Preventive Healthcare: Functional Medicine and You

One of the main characters of the True Justice series is Dr. Sarah Collins.

She has devoted her life to helping people regain their health, so that is why we are discussing the topic of preventive healthcare in this article.

When healthcare matters are being discussed, she can’t help herself. She must try helping the other characters in the books of the True Justice series find and maintain their optimal health status.

It’s one of the endearing qualities (OK, call them quirks if you must) that make this series so appealing.  

She is a great character and if you are a reader who enjoys a good book, you can begin reading the True Justice series by checking out the first book in the series, Higher Justice.

It is Higher Justice that introduces Dr. Collins and explains why she becomes the type of person she does.

Enough about Dr. Collins, let’s talk about preventive healthcare and how it can benefit you and your loved ones.

The goal of preventive healthcare is to help people stay healthy, and when it is used consistently, it does a pretty good job of keeping people well.

Overall, preventive healthcare saves a tremendous amount of money and helps avoid a lot of pain and suffering in the process.

We discussed the significant savings that can be obtained by paying attention to preventing health-robbing disease processes before they can begin in a previous blog post. It’s well worth reading if you haven’t yet.

Keeping your body healthy works spectacularly, and the beautiful thing about it is, all you have to do is give it what it needs. It will continue working at peak performance for a long, long time. 

To some folks, preventive care simply means that they receive medical services that defend against health emergencies.

This includes things like getting annual physicals, well-woman appointments, and dental cleanings on a timely basis.

More involved preventive, or early intervention,  measures include procedures such as immunizations or colonoscopies and screenings for conditions like skin cancer, high blood pressure, or high cholesterol.

These are effective early intervention methods to find disease in a timely manner when it is usually more easily treated, but it’s not what we are discussing here.

If allowed to progress to more advanced stages, disease is often more difficult and expensive to treat. Also, more heroic and therefore more expensive procedures are usually necessary over a longer time period thereby raising costs and adding to suffering.

You can avoid getting to the stage where more expensive, painful, and heroic procedures are necessary by taking a few, easy steps to maintain the health of your body and those of your loved ones.

The best idea is to stop diseases from ever beginning, and that is the type of preventive healthcare we will be discussing in this article.

Pro-active preventive healthcare keeps health care costs lower without the pain and suffering involved.

It makes sense to avoid the agony of pain and suffering if possible, right?

Right!

Remember, saving money isn’t everything when discussing healthcare. The cost and agony of pain and suffering can be incalculable.

So how do we stay healthy?

It’s simple really.

We merely have to give the body what it needs to function correctly and avoid the things that will damage or put excess strain on it.

But where should you start?

A good place to start is to read the amazing books now available to get a basic understanding of the concepts of preventive healthcare.

Dr. Jeffrey S. Bland is well known in the field of functional medicine and has authored several books on the subject.
Dr. Bland is very adept at discussing cutting edge research on the cause of disease and explaining it in simple, easy to understand terms.

He brings everything into clearer focus as to why the current state of medicine with its drug-oriented approach to disease mitigation is not working very well in the grand scheme of things.

He also delves into how living a healthy lifestyle through the functional medicine paradigm can make inroads into the chronic disease epidemic plaguing much of western society.

​Are you sick and tired of being sick and tired?

A lot of people are, and they simply don’t know what to do about it. 

​Dr. Bland’s book, The Disease Delusion: Conquering the Causes of Chronic Illness for a Healthier, Longer, and Happier Life, will open your eyes to life as it is meant to be lived. 

Read this book because it will change your life for the better.

Until you are truly healthy, you don’t understand how good you can feel.

Dr. Bland’s book goes through the biological breakdown that leads to chronic disease and will open your eyes to the way things are meant to be so you can proactively keep yourself and your loved ones healthy.

Functional medicine offers a new approach to healthcare that is the basis of regaining your health by personalizing your healthcare management program. 

That’s reasonable since we’re all individuals with unique biological needs. 

