What Does Wellness Mean?

Many have attributed the word wellness to Dr. Halbert Dumn, who wrote a booklet in 1961 titled High –Level Wellness, in which he basically defined it as a lifestyle approach for pursuing elevated states of physical and psychological well-being. Chiropractors are the originators of the wellness movement, being the only health care professionals who recognize the body’s natural ability to heal itself. Proper nutrition, exercise, and routine chiropractic care, among other things, help the body to perform at maximum efficiency, resulting in improved function.The body is made up of muscles, organs, and glands that are controlled by the nervous system, and the nervous system consists of the brain, spinal cord, and nerves. It’s when the signals don’t get from the spinal cord to the nerves and then from the nerves to the muscles, organs, and glands that the body begins to lose proper function and symptoms begin to occur.Mainstream medicine doesn’t recognize these symptoms as simple alerts from the body that there’s something amiss, but instead as something that must be eliminated through chemicals or pharmaceuticals. They don’t seek to facilitate wellness, but rather a lack of symptoms.The biggest overall difference between mainstream medicine and wellness care is just that: medicine. Today’s medical professionals are still treating symptoms instead of the cause of the problem. The bigger problem lies with the fact that the medicines usually begin to create their own list of symptoms that must be treated with more medicines. It’s a domino effect leading not to health and wellness, but to illness and dependence.By focusing on symptoms instead of body function, they avoid having to look at the root cause and can ignore the lifestyle habits or outside influences that are the underlying problem. A drug-induced lack of symptoms leads to a false sense of security and avoids the lifestyle changes truly necessary for wellness.Chiropractors recognize that the symptoms are there for a reason, an alert from your body that something isn’t right, and begin to seek the cause of the problem. What you may not realize is that your body is constantly adapting; when something isn’t quite right, the body will try to compensate. Allergies, Emotions/Stress, Toxins, Structural imbalances, Electromagnetic radiation, and Nutritional imbalances begin to wear on the body and that is when our wellness is compromised.