Real Life Wellness–How do you Plan to Recover Your Health?
By Bill Hemmer
Everybody wants to be healthy. We look on media every day that shows us beautiful people and places that makes us yearn for the “good life”. I feel the same way. But we all have stuff that stands in our way. I broke my neck. I herniated discs in my low back, mid back and neck. I have a 14-inch rod and two screws in my leg. You get the picture.
Over the last 30 years, I have spent my professional career taking care of people and learning more about taking care of myself at the same time. As my practice has evolved, so has my approach to health. I have developed a three-phase Functional Health Recovery program over the last five years. This plan combines all three parts of health: Physical, Chemical and Mental.
Chiropractors have always been known to help people with their physical health. More than 90 percent of people still come to see me for back pain. I get that. But, over the last 10 years my effectiveness treating people from only the physical point of view has become less effective. At first, I thought I had lost my touch, but as I dug deeper into the problem I discovered, the people I couldn’t help were having much bigger problems than just a physical pain.
These people came in with Diabetes, Heart Disease, High Blood Pressure and many other chronic diseases that had pain associated with them, but they also had a chemical part of their problem that couldn’t be ignored. Therefore, I developed chemical treatment protocols (whole food supplements, specific diet plans and herbal extracts) for these processes that complement my physical treatments. The mental part of their plan was the knowledge that we were looking at their entire health picture, not just parts of it. This combination has been very successful for the patients who have taken advantage of it.
The people who are still having the most problems are the ones who think they have to wait until they get really sick before they do something about their health. Our health care culture over the last 80 years has created an environment that allows us to ignore our health until we get really sick. Drugs have been able to mask so many symptoms that it’s only when something really catastrophic happens (a heart attack, stroke, seizure or injury) that we begin to look at our true lack of health.
It’s not your fault this is the case. Our entire health care system is designed to rescue people at the end of an injury or illness. It has been developed over the last 80 years, and we have the best system in the world to address these two problems. But this system doesn’t help the poor people who come to see me with terrible chronic pain being caused by arthritis who have an underlying disease. Nobody is addressing the whole person: physically, chemically and mentally. This is why I have been working to create such a system that makes sense and gives you the power to become your own health care provider.
More about that next week.