Do You Want a Health Care System or a Healing System?

The current debate over health care reform has been about politics and money. There is no escaping either factor. Huge vested interests are spending millions of dollars a day to pressure Congress into minimal reform. But even if the political system were pure as snow, an aging American population makes it inevitable that the health care system is going to grow more and more expensive. These external factors fill the news every day, obscuring a simple fact: Your health depends far more on the healing system than the health care system. The healing system is inside your body. Its intricacies are just now being fully explored, but certain broad trends have become clear.

• The healing system is more flexible and powerful than previously thought. For example, the brain can heal itself, a finding that seemed impossible a few decades ago.

• The healing system is highly sensitive to outside conditions. Stress and emotional discomfort, for example, can severely compromise your ability to heal.

• Healing affects your genes and how they are expressed. An expressed gene is an active one, and this activity turns out to be far more responsive to your state of mind-body health than previously thought. The old image of fixed genes is rapidly changing to a conception in which the body's genetic material is eavesdropping on all the experiences in your life. In short, a gene isn't a thing; it's a process.

• The healing system is automatic, but your lifestyle choices make a huge difference in the efficiency of healing.

These factors hold true throughout your life, and if we simplify them to one sentence, this would be it: Change your life and you change your healing system. That may sound like the advice we get constantly about proper diet, exercise, and stress management. But with new evidence showing up every day that lifestyle affects an incurable disease like Alzheimer's, for example, it's becoming clear that your own healing system will always be the front-line defender of your well-being, not your doctor or the drug companies. So-called lifestyle diseases used to be restricted to conditions like heart disease, obesity, and type II diabetes, where a link with improper diet was easily demonstrated. Now a wider range of disorders is being linked to lifestyle choices, not by one-to-one correlations but through more general trends. That is, no one can predict exactly which disease you might contract due to poor lifestyle choices, but at the same time, reversing those poor choices has a broad effect in improving your power to heal.

Some recent statistics bring home how crucial it is to rely on the healing system rather than the healthcare system:

• 58 million Americans are overweight; 40 million obese; 3 million morbidly obese

• Eight out of 10 people over 25 are overweight

• 78% of Americans don't meet basic activity level recommendations

• 25% are completely sedentary

• 76% increase in Type II diabetes in adults 30-40 years old since 1990

The statistic that really jumps out has to do with sedentary lifestyles. We are addicted to sitting on the couch watching beautiful, slim, fit actors and athletes on television, with a steady increase in other sedentary activities like surfing the Internet and playing video games. In addition, these activities are reaching into younger age groups, making children less active and therefore more inclined to obesity. Yet the simple fact is that the alternative to being sedentary isn't joining a gym. The greatest benefit of exercise occurs when you move from being sedentary to light activity like walking, doing housework, gardening, and climbing the stairs. Exercise at higher levels will bring increased benefits, certainly, but this first step brings the biggest single improvement in health. Being sedentary is more harmful to you than forgetting to jog three times a week. In addition, at least one study has shown that when overweight adults are put into groups that walk, jog, or run every day, the group that lost the most weight were the walkers.

Thrashing out health care reform is a defining issue for the coming decade and an inescapable duty. Having said that, I urge you to look inward rather than outward. The most perfect health care system can't do as much for you, on a daily basis, or do it as cheaply as your own healing system. The evidence is there, waiting to be acted upon.

Published in the San Francisco Chronicle

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Comments

[dadw5boys]

Clean up the food supply.
Warning labels on Cheese, only 2 slices of bread a day, all skin should be removed from chicken and no pork sold unless it is full cooked , no drugs in meats at all.

[huffity]

LIving without health insurance or in fear of losing it is STRESSFUL. It's a constant, nagging,chronic, daily stress millions of Americans live with, some for years or even all their lives, that no amount of meditation or mindfulness or deep breathing will dispel.

Maybe Deepak should go back to haunting Larry King's show, where he could continue telling us more than we ever wanted to know about his dear departed friend Michael Jackson.

[tinrobot]

We need both. Like you said, wellness care is important, and will prevent a lot of illness.

But people will still get sick, hurt themselves in accidents, and have all sorts of other things happen that require hospitals and doctors. We still need a health care system.

It's nice that you use this political fight to sell your agenda, but heath care also needs voices like you to stand up for what is right - universal health care for all.

[lemonyashes]

Worrying about Healthcare Reform NOT passing is making me sick and tired and crazy.

