Mike Lang’s philosophy of health is that only 100 percent health is acceptable. Our standards of prevention are not high enough.  Too often, prevention comes too late. By the time we do something, it’s generally in reaction to the possibilities of disease instead of proactively working towards optimal health.

The current situation

• The current medical standard for treatment is based on about a 40percent level of health.  This is a standard of disease and sickness, not healthWestern medicine is geared and designed to deal with drastic conditions at and below a 40 percent wellness level. These require heavy drugs, surgery, radiation, and electric shock therapy

• Most people exist somewhere in that very large range of health from 90percent healthy down to 40percent health—a wide range that is largely ignored by our medical system.

• Within the ‘alternative’ health care community, voices have been calling for greater emphasis on preventative healthcare for years. Today, there is a growing awareness among mainstream medicine as well as ordinary people that we need a higher standard. “Preventative” medicine is a more effective not to mention more cost saving way to keep people from becoming ill.

• Preventative medicine deals with the potential for illness before that 40 percent below optimum level is reached.  It does not ignore early warning signs; instead it focuses on raising the overall health levels before the patient reaches that low point.

• This range also needs to be considered in relation to conditions that do plummet below the medical standard of 40percent.  Even people who are generally at 90percent health level may well have conditions that fall into the medical “drastic” category: cancer, diabetes etc. despite their best efforts to maintain a healthy lifestyle.

• We need to focus more on the health we want to have and less on what we’re afraid of, or worse yet, ignoring our health altogether until we have sickness. This in turn leads to leaving our health in the hands of medical practitioners who only have drastic medical measures to help us.  It’s a model most people take for granted, but it’s far from optimal.

What we need to change

• There should be different forms of treatment and support available for people whose general regular health levels are higher and those who are lower.  Just because someone has cancer does not mean that their overall health is poor.  Yet the medical system treats everyone who has cancer with drastic measures such as surgery, radiation and chemotherapy.  What if diet, exercise, and milder forms of treatment and medication were available and curative to those with generally higher health levels?  Our medical system treats illness with “sledgehammer” treatments that have very serious short and long-term side effects.

• We need to focus on 100percent health--holistic health--not at disease.  We need to know what the signs, descriptors and practices of 100percent health are. We need to be able to measure people’s level of health not their levels of illness.  We need to develop instruments to measure 100percent health, not 40percent sickness standards.  We need to develop our knowledge of smaller health “tweaks” to give even someone with 90percent health a place to adjust “upwards” to 100percent.

• All of our medical tests are about finding numbers for how much damage we have in our body—cholesterol, blood pressure, hormone levels, blood sugar, etc. and treatments are aimed at changing the numbers designated as “dangerous”. Knowing the negative numbers is no guarantee that we will reach our potential for optimum health. 

• We need to develop a sense of what a balanced, well-rounded, holistic lifestyle can be. This means getting informed and being proactive.

• We have to put pressure on all levels of government to enact legislation that protects  consumers and regulates producers of foods and drugs. We want improved labeling laws that alert us to GM foods and carcinogens described in language the average person can understand.

• We need to take the initiative in our personal choices and as citizens. We need to get the message out that the ultimate responsibility for our health rests with us.

Excuses, excuses

• We’ve grown accustomed to a culture that continually bombards us with conflicting studies, fear based standards, fragmented information that convinces us that we cannot possibly know our own bodies, cannot expect to have optimum health, and has taken all the possibility of out of maintaining a healthy lifestyle because supposedly there is too much to learn, too many details and complicated inter-relationships of complex bodily functions that even the “experts” can’t fully understand.

• When did we lose sight of our body’s magnificent ability to regulate and maintain our health?  When did we start believing that we can or need to understand and control all of our body’s functions?

What you can do
Our bodies are really perfect at doing all of those complicated complex functions that we want to interfere with by ingesting medications and alterations.  We can marvel at its ability to regulate the most sensitive functions of our health and concentrate on giving the body what it really needs:

• Balanced, healthy diet that goes beyond staying slim
• Sufficient exercise, rest, and relaxation
• Unpolluted air and water
• Healthy relationships
• Congenial work and appropriate play
• Spiritual work like meditation or prayer

 
Your body’s response to your lifestyle is the perfect indicator of what you need to know or do. 

Prevention is not enough—you need to know what excellent health looks like in holistic, realistic, detailed forms and then you need to learn about small adjustments to keep you in tip top condition. 

These are natural health builders. They will keep you healthy, provided you commit yourself and practice them all the time.

Heavy medication, surgery, etc. are drastic, last ditch, triage methods that we have come to accept as “normal” and acceptable “health” care.

It is not. It is the dangerous sickness standard that diminishes and diverts our attention from our own moment to moment responsibility for our own health.