Dream Health Can Be Yours
A Chiropractor’s Approach to Wellness
by Brian Wilmonovsky, D.C.
 Today we live shorter less healthy lives than our ancestors did. This seems shocking to most people because the average life expectancy is increasing. But if you take away the advancements technology has given us with infant mortality and crisis care, our healthy ancestors had significantly lower incidents of the top killers of our time, heart disease and cancer, which accounts for 66 percent of all deaths in America today, leaving the United States 37th out of the 39 industrialized nations for overall health. Why is this? It’s because in America we live in an environment that is incongruent with the way our bodies were designed. It would be like taking a dump truck and entering it into a NASCAR race. It wasn’t designed to perform like that. Today heart disease and cancer are not the pathology; our incongruent lifestyle in America is the pathology. Our healthy ancestor’s lifestyle was much more congruent with the way our bodies were designed. They walked 10 miles a day, rested one day, and hunted and gathered the next. They only ate organic fruits vegetables and meats and they only dealt with a fraction of the stresses in today’s unhealthy American lifestyle. Today in America we’re seeing childhood diabetes escalate to levels never seen before. Obesity levels are up to almost 30 percent. We have more stress with all the technology we interface with and families are more financially pressured than ever before. This environment creates disease.
As a certified chiropractic wellness practitioner my clinical goal is wholeness not reduction of symptoms. Moving the body towards wholeness allows the body the ability to move towards health and balance itself. The medical profession focuses on treating disease and relieving symptoms. Think of it this way, if you had a fire in your house, who would you call, the fire department? Think of your house as your body. We have this crisis, the fire department comes and saves the life of your house by putting out the fire, but in the process they use axes and break down doors and break out windows, cut holes in walls, and spray the entire contents inside. They save the life of your house, but a lot of havoc happened along the way. Now, who are you going to call to rebuild your house? Are you going to call the fire department (or the medical profession), or a reconstruction specialist, somebody who works with your natural inner healing system to get it well and keep it well for a lifetime? That’s the goal, to move your body towards wholeness. It’s tough today because as soon as you click on the TV you see billions of dollars of advertising for drugs which give us quick fix answers. You also see tons of food advertising saying supersize it, eat more disease creating food. Children, by the time they’re 20 years old, will be exposed to 18,000 hours of drug and food advertising! This really sets into your mind how you think about the world. I see a lot of information out there on “natural care,” but it’s often very fractionalized. Take this one vitamin or do this one exercise and your body will be well. Well, it’s not the truth.
Think of it this way, if you had two ponds, one pond was healthy and it had good runoff from water and streams around it, and you had another pond next to a chemical factory and chemicals were pouring into it, in a year or two you wouldn’t necessarily see the difference between the two ponds, but after several years you’d notice that the second pond would be sick. How are we going to bring that pond back to health like the first one? Are we going to go in there and give more drugs to the pond because the water smells, are we going to cut out pieces of the plants because they’re black and dark? That doesn’t make any sense at all. We’re going to stop the toxicities that are going into that pond, clean out the sludge, and allow that pond’s natural healing system to move towards rebalancing itself. It’s called homeostasis. Homeostasis is our bodies’ natural ability to move towards balance and health. But it can’t do it when two things come into interference, toxicity and deficiency.
In our hectic lifestyles in order for homeostasis, healthy rebalancing, to become reality we must remove toxicity and deficiency. Some people dream of being healthy again but feel it is more of a nightmare to do what is necessary to accomplish that dream. Living the dream of a healthy life is vital to attaining and maintaining homeostasis. So how do you live that dream? Each letter of the word “DREAM” stands for a piece of that homeostasis puzzle.
Diet
Rest
Exercise
Alternative care
Motivation
Diet—The fast-food industry has created a significant difference in how we think about our food intake. Years ago, most people ate at home, and they ate food grown at home. Our lives are so fast-paced and stressful that many of us simply lack the time and inclination to prepare food at home. In order for our bodies to begin the natural rebalancing process, it’s necessary to change what we put into our bodies. The focus should be to filter what goes into our bodies through the lens of toxicity and deficiency. The best way to start is with a few simple choices in your daily routine. Increase the amount of water you drink, eat raw vegetables or fruit with every meal. Take recommended supplements. These steps will make a difference. Optimal health requires optimal nutrition.
Rest—Maintaining a healthy lifestyle cannot be achieved without proper rest. When we rest our bodies our minds shut down, allowing them to regenerate and heal. Many of us work long days at stressful jobs and don’t know what a difference it would make to get enough sleep. Somehow we look at sleep to be an interruption to more valuable activities, even a waste of time. So how do we get the proper rest we need? Start with taking a nap. Take your vacation time, use prayer or meditation to help quiet your body. These techniques counterbalance the damaging effect of stress on our bodies.
B
Exercise—Our bodies were designed to move. We’re equipped to walk and climb, lift and carry, push and persevere. When we deny our bodies the active move-ment it was designed for, we force all that energy to come out in other ways, such as stress and anxiety. We allow our well-designed bodies to waste away and lose effectiveness. Our bodies can no longer effectively fight illness, we’re now sluggish and weak. When you move your muscles and joints, you enjoy improved mental acuity, decreased emotional depression, increased immune function, and overall increased sense of well-being.
Alternative care—My focus has been in chiropractic care. I believe chiropractic care should be at the top of everyone’s alternative care list. I say this because one of the most overlooked parts of wholeness is our spine and nervous system. What I see in my office is many patients with years of built up damage in their spine and nervous systems much like a dentist with a patient that had not come in for decades. What happens to the spine due to stress from the beginning of our lives is the vertebrae go out of alignment and cause pressure on our nervous system which is our healing system. This is called a vertebral subluxation. It takes almost 60 to 80 percent of misalignment to happen before pain and symptoms are felt, the whole time decreasing out body’s immune system. If the host is weakened by misalignment, causing pressure on the nervous system, it sets the stage for the body to get many different problems and diseases. What we see is that strong bodies don’t get sick, weak bodies do. In America we’ve been taught to wait for the body to show symptoms and pain before we take care of it. By this time the body has already become weak and unhealthy and often correcting the whole underlying problem is necessary to return the body to health and not just patch up symptoms. The way we achieve this is with a chiropractic adjustment which puts a general force into the spine to retrain the spine to a new healthy position over time. It’s much like orthodontics. When the vertebrae are left out of position it becomes stiff and rigid. Much like when a cast is taken off someone’s arm it is immobile stiff and weak. Chiropractic adjustments do just the opposite. They put flexibility alignment and relieve nerve pressure and allow the body to move to health all by itself. We call this the healing from within.
Motivation—Motivation is essential to obtain and maintain homeostasis. With proper motivation it is possible to maintain the healthy habits necessary to bring about the changes our bodies need in order to become what we were designed to be. Give yourself the right message. Spend time with people that are uplifting.You’ll come away from those encounters feeling more light-hearted, more built up, and more positive than youwere before.
In my family, my children have been adjusted since the day they were born and lived the dream health lifestyle.They have never had a drug in their body. Understand I am not anti-drug, for their purpose, I’m just more pro-health and wellness. Last year my kids didn’t even have a cold. I haven’t missed a day in clinical practice since I began 17 years ago and I don’t say these thing to boast, I just say them to point out that our health results are quite different from the norm and what we have done different is lived a more congruent lifestyle of wholeness through the five steps of the dream health lifestyle. I write this with passion and urgency that you and your family would start moving towards a health system that would allow your bodies to flourish in an ever increasing unbalanced world.
To remember it’s not cure you need, it’s a wholeness lifestyle.
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