How Wellness Chiropractic Can Save The Country

Last post, I went all “Dennis Miller” on you with a rant about the health care industry in this country.

I thought about softening things up a little bit this week, but then I stumbled across a few statistics and came back to my senses.

Out of all the countries evaluated, the U.S. ranks:

38th in the world in overall health (one spot behind Costa Rica, one spot ahead of Cuba)
5th in male obesity
6th in female obesity
30th in life expectancy
1st in per capita health expenditures
5th in government health spending
1st in the number of nurses
2nd in the number of physicians
3rd in pharmaceutical employees
4th in the consumption of sugar
Almost 20% of our children are obese (tripled from 20 years ago)

So… no, I don’t think I’m going to soften my stance one bit. If anything, I’m going push even harder because we need to get this information out to the masses.

You would think, with all the money we throw at health care every year, that we would easily rank at or near the top of these rankings. Not so much.

That’s because the medical model does not work at improving health. Treating symptoms of disease with drugs or surgery after they have become a problem is not sufficient for becoming a healthy nation.

Need proof? I just gave it to you. Need more? OK.

We spend $147,000,000,000 fighting obesity every year.1 That equals $402 million every day. Wow.

That figure is expected to balloon to $344,000,000,000 by 2018. That’s only eight years away.

This number is just for obesity. It doesn’t even include heart disease, diabetes, many cancers… all of which we currently spend even more money on than obesity!

It’s unaffordable. I would say it’s going to bankrupt our country, but it already has!

There’s a HUGE need for real change with health care in our country, and the current system is simply not getting the job done. My confidence in the recently-passed health “reform” bill is not exactly great either.

Incidentally, Japan ranks #1 on the top of this list. Want to know why? They get it.

They understand the difference between health care and sick care. They take a proactive approach to health because they realize that it’s cheaper to prevent people from developing disease in the first place than to shell out a bunch of money after chronic disease has developed.

All that said, know that I’m not trying to over-simplify things. I realize that there are very real diseases that will not respond to diet and exercise changes and do require medical intervention. But 75% of the illnesses treated every day are lifestyle-related.2 What does that mean? It means they are preventable!

That’s the ONLY way we are going to change our health in this country. We have to abandon using the medical model for “health” and only use it for what is was originally designed…. emergencies.

Enter: Wellness care.

Wellness doctors are equipped to empower their patients with the knowledge, the science, and the tools to achieve REAL health. Wellness chiropractors even more so.

A recent study by Dr. Richard Sarnat (who is an M.D.; I’m just saying…) found that regular utilization of chiropractors as primary care physicians reduces the need for hospitalization by 60.2%, hospital days by 59%, pharmaceutical usage by 85%, outpatient surgeries and procedures by 62% and global health care costs by more than 50% when compared to conventional medicine.

Not bad huh?

Seek out wellness care. Seek out health. Be proactive!!! That’s what health really is.

Take the necessary steps every day to give your body everything it needs to be healthy, and ensure you don’t give it anything it doesn’t.

Confused as to what that is? Contact me today and I’ll show you.

See you next time!

1. U.S. National Institutes of Health. Johns Hopkins Review, Bayview Medical Center. 2004

2. Eaton SB, Konner M, and Shostak M. Stone Agers in the fast lane: Chronic degenerative diseases in evolutionary perspective. 1988; Am J Med. 84, 739-749.