What is Health?

Are you healthy? How healthy are you? Would you like to be even healthier?

Health is an interesting subject, since most people want it, yet few have a clearly defined understanding of what health actually is.

What is health? Is health merely the absence of obvious disease and illness? If you are not showing any outward signs of being sick, are you automatically healthy? What about the person who dropped dead from their first heart attack? Were they healthy just before it happened, and then died? Doesn’t it make sense that health and illness usually accumulate over time, often unnoticeably? If this is so, many people not showing evidence of their illness, previously thought to be healthy, may in fact actually not be healthy at all.

It seems logical that health is present in degrees, rather than you have it in total or not at all. Unfortunately, the top causes of death in the western world, being heart disease, cancer and diabetes, are often present without obvious outward indicators. Wouldn’t this then demonstrate that the absence of signs and symptoms does not qualify a person as healthy? By the same logic, what about when you do have symptoms such as pain? Does this mean you are certainly sick?

Let’s have a look at pain. The presence of pain may often be your body calling out for attention. “Hey there is a pebble in my shoe.” “I am overindulging in coffee, sugar or alcohol, so I feel sick, have a headache, or just run down.” What about a symptom like a cough or sneeze? Are you sick, or is your body trying to remove some foreign bodies that are irritating you?

With this understanding, maybe it’s a matter of context. When you sense messages from your body, determine why they are there, what your body is trying to tell you, and then how you should respond accordingly.

A simple yet powerful way to understand how healthy you are, could be to view health by three components, being wholeness, function and adaptability. Wholeness means having your parts. Once you have parts removed like tonsils, appendix, gall bladder, etc., you can still function, but not as fully as your birthright should have allowed you to. Function means that the parts you do have are all working optimally. It’s not whether you can breathe and walk, its that you can breathe fully and walk briskly without limitations or impediments. The third component, adaptability, is the essence of health. How do you adapt physically chemically and emotionally?

When you strain or stress a body part through bad movement or poor posture, do you recover quickly? When you eat rotten food, do you feel unwell and malaise over a long period of time, or quickly bring it up, and return to normal rapidly? When you are surprised or shocked, do you get over it there and then, or do you take a long while to recover? How you cope and adapt to these circumstances determines your adaptability, the third component of health.

Did you know you your nerve system is your master control system, made of a network of fibers, similar to an electrical wiring system? Interference or stress in the spine may alter the transmission of messages between your brain and any of your body’s muscles, organs, and tissues, affecting control and coordination of systems and function throughout your body. This nerve system stress or interference may be creating inefficient function of your body systems, resulting in loss of efficient functioning organs and systems, resulting in a lowering of your health potential.

Since the primary focus of Chiropractic is the optimum function of your spine and nerve system, Doctors of Chiropractic are the natural and logical choice of health professionals to seek out in these circumstances. Look for a Healthy Life Doctor of Chiropractic in your area who can professionally assess your needs, and guide you to living a more fulfilling healthy life, naturally.

Dr. Ari Diskin is a US trained Healthy Life Doctor of Chiropractic, with over 30 years professional experience, having cared for over 10,000 people.  He uses Network Care as part of his 3 Step Vitality Program, in Melbourne Australia.  For more information www.DiskinLife.com.