Perhaps it's time to confront the common misconceptions of what health is before we discuss how to best obtain and maintain it.  Misconceptions, common beliefs that are unfounded, they don't work; they never will work and have never worked in the past.  

Yet we are correct to readily and thoroughly believe that health is something, but most of us erroneously miss the target of comprehension.  

Perhaps if you knew and were to think more like a chiropractor we could stop the misconceptions and help President Obama with his apparent undefeatable war on “health care costs.”  

Chiropractors think this way; health is an innate state of wellness where everything in the human body is functioning to potential all of the time.  

Chiropractors believe that the human body doesn't need help, just don't interfere with its instinctive and innate abilities to find its own balance, its homeostasis.   

In my practice I've challenged our body's potential ability to find its balance, its homeostasis and function, its health.  And I'm a demanding chiropractic practitioner.  You bring your body to me for care and I'm going to put it to work to find out how healthy it is.  

For the over 35 years I've been in practice it has become apparent that the health of the human body is a slippery eel indeed.  Health is hard to get back once you've lost it and harder still to constantly maintain it once found or returned.  

Before we philosophize on what health is let's get something out of the way.  Let's all understand what health is not, and then we'll discuss what health must then be.  

First, health is not what you feel or for that matter what we cannot or don't feel.  Health has nothing to do with symptoms at all.  Let me repeat this in another way.  What we feel is of interest, what causes us to feel symptoms are of concern.  We get those symptoms when something isn't working right, something isn't meeting its potential to function and the parts are laboring.  We cannot treat the laboring effectively; we must treat the cause of it.  

Secondly health isn't what things may look like.  Although it's true that structure equals function to a great degree there is more to health than what something looks like.  Healthy isn't what you look like although what you look like may reflect a lot of things that may not be working, not up to health potential.  

So if healthy isn't what it looks like and it isn't what we feel then what is it and how can we assure ourselves that we are expressing our fair share of it?  

That is the billion dollar question.  The nightmarish non healthy conditions of most of our poor and ignorant society along with our ongoing appallingly ridiculous assumptions about proper body care are literally rapidly, relentlessly and brutally killing us.  And to make matters worse it costs us our children's legacy to do it.  

Bodies are what they are.  Don't interfere with our bodies and they run beautifully and well, boasting of their resiliency and adeptness.   Most of us are born of good stead and have the potential to enjoy health for the duration of our all too short life spans.  

We are born with potential and then someone comes along and leads us astray.  They teach us how to shorten our lives, how to get ill and how to be unhealthy.  Usually we are led by an unwitting parent, someone that has assumed that their parents did the right thing by them and that's the way to go. (assume = the ass before u and me)   

Never assume, never believe without first “big braining” it.  That's right, you have a big brain and it's time we used it in our personal confrontation and fight for our health.  

The first modern day chiropractor, Daniel David Palmer, is credited with getting the ball rolling towards manually confronting interferences with our spinal health.  

Dr. Palmer, a Canadian, gave the first chiropractic adjustment in 1895.  He was persecuted for his methods as were thousands of chiropractors to come for many years following, and even today gross prejudice exists from the bayards of health care control and administration. (a bayard is one that is “uninterested” in what others have to say)   

Even when I graduated from the Canadian Memorial Chiropractic College in Toronto in 1973, upon returning to British Columbia I was taken aback by the Chiropractic Act of the province.  The Act did not allow us to adjust the extremities.  Imagine what that meant.  I had studied eight years, was licensed and permitted to vigorously adjust the spinal bones surrounding the brainstem, but I wasn't permitted to even lightly adjust your elbow.   

Of course we have corrected these injustices but as far as your health goes there are a plethora of ignorant assumptions and practices that are outdated and continue to go on in all settings of the erroneously labeled “health care system.”  

And these hobbling practices through our ignorance hold back the advancement of our health and wellness.  It costs us money to chase the old incorrect paradigm of what health is supposed to be.  It costs us in misery and hardship to support the misinformation and therefore the misguidance of our habits as citizens.  

If our beautiful perfectly made and potentially perfect functioning body just doesn't need any interference to do its job, then where does the interference of it come from?  

Interference comes from us doesn't it?  It comes from me and you and like it or not it's the way of the game of health.  Our bodies are what they are and we're just not looking at them correctly.  We are misinformed about what our bodies really are and how they work and the bayards that surround us all seem uninterested in us knowing the truth and the way out for all of us.  There is only one way back to our good health on a large and permanent scale.  

What we do to stress our bodies causes us to malfunction.  But stress is a symptom, not a cause of disease.  Stress is of interest but not of concern.  Stress is a natural instinctive and innate response to a stimulus.  It is our reaction to the stimulus that causes disease and loss of health.  

“Oh come on Doc. I have stress!”  Sure you do, we all have stress from some cause or another.  But our response of stressing is always the same; we “draw up tight.”  

Stress, from old French “stricture,” from Latin “strictus,” i.e. restrict or constrict.  Restrict and constrict something and then go and put it to work.  When it cannot function to potential then label it unhealthy and you will be right.   

So if we, as a large and functioning society, were correct to treat stress then when the body gets-up-tight and strains and sprains becoming painful, either inside or outside of itself, we drug it.  How does the drugging and stupefying of the brain and nerves help in reducing stress, in returning that “drawn up tight' individual back to healthy functioning?  

How can numbing the sprained joints and holding elements of the body be labeled health care?  How can reducing the inflammatory state with drugs be “healthy?”  Under a functional load the parts still fail to function.  The body isn't healthy.  It just feels good and we already discussed that.  How we feel isn't a benchmark for health.  

How many of us or our loved ones have gone to the lab and had their blood pulled and got the worst of bad news in return for their visit?  “I didn't feel that coming on!”  The lab test showed that things weren't working but long after the initial shift from function had begun.  

The fact is very few doctors test function and fewer of us still go to our doctors on a preventative basis.  

Early identification and treatment of the causes of stress is the only way to keep tabs on a body and prevent it from early drawing-up-tight and breaking down.  

The secret to stopping stress?  We must think as a genius and apply our wisdom to overcome the stressors common to the “Garden of Eden.”  These common stressors are all about us, constantly. Yet they are also within our grasp of comprehension, and then of course, elimination.   

Just like health can be regained in many cases by information and application of knowledge in a timely fashion, so can we avoid many of the common stressors that are ruining our bodies at an accelerating and alarming rate.  

That is why the chiropractor takes four years of study including diet and nutrition, lifestyle assessment and counseling.  We as chiropractors know that to be healthy things must be sound and functioning on the inside as well as within the musculo-skeletal and nervous systems.   

We as chiropractors know that the identification of stress and its immediate reduction is a multifaceted essential way of viewing and achieving our health potentials.   Only your chiropractor trains so extensively on these premises and his paradigm of health, which is practiced throughout the chiropractic profession, and is proving itself over and over again.  

For those of you that read this column regularly I would like you to know that my next article we will delve into our common stressors in the “Garden of Eden.”  Hang on to your paradigms for we're about to shift the one on “health!”   

Also please feel free to forward this to all of your likeminded friends as we would like them to also catch up and be ready for this “stress eliminating” information.