Healthy Living DIY

...no one approach is best for everything.

The conventional Western approach is second to none when it comes to emergencies (accidents, heart attacks, and the like) and diagnostic testing.

• My own grandfather would have likely doubled his lifespan if he'd had access to a simple antibiotic at the right moment.
• My father added 20 years or so of good-quality life following heart surgery. (A healthier lifestyle might have helped him prevent the surgery, but by the time his heart failed it was too late.)
• I would most likely be deaf right now if not for an operation I had when I was 4 - dealing with a side effect of having had the measles. Measles. When did you last hear of someone having the measles? Not lately, huh. Thank Western medicine.
• A close friend of mine would most likely have bled to death a couple of years ago had a surgeon trained in conventional Western medicine not intervened quickly after an accident.

The men and women who train for years to serve our culture as Medical Doctors do us a great service, and most of us have at least one incident in our family history to thank them for.

Yet, like any system, conventional Western medicine has its limitations. Many people find that when their goal is the creation of health (versus the treatment of illness), natural or holistic approaches have a lot to offer.

Medical Doctors, for the most part, deal with cleaning up our messes after they've occurred. They're also unsurpassed when it comes to diagnostics. For the conventional Western practitioner, however, teaching us how not to get sick is secondary. (Think this through. Would you expect them to be the go-to people for teaching us how to not need their expertise? It doesn't even make sense.)

Natural or holistic approaches offer a lot when it comes to helping us learn to be healthy. Sometimes a natural approach relieves illness. Other times, it helps us create ourselves as an inhospitable host for disease - so that we're perhaps less likely to become ill in the first place.

Should we expect Western medicine to be the expert resource for something it's not designed to address? Should we be mad at them because they don't do as well at a particular part of the health game as somebody else?

Of course not! That would be ridiculous. No more rational than getting mad at your plumber because he's not an electrician.

My answer: Choose both. Take responsibility for keeping yourself as well as possible. In doing that, you will undoubtedly take advantage of the products and services available in today's marketplace of natural or holistic health care. Nobody has time to learn everything from scratch - we need access to experts in every field.

But don't burn your bridges. Keep your doctor's card on the fridge. Schedule your check-ups. Go.

Should it happen that, despite your best efforts, you get ill anyway - choose both again. Keep your friends on both teams. In an emergency situation, you will definitely find me at the hospital, not the health food store. However once the crisis has passed, you'll find me "nose in book," cruising the Internet for information, or consulting with a holistic practitioner. Maybe I'lll need a little pro-biotic chaser to follow the anti-biotic regimen that kept my system from being overcome by infection...

Make sense?