You hear a lot these days about wellness and some of us may wonder what exactly this term means.  What constitutes wellness anyway? Is there a difference between health and wellness, or are they complementary terms?  After all if I’m not sick, I’m well, right?

Wellness is a voluntary seeking out of ways to give one a higher quality of life and focuses on staying well and not waiting for disease to strike before you make lifestyle changes. If you do have health problems, wellness care focuses on finding and eliminating the cause of disease and not just treating disease symptoms alone.

While it is desirable to eliminate symptoms when they appear, in most cases it is way more important to treat the cause. On the other hand the ‘sickness industry’ is the conventional surgery and synthetic pharmaceutical drugs business. It tries to treat disease and sickness after it appears. The difference between the two is easily explained:

Sickness care – reactively treats the symptoms of disease after they occur

Wellness care – proactively prevents poor health and disease and slows the aging process

Having good health is way more than simply not being sick and really means the optimal functioning of all body organs and systems. What we have previously known as ‘health care’ in is in reality nothing more than ‘sickness care’. 

Let’s look at it like this – you ignore your health you get sick, and you front up to the doctor in the hope he can fix you and make you better. You do not go to him when you are well so the doctor takes care of your sickness. Any treatment he gives you is designed to manage the symptoms of your sickness.

Drugs or all sorts are usually dished out – antibiotics for infection, ant-inflammatory drugs for pain, blood thinning drugs for heart disease so pumping it around the body is easier, ritalin for out of control children, drugs to lower cholesterol and so on. The cause of the symptoms is ignored and the primary concern is the symptoms themselves.

But this is clearly not working as one out of every two of us now has a chronic ‘lifestyle’ disease such as heart disease, cancer or diabetes or one of dozens of others. Many people have multiple conditions that leave them with a much lowered quality of life. Despite all the billions of dollars spent on ‘sickness treatment’ our health is spiraling downward at an alarming rate.

Modern medicine has failed to halt this trend and the drugs they prescribe have some very serious side effects – in some cases life threatening side effects. It is beyond belief that statistics show that medical errors rank as the third cause of death in the US.

Decades of sickness treatment rather than promoting wellness, healthy aging and finding causes for disease have led to an urgent need for all of us individually to take greater responsibility for our own health and wellness. This means moving from a ‘sickness/curative’ mindset to a ‘wellness/preventative’ view of our life.

Wellness is being aware of what it means to take care of one’s self physically, mentally and emotionally with for starters, proper body strengthening exercise and nutrition that contains little processed foods and more natural whole foods. Just these two strategies would improve health at the most basic level.

Sometimes it may mean getting out of our comfort zone to achieve goals like losing weight or quitting smoking but no one said we have to have an easy ride. But whatever it takes it is will be a lot easier than the fear based, passive, reactive sickness treatment route that is prevalent in our society today.