Friday, June 27, 2008

Differing Approaches To Achieving Wellness

Everyone wants to achieve a state of better health and wellness. There are medications, treatments, exercises, shows, and books dedicated to helping people get to this proposed state. However, there is something that is being ignored amidst all this. This is something important, I think. In fact, it is probably more important than any of the advice or techniques about achieving wellness. You see, this thing is a question that people don’t seem to be answering. If they are answering it, the answer either isn’t very clear or conflicts with what everyone else seems to think the answer is. No, I’m not talking about life itself. Everyone knows life means ’42.’ What I’m talking about is what does it actually mean to “achieve wellness?”

Most of the medical establishment tends to recapitulate the same words and phrases that comprise that is seen to be standard wisdom for achieving wellness. Watch your diet. Exercise regularly and properly. Drop the extra pounds that you have. Quit smoking. Have your body screened regularly for various dire illnesses so you can avoid problems early on. Keep your blood sugar and cholesterol levels as low as you can. Keep in touch with your primary medical provider, and have any aches and pains checked out – they might be signs of even worse problems. These things are what the medical establishment wants you to remember; these are the things they saw will help you achieve wellness and better physical health. Still, there are those who choose to dissent – and some of them are from the medical community itself.

According to a certain Dr. Hadler, all the fitness and health in the world can’t undo one simple fact: we’re all going to die. No, he doesn’t have a skull decorating his desk, but that would add a touch of visual confirmation of his view. He says that all the good stuff in the world isn’t going to do much help against the ravages of time and aging. There is no way to hold off every dire illness in existence at bay for eternity, much less something as unstoppable as time. The fact is, permanent wellness is simply impossible to achieve – it isn’t even a real option. He says that the real goal should be reaching a ripe, venerable age with most of one’s core physical abilities still largely intact – no loss of hearing, sight, bodily functions, and the like. He also says that if you want to achieve that long-term goal, ignoring the medical establishment is the easiest way to do it.

The fun part is that both these sets of advice are from people in the medical establishment. That simple little detail means that they both have a rather large degree of credibility. The question becomes which one is really the more accurate one. That isn’t so easy, because on one hand, Hadler is right in saying that you’re going to die eventually, so delaying it shouldn’t even be considered an option. On the other, nobody really wants to die and doing a lot of healthy things can not only delay death, but also decrease the risk of dying in certain ways.



Resource Box : Harvey Ong is a part-time writer and a part-time researcher. He is currently self- studying various Far Eastern languages and is an avid fiction reader. He is currently writing articles oriented towards consumers of pharmaceutical products, but has written about used car loans, gambling and casino strategies, and overseas travel in the past.

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