Have you heard the term wellness? It has two contexts, one in alternative medicine and one in Western medicine.
In the alternative medicine world, wellness means taking care of yourself so you don’t get sick. Let’s find ways to avoid cancer, heart disease, mental illness. We can do this through changing our diet, exercising more, and changing our energy fields.
In Western medicine, we wait until we get one of these diseases, then we rush heroically to beat the disease. In Western medicine, the term wellness means early detection of disease. If you walk into a Wellness Center in a hospital, you’ll see mammogram screening rooms, MRI machines and other tools to scan for the existence of disease.
Is that wellness? To me, it’s not. Wellness is about staying well, it is about avoiding disease in the first place. When a person is told You have cancer, it is a major blow to their psyches, and their lives. Why go through that if you don’t have to? Why not do whatever you can to avoid that terrible day?
Western medicine treats the pre-detection part of life as a kind of random soup of nothingness. You...