Why shouldn’t we personalize our healthcare management program to meet our specific biological needs to stay healthy and avoid the agony of disease?

It only makes sense.

We can easily give a name to a disease by going to the doctor and having it diagnosed, but it does nothing to help alleviate the suffering caused by that condition.

As an example, a person who is sad and feels that their life is hopeless, can’t sleep, has no interest in life, food, or even sex, will probably be diagnosed as being depressed.

Good, now we have a name for the condition, but what can you do about it?

Functional medicine is the science of establishing health and doesn’t simply name a disease then walk away without offering a solution to the problem.

Diseases or conditions that plague many people simply go away once true health is restored.

Is it easy to reestablish health in an unhealthy body?

No, not really, because you’ll have to make some lifestyle changes, and that can be difficult for some people.

But it’s essential to address and overcome the multitude of reasons why a body is unhealthy otherwise ill health will continue unabated.

That’s unacceptable.

It takes time and effort to change your habits, but it’s really not as difficult as you may think.

Once you develop a problem that has been in the making for years, it only makes sense that it will take some devotion to correct the conditions causing it.

It’s the only true way to correct the root of the problem.

No pill, potion, or lotion can overcome a deficiency within your body.

That takes devoted determination to heal yourself. That’s reality, and there’s no way around it.

Functional medicine is a personalized method of getting to the root cause of disease and eliminating it.

That means it gives you a personalized path to health.

And that’s a cool thing.

A REALLY cool thing!

Read Dr. Bland’s book, The Disease Delusion: Conquering the Causes of Chronic Illness for a Healthier, Longer, and Happier Life, and see if it makes sense to you. 

I’ll bet it does, and you’ll be wondering why you haven’t started taking better care of yourself years ago.

We’ll be discussing a lot more tips and techniques that will help point you in the right direction to restore, improve, or maintain your health so check back regularly.

As a matter of fact, why don’t you sign up for the RSS feed so you can be notified when a new blog is posted?
I have many more preventive healthcare tips you may be interested in hearing about.
 
Until next time,
 
Dale (aka: D. E. Heil)

HOW TO STAY HEALTHY: PREVENTING HEALTH PROBLEMS

Dr. Sarah Collins, one of the main characters in the True Justice series, is a Doctor of Chiropractic whose practice emphasized preventive healthcare practices.

But wait, don’t chiropractors only fix bad backs, sore necks, and headaches?

No, that’s what chiropractors have become known for because they’re pretty good at helping people with these afflictions, but the true basis of chiropractic is preventive healthcare.

If chiropractors can keep their patients healthy, then folks won’t get sick and need other, more radical forms of care.

But how do chiropractors keep people healthy?

Well, to answer that question, let’s look at what Medical Doctors do. They use drugs and surgery to assist their patients.

Doctors of Chiropractic use just about everything else like spinal manipulation, nutritional counseling, acupuncture, exercise, advocating a healthy lifestyle, etc.

Not all chiropractors utilize every one of these different facets of preventive healthcare, but most use at least one of the thirty-one recognized methods of spinal manipulation to help people regain and maintain their health.

For today’s discussion, let’s restrict our conversation to how spinal manipulation can keep people healthy.

We'll cover diet, exercise, and a ton of other aspects of preventive healthcare in later blog posts. 

For decades, chiropractors have been explaining the healthcare benefits of spinal manipulation by stating that they remove nerve interference by adjusting the spine so an unimpeded nerve flow can keep the various organs and systems of the body functioning at peak efficiency.

Well, yes and no.

It was an explanation that was easy for everyone to understand but it wasn’t totally correct.

However, it was the best way chiropractors had to explain how chiropractic works to keep the body healthy. 

At least it was the best explanation they had until the scientific research caught up with the results they were seeing in clinical practice.

Recent research has been able to shine more light on this subject.

It appears that instead of direct nerve interference, the interference is being caused by pain signals that feed back into the spinal cord from a distressed joint or organ.

