Dr. Sarah Collins, one of the main characters in the True Justice series is a Doctor of Chiropractic with an extensive background in nutrition and getting sick people well.

You can see what I’m talking about by reading the first book of the series for FREE or by visiting the rest of this website to read the blurbs for these books.

Dr. Collins is fanatical about health and doesn’t miss a chance to offer health enhancing tips to her friends and just about everyone she meets. It’s one of the quirks that make the characters in the books of the True Justice series so memorable.

Writing a series of novels is fun.

Suffering from health-related ailments is not fun at all.

In the novels I write, Dr. Collins always looks toward diet and what people are eating (or neglecting to eat) that may be at the root of their health problems.

This makes perfect sense because it is well known that many health problems originate with the diet.

In this context, we are not talking about a weight-loss diet, but rather, we are using the term “diet” as it pertains to the foods people eat.

The Typical American Diet as outlined and discussed by Dr. Lisa R. Young in her epic book Finally Full, Finally Slim: 30 Days to Permanent Weight Loss One Portion at a Time . As Dr. Young points out, diet has been implicated in fostering quite a few nasty conditions ranging from heart disease to Type 2 diabetes, arterial disease, obesity, and various cancers.

Whether through intuition or study, many people have begun eating a regimented diet to avoid the pitfalls caused by the foods commonly found in the Typical American Diet. 

Many people have adopted a Ketogenic diet by reading Complete Ketogenic Diet for Beginners , a paleo diet by reading Paleo Diet for Beginners , a Vegan diet by reading the Vegan Survival Guide, a vegetarian diet by reading Living Vegetarian for Dummies, or any one of the numerous diets and their variations that abound in today’s world.

These are all fine, if they fit your needs, but all of them are not right for everyone.

It is common to find people jumping from one diet to the next because some aspect of the eating style they are experimenting with just doesn’t work for them.

It may be that they crave meat while on a vegan or vegetarian style diet such as Living Vegan for Dummies , or they may hunger for starchy vegetables if they are on a ketogenic diet such as Keto Clarity by Jimmy Moore .

Maybe, a certain aspect of one of these diets doesn’t set well with them. It is not unheard of that one person may do exceptionally well with most foods on one of these diets, but they just don’t work for other folks.
In other words, there is something missing, causing a gap for them, in each of these dietary regimens.

In today’s discussion, we won’t bother looking at what foods commonly found in the Typical American Diet are particularly harmful because, as you will soon see, it doesn’t really matter.

Nor will we delve into each of the diets mentioned so far.

Instead, we’ll concentrate our efforts on trying to establish the proper way of eating for you as an individual.

And what can be more individualized than your blood type?

Dr. Peter D’Adamo has written an interesting book entitled Eat Right 4 Your Type. It is this tome and the information in it that we will be examining.

In addition to discussing how this book may be of great benefit to you, we will outline a process so you can determine if this diet is helping to alleviate some, or maybe even all, of your health issues.

Why should you be concerned about consuming a diet based upon your blood type?

Because it is somewhat individualized for you, which the other diets listed above are not.

Dr. Adamo has also written the Eat Right 4 Your Type Complete Blood Type Encyclopedia that has nearly 1,000 entries on treating symptoms and illness according to blood type.

This book will give you keys to unlocking the secrets to the health and well-being of yourself and your family.

Eat Right 4 Your Type Complete Blood Type Encyclopedia is the essential desk reference to answer all your questions and is the first book to draw on the thousands of medical studies proving the connection between blood type and disease.

It is the ultimate blood type guide and covers why your blood type makes you more susceptible to certain diseases, allergic responses, and chronic pain.

Eat Right 4 Your Type Complete Blood Type Encyclopedia discusses digestive health and why it affects fatigue, your immune system, sleep, memory, and the ability to keep a thought in your head without having it flit away into nowhere. It helps you maintain healthy skin and specifies what exercise or nutritional supplements to take based upon your individual blood type.

If you’ve been having problems consuming some of the foods found on the other diets, it may be because that diet contains a food that should be avoided based upon your blood type. By following the steps I will outline below you will be able to prove or disprove each theory as to what types of foods are good or bad for you as an individual.

For instance, consuming dairy or fatty foods from meat, major constituents of the ketogenic diet, may not agree with you if you are eating a ketogenic-type diet and your blood is Type A.

Dairy and red meats are taboo for people with blood type A, and that’s why those foods may be causing you trouble.

