Can you buy me some health?
Posted on November 16, 2016 in Dr. Rachel Family Chiropractic, Uncategorized
Thanksgiving is right around the corner! A time to pause and reflect on all we are thankful for, to give to those in need, and to spend time with friends and family. It is a time that many of us will travel to see our families, some near and some far. Some of us look forward to traditions steeped in parade watching, eating, football watching, and of course reflecting on what we are most thankful for.
This time of year we often do some thinking about the original pilgrims and beginnings of American Thanksgivings. So for all you historians, according to Wikipedia…”[Thanksgiving] has been celebrated as a federal holiday every year since 1863, when, during the American Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a national day of “Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens”, to be celebrated on the last Thursday in November. While our American Thanksgiving tradition features a lot of extras, we must not forget this praise and thanksgiving for the blessings we have been given. Of these many blessings one includes our health. Our health is a blessing that we may take for granted, and may even often forget unless our health seems to be threatened in some way.
Aside from gratitude, during Thanksgiving many of us will turn some of our attention to shopping, buying, and hunting for the best prices and deals in all of our favorite stores. Electronics usually rein as the big prizes, including phones, tablets, big screen TVs, household appliances and more. Many of us will spend at least a few minutes of our Thanksgiving meal discussing where we will be going early Friday morning and what we will be searching for in our purchases. And less than 24 hours later we will come out of our tryptophan stupors and football haze and rise to the early morning occasion to hopefully get a good head start on our holiday shopping. It’s fun for those who enjoy it, and mentally exhausting for those who don’t.
It seems that most years I can manage to avoid all the hustle and bustle, but every few years I will join several family members on Black Friday to take advantage of the discounts stores offer. While I don’t plan to go shopping this year, I will add a bit of my two cents as to how our American post-Thanksgiving frenzy might in fact teach us something about our health.
Our health is a blessing, and something to be thankful for. We are given the blessing of health from the moment of our conception. It is something we have within us, rather than something we can buy. Yet we have all heard people say, “We are so lucky that we didn’t get sick this year” or “You’re so lucky you are healthy”. Often when we hear statements like these we continue to think that health is a state of being lucky, not catching a bug, depriving ourselves of delicious foods, or being fortunate enough to avoid injury.
But health, in fact, isn’t really any of these. Health isn’t a lucky cliff you land on or can slip off at any minute if you mess up. Rather, health is more like a steady, very subtle incline of a hill that we must work at to ascend. Health is the way we describe our body’s constant effort to react in a positive way to our environment inside and outside our bodies. It is not a downward coast, nor a neutral glide. In other words health is how well our internal reserves are working to our benefit, how well our engine is firing on all cylinders, and how well our body is working efficiently with the resources we provide it with.
Our health is measurable, but I might suggest that the yardstick by which we measure it differs dramatically than what we might use to measure our success on Black Friday. Our health shouldn’t rely on a yearly check-up to see if we got lucky, ate the right foods, or completed the right workouts. There is no short-cut, sale or discount to proper health and healing.
As a chiropractor, the most important aspect of proper health and healing I see in my patients is that of the alignment, balance, and integrity of their spine and nerve system. From my own experience growing up with the blessing of chiropractic care for myself, no monetary amount can be placed on the value of a balanced nerve system. No matter how healthy I eat, how much exercise I get, or how good my yearly benchmarks and check-ups are, the lifelong balance of my nerve system through chiropractic care is the main reason for my current level of health. Here’s why: like the engine in your car or the conductor of an orchestra, the system of the body that controls how well all the other systems work is the nerve system. Proper health cannot exist if there is misalignment or subluxation in the spine and nerve system, just as much as Black Friday would not exist without retail sales and discounts.
Subluxation prevents the nerve system from working correctly, and so with subluxation in the spine and nerve system proper healing cannot take place in the body. We can try and alleviate the effects of ill-health by taking an outside-in approach to body function with pills, potions, and lotions, but addressing the subluxation in the nerve system is the only true inside-out solution. And health from the inside-out is the best solution the agrees with normal body physiology.
Our health is not something that can be bought, whether on Black Friday or otherwise. A well-balanced spine and nerve system is the only solution to ensure the body has the best foundation to achieve and maintain health. So you see, health really isn’t a matter of luck. And benefiting from chiropractic care isn’t luck either, just the same as benefiting from brushing your teeth isn’t really a matter of luck but prudent decision making. Only when the brain is fully connected to the body can proper healing can take place.
So good luck on your Black Friday shopping, but as for your best health- blessings and gratitude for a well balanced spine and nerve system from your Family Chiropractor!
Dr. Rachel
