I’ve been reading a book by Chris Cowley and Henry S.Lodge, MD. Here are some excerpts:
“What I really like is the notion of long-term relationships with patients and keeping them in good health. Not just curing diseases but promoting health, which is a different thing. I would like to help them have a better life, not just cure them of this and that.”
“I had done what doctors do well in this country, which is to treat people when they come in with a disease. My patients had good medical care but not, I began to think, great health care. For most, their declines, their illnesses, were thirty-year problems of lifestyle, not disease. I, like most doctors in America, had been doing the wrong job well.”
“Most modern medicine is what lawyers and bankers call transactional: a one-shot deal. You blow out your knee, you have a heart attack, and you see a specialist. A short, intensive period of repair or cure follows, and the parties go their separate ways, probably forever. … I am “on notice” of how my patients are living, and of how they are dying. I am “on notice” that, no matter how great our medical care, we all need great health care, too – and very few of us get it.”
This book was published in 2007 and they based it on the research that was available. There is even more research now to back up their statements.
What does this have to do with chiropractic and me? If you substitute “back problem” for “illness/disease”, his statements come close to my purpose for caring for you. Chiropractic offers the opportunity to improve your health beyond “a transactional service” for a back problem.
What does that mean, chiropractic can improve health?
- Health is normal and every living thing can self-heal and self-regulate.
- We regulate our health through the nervous system.
- If the nervous system is compromised, irritated, then healing and regulation will be compromised.
- A common place that the nervous system can be compromised is the spine through sudden events or long-term accumulated stress.
This is the foundation of chiropractic. And current orthopedic, neurologic and neuroimmunologic studies/research prove it.
So, I am extending an invitation to you: join me for true health care; move out of the old model of transactional symptom care.
Oh, the name of the book? “YOUNGER NEXT YEAR”.
– Dr. Tom Morris