What happens first? The problem or the pain?
Problems happen first. Be Proactive with your Health.
Think about heart disease. This is a problem that develops over someone’s entire life and can completely change their quality of life when a big painful event occurs. Until that event, they are usually quite pain-free. The same goes for the spine and nerve system. Our health care system in Canada is completely over burdened with all types of diseases and problems that have developed slowly over time.
Don’t wait for the pain before you make positive changes to your lifestyle.
Instead, take a proactive approach towards health and wellness.
That is what I help people do as a Chiropractor.
Below are some key concepts that need to be understood if you want to live towards a longer, more comfortable, and active life.
What is health?
Most people answer this question by saying, “when I feel good” or “when I don’t hurt”. This type of mindset is one reason why our emergency care systems get completely overwhelmed as it feels quite good to sit on the couch, eat chips, and drink beer. But this is not healthy! In fact, many feel good activities, such as sitting for extended periods of time are risk factors for premature death (bad health!)
My favourite definition of Health is by the World Health Organization:
This definition starts you thinking towards a completeness of health and not just avoiding pain. As health is something to continuously strive towards and not to be taken for granted. Proactive steps need to be taken in order to get the most out of your body. This type of mindset will help you live proactively towards a longer, more comfortable, and active life!
What is Wellness?
At Erin Mills Optimum Health we consider wellness to be a state of mind or attitude that involves incorporating healthy habits and actions that will lead you towards greater physical, emotional, and spiritual health. Read more about wellness here.
What are symptoms?
Symptoms are your body talking to you. Symptoms can include:
- pain
- headaches
- numbness
- soreness
- stiffness
- achiness
- tiredness
- depression
- coughs
- sneezes
- fevers etc.
The list is endless and can essentially be explained as the resulting experience of your life on your body.
Your life is experienced through your nerve system. This nerve system constantly gets input from the body about what is happening in the world or your body. If something is wrong, it tells you.
But you have to listen.
Some of the signals are confusing. I commonly have to coach people about what the symptoms they are experiencing are telling them.
Usually people rush to over the counter pain killers or anti-sneezing pills, or anti-coughing pills, or anti-runny nose pills without addressing the reason why the symptom is occurring. Some of the symptoms they are stopping are actually beneficial for their body to heal (even though they are uncomfortable.)
For example, a cough is designed to make it unfavourable for bugs to live in your lungs, so why stop a cough from occurring? Maybe in church this is a good idea so you don’t interrupt the sermon.
But those are social reasons (also important for Health according to the WHO definition of Health) and will be more comfortable short term, but they are not to encourage your body to heal or live towards a longer more active life.
There are multiple examples of common symptoms that people I see chose to ignore with pills as opposed to doing anything proactively for their body to help it towards a healthier state.
I hope to coach you through some of your that you may be experiencing in order to ensure you live towards a longer, more comfortable, and active life.
I commonly use a graph to demonstrate these concepts. The graphs with my attempt at written explanations are below:
- There is a range of health from 100% or Optimum Health to 0% or Death. There is a symptom threshold line that when you fall below the line you hurt or feel symptoms, and when you are above it you do not. Lots of people will say that they are health, or not sick when they are not experiencing symptoms. Most people will say they are sick when they are experiencing symptoms.
- We will all go over and above this symptom threshold line many times throughout our lives.
- Many people commonly use pills to stop the pain or symptom without proactively addressing the problem or realizing the purpose of the symptom. The pills make you feel better by lowering the symptom threshold line, not by affecting your state of health.
- I teach my patients to take a proactive approach to health and wellness. Do your best to constantly strive for better health…towards optimum health. Don’t be satisfied hovering along the symptom threshold line. Create a buffer for your body to be flexible to the life events in your future. And especially, don’t just ignore the problem by lowering the symptom threshold line closer and closer towards 0%!
Take a proactive approach to your health and wellness! Chiropractic is for you!
If you enjoyed this lesson, also check out how to improve your health by minimizing the impact of stress on your body and how function and alignment matter to your health!
Dr. Callum Peever – Mississauga Chiropractor
