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Medicine Preventive and Curative
By 1a2b | July 15, 2010
Have you heard the term “wellness?” It has two contexts, one
in alternative medicine and one in Western medicine.
In the alternative medicine world, wellness means taking care
of yourself so you don’t get sick. Let’s find ways to avoid cancer,
heart disease, mental illness. We can do this through changing our
diet, exercising more, and changing our energy fields.
In Western medicine, we wait until we get one of these diseases, then
we rush heroically to “beat the disease.” In Western medicine, the
term wellness means “early detection” of disease. If you walk
into a “Wellness Center” in a hospital, you’ll see mammogram screening
rooms, MRI machines and other tools to scan for the existence of
disease.
Is that wellness? To me, it’s not. Wellness is about staying well, it
is about avoiding disease in the first place. When a person is told
“You have cancer,” it is a major blow to their psyches, and their
lives. Why go through that if you don’t have to? Why not do whatever
you can to avoid that terrible day?
Western medicine treats the “pre-detection” part of life as a kind of
random soup of nothingness. You can’t really do anything about any of
these diseases, you just get them or you don’t. No rhyme or reason to
it, it just hits you, and then you deal with it.
Genetics is a big factor in the Western medical model. If you get
cancer, ah, well, it was in your genes that you’d get it. You see,
your great grandfather had cancer, so it was inevitable that you’d get
it too.
Huh? Unfortunately, Western medicine can’t explain why siblings get
or don’t get diseases supposedly passed on from their parents. One
sister dies of cancer at a young age (because of genetics) and the
other sister lives to be 100 (genetics).
For my part, I’m going to take the best care of myself possible, and
not play a silly waiting game for disease.
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