Those noxious pain signals then shut down portions of the autonomic nervous system.

Interestingly, the pain that causes all this havoc can be sub clinical.

That means that even though people do not feel the pain because it is below the threshold below which they can detect it, it’s still there doing its nefarious work.

But what’s the autonomic nervous system do, and why is it so important?

It governs all the stuff we don’t have to think about like digestion, keeping our heart beating, etc.

Spinal manipulation is a common method (almost exclusively administered by Doctors of Chiropractic these days) used to correct a malfunctioning joint and thereby stop the flow of pain signals to the spinal cord.

That allows the autonomic nervous system to return to normal.

A wonderful study comparing chiropractic care to medical care published in 2007 illustrates how spinal manipulation translates into real world benefits.

The free abstract of that study that can be found at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17509435.

Abstracts of scientific studies are relatively easy to read and only a few paragraphs long, so don’t be afraid to check these results for yourself.

When using Doctors of Chiropractic as the gatekeeper of an IPA instead of the more traditional Medical Doctors, this study found a reduction of 60.2% for in-hospital admissions, 59.0% less hospital days (the number of days a person stays in the hospital after they’ve been admitted), 62.0% fewer outpatient surgeries and procedures, and a whopping 85% decrease in pharmaceutical costs when compared with conventional medicine IPA performance.

That’s a lot of monetary savings (and much less pain and suffering for patients) resulting from preventive healthcare practices being used by their doctor.

That’s especially true when these stellar results brought about by preventive healthcare measures are compared to irresponsibly waiting until a health problem starts which then must be tended to by more radical and expensive methods.

Remember, it’s not just the cost savings that are important.

Avoiding pain, suffering, and loss of normal living during the duration of an illness is also vitally important.

The resulting reduction in pharmaceutical costs and utilization alone when utilizing Doctors of Chiropractic as healthcare gatekeepers would go a long way toward helping to alleviate the “Opioid Crisis.”

The opioid crisis is what you hear so much about in the news these days because people are being treated with narcotic pain relievers instead of addressing the root cause of their health problem.

You may also ask, what is the subluxation that the Doctor of Chiropractic corrects and why is it so important?

The simplest explanation is that it is a joint that is not moving correctly.

Make it move the way it is supposed to, and the subluxation disappears along with the noxious nerve impulses feeding into the central nervous system and shutting down portions of your autonomic nervous system.

The overall effect is that now the nerve impulses can flow freely from the brain to the various body parts free from interference.

That, in a nutshell is how chiropractic can keep you and your loved ones healthier.

Dr. Terry Rondberg explains all this in wonderful detail in his tremendous book, Chiropractic First: The Fastest Growing Healthcare Choice... Before Drugs or Surgery.

Dr. Rondberg points out, in easy to understand terms for the layperson, that Chiropractic is the largest natural primary healthcare profession in the world, and why that is important for you and your family.

Chiropractic is the first choice for many families who want to avoid the use of dangerous drugs and the risks of unnecessary surgery.

Maybe you should read Dr. Rondberg’s book and see why it may be the best choice for your loved ones also.

You can check out his book to see if you want to begin keeping your family healthier by clicking here.

Well, that’s the basis of what Dr. Sarah Collins alludes to in the True Justice series of novels.

Naturally, she doesn’t go into that much clinical detail (that would get boring very quickly, and I never allow my novels to become boring!) but she does try keeping her friends healthy by offering tiny snippets of advice.

She really can’t help herself.

Her whole life has been wrapped up in learning preventive healthcare techniques and keeping people healthy.

It’s a shame she can’t do it full-time anymore, and only does it for her closest friends, but you’ll have to read why. I don’t want to spoil the story for you.

I hope you enjoyed this little blog posting and return for more.

As a matter of fact, why don’t you sign up for the RSS feed so you can be notified when a new blog is posted?

I have a lot more preventive healthcare tips you may be interested in hearing about.
 
Until next time,
 
Dale (aka: D. E. Heil)