Recently our fancy (read 'over priced') front-loading washing machine stopped working. When the repairman showed up, without any poking around,  his first diagnostic impression (in the first 30 seconds, no less) was that there was a problem with the water pump. Sure enough, he found a small triangular pad from a bathing suit top had somehow made it into the water pump and clogged it up, bringing everything to a halt (sorry you mid-westerners and east coasters, yes, in San Diego we can wear bathing suits in October).  It was a very simple mechanical problem and solution - open up the machine and pull the offending chunk of fabric from the water pump. The repairman was able to reduce the machine to the sum of its parts and figure out the problem and correct it.

If only our health problems were so easy to manage...

One thing I love about pursuing health through proper eating, moving and thinking is that it’s appropriate for everybody, and it works whether you’re sick or well. I love how it’s always correct to eat fresh organic foods, move every day, get optimal rest, and be thankful and optimistic. I’m comforted by the fact that the government and drug companies can’t take that lifestyle, tool or strategy from away from us.

If the body's 'water pump', the heart, clogs up, we can't just reach in and pull out the clog. Despite what cardiac surgeons may optimistically tell us, bypassing a clogged artery won't produce a healthy heart - that comes from our lifestyle choices. When we provide our bodies with fresh whole foods, lots of exercise and rest, and lots of pure water regularly and consistently provided in sufficiency and purity, we flourish in a healthy state. When our body malfunctions due to a lack of those lifestyle components or nutrients, contrary to what medical science advocates, we can't fix a lifestyle-caused health problem with drugs and surgery - only by returning to proper lifestyle behaviors. Although our bodies' are made up of a multitude of systems, organs, tissues, and cells, they are all part of a dynamic biological system and they all require the same things for optimal function and health.

As America marches toward an uncertain future regarding how we will take care of ourselves and each other under the delusional misnomer of health care, lurking in the foreground and the background is the dark side of medical or allopathic research and treatment – reductionist thinking and methods. [Wikipedia defines reductionism " ... to either mean (a) an approach to understand the nature of complex things by reducing them to the interactions of their parts, or to simpler or more fundamental things; or (b) a philosophical position that a complex system is nothing but the sum of its parts, and that an account of it can be reduced to accounts of individual constituents. Reductionism is strongly related to a certain perspective on causality."]

It’s that last part about reductionism being ‘strongly related to a certain perspective on causality’ that has proved to be a cultural stumbling block for modern society to understand health. Although using reductionist methods of investigation and correction proves successful when seeking to understand and repair mechanical things like cars, watches and refrigerators, in vitalistic living biological systems like the human body, it rarely proves successful. The current medical or allopathic model proposes and acts upon the premise that if we break down the functioning of the human body to its smallest level, be it cellular, molecular and now more recently, genetic, it will enable science to overcome virtually any disease or condition with drug or surgical treatments targeted at those small parts. The bad news is that that misdirection is leading us astray - science has now shown that it's only by choosing the correct 'large' lifestyle choices that can bring those 'small' components into an alignment called health, not chemicals or surgeries.

The good news is that you have the ability to affect your own genetic, molecular and cellular requirements without having to check into a state-of-the-art health facility or hospital. It's really quite simple - just eat a plant-driven* diet centered around fresh whole foods, get plenty of exercise and rest, drink pure water, and keep your attiitude, thoughts and words in the positive column and the good life is yours to keep!

[*by the way, 'plant-driven' does not mean vegetarian.]