What goes around comes around.
Hippocrates’ opinion was that wellness comes from what we eat: “Let your food be your medicine, and your medicine be your food.”
Then we discovered the magic of medicine, and learned to neglect nutrition. We also seemed to ignore the writings of Paracelsus, sometimes called the father of toxicology, in the early 1500’s, in this description of pharmacology: "All things are poison and nothing is without poison, only the dose permits something not to be poisonous."
By the late 20th century we had reached the point of creating food to satisfy taste more than nutrition, and turning over to the medical industry the challenge of keeping us alive and “healthy” (free of symptoms). With the growth of the “health care industry” and proliferation of pharmaceuticals, we turned over to professionals what had traditionally been a personal responsibility. A brief study of the status of our national health reveals the fallacy of that move – despite our spending the highest amount on health care, we recently ranked only 39th in wellness among nations of the world.
The return to the original paradigm is underway. The efforts of such medical doctors as Dean Ornish (author of Dr Dean Ornish’s Program for Reversing Heart Disease … The Only System Scientifically Proven to Reverse Heart Disease Without Drugs or Surgery, Random House 1990), the professional community is slowly realizing that slash, burn, and poison (a.k.a. surgery, radiation, and chemo) are not truly remedies for what ails us. The painstaking research of career professionals such as T. Colin Campbell, PhD (The China Study, Benbella Books, Dallas, TX: 2004) has documented in very clear terms the linkage between diet, lifestyle, and wellness. Even economists are catching on! Paul Zane Pilzer, in The Wellness Revolution … How to Make a Fortune in the Next Trillion Dollar Industry, John Wiley and Sons, Inc. 2002, describes the transition from health care to wellness.
The saddest thing about paradigm shifts is also the greatest joy: When the paradigm shifts, everyone starts at zero! Just as buggy whip manufacturers were left out of the automobile industry, the medical industry will wake up one day soon and wonder where all the patients are. Meanwhile, those who join the growing Wellness Revolution will age without as much aging, will heal themselves of (or better yet, prevent) many of the common diseases of aging (a.k.a. diseases of affluence). Agribusiness will slump as wellness-conscious consumers move more and more to organics and heirloom foods.
As with any paradigm shift, some are pioneers, some go with the crowd, and some will hold out to the bitter end – they will die rather than switch (literally). Will you join me as a pioneer before it is too late and you get trampled by the crowd?
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