Your Health Matters …

Human Life Styling

“Patients carry their own doctor inside them. They come to us not knowing that truth. We are at our best when we give the physician who resides within each patient a chance to go to work.” - Albert Schweitzer

In 1975, Drs. John McCamy and James Priestly wrote a landmark book entitled, Human Life Styling. Though it’s been more than thirty years, the concepts promoted by these two MDs are the foundation of 21st Century Health care. Dr. McCamy wrote in his work about the “Four Horsemen of Health”:

Diet * Exercise * Stress Reduction * Environment (Ecology)

He expanded on the work of pioneers in the field of Health, Wellness, Longevity, and Life Style. People like Dr. Hans Selye, Dr. Linus Pauling, Dr. Emanuel Cheraskin, and Adele Davis.

Clinical disease is usually the last step of a decade or more of deterioration. Annual check-ups only lead to early detection of disease before it gets worse. This is not prevention. True prevention aims to prevent signs or symptoms of the disease from occurring in the first place.

“Every major disease is predictable and preventable in the first decade of its development.”

Human Life Styling focuses on changing lifestyle to achieve optimum health. The keys to Human Life Styling (HLS) are the following:

1. There is a difference between good health and average health. A truly healthy person has no physical or mental complaints. He should feel good all the time, have a great deal of energy and vitality, and have no recognizable symptoms.

2. Disease takes a long time to develop. Symptoms appear long before the clinical disease is manifested, sometimes decades before a precise diagnosis of disease. Invariably, the patient reveals a deficiency in all three areas of nutrition, exercise, and stress response.

3. Susceptibility factors increase the likelihood of disease. Resistance factors decrease the likelihood of disease. HLS means building up resistance and lowering susceptibility. All factors of resistance must be present to stay healthy. Miss one and resistance is lowered.

Heart disease, stroke, cancer, periodontal disease, and most chronic diseases have similar risk factors (though maybe not in the same sequence of importance).

Smoking, alcohol, overeating, poor diet, refined foods with white flour and high sugar content, lack of vigorous exercise, bottled up emotions, and high stress are significant risk factors.

Human Life Styling concerns itself with “Quality of Life” factors: Aging slowly and gracefully – living with energy and a positive orientation towards life.

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