Last weekend, we read an article in the July/August 2009 news digest of Healthy Options entitled Alternative Medicine: A New Understanding by Burton Goldberg. It discusses another aspect of life over which families can regain control: health.
Our family members can be much more effective citizens of the world if they are in the best of health.
However, there is a general impression that peak health is elusive because sources of illness abound in the environment and protection from them can only be gotten from the products of medical science. But it's difficult to believe that human beings can be so fragile having survived as a species for so long before medical science even existed.
In the article Goldberg explains that conventional medical thinking is disease-oriented and not exactly authoritative when it comes to maintaining health.
Goldberg further discusses that health is achieved not merely through the application of cures when sickness is already present but ideally through the proper care of the whole organism which will make it impervious to most causes of disease. This, he says, is the basis of alternative medical practice.
It was cancer that caused us to seriously inquire how we could take charge of our health. Close relatives became afflicted with the disease. After getting over the initial shock, we started talking to doctors and reading some books about it. We eventually found out that the prevalence of cancer as well as the seeming explosion of other strange diseases in recent decades is an indicator of how ignorant we have become about taking care of our bodies.
We also learned that certain changes in lifestyle would dramatically improve our health. We tried these suggested behavior modifications ourselves particularly those concerning our eating habits. We made the changes gradually, starting in the year 2000. First, we took out pork from our regular daily diet, then other meats one by one until in 2005 we became vegetarian-at-home. (We almost always eat home-prepared vegetarian meals unless there are gatherings with relatives. Food is an emotional issue with some of our relatives so we eat the healthiest that is available during these occasions.)
What also helped is that we made the changes as a family. The fact that we are in solidarity with each other as we improve our lifestyle strengthens our resolve and our commitment. Incidentally, the kids are stricter vegetarians not having been conditioned to prefer animal products early in their lives as the rest of us were.
We have been vegetarian at home for over four years now and are satisfied with the results. We have, to an extent, become healthier and more resistant to illness. We still get sick but it's not a big deal for us. For example, last week we had the flu. But it wasn't debilitating. We all felt a little weak and some of us ran a fever while others had diarrhea but we were still able to go about our daily business and recovered in a couple of days. How we would fare against more serious illnesses, time will tell -- or a general check up that we're undergoing soon.
At the very least, the fruit of our efforts is a greater understanding of the workings of our bodies. We no longer feel helpless in the face of health issues such as illness.
We all need to inform ourselves well regarding how to take proper and holistic care of ourselves and our family members and apply what we learn so that we reach a point where we don't get sick at all.
There are links in this blog that provide the information about health that we believe everyone should know. Please let us know what you think about them or if there are other sources you'd like to recommend. There's so much more that we could learn especially from other families that have read on and tried out healthy lifestyle changes themselves. Hopefully we can enrich each other and help each other become healthier through dialogue.
Our health is truly in our hands.
No comments:
Post a Comment