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Health Integrity: Integrity Stimulus Plan Key #2

The impact of increasing interconnection is far greater than most people realize. Our health care challenges powerfully illustrate how one person's, company's or industry's actions affect other people, society and our economy far more than ever before in human history:

• Jack the Mechanic's choice to neglect his health drives up Jill the Bus Driver's health insurance payments and costs their employers a huge amount of money in lost productivity and higher insurance premiums.
• Company X's choice to pollute ground water in your community makes more people sick, which drives of the cost of your health insurance premiums.
• The pharmaceutical industry's attempts to make the FDA limit our access to nutritional supplements drives up the cost of health care for everyone.
• The FDA’s willingness to allow the food manufacturing industry to include ingredients and additives in foods that promote obesity, cancer, and numerous other diseases drives up the cost of health care for everyone.
• Conventional medicine's choice to over-focus on expensive invasive medical procedures and focus far too little on far less expensive preventive and natural health interventions has skyrocketed the cost of health care, Medicare, and health insurance premiums, even as the overall health of citizens continues to decline.

The Keys to Optimal Health and the FDA’s Role in Eroding or Supporting Them

The United States has one of the most dismal cost-benefit ratios for healthcare in the industrialized world. To change this we need a new Health Integrity formula: Citizen Self-Care + Health Model Reform + Citizen-Centered Oversight = Health Integrity. Without this formula, health insurance will remain unaffordable, as will any attempt to make health care available to all.

Here are some key areas needing the most attention in order for this Health Integrity forumula to work.

Having the energy we need to live in integrity with our three core drives requires optimal health. Without it, we can’t create the life we want, be there for the people we love, and make a positive difference. Neglecting your optimal health is your choice to have less energy today and more misery as you age. Your choice to neglect your optimal health is also your choice to drive up the cost of health insurance for everyone including you. In other words, optimal health isn’t only good for you – it’s also the socially responsible thing to do.

Health integrity means committing to your own optimal health and demanding that businesses and government do a better job of supporting health integrity. For instance, it is time for the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) to more aggressively promote health integrity and health freedom, by stopping being the servant of the pharmaceutical and food processing industries, and other self-serving special interests. Because Health Integrity also includes environmental health, it is important that the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) focus on its health stewardship responsibilties as well.

Here’s an example of why: Optimal nutrition is one of the foundations of health. Nutritional deficits are a core cause of illness (as is environmental toxicity). The sicker the American public gets:

• The higher health insurance costs go
• The more compromised American productivity becomes
• The more money government health programs such as Medicare costs taxpayers
• The more money there is in the pharmaceutical industry and physicians focusing on extremely expensive treatments needed for treating catastrophic illnesses.

The FDA must reorder its priorities because:

1. The food industry is at the front line of health and illness.
2. Until the food industry takes its role as a leading health care provider seriously, nutritional supplements will remain on the front line of health and illness.
3. Until conventional Western medicine makes preventive and restorative health its first priority, complementary and alternative health resources must be aggressively supported because their focus is preventive and restorative health.
4. Government has a responsibility to its individual and business citizens to ensure that the right that conventional medicine and the pharmaceutical industry has to be profitable is not allowed to overshadow consumers’ rights to utilize preventive and restorative health resources. Government also has a responsibility to its citizens to treat the food industry as the front line in health and illness that it is.

The United States has one of the most dismal cost-benefit ratios for healthcare in the industrialized world. The above example illustrates only a handful of the ways in which our health care fundamentals must be reordered to make health care more affordable for individual citizens, businesses, and government supported health programs. Citizens, businesses, the health care community, and government have a social responsibility to rebuild the fundamentals of our health care model from the ground up.

On a societal level, health integrity includes more than people realize. It includes the agriculture industry, the food processing industry, and the environment, in addition to the health care industry, which includes not only conventional medicine but complementary health methods and psychological services. In summary the top keys to societal health integrity include:

1. Citizens, businesses and government must treat the food industry and the environment as the front lines of health & illness that they are.
2. Nutritional supplements must also be supported as the front line of preventive and restorative health (via supporting evidence-based research).
3. Because preventive and restorative health is not conventional medicine’s top financial priority, both complementary health methods and psychological services must be aggressively supported as the front line of prevention and restoration.
4. Government must place top priority on consumer health freedom to utilize preventive/restorative health resources while supporting conventional medicine and the pharmaceutical industry in remaining profitable in socially responsible ways.

