Redefining Health

Many years ago, before the practice of medicine was turned on its head by the Rockefeller-funded Flexner Report in 1910, people understood that "being healthy" was a fairly straight-forward practice of eating well, sleeping well, and exercising.

Now we find ourselves in 2025, when our food, water, air, and soil are significantly toxic. Our governments and so-called health institutions spread fear and dissent at every turn, and people have somehow come to believe that health is a partisan issue that depends on what political party you adhere to.

What does “healthy” really even mean in this modern era? Can it simply be defined as a state of well-being, free of disease (dis-ease), as it once used to be?

A relatively new definition of health includes “not displaying clinical signs of disease or infection.” Emphasis mine, because it's worth noting that this updated definition views health through an increasingly narrow lens – and it indicates that our ideas of health have shifted dramatically - and for the worse - in the last 115 years.

We have collectively lost trust in the human body's resilience and ability to heal, and the medical-industrial complex has largely succeeded in getting people to view the human body as a faulty machine, typically prone to dysfunction.

The Roots of Medicine - Living Well

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, a doctor was a part of his community and frequently treated whole families over many years and generations. He got to know each member of the family intimately, and was a hands-on master of reassurance who resorted to medicines or surgeries only when necessary.

Prescriptions of fresh air, mountain spring water, seashore, and sunshine may sound quaint to us today - but in our recent ancestors’ time, these were taken seriously and frequently brought beneficial results. 

Why? Because the medical minds of yesterday understood that health was undeniably a function of our emotions, environment, and the quality of air, water, and food we had available to us.

Every aspect of our lifestyle, from our thoughts and beliefs to the meaning we derive from the work we do, influences how our body processes toxins and responds to potential threats. This is still true even now - in today's world - although this commonsense approach has been strategically downplayed and dismissed for some time.

Old-New Medicine: Terrain Theory and Conscious Cells

Terrain Theory - the idea that germs alone are not responsible for illness and disease - is credited to Antoine Béchamp. It's actually not a new concept, although it was eclipsed by germ theory in the early 1900s because the idea of an invisible, tiny enemy would better serve the agendas and profit motives of the burgeoning pharmaceutical industry.  

Béchamp's observations of living tissues under the microscope caused him to coin the term 'pleomorphism', which describes how our living tissues morph or change their function in real time, in response to different environmental inputs.

In other words, as long ago as the 1880s, our cells were observed to be able to respond to their environment. This indicates that we are capable of conscious action even on a cellular level.

This flies in the face of germ theory, which states that the introduction of a specific pathogen will necessarily create a specific disease, regardless of the body's ability to orchestrate a unique immune response.

In the 1920s, the New Thought Movement began to emerge among many teachers and scholars. The central idea was that our thoughts influence physical reality. Later, covert military projects tested and validated practices like astral projection, remote viewing, and telekinesis. Naturally, this influence of our thoughts and mindset extends to our health and wellbeing.

German New Medicine is an even newer science, documented by Dr. Ryke Geerd Hamer in the 1980s. He discovered specific correlations between emotional shocks or disturbances in our lives that would lead to the physical manifestations of what we call disease or illness.

In GNM, the presentation of symptoms are interpreted as the body's attempts to stabilize us in response to perceived survival threats, and often indicate the resolution of a problem, rather than its onset. GNM is currently rising in popularity as more and more people begin to claim radical self-responsibility for their health and wellbeing. Hamer's findings and research are discussed in detail within the text of his Five Biological Laws of Nature.

Modern Medicine vs. Holistic Medicine

Despite these alternative approaches, the mainstream medical-industrial approach to dealing with illness is still the default for most people. It's what we're familiar with, and what we've been conditioned to accept.

Mainstream, modern medicine relies on a series of external inputs - it's done to us.

Holistic medicine provides us with the capacity to take our power back. 

While we have made massive advances in emergency treatments, technology like organ transplants, and acute infections - we also seem to have forgotten the foundation of all medical care: First, do no harm.

Modern medicine is focused on finding problems rather than on prevention or cures, because of its heavy bias toward prescription drug use and surgery. If the best, most profitable tool you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail.

While modern medicine has brought many life-saving advances, we are also less resilient in both body and mind than our ancestors - and holistic wellness practitioners like me are determined to do something about that.

Solutions in Diet, Food, and Nutrition

How far does your food travel to get to you? The typical fruit and veg at a grocery store has already travelled thousands of miles, and from seed to plate, it's been handled by dozens of machines, sprayed with questionable chemicals, and probably touched by the indifferent hands of many strangers.

If you live on a homestead or have a small garden plot, your tomato or lettuce or raspberries might travel as little as 20 feet from your yard to your plate. Even better, they've been tended by you, for you - and they're perfectly shaped by and adapted to the same location and climate conditions that you personally live in.

