Healthy or Just Not Sick?

Do you want to be healthy or just not sick? This is one of the first questions I ask my patients when they are considering starting Chiropractic care.

It is very important to establish someone’s health objectives and intended outcomes from the outset. For some patients, all they want is to ‘feel better’, in other words, to be ‘less sick’, whilst for others, they want to achieve greater levels of well-being, beyond the resolution of their aches and pains.

​For some of you reading this, you might be thinking, ‘what is the difference between being healthy and just being ‘not sick’?

The answer to that is illustrated by asking the following questions and understanding the analogy raised:
Do you want to be happy or just not sad?
Would you like to be attractive or just not ugly?
Would you rather be rich or just not poor?

You see, in order to understand the difference between being healthy and being ‘not sick’, it is important to realise that there is a whole spectrum of degrees of health and sickness that inhabit the scale between 100% life (true wellness) and 0% health (death).

And your lifestyle choices move you along this continuum, either towards health and away from sickness, or towards sickness and away from health.

Living in the Western world, we have forgotten, or worse, ignore the rules on how to live congruently with nature, and how our genes have developed. The majority of us don’t eat healthy food anymore.

In fact, a lot of the stuff we eat these days isn’t really food at all! Our diets nowadays are composed largely of industrial products – things that are produced in a factory, made with a dizzying array of chemicals, sweeteners and additives, that come packaged in plastic, cardboard, foil or cans.

A healthy diet in an ideal world should be composed of foods you see growing from the earth, running on the land, or swimming in the sea.

Very few people exercise anywhere near the amount necessary to provide the body with what it requires to function optimally, and to sustain it in an environment which provides challenges and demands at every turn.

For example, it has been said that compared to our hunter-gatherer predecessors, our total energy expenditure ‘barely equals’ the resting metabolic rate of these people who had no choice but to roam on foot for up to 10 or 15 miles a day. [Cordain et al, 1998 Int. J. Sports Med. (19) 328-335]

So what has all this got to do with Chiropractic?
Isn’t a Chiropractor just a ‘back doctor’?
It has everything to do with Chiropractic, because being a Chiropractor I am interested in these aspects of your lifestyle - and more.

My purpose is primarily to facilitate you achieving greater levels of health and well-being, and not just helping you feel better from your aches and pains. The path towards expressing higher degrees of health and function is a process, and as such requires time and effort.

The lifestyle decisions you make today will be reflected in your health tomorrow.
​
Choose wisely!