Purpose Of Medicine

Improving and Maintaining Health

It is never too early (or too late) to think about how to improve your health. But looking at how to cure disease is only one part of a healthy lifestyle. It is also important to maintain health through several different methods that are readily available to us. Hahnemann was a pioneer in demanding a health-conscious lifestyle from the people he was around.

An increasing trend that has surfaced in health care management organizations is the belief that we have diseases that can be categorized and related to any ultimate cause of death. Most of us can live out our lives without chronic disease or disability and succumb only to old age when the time is finally up. The goal of a healthy life is as Dr. Ernst Wynder, president of the American Health Foundation put it, to “die young as late in life as possible.”

90 percent of your health is determined by factors beyond medicine’s control: your genetic background, the healthfulness of your environment, and most important, how you live – what and how much you eat, your drinking and smoking habits, how much your exercise, and how you relax.

As homeopaths, we may hold the key to many paths away from disease but in promoting good health through lifestyle choices we can keep people from getting on the path to disease in the first place. Our genes predispose us to certain types of disease but unless we encourage them to do their dirty work, they will never express their dissatisfaction with our choices.

You’ve heard that our life expectancy has increased over the time when homeopathy was introduced and many principles were adopted by conventional medicine. That’s true but it’s been due to fewer deaths in infancy, in childhood, and after childbirth – the result of improved sanitation, immunizations, and antibiotics. Among middle-aged Americans, however, men live only four years longer, and women only seven years longer that did their counterparts at the turn of the century. It is more of our responsibility to improve and keep our health that it is of the physician’s. Remind yourself often that a pill will never be the solution to any ailment that you may have.

The recommendations that make up for a healthy life are based around a few principles:

* Avoid hazardous behaviors such as cigarettes, excess alcohol and calories, mind-altering drugs, unsafe driving and recreational practices, misuse of dangerous tools.

* Pursue health-enhancing activities, such as regular exercise, a proper diet, and protective health measures such as routine check-ups.

* Get proper diagnosis and treatment. Know the limits of what you can do and don’t hope for any more when your or another person’s health is at risk.

A personal health inventory is a way to check your health so that you know of the hazards you or the people you work with are exposed to. This determines your health age. It should be no greater than your chronological age, and the lower it is than your chronological age, the better.