Wellness is a journey to improve one’s life in all aspects. In this way, it is a holistic enterprise. Whereas wellness can be divided into different parts, the most efficient definition would be the easiest one: to be healthy, wealthy and wise. We can also call it the art of living a fulfilling life. But the field of wellness is too confusing and there is a lot of chaos. Navigating this world requires careful evaluation of oneself and the environment. For this understanding, one has to study too many difficult things, which is the reason for this blog. That is to say, humanize the knowledge so the audience can effectively upgrade their lives.
The same reason lies behind the popularity of some alternative treatments and holistic self-care frameworks. They are often easier to understand and I have to acknowledge, there are some who explain things better than the current scientific theories. But there are certain elements in these frameworks that need scrutiny and revision. Once performed, they can be even more beneficial. This is what I want to achieve, and this is how I can contribute to the wellness of this overall world.
The problem
The problem in wellness is that there is no curriculum or outline assigned to wellness, and neither is it taught at any educational institutions, it can also be used to trick money out of people by using vague and superficial stories. One of the reasons I have started this blog are the experiences I had with the words holistic and wellness in the past and to release the burden of seeing the injustices being done in this domain. It is also to clarify that the type of wellness you will find in this blog are in no way similar. I strive to share only what is reasonable, clear, and objective.
If you have to choose between the chemical and the natural, what would you select? Natural, I guess. So in illness, anyone with a tendency to achieve wellness will prefer holistic and natural treatment over the conventional medicine which is not holistic. Let’s take an example of holistic medicine to understand that.
Once upon a time I fell ill. I went to a famous doctor. The first thing he asked me was about what I had eaten last time. Then he continued to inquire into the foods I had eaten recently. Since I had a cold, he found the orange juice which I had drunk 3 days prior was causing the throat pain and becoming cough, not the weather.
This is commonly known as post hoc fallacy when two things happen at same time, but they are unrelated in terms of causation. Quacks use this to prove that they have diagnosed the underlying cause behind the disease. No matter what you say, or whatever connection you make, it shouldn’t be verifiable. This is the only rule besides the seemingly scientific connection that you have suggested. It is obvious that what you proposed should look plausible and it shouldn’t be entirely baseless. Now let’s continue the story.
Each time I took his medicine I had different experiences. I took the medicine for a week but my colds were not getting better. I was having rapid changes in my condition. One day I was feeling weak, the other day I was having watery eyes and the next day I was full of hunger. I asked him