Monday, May 4, 2020

Lawn Care, Marvel Superheroes, and Putting it All Together

It's summer-time!  A period of the year that involves a lot of lawn mowing and blockbuster movies among other seasonal characteristics.

Our guest blogger this month, author Julia Monnin, recently wrote in her own newsletter that most of us are ardent about tending to our grass after a rainy week or two messes up the lawn care schedule, but that we oddly do not apply a similar ethic toward the things that matter more to our own personal well-being.  Lawn care over health care?  Really...?  Yes, really.  That is the way it goes right now.  If the grass gets too high, then we plan an attack like the evil Thanos of Marvel Cinema lore is descending on our homes from planet Titan, but taking the steps to ensure long-term well-being is not nearly as high on the priority list for most.  

Consequently, every newsletter that I write is thematically linked to fundamentally altering the way that you look at health, so that you can more readily recognize the basic things that you need in order to achieve it.  Combating most of what I teach is the mindset that permeates almost every facet of our healthcare system in America: that your role in being healthy is minimal and that you should just wait around until you have symptoms, then treat them ad nauseum and indefinitely (with a basic mandate that you should not question any of this).  No one taught us that it is a lot harder to get a sick person well than to keep a well person healthy like we were once taught how much easier it is to do lawn maintenance regularly than to let the grass grow a foot tall before mowing.  Until we reach a point in history when the population takes back its personal responsibility to be healthy, which would lend itself to a proactive rather than reactive paradigm shift and re-position health education toward prevention and maintenance, we are going to have to come to grips with the following, which I creatively commented on in my December 2018 newsletter:

In the fight to be healthy, like Avengers: Infinity War,
I can be your Spider-Man, but you’ll also need Thor,
And Hulk and Captain America, even Dr. Strange,
Iron Man and Black Widow too for overall change;
So, think integratively when getting or staying well,
To serve every organ, muscle, tissue, and cell.

Optimal health cannot be achieved through getting your head on straight OR nutritional change OR affirming your faith OR regaining structural integrity OR consistent exercise OR routine massage OR by meditating daily.  It is not an either-or proposition.  However, if you change all of the above uses of "OR" to "AND" then you have the ability to be the very best version of you possible.  It takes a consistency of health-oriented (which is different than disease-oriented) habits, a commitment to achieving complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease and infirmity (of symptoms). 

So, assemble your team, and no matter the level of health villainy working against your ability to thrive - be it the equivalent of Thanos wielding the Infinity Stones and pushing you to your absolute limits, or an old rich businessman using a giant iron suit for the first time who is rather easily dispatched (and anywhere in between) - if you take the time and put the effort into unlocking your inborn, borderline superheroic recuperative “powers,” you get well.

Thinking good things for you, as always,

-Dr. Chad



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