
Preventative care may or may not be a term that you have heard before, but it is common philosophy among alternative healthcare practitioners. The basis of preventative care is that you maintain a baseline level of health and address issues before they can develop into serious illness. Keeping people healthy is basically all it is. It’s simple, and can be done for very little cost through all-natural alternatives, such as eating healthy, exercising, and developing a healthy mindset.

Furthermore, this keeps more people from developing life threatening conditions that are not only scary to the individual and those that love them, but are also a financial burden on the nation’s healthcare system. Medication and surgery are very costly treatments that end up costing individuals, companies, and the nation trillions of dollars each year. The US government alone spends $3.0 trillion each year on a national healthcare system that rarely talks about preventative care. If they do talk about it, they often use corporate funded, biased, limited, and outdated research to promote a national health campaign that doesn’t work. Such as the abysmal food pyramid which has slowly graduated to the slightly less abysmal MyPlate. Instead, mainstream medicine is primarily based in diagnostic care which chases symptoms after they have occurred.

Having grown up with a chiropractor as my dad in a household that was inherently concerned with holistic health, it seems natural to me that preventative is the better choice. However, I can see why many choose not to use it or believe in it. People grow up learning to trust the expertise of their doctor’s and the government. They are told over and over by their peers, professionals, and advertisements that medications and the proper way to correct any health complication. It becomes normal to believe that synthetic and invasive treatments are more effective and inherently natural than alternative methods.

People also become comfortable living a lifestyle of poor health. It is easy, addicting, and again normal to eat processed foods, distract yourself with crap entertainment, work an unfulfilling job, spend all your time with people on the same cycle, and release all the stress through binge drinking on the weekends. Though this is a broad generalization, you can see these patterns more or less repeat in many people, and again one of the more enticing aspects of it is that it is a socially accepted norm.

Adding yet another layer, lifestyle changes are a difficult, scary, and often expensive undertaking. Especially in a family, where everyone is intertwined in their lifestyle, and making a change for yourself often means shifting the entire family dynamic. This can result in resistance from your loved ones and takes serious dedication, energy, and time to make happen. Even for the single person, actively choosing healthier choices in all aspects of life requires a mindfulness and perspective shift that is very different from the mindless ease of eating fast food and watching TV. When you finally muster up the courage to take steps to being healthier, you find that organic food is more expensive, that personal trainer around the corner charges $60/hour, and that books can cost $20 a piece.

Locking this pattern in further is the fact that many people living this lifestyle have health insurance. So when the inevitable happens and they develop a condition, they get to pay next to nothing for traditional treatment. While other options, such as chiropractic, exercise, or nutritional advice, will likely not be covered by their premiums, so they will likely never consider those treatments as options. Why would they? It’s expensive and they have been told that chiropractors are quacks, you can exercise at home using P90x, and that organic food isn’t very much healthier than the junk food they continue to buy. The culture that surrounds us has shaped a lifestyle of bad health that lends itself perfectly to mainstream medicine.

To make the switch, you must first realize how logically flawed the idea of diagnostic care is. When someone is ill, they look at the symptoms and prescribe something that masks those symptoms so you can go as if nothing is wrong. Oh, and when that medicine begins to destroy your liver or reduce your ability to regulate an essential hormone, you can take a pill for that too, and so on. It subliminally gives the message that it’s okay to live your terribly unhealthy, unsatisfying lifestyle, because at the end of the day you can take a little pill that will let you keep living that lifestyle for a few more painful years. It is all surface, there is no focus on the root cause of the problem.

Here is a microcosm of an example. When someone get’s a headache, what do they do? They take an aspirin. Or, it it’s really bad, they resort to Tylenol. This is has become such a normal pattern that people don’t give it a second thought. However, consider what that headache might mean. Is a headache normal? Is it normal for your body to reject it’s environment to the point that you feel pain in your head? Or is a headache a sign that something is wrong?

Pain is a designed to be a warning sign, it is meant to make you do something to remove yourself from danger, it is not a normal part of daily existence. So when one get’s a headache, it’s not their body doing what everyone else’s does, it is the body telling you that there is some substance or external stressor in your environment that is causing you harm and you should do something about it. For most cases, people’s headaches are a result of their diet, tight muscles, stress, and staring at screens all day. So to treat that headache, it makes sense to reduce these stressors and make the root of the headaches go away.

Eat healthy, stretch, improve your ability to handle stress, put yourself in a different environment, and honor your nature. That is truly correcting the problem, that is a permanent solution to headaches that relies only on the natural function of the body. Whereas when one takes an aspirin, it is only temporary relief that relies on a chemical reaction to trick your body into not feeling pain.

This small example can be expanded to fit most cases of how mainstream medicine handles complications. Of course, there is a time and place for medicine and surgery. Many of the breakthroughs that have been made are truly revolutionary treatments that can quickly heal what were once life threatening conditions.

If I broke my arm right now I would not go to a shaman, I would go to the emergency room and accept their anesthesia.

The problem lies in the pervasiveness of medicine and people’s reliance on it. Things such as diabetes, obesity, anxiety, and cardiovascular disease are not chance occurrences that stem from a single source which can be quickly understood and easily corrected. They are the result of a lifetime of bad habits that have disrupted the complex workings of the body and now must be fundamentally corrected through lifestyle changes.

To get back to the initial point of this article, preventative care is essentially to promote these lifestyle changes before complications arise. Generally this is done through simple, all natural changes. As I said there will be resistance from most people to the total shift, but doing it in small steps makes it doable.

Working with people and educating them on what the truly healthy alternatives are is a huge part of it, because so many have been inundated heavily by mainstream medicine and take time to convince of the alternative. Someone who has already gathered all the knowledge and can serve as a trusted guide in the process can be an invaluable part of the process. They serve to keep you on track and to cut through all of misinformation out there.

In alternative healthcare, preventative care centers around the triad of health, which states that the basic three tenants of health are nutrition, physical structure, and mental health. This is discussed in depth in our article, The 3 Steps to Wellness but the basic idea is  through these three columns, anyone can maintain a high level of health. They are simple to understand and despite the resistance that people will have, easy to implement into daily life.

At the end of it, preventative care provides people with good health without need for risky medicines and procedures. This saves money for the healthcare system, reduces the amount of people who develop complications, lowers the complexity of conditions that arise, and ensures a baseline level of health in the general public.

In a way, preventative care is about much more than preventing disease. In my experience preventative care also leads to an overall higher quality of life. Preventative care is a way to educate people on how to live a lifestyle that agrees with their natural biology. Daily activities from moving, thinking, interacting with others, and even breathing become easier more enjoyable experiences, Your mood is better, you have motivation, and you are inspired to do something productive to inspire change in others. It is a very different system of healthcare.

If a system of healthcare that is based in prevention rather than reaction could continue to gain momentum and become the new normal, the current state of health in America could quickly be improved. The horrendously high rates of obesity, cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, and mental health disorders could all become a part of our distant past if preventative care is correctly implemented.


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