Investing in your wellness,
by paying attention to self-care,
is being self-insured.
Are you paying for insurance that ignores beneficial alternatives?
Learning constructive habits improves the quality of your health. It’s that simple.
So do we really want to pay so much more, instead of paying attention?
The time has come for putting low-tech, hands-on, gradual, gentle, humanistic methods on a par with biotechnology and medicine. What we recommend is for the towns we live in to adopt a primary focus on health as well as illness, and to develop that emphasis through education.
Improving health through better self-care is the focus of true Prevention; learning about self-care is the foundation of our Healthy Communities programs. Prevention deserves to be as important as primary care. This is the province of Education, not Medicine.
Self-management was Tom Hanna’s word for taking things into your own hands. Hanna * worked in a hands-on manner, literally, yet his primary aim was to employ methods that you could learn. The approach is so effective that it often reversed conditions that were previously said to be beyond medical help. He was able to demonstrate that self-care methods are not only beneficial, but deliver more advantages for stamina and longevity.
* for more information about Tom Hanna, visit www.drjessedelarosa.com
Can we insure ourselves?
If we truly want a system for health care, we’d better stop neglecting such a large and necessary field as Prevention. Having health insurance has forced people to comply with using only limited resources; these services also happen to be methods that direct you outside of yourself. That external orientation replaces the natural tendency of self-management.
Insurance companies usually allow for some preventive testing (e.g.mammograms and yearly physicals), but they generally exclude the many procedures that reduce the dangers of stress. They provide very few incentives for you to invest in your wellness; as a result, this diminishes the importance of health values. Simple restorative habits and methods of reducing stress can easily be taught – and we could change policies to provide incentives for those who practice more wellness, more often. By changing our focus to emphasize the need and value of self-care, we can curb and eventually reverse the dramatic escalation of health care costs that have hurt us all.
Vermont Wellness Education is seeking financial support for our Building Healthy Communities advocacy. This is an initiative that began in New London, CT, and is represented at www.building-healthy-communities.net. With your help we will create the education programs your community needs, for those who need skills grounded in Prevention.
The current system not only limits resources and charges us extravagantly, it has drained the national economy and still under-pays many who deliver primary care. Physicians are forced to limit their time; that eliminates their ability to consider these matters with you. Since this system has no affordable means to teach wellness (although nurses are under-utilized), many people need new resources to help them take real steps in prevention; right now, they are on their own.
However, Hanna believed you should be on your own. He encouraged it by giving people exercises that let them implement excellent self-care. When they learned ways to release tension, they gained energy and became smarter by increasing their sensory awareness. Hanna wrote much about self-care, and dispelled the myth that health declines with age. The release of tension allows the body to relax, and that minimizes the factors that cause severe illness, e.g. lowering blood pressure, improving flexibility, reducing pain, and even eliminating depression for many. We feel these large-scale, community-based programs, which must be freely provided to those who need to learn the skills, have the support, and become grounded in their self-care, is the best way to improve Prevention.