it be nice? It’s entirely possible — but it’s up to you. What are you waiting for?
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Dr. Alex Rinehart is a Chiropractor and Certified Clinical Nutritionist. Through his practice at CoActive Health, his commitment to mind/body/spirit integration is emphasized by working in partnership with his patients to achieve wellness, with specialized services to support chronic conditions.
