Changing Your Thought Process

Understanding healthcare is very difficult to do. How would you even know if you are thinking about your health the most correct way possible? To tell people to change how they think about healthcare would be like trying to get you to think of yourself seven tall when you are five foot two. You won’t even know where to begin. So let’s start with where you are and then show you where you could be.

Over the last 50 years we have been trained to go to a doctor if we have pain, sick, or injured. If you have pain, great marketing campaigns have trained us to reach for a painkiller or muscle relaxer. If you have colds we reach for medicines. We quickly reach for braces, orthotics, and now even surgery. But what if there was a way to help yourself out of pain without expensive surgery, braces, or pills?

Instead of reaching for pills, stop to think about what is actually causing the pain. Start thinking about your body from an engineering viewpoint. If you have a tower with support wires and one of the wires is shortened, the stress shows up on the other side. The same is true for your body. If a muscle on the left shortens, chances are the stress, or pain, will show up on the other side. Your body is about balance. Every joint in your body has muscles that cross over the joint. The muscle below attaches above the joint, while the muscles above attached below the joint. Therefore when your muscles tighten, the spacing in your joint gets smaller. This can cause joint pain, dislocation of joints, and over time wear out your joints.

Braces and surgery are really only short term fixes. If you are dealing with foot pain, putting in orthotics will stop the pain temporarily, however you are still allowing your body to walk on your feet badly. This will affect your knee later. Surgery is not really the answer either as once you cut something, you can’t really put it back, so again you change the body balance.

We practice medicine as if we think that the bones move the muscles, when actually the muscles move the bones. Most people, and doctors, would say we know that the muscles move the bones. So why do we blame vertebrae for pinched nerves, bulging discs, and even herniated discs, when in fact the muscles are creating the pressure on the discs? If the muscles are tight and creating the pressure, then to put spacers between the vertebrae would seem to increase the pressure which would damage the bone over time. For the short term, you are getting relief by releasing some of the pressure off the discs,but at what cost down the road?

I am not blaming anyone for this misunderstanding of the human body and neither should you. The medical world is only giving us what we ask, a quick fix. So what can you do at this point in your life to change your health?

Start by learning about your body. Ask therapists, doctors, and nurses more detailed questions about your body. if they will not tell, then find someone who will. Read about your body and find out what it needs. We are so busy trying to force our bodies to conform to what we want quickly that our bodies are rebelling. Just give it what it needs. Your body is an amazing healing machine. Oxygen is the real healing element of the human body, yet very few of us actually get enough oxygen.

The food you eat is equally as important. Talk to a dietitian that believes in the healing power of food. Learn what to look for, get tested for what nutrients you are deficient, and decide to change your way of thinking. The only thing that will change your health is you, regardless of how old you are. You are still in control!