Do You Have a Wellness Team?

Every major corporation has a board of directors, who work together to bring individual responsibilities and areas expertise together in a way that creates group wisdom. It is as a board that big decisions can be made for the health, profitability, and vitality of a corporation.

When it comes to your wellness, do you have a team? A board of directors for your health? Who do you look to for decisions about wellness?

Well, many people look to their family physician for such information and help. The problem, however, is that physicians are not specialists in wellness. Instead, they excel in areas of pathology and emergency. Crisis management is what medicine does best. But what can a physician do for you if your eyes, ears, and nose all appear normal, there is no irregularity in your heart or lung sounds, and all laboratory tests on your blood and urine are within normal levels?

This is what medicine often refers to as "the picture of health"—health as the absence of sickness. But if you look at my previous blog postings on the definition of health, it is optimal function and not merely the absence of disease. It is in this realm that medicine tends to lack.

Medical doctors get very minimal training in optimal nutrition (not just deficiency treatment), and in the wellness arts. Chiropractors, on the other hand, have a similar education to medical doctors, but spend their time on nutrition, adjusting procedures, wellness philosophy and exercise, and optimizing physical function rather than on topics like pharmacology, surgical techniques, and chronic disease management.

Chiropractors are ideally suited through education and practice to be the board of directors of your wellness team, just as your family physician is ideally suited to do the same as the board of directors of your sickness or crisis management team. When you look at what each of your practitioners specializes and knows best, you may find yourself looking for a team of experts rather than a jack of all trades.

Dr. Sidenberg