A complete approach to health includes these four dimensions:

1. Illness Prevention: Environmental health, food health, exercise health, sleep health, energy system health (see www.TheNewIQ.com/epa for a brief introduction to energy system health).
2. Optimal Health: Nutritional supplements, health-supporting relationships, work-life balance/passion, internal quiet, proper life experience digestion (finding meaning from past traumas and other unexepcted or undesired life experiences so that they don't limit or victimize us in the present, because improper digestion of life experiences has been shown to cause health problems)
3. Illness Management: Conventional medicine manages illnesses mostly via drugs, surgery, and emergency services. Conventional medicine places far less emphasis on illness prevention and optimal health than on illness management. This category is the most expensive of the four health categories, partly because these interventions are the costliest of all health interventions, and partly because our relative lack of attention to illness prevention and optimal health causes far more people to need illness management services than would be the case if we made a priority of emphasizing illness prevention and optimal health strategies.
4. Restorative Health: While some conventional medicine interventions can help restore health from some illnesses and injuries, integrative health approaches help restore health with a much wider range of illnesses and injuries than cinventional medicine alone.

On an individual level, health integrity includes more than most people realize. Health integrity means taking full responsibility for your internal, environmental and logistical self-care.

• Internal Self-Care includes nutrition, sleep, exercise, keeping your energy system balanced and strong, and creating a quiet mind through practicing inner silence and mindfulness.
• Environmental Self-Care includes creating physical environments that nourish you (home, workspace, and outdoor), and it also includes people environments (surrounding yourself with your people who value your true self, are good at healthy bonding, who value making a difference, and who cherish integrity).
• Logistical Self-Care includes simplifying your commitments and tasks, and organizing your life logistics, so that your to-do list supports your three core drives instead of you spending your life being a servant to your to-do list.

What Will You Include in Your Integrity Pledge About Health Integrity?

1. Becoming the Change

Which of the three dimensions of integrity-centered self-care (internal, environmental, logistical) do you tend to neglect or over-emphasize?

In light of this, what specific commitment will you make to upgrade your health integrity?

2. Impacting Your World

Select a specific action you will take to help upgrade America’s health integrity. Here are some possibilities:

• Family: I will raise my children with health integrity by role-modeling and supporting optimal health habits, and by providing them with the best possible health care.
• Media: I will lobby the media to more aggressively report on all issues that undermine health integrity. (You can do this by writing letters to editors and/or contacting show producers and/or calling in to which talk shows, etc.)
• Schools: I will advocate for full-spectrum self-care education to included in the curriculum of the schools, colleges, universities and/or other training programs in my community, or that I have some other connection with.
• Places of Worship: I will get my house of worship, or my religious or spiritual organization, to sponsor workshops for upgrading our health integrity.
• Community and Service Organizations: I will get the community and/or service organizations with which I am connected to champion health integrity.
• Businesses: I will advocate that the business(es) with which I am connected as an owner, executive, employee, vendor, stakeholder or customer, to provide health integrity education as part of staff development, and to sponsor those programs in the community, and to pressure their health care insurance companies to demand health care reform.
• Health Providers: I will advocate training physicians, nurses, and other conventional health care providers such as Physician Assistants, in preventive interventions and nutritional supplements that can help with optimal health, disease prevention and disease intervention.
• Government: I will demand that the FDA: 1) Stop allowing health-eroding food ingredients and additives and start rewarding farmers and food manufacturing companies for providing health-promoting foods; 2) Promote health freedom; 3) Stop allowing the pharmaceutical industry to bring inadequately tested drugs to market or to squelch the nutritional supplements industry; and 4) Embark on a vigorous public education campaign to help the public become more sophisticated consumers of food, nutritional supplements and medication.
• Internet: I will use the internet to increase people’s awareness of individual and societal health integrity issues. (You can do this by e-mailing people you know, providing information on your website, blogging on other websites, and/or posting information on social networking sites to which you belong).
• Other: You specify.

Decide who you will contact, what you will say or do, how this will happen, and when you will do this. Then do it.

Revisit your commitments every six months to decide whether it's time to modify them.

Click on this link when you are ready to go on to Integrity Stimulus Plan Key #3: Economic Integrity.