Our health care system focuses on treating and preventing illness.
While doctors make some lifestyle recommendations at a typical annual physical, most of the time and effort is spent on screenings. Checking for high blood pressure, listening to the heart and lungs, and taking urine and blood samples are mainstays in the quest for early detection of disease. Then there are schedules for screenings at different ages, such as a colonoscopy at age 50.
But there is another approach to health, one that does not focus on disease but instead on health. This approach looks for parts of the body that are stressed and seeks to restore them to normal. From this perspective, disease is seen as the late effect of dysfunction, and to focus on disease is to miss the opportunity to help the body avoid the problem in the first place.
Let’s take the example of high blood pressure. It is a very common problem in our society — 60 to 70 percent of seniors have hypertension. In the disease-based model, the earlier the problem is detected and the sooner the patient can be started on medications, the better. But from a wellness viewpoint, stress on the body is causing blood pressure to elevate; it doesn’t just happen by itself. Once blood pressure starts to rise, for many patients lifestyle changes alone are not enough to lower it back to normal.
Luckily, while lifestyle changes are the mainstay of wellness care, they are not the only tools, by any means.
The adrenal glands are the most common culprits in causing high blood pressure. They can be assessed by some simple tests, and if the tests show them to be stressed and dysfunctional, treatment is directed at helping them work better.
There are natural supplements that support adrenal function. Despite the fact that they are not drugs, some of them can improve adrenal function quickly, with rapid improvements in blood pressure. Unlike drugs, which improve one bodily function — in this example, blood pressure — but disrupt many others in the process, often called side effects, wellness-based treatments typically do not.
In fact, they often improve other functions instead of “gumming up the works.” While they help the adrenals better regulate blood pressure, they also may help regulate sleep, handle stress and even control body temperature, easing menopausal “hot flashes.”
There are other ways of improving adrenal function; acupuncture and herbals commonly are used. But the basic idea is the same — to improve health by restoring function, instead attacking or even waiting for disease.
Of course, the wellness approach does not ignore disease. It’s just that the focus is different. It’s not that medical screenings have no benefit; they just don’t show the whole picture. Wellness care can still help, even long after the disease is established. But like any treatment, the earlier care is started, the better.
A wellness-based primary care system regularly would evaluate the patient, just like medical care, but would be better at catching relatively minor problems before they become active disease. A system that only recognizes disease will miss the opportunities wellness care can take advantage of.
Dr. Michael Noonan practices chiropractic, chiropractic acupuncture and other wellness therapies in Old Town. He can be reached at noonanchiropractic@gmail.com.