Regenerative farming practices mean that the meat and dairy we eat can have a positive environmental impact. Supporting small, ethical farms with sustainable practices like rotational grazing and permaculture design is a fantastic option for the environment and our physical health.

A hundred years ago, “local food” was the only type of food most people had access to - but now it's seen as a luxury, impractical at best.

Large-scale growing practices deplete the soil to the point that there are drastically fewer nutrients in our food today than there were in the 1970s. Genetically modified grains, processed sugar, and inflammatory seed oils make up the bulk of the modern diet, and it's absolutely vital we make the connection that our diet and health are inextricably intertwined.

More Convenience Equals Less Physical Movement

Modern life is all about convenience – and in the last 120 years, we have invented so many new ways to sit still! While the avoidance of backbreaking, repetitive, and dangerous work is a relief and a boon for our bodies, the transition to sitting so frequently is not.

Our work has us shut up in stuffy, climate-controlled offices, hunched over electronic screens with blue light, wearing clothing and shoes that restrict and confine our body’s natural movements.

In contrast, our recent ancestors rode bicycles, walked everywhere, frequently squatted and reached their arms overhead, carried heavy loads, and generally were more active - both indoors and out.

Too little physical movement is correlated with high blood pressure, low stamina, digestive disorders, fatigue and sleep issues, depression, anxiety, muscle atrophy, poor posture, low energy, and a host of other conditions. Even our culture’s libido is lagging, due to alarmingly low testosterone levels in so-called “healthy” young men.

Physical body movement and exposure to sunshine (both sunrise/sunset hours and at mid-day) can make a significant and drastic impact on our physical and emotional wellbeing.

Something as simple as a ten-minute walk after dinner can jumpstart our metabolism, encourage healthy bowel movements, stimulate our lymph system, and regulate our body's stress hormones, inflammatory markers, and sleep cycles.

We are biologically designed for frequent daily movement, walking, and lifting heavy things - and our bodies need movement just as much as proper food and sleep.

Avoiding Vivisection of Our Body and Soul

Modern health care encourages us to see our body as a stripped-down, generic machine of isolated systems, and if none of the systems are sending out obvious emergency signals, then voilà! We are deemed healthy.

However, our bodies are not machines, and our parts and systems do not function separately. We are interconnected, dynamic beings who respond to much more than just pharmaceuticals (or a lack thereof).

If we start to look at health not just as the absence of dis-ease, but as something we can take pride in consciously creating and pursuing - we will start to add in things that are beneficial, instead of just focusing on avoiding things that are "bad".

This might look like cultivating a dance or mindfulness practice, finding passion in cooking deeply nourishing foods, or moving to a place that supports us in growing a garden or food forest and connecting with the beauty of nature.

When we create habits and make choices that increase our feelings of joy, delight, and community with others - our entire lives will harmonize in our pursuit of health and wellbeing. 

Instead of health being another formula to chase or set of products to buy, we start to recognize that every facet of our life can be health-affirming if we consciously focus on living an integrated, holistic lifestyle.

A Holistic Model of Wellbeing

If you resonate with these ideas of health as a whole-istic pursuit, you might deeply resonate with what I've come to see as a core tenet of my practice as a holistic doctor:

You are your own best medicine. 

Do you crave a well-rounded, stable and grounded lifestyle, free of extreme stressors, with ample opportunity and trust in your body's ability to heal?

All these things are critical to our health and wellbeing, yet they are largely dismissed by health care professionals whose myopic focus on lab results and protocols leave little room for conscious co-creative health care.

The implications of trauma and stress are real and far-reaching, with epigenetic impact for up to 14 generations. This means that our levels of health, wellbeing, stress, and resilience now are actively creating the future of humanity via the genes we pass down to our children, and their children.

Every choice you make has consequence in the larger picture of your wellbeing.

Taking a proactive, additive approach to our wellbeing includes taking time to re-calibrate our nervous system, and to prioritize ways in which we can actively heal and move on from past traumas, instead of repressing our unconscious feelings.

So how do we holistically cultivate true health, strength, and resilience?

We can choose to become more intimately acquainted with our food supply.

We can reflect on our daily decisions of how and how much we move our bodies.

We can choose clean water sources, free of toxic additives.

We can look to our internal voice, learning to trust that we are our own best healer, rather than seeking external validation from a broken, predatory system.

Finally, we can rethink our definition of health from simply the absence of clinically-defined diseases to include holistic, additive perspectives that enrich our lives in a variety of ways.

Returning to our roots helps us remember what true, vibrant holistic health actually is - and how we can create it for ourselves.

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