Dear colleagues,

Discussions on improving health care have emerged early in our political campaign season’s kick-off. Central in this dialogue are the topics of rising cost of treatment, gaps in coverage, and availability. 

When it comes to health care, we mostly focus on issues related to acquiring treatment services, but what if we widened our perspective and also looked at options for producing more of our own health?

SEEING HEALTH CARE FROM ANOTHER VANTAGE POINT

Good starting points for producing health are recognizing that is it is natural to be healthy, regularly noticing what is right with our bodies, and understanding that health is a resource that can be strengthened, not a problem that must be fixed.

Strengthening and producing health, which is personally enriching and which reduces the need for treatment services, are ideas that merit attention. These concepts may be unfamiliar but are not new. Two thousand years ago in The Meditations, Marcus Aurelius describes his father’s approach to personal health this way: “He took reasonable care of his body’s health…so that through his own attention, he very seldom stood in need of the physician’s art, or of medicine, or of external application.”

Seeing health care from another vantage point opens us up to broader ways of thinking about health and expands the possibilities for producing and strengthening it. In our recent concept paper, A New Way Of Seeing, we present possibilities that we hope you will find inspiring. Please take a look and let us know what you think.

SAFEST MEDICINE OR SLOWEST POISON?

Ann Wigmore’s decades-old admonition is validated by a recent report on the negative effects of ultra-processed foods. The timing of this report offers us further encouragement for taking advantage of the abundant, minimally processed vegetables and fruits available during the summer.

WISER WORDS

“The most powerful thing we can do to improve health is to change our concept of what is possible.” —Joyce M. Young, MD, MPH, “A New Way of Seeing”

Thanks for joining us.

Sincerely,
Your colleagues at Advanced Wellness Systems