How Wellness Care Takes the Fear Out of Health Treatment

Introduction:

Exploring the profound gap between standard medical and wellness care reveals a shift from symptom treatment to proactive health maintenance.

Key Takeaways:

• Difference Between Standard Medical and Wellness Care: Standard medical care focuses on treating symptoms of diseases, while wellness care aims at finding and correcting the root causes of health issues, as well as preventing future problems.
• Importance of Wellness Care: Emphasizes on maintaining health through proactive measures rather than reactive treatments, akin to regular maintenance of a car to prevent breakdowns.
• Lifestyle Choices: Both approaches endorse healthy lifestyle choices, but wellness care promotes a positive, proactive approach to maintaining health and preventing disease.

What is the difference between standard medical care and wellness care?

Standard medical care treats symptoms after they appear, focusing on disease management. In contrast, wellness care seeks to identify and correct the root causes of health issues and prevent them from occurring, promoting a holistic and proactive approach to health.

The difference between standard medical care and wellness care is as profound as the difference between being sick and being well. Healthcare as we traditionally know it in the United States is all about identifying when someone is suffering from a disease or condition and then treating the symptoms. Wellness care on the other hand, is the practice in determining the actual cause of the symptoms and correcting it, as well as preventing health problems from occurring in the future. A lot of information about wellness care has been published, some of it good and some of it bad. To understand the truth though, the key differences between wellness care and the standard clinical approach to managing our health can be distilled down to a few basic facts.

The Clinical Approach to Healthcare

As has been recognized by our government, the term “healthcare” is really a misnomer when used to describe how our physical and mental health is managed when we seek out the help of medical physicians. This brings us nicely to the first basic fact about medical healthcare: We go to our physicians or to a hospital, clinic or other medical institution when our bodies start to tell us that something is not right. The only real exception to this rule is when we undergo a regular checkup.

However, the objective of a checkup is merely to determine if there are any symptoms of a health problem at a given point in time. If there are symptoms, we receive treatment, if not, the objective has been met and off we go. The fundamental problem with this is that many health problems are asymptomatic until they become serious. If a checkup does reveal a sickness or condition we didn’t know about, the chances are it’s been present and unnoticed for some time.

Making us Better is not Getting us Well

Similarly, if we visit the doctor because we are in pain or feel unwell, or notice an unwelcome change in our bodies, we will receive some form of treatment. However the treatment is intended to provide a degree of pain management, make us feel better or to eradicate the visible symptoms that caused us to seek medical help. To use an analogy, this is like having an automobile, running it daily without any maintenance, taking it for an annual roadworthiness test, hoping it passes and only taking it to the workshop when something breaks or goes wrong.

Most people wouldn’t dream of foregoing the scheduled maintenance and servicing of a car, yet that’s exactly what we do with our own health, which is of far more value than our automobiles. From the day we are born until the day we die, we work our bodies hard. Wellness care addresses the need to look after our bodies and prevent sickness and disease from taking hold. Wellness care seeks to identify and resolve the underlying causes of sickness and treat them, either before or after symptoms manifest themselves. As its name suggests, wellness care is about treatment to keep us well and, when problems do arise, to make us well, and not just to eliminate symptoms.

Positive Expectations and Lifestyle

While medical healthcare and wellness promote the same healthy lifestyle, the difference is in the approach to this. The medical approach and wellness care are both based on the same facts about lifestyle and health, championing lifestyle choices such as:

• Staying physically active
• Maintaining optimal body weight
• Pursuing a healthy diet
• Avoiding smoking and tobacco products
• Limiting alcohol intake
• Avoiding behaviors leading to risk of injury and disease
• Avoiding stress

However, in the medical approach or “fear-based care”, which is a more apt description of medical healthcare, the approach is to warn against the consequences of making the wrong choices and is often actively approached only when directly addressing an identified condition. It’s the same fear-based approach that we take when we seek medical help. We seek medical help when we are afraid something is wrong. We have checkups because we’re afraid something might be wrong that we don’t know about.

Wellness care takes the opposite approach to treatment and lifestyle. To return to the car analogy, you probably look after your car by washing it, servicing it and generally keeping it in good order, not because you are afraid it will break down if you don’t. You do it because you value it and know it will serve you well if it’s looked after.

That’s the wellness approach to lifestyle. Wellness care is all about making the most of your body’s natural ability to heal itself and using self-care to keep yourself in optimal condition. The lifestyle approach to wellness is based on the positive expectation that looking after yourself will keep you well and improve your ability to become well after the inevitable health setbacks that are part of life.

Wellness Treatments

Wellness care applies the same principles as the marriage vow “in sickness and in health”. This applies to your lifestyle and to wellness treatment. For example, advanced chiropractic care, which is focused wholly on wellness, involves the identification of spinal misalignments or “subluxations” which can lead to any number of health conditions, yet remain undetected until they result in conditions that display symptoms. By visiting a chiropractor regularly, these subluxations will be identified and corrected, preventing future problems. Of course subluxations can develop at any time and should a problem develop, your chiropractor will be able to help you remedy it by treating the subluxation. With the causal issue resolved, your body will be able to heal itself, either on its own or with the help of further conservative treatment and self-care techniques.

Wellness care isn’t limited to chiropractic adjustment. Numerous wellness treatments are available which are all practiced on the same basis. The objective is to identify anomalies which cause pain and sickness and act on them directly, whether symptoms are present or not. At OC Wellness Physicians Medical Center, we offer a full range of wellness services from acupuncture to weight loss support, all tailored to your unique individual needs, in sickness and in health, just call us on (657) 837-2608 or schedule an appointment online.