[lemonyashes]

Health Security will go a long ways to healing the people of this country.

[lemonyashes]

Geez, play into Republican hands why don't you? I practice healing everyday because I don't have health insurance, my employer doesn't offer it he is a small business. I would prefer to have affordable health insurance as I don't know how effective my healing powers are. And it cost good money to get healthcare from healers they don't heal for free either. But get health reform passed so we can have some health security then I can relax enough to heal.

[ModernTimes1]

Do You Want a Health Care System or a Healing System?

BOTH!!!

[wilray]

The question asked is about like asking do we need safer cars or do we need a safe transportation system. Why don't we just all gird ourselves with Volvos and say let's not worry about traffic signals, speed limits, or maintaining our roads and bridges. This is not an either or situation. It's not a choice of one of the other. We should have both.

[isayfew]

I have a lot of respect for Dr Chopra but he seems to miss the point about health care reform . I am a small businessman who is trying so hard to get health coverage for his workers but i can not keep up because the cost are going up every year and i do not have any control over it. At many occasions coverage was denied due to insurers" discretions" ie: take it or leave it . Universal Health care is available to French, Canadians,German and British citizens why not to US citizens. I know senior citizens who have to chose between food and drugs or treatment.
This debate is beyond politics it is about survival and all the attempts by the insurance lobby to stiffle and prevent this debate from going on and by disrupting town hall meeting under the disguise of " outraged citizen" against health care reform. I found out that theses people are PAID at the rate of $1,4 million a day to disrupt any attempt to keep the dialogue going. what happened to free speech

[MacGregor57]

My friend, I like almost all you have said. In that free speech has not had anything happen to it I would hope that the willy nilly use of the term be reserved for The Party of the Downtrodden. It's quite possible that $1.4 mil. gets you a lot more free speech but you and I are right here standing against the bucks. Good luck with your business, and, if all goes well you will have some of your headaches taken care of.

[snesich]

I want BOTH.

I know you mean well, Deepak, but this discussion isn't helpful. It's premature when we're still living in a "health care for profit" country.

Too many Republicans and insurance company shills are using this as a diversion, arguing, "Well, we should really just be looking at a way to keep people healthier (and keep insurance company profits high) instead of all this talk about changes in the health care system."

Yes, people need to live healthier lives and make better choices about everything. However, you're always going to still need doctors, operations, hospitals and even drugs to help the sick and injured.

Regardless of anything else, we need a health care system that services all citizens, regardless of the amount of money they have.

[Whitley2009]

Doctor Chopra,

Perhaps we all should ask why the Bush Administration gave the Iraqis a new national health care system. Maybe we should ask if our poor and ill people and unisured people would be happy receiving even half of the benefits the Republicans gave the Iraqis. By the way, their plan is alive and healthy.

[worldview47]

just how many people know this? why isn't it on the news?

[NoDrama]

What I want is to get insurance profiteers out of the payment system. I'm fine with anybody who thinks that's the best way sticking with their current plan, but let me choose a system where the motive isn't about CEO bonuses and budgets to pay for lobbyists coming out of MY HEALH CARE INSURANCE PREMIUMS.

It's time to peel back the rhetoric, to get past the sound-bites and the spin-mongering "pundits" -- to stop pretending this is about death panels or a way to cover illegal immigrants, and find a way to preserve our American way of life by insuring that every citizen can afford decent medical care as needed. http://actualizers.blogspot.com/2009/08/have-town-halls-jumped-shark.html

[Angie Cordeiro - Huffpost Blogger]

Doctors willing to "Pay it forward" ?

[cathyceases]

A healthy lifestyle won't prevent the catastrophic or genetic diseases -- it's not insurance against the uncontrollable, which is why healthcare reform is so badly needed. Pontificating on healthy choices is well and fine, but this is also a morality issue beyond evoking Ayn Rand like platitudes on taking responsibility for your health. No one should be denied life because a lack of money and coverage.

[Dem02020]

No person who at present might require health care, but has no health insurance and so therefore stands to be either financially broken by paying for that care, or otherwise does not stand but kneels, to do a lot of begging... no such person is helped in the least way, by any kind of too late preventative measures.

We're talking about Public Policy here, not a state of mind.

There's a wild difference, and no state of mind or preventive measure advice has ever insured anybody who's uninsured, or treated anybody who's truly ill.