Health Cannot Be Measured
The Western Medical Paradigm – Part 1
Consider two of the most common “health screeings” in medicine: blood pressure and cholesterol testing.
Are you healthier by virute of having the tests, be they normal or abnormal?
If they are abnormal, what is the consequence of the test?
If your levels are undesirable, you will probably receive drugs to manage the levels (“when diet and exercise fail”). Are you healthier because you are now on a drug?
Most of us recognise that drugs are synthetic, highly refined poisons designed to elicit a temporary physiologic effect. How is it possible that a poison can make us healthier?
Part of the problem is that in the medical paradigm, health cannot be defined or easily measured.
Even the World Health Organisation’s definition of “Optimal physical, mental and social wellbeing, not merely the absence of disease” is lame. How is any doctor to decide what optimal physical wellbeing is for you, let alone mental and social wellbeing?
Does your doctor measure how fast you can run 200 metres? Swim against a current? Carry someone to safety? Jump off a 6 foot fence? Resist a dose of salmonella? Recover from a bout of the flu? Surely those are all signs of optimal wellbeing.
High blood pressure is supposed to make a stroke more likely but less than 2% of people who take the medication for a year prevent a stroke.
http://www.medicine.ox.ac.uk/bandolier/band50/b50-8.html
Cholesterol turns out to be somthing of a red herring as well, as some studies suggest that a higher cholesterol level lets you live longer.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9343498
Without a way of measuring health, doctors are forced to look for indicators of disease.
This approach is never preventative or constructive. Looking for reasons to intervene with destructive poisons can never build health and can only create dependence on medication. More on treatment later.
The Alternate View
Although most chiropractors study all the same subjects as a medical doctor and just as many hours, we choose a different paradigm.
My definition of health is being resistant to illness and injury.
Under this definition any illness or injury is a sign of poor health.
In my practice, I measure resistance and robustness through muscle strength because muscles are our main source of injury resistance and they stimulate and run many organ and endocrine systems.
Almost invariably, the stronger someone is on testing, the less they are ill or injured, no matter what their activity levels.
Normal strength and muscle response becomes an effective objective for every patient and it turns out that muscle strength is one of the most important indicators of longevity and mortality.
A major study published in the British Medical Journal in July 2008 found that weaker men tended to die earlier than stronger men, even after allowing for activity level and cardiovascular fitness?
You can read the fascinating study here http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/abstract/337/jul01_2/a439.
The researchers measured the maximum strength of over 8000 men and followed them for 19 years on average. They found that men with the lowest strength had the highest death rates from all causes, including heart disease and cancer.
Interestingly, the effect was still present in those who did no exercise at all.
In my practice now, I use the protocol from this study to measure my patient’s strength and then re-measure every 6 visits. It’s remarkable how people’s strength increases and they become normal with the right treatment.
It doesn’t happen overnight (well, it does, sometimes) but with patience and persistence, it can become a reality for most people.
What about you? What is your definition of health? How would you want your health measured?
It’s your body, let’s get it working the way it should
Simon King
www.tweaks.org.au
