Healthcare vs. Sickcare
When I take a step back and look at the health of the world around us all I can think is that this isn’t okay. We have gotten so used to our friends and family members being sick that we feel like it is normal. There has been so much chronic disease and early death that it feels like that’s the way it has to be. 5 out of 6 people currently die of either heart disease or cancer. Alzheimer’s and dementia rates are rising so rapidly that it will likely bankrupt our economy. Not to mention the younger generations. The kids these days are en route to be the sickest generations in history with early onset of chronic disease becoming more and more common. 1 in 4 children now have at least 1 chronic disease. Cancer is the number one killer in children. 1 in 34 have autism. Again, these numbers keep getting worse, not better! What we are doing for our health simply is not working. We need a better system.
So what do we currently do for our health? In a nutshell, we react. This is one of the biggest problems with how we manage our health currently. Just in general what we do is we wait. We wait until we are sick, we feel bad, or have some amount of pain before we do anything at all. And generally our first step is to reach into the medicine cabinet and grab something like an asprin to cover up whatever that new problem is. The issue with that as we all know, aspirin doesn’t FIX anything. It just covers problems up and what CAUSED the issue is allowed to continue to get worse until instead of an aspirin, we are heading to the doctor for an even stronger drug that’s even better at covering things up, allowing it to keep getting worse until next thing you know we are cutting things out and fusing things together. That is our current system for health these days and it’s not working. The US spends more money on healthcare and takes more drugs than any other country in the world. We are only 5% of the world’s population yet we take 85% of the world’s drugs. If money and drugs were the answer to health we’d be the healthiest nation on the planet. But year after year the WHO ranks us dead last in overall health among industrialized nations. We have more cancer and heart disease and more babies dying before the age of 2 than any other country. We need a better system.
I don’t like to call our medical system “healthcare”. It has nothing to do with health. In fact medicine is the study of disease and how to treat sickness. It has nothing to do with health. That is what makes it so reactionary. Imagine you go to the doctor and there is nothing “wrong” with you. All the tests are negative. There is nothing they can do for you. You’re free to go about your life until something breaks then we have a drug for that! Keep living your life as you wish. Eat whatever you please and when the inevitable day comes when you get your diagnosis then we can help. That is sick care. Health care would look radically different. What if instead of your doctor looking to see if you are sick they looked to see how healthy you are? Imagine all the disease and suffering that could be avoided if only we asked a better question. “Am I healthy” as opposed to “am I sick”.
How do you know if you are healthy? Well if you recall from our last newsletter, health is your body functioning at 100%. When you are functioning at full capacity there is 100% health, 100% life, 100% vitality! So a proper healthcare system would look at how well your body is able to function. Are you putting in foods that help your body function better or worse? Proper function requires motion and oxygen. Are you moving and breathing? How many chemicals are coming in, keeping you from functioning well? What are your thoughts like? How stressed are you? Your thoughts create your reality and have a direct impact on your health. But a true healthcare system must start with the nervous system as the backbone (pun intended) of health! Your nerve system controls all function, all healing, all digestion, and respiration, all of it. So to be healthy, to have full function in your body, your nerve system must be firing on all cylinders and you must have a healthy spine. That’s why Hippocrates said “look well to the spine for the cause of disease.” Hundreds of years ago he knew that misalignments in the spine interfere with the nerves and create dysfunction leading to disease in the body.
If you haven’t noticed yet, this new healthcare system is exactly what we teach at NGFC. It is the 5 Essentials of health. Eat well, move, take care of your spine, these things build HEALTH in the body. It is a proactive lifestyle. Never waiting for sickness but taking action to build health. Living in such a way that your body is able to function well and you are able to live your best life free from pain, sickness, and disease. A life free from dread and fear that one day the diagnosis will come.
The problem is that most people still wait. They wait until their mid 20s or 30s or even later in life to start building health. But as we talked about before, even children are sick and suffering! We must stop assuming that it is only adults who need to care about their health! Building health should start from conception and the question should be asked every day thereafter, am I building health or disease? Today, choose to build health. Adopt a new healthcare system. Live the 5 Essentials lifestyle.
In Health and Faith,
Dr. Marc
