Navigating your way to good health

When your current health practices aren’t working, it’s OK to navigate your way to good health. You don’t have to take my word for it.  Wanting to be healthy and well is what drives thousands of Australians to investigate what they can do to achieve a better health outcome.

It’s probably safe to say that all of us want to live a healthy, happy life. One way of achieving this goal, is to look around at the different systems of health care – to find out what’s available and what might work for us. This may seem like a daring step for someone to take. Yet an old advertising slogan for attracting tourists to the Northern Territory gives this advice:  “You’ll never, never know, if you never, never go”.

My grandmother heeded that instruction and took a new road to wellness. Troubled by the after- effects of bad surgery, taking daily medication, and forced to wear a heavy surgical corset, she was presented with a book on a healing faith-tradition which she’d never heard of before. However, being a spiritually-minded woman who believed in the power of prayer, she decided to read it. The result was healing. She was able to dispense with the corset and the pills.

My granny, told me years later, that she was encouraged to take this path to better health by this Scriptural text. “And I tell you, ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find;…”. This prompted her to accept the book so kindly offered to her. She said that she believed she had nothing to lose, but hopefully something to gain. So she acted on that old adage, “nothing ventured nothing gained.” It was a life-changing moment, not only for her, but also for my mother and me. We too read the book and were both healed of chronic ailments.

Finding a route to beneficial health options is not difficult to accomplish these days. A popular one is via Google and the Web. There you’ll find an astonishing array of information.  For example, if you type in this question, “what can I do to be healthy?”, Google will bring up about 1,310,000,000 results in 0.51 seconds! That’s a lot of helpful ideas, right there.

To be informed, so you can make better decisions about how to take care of yourself, you can also visit your local bookstore. There you’ll find numerous titles on health and alternative healthcare strategies – the most popular being the Mind, Body, Spirit category. According to the Book Industry Study Group, 92.3 million health-related books were sold back in 1999. This number continues to soar. The reason, say market analysts, is the current spiralling cost of healthcare. This is what is giving many people the incentive to seek out fresh methods for staying well.

The ongoing trend towards investigating the connection between thought and body, is evidenced at events such as Healthy Living and Conscious Living Expos, as well as the big Mind Body Spirit Festivals held in Australian capital cities.  At these events, thousands of health-inquirers are willing to pay an entrance fee for the opportunity to speak with exhibitors and attend workshops. These health-seekers, act on the old saying, that “there’s no harm in looking”.

Mary Baker Eddy, an early pioneer in mind-body medicine, may have felt like this when she started investigating the health methods of her day. Needing to be well, she tried hydropathy, the Graham system of diet, and she practiced homeopathy. Her research led her to a break-through discovery of the healing power of a divine Mind, and to publishing these findings in a best-selling book.

Today, modern scientists are also taking the road to discovery. Health research is driving the way forward to a better understanding that we are more than just flesh and blood.  Psychologist, Donald Moss, of the Mind-Body Medicine Faculty and Director of Saybrook University’s Integrative Health Studies program says, “I think the general public is ahead of the medical establishment: the medical establishment is catching up. I see an increasing awareness and interest in mind-body medicine everywhere I go.”

When an intern at the University of Pittsburgh Health Center, Moss says he encountered patients with chronic illnesses for the first time. He saw that conventional medicine could not help them, but an approach that took the patient’s mind into account, along with their symptoms, often could. It moved him to become a mind-body specialist.

Now, thanks to Moss and others like him, society and medicine have become interested in alternative treatments. There is now compelling research, case studies, and a growing body of empirical studies which document largely positive effects of religion and spirituality on health. These range from such tangible and easily understood phenomena as a reduction of health-risk behaviours in church-goers, to the more elusive effects of distant prayer on health and physiology.

Navigating the spiritual highway to good health is definitely becoming easier. Spirituality is now very much a dimension in the complementary and alternative medicine field (CAM).  So if you’re seeking a new way to achieve good health, this arena may offer you a pathway of opportunity.