People with Type O blood tend to do well on the Ketogenic diet like the one found in The Keto Diet: The Complete Guide to a High-Fat Diet, with More Than 125 Delectable Recipes and 5 Meal Plans to Shed Weight, Heal Your Body, and Regain Confidence because they can digest dairy and red meats, which is a large portion of the ketogenic diet.  

However, even when people who have blood type O are eating correctly on the ketogenic diet, and following the clean eating regimen as found in helpful books like Clean Keto Lifestyle: The Complete Guide to Transforming Your Life and Health, they may still have some issues with certain foods like coconut oil because it is a food that should be avoided because they have Type O blood.

Do you see how the blood type diet can help you narrow down the foods that you should eat and those that must be avoided?

Good.

Now let’s get into how you can monitor your health to assure that the blood type diet is the best one for you as an individual.

First, you’ll have to make a list of all the ailments you suffer from.

Don’t only include the big, major ailments on your list. Make sure that you list ALL your ailments.

It may be hard to remember, or even recognize, those small ailments.

To catch all the small, relatively insignificant ailments that may be caused by the foods you are eating, think about that you have that other people don’t.

This list may include minor things such as a strange little itch that occurs in a specific spot on your body.

It may include a vague pain or something as innocuous as stiffness when you get up from bed in the morning (no, it's not all just "old age" causing this).

An easy way to visualize what your various ailments are is to begin at your head and work your way down to your toes.

Do you have healthy hair or is it falling out very quickly and thinning out?

Do you have headaches?

Do your eyes hurt, itch, or are blurry?

How about your throat? Heart? Lungs? Stomach? Do you have a hard, bulging abdomen? Genitalia (is it itchy or just not working the way it used to?). Are your bowels working normally and not constipated or having diarrhea all the time?
Work your way all the way down your body one level at a time until you reach your toenails.

Do your toenails have fungus? If so, write it down!

Aren't limber anymore and can't bend down? Write it down!

After you make your list of ailments, make two or three photocopies of your list. You will use these copies to make comparisons later so you can chart how well you are doing on this diet.

If you are more comfortable using an Excel spreadsheet than a pencil and paper, make a few copies of the spreadsheet so you have a blank copy to use later when your test whether you are making progress with this diet or not.

Using one copy of your ailment list, put a number between 1 (mild) to 10 (terrible pain or aggravation) beside each ailment on your list, then put that copy away in a safe place and ignore it until it's time to compare it to a new list.

Since inflammation is a large component of eating the wrong foods (you will learn about this when you read the book Eat Right 4 Your Type, you will want to take some measurements of various parts of your body.

You didn’t know that what you thought was fat is actually inflammation, did you?

Well, using this method, you can prove it to yourself.

While we are not discussing using the Eat Right 4 Your Type diet to lose weight, one study I found about it noted that everyone who followed it did lose weight. That’s a pretty significant statement to be made in a medically oriented scientific journal so it’s worth paying attention to.

While losing weight may be high on your list, I’m more interested in the health benefits associated with that weight loss. The less fat and inflammation your heart must pump blood through will lower blood pressure and take some stress off your heart.

In today’s world, that’s important.

Do you now see how this is all tied together in helping you obtain and maintain better overall health?

Let’s look at exactly how you can accurately take measurements of your body so they will be repeatable and give you good, dependable data you can use to evaluate your progress with your new eating regimen.

First, you should take measurements of any body parts that you aren’t happy with.

Don’t like your chubby thighs?

Using a flexible cloth tape measure like tailors use to fit clothing to people, measure up a specific distance above or below a hard, bony prominence that won’t change as your body composition changes, and then take the measurement you’re interested in recording and comparing at a later date.

In this instance, you can measure up from the top of your kneecap to your thigh area and take your thigh measurement there. Record how high above your kneecap you measured and what the actual measurement was. That way you know you are measuring the same place each time you measure it.

If you want to measure both thighs together, take your measurement around the bony prominence of your hip joint.
For your upper arm, take a circumferential measurement the same distance above a bony prominence like your elbow.

You get the idea.

Just make sure to record (write down on paper or on your computer) where you took the measurement and what the measurement was on any body part you are evaluating.

That way, you can go back every month or so to take another measurement at the same place and see if there are additional changes taking place.

Read Dr. D’Adamo’s book, Eat Right 4 Your Type, 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)

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)