As a holis­tic Chi­ro­prac­tor and Board Cer­ti­fied Clin­i­cal Nutri­tion­ist, my role is being more of a moti­va­tor and guide for health information.

Although the mer­its of self-directed care is a sub­ject to be argued else­where, what is clear is that twenty-first cen­tury health­care neces­si­tates a new line of think­ing for health insur­ance com­pa­nies, researchers, patients, and doc­tors alike.

• Con­ven­tional med­i­cine has asked the philo­soph­i­cal ques­tion “How do we screen, treat and man­age dis­ease”.
• It is my opin­ion that we should ask instead, “How do we pro­mote and main­tain health” while work­ing with the dynamic rules of the human body.

Well­ness approaches are less depen­dent on objec­tive tests and mea­sures, and are much more sub­jec­tive and algo­rith­mic by their very nature.

The answers we are look­ing for are likely found in com­plex fields such as chaos the­ory and quan­tum physics, but well­ness is really just about iden­ti­fy­ing hid­den pat­terns behind ill­ness and coax­ing them back into bal­ance.…the body knows how to fig­ure out the details.

The word “Doc­tor” lit­er­ally trans­lates back to “teacher”, and so I think that med­i­cine is fail­ing today partly because health pro­fes­sion­als have lost sight of their roles.

Health pro­fes­sion­als have become machin­ists, largely focused on symp­toms and dis­ease labels. “Care” is now char­ac­ter­ized by run­ning patients through a myr­iad of tests and bas­ing rec­om­men­da­tions sim­ply off of stan­dard devi­a­tions and averages.

The “per­son” has been lost in med­i­cine, and it is the “per­son” where the answers are more likely to be found.

The body is the smartest Doc­tor and the most skilled phar­ma­cist you could ever find…if given the right tools and envi­ron­ment to do so.

Chi­ro­prac­tors often refer to this phe­nom­e­non as the “Innate”, which has been the basis of Chi­ro­prac­tic phi­los­o­phy for over the last 115 years.

Sci­en­tific research sup­ports an impor­tant role for Chi­ro­prac­tors in our health sys­tem for both health out­comes and cost-effectiveness.

But before we turn to a sys­tem where pro­fes­sion­als rec­om­mend “two adjust­ments and see me in the morn­ing” , I think the answer lies in the very ques­tion Chi­ro­prac­tors ask…“What is inter­fer­ing on a phys­i­cal, bio­chem­i­cal, emo­tional, & spir­i­tual level with your innate abil­ity to express opti­mum health.”

One of the most remark­able things about Well­ness is that it is a jour­ney, not an end in itself.  Holis­tic care is about look­ing to the “Whole” per­son and lead­ing with a respect and admi­ra­tion for the body’s dynamic abil­ity to self-heal and self-regulate.

There truly are no straight lines to well­ness, but its achiev­able with patient, yet con­certed action.

For those brave indi­vid­u­als who under­take a well­ness pro­gram, 90% of the bat­tle is get­ting started, the other 10%? — lis­ten­ing to your body and build­ing a sup­port net­work to meet your health goals.

Instead of becom­ing a vic­tim, you learn to adapt your life and career to fit your new health needs.

My patients often walk in to my office with a laun­dry list of symp­toms. I tell my patients that sets of symp­toms are expe­ri­enced like a pen­du­lum, swing­ing back and forth — lev­el­ing out peaks and val­leys, and a hope­fully reach­ing a tip­ping point where the body finally resets with a higher capac­ity, vibra­tion & attrac­tion for health.

My job, and ulti­mately my pas­sion as a health pro­fes­sional, is find­ing the com­mon pat­terns behind the symp­toms my clients expe­ri­ence, fit together the pieces of the puz­zle, develop a story of how my patients went from A to B, and develop a per­son­al­ized & mul­ti­di­men­sional to cor­rect those patterns.

When you focus on the upstream influ­ences of health and dis­ease, the down­stream symp­toms and expe­ri­ences remark­ably seem to fix themselves.

Focus­ing on the whole per­son, may just reveal the answers to our health­care dilemma after all.