By Shawn Bladel, DC, Eastland Chiropractic & Wellness Center
Imagine living for 70, 80, 90 years with quality health. Imagine living your life without the need for medications or surgeries. Imagine enjoying your family, children, grandchildren, your vitality, and saving hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical expenses. Do you believe it’s possible to live this type of life? This is the type of life people are meant to live, but unfortunately, statistics show that most will never reach such a state of living.
It is quite likely that most of the people you know — your family members, your friends, co-workers, maybe even yourself — are already taking medications. In fact, there are probably many people you know who are taking multiple medications, regardless of their age. Are you? Do you take a medication for conditions such as allergies and sinus issues, headaches, mood, joint pain, sleep problems, blood pressure, or cholesterol? The medications may make you feel better, but do they make you healthy?
Ask yourself why most people will never live a truly healthy life. You can see that most won’t, but why? It may help to think about how you were raised. Not the type of home you grew up in or what school you went to, but the mindset with which your family took care of their health. In most families, there wasn’t much attention given to health until someone didn’t feel well or got sick. When they got sick — even if it was an ordinary cold — they took medicine to feel better. If it was a more serious problem, a visit to the doctor was in order, which likely necessitated a prescription medication. Other than trying to figure out who the heck sneezed on you, families usually focused on what would make them feel better, but not on why they got sick in the first place. Not much has changed in today’s families.
Let me ask you this question: when you woke up today, how did you determine how healthy you are? On what did you base your level of health? I speak with people every month, and when I first ask that question to someone I have never met, they usually tell me that they base their health on how they look or feel. Wouldn’t you agree? If you look and feel terrific, that should be a good indication of health. But is it really? Have you known someone who felt great, and then had a heart attack? Or someone that felt fine, and came away from a routine check-up with a diagnosis of cancer?
When my wife Heather and I first learned that being truly healthy has very little to do with how you feel, we were quite confused. After all, we had three children at the time, and had learned that when they were sick and had ear infections, we went to our medical doctor and usually got a prescription. Or if my wife had migraines, which occurred every week, she couldn’t get out of bed, and we sometimes found ourselves going to the emergency room. This went on for several years, and just prior to putting tubes in my child’s ears and placing my wife on another medication and round of steroids, we were referred to a doctor who helped transform our family’s thinking from a symptom and sick care mindset to one of preventing health problems before they began.
So what did this doctor teach us that changed our mindsets forever? He taught us that health is, based on the World Health Organization’s definition of health, when the body is functioning at 100 percent. The key word here is function. That sounded great, but what did it really mean? How would I know if my wife or children’s bodies were functioning at 100 percent?
For answers to this and other questions, read next month’s article on what it means to be healthy.
For more information on all the services offered at Eastland Chiropractic & Wellness Center, call 309-662-8418 or visit them online at EastlandChiro.com. Their office is located at 2406 E. Washington Street in Bloomington. Their goal is to educate people and create an awareness that allows everyone to make smart, informed decisions regarding their health and well-being.