In the last post, we talked about if you mastering your health and vitality or are you perhaps just subscribing to the latest health trend without fully examining if it’s moving you towards greater health and wellbeing?
It’s important to examine why we are making a particular health choice. Are we being bossed into it? Or are we minimising ourselves, elevating someone else and latching on to the their latest health kick without understanding the rationale or philosophy, only to then wonder why we can’t sustain the new ritual???
This is why I love the relatively new area of research: Salutogenesis. Derived from the Latin term salus (health) and the Greek word genesis (origin). Salutogenesis is a paradigm that examines stress and its negative impact on health and promotes the strengthening of the individual’s salutary resources.
The World Health Organisation has defined it as,
“The process of enabling individuals and communities to increase control over, and to improve their health. Empowering individuals, empowering communities.”
Come again…Saluto-what-a-sis?
In contrast to our current health model salutogenesis, the study of health origins and causes, starts by considering health and looks prospectively at how to create, enhance, and improve physical, mental, and social well-being. Salutogenesis theories aim to explain why some people become sick and others don’t.
Salutogenesis is focused on what gives birth to health, happiness and vitality and is completely aligned with Chiropractic.
For those of you who know the origin of chiropractic D.D. Palmer, the pioneer of chiropractic who posed the question –
“I desired to know why one person was ailing,
and his associate eating at the same table,
working in the same shop, at the same bench was not. In other words,
why would two individuals with the same living conditions,
with the same working conditions, subjected to the same stressors,
find themselves in the situation where one would enjoy health,
and the other did not?”
This desire to better understand health, adaptability and resilience lead him to develop our incredible profession, the discovery of vertebral subluxation and its relationship to health. Think of your brain as a computer. It coordinates, via your nervous system, both organ and cell function. Nerve messages can be impaired by vertebral subluxations which occur when there are misalignments of one or more vertebrae.
This results in altered joint motion and nerve irritation which in time can lessen organ function and general health and wellbeing.
As Einstein said,
“No problem can be solved from
the same consciousness that created it.
We must learn to see the world anew.”
Want to become a master in salutogenesis too???
Rather than reaching for pills and syrups, a family or individual focused on salutogenesis and wellness does not expect that health comes from the outside. Instead they honour the ‘doctor within’; the innate healing capacity which resides within each of us. The same intelligence which coordinates the beating of our heart, our food digestion and immune responses.
We must look at our health rituals old and new and examine if they are strengthening our health. We must look if the health practitioners, advisors and products we subscribe too are aligned to the vision we hold for our future health.
For more holistic health principles please see Well Adjusted Babies and Ticklish.
. . . . .
Yours in health…
Jennifer Barham-Floreani
Bach. Chiropractic, Bach. App Clinical Science
Registered internationally, no longer practicing as a chiropractor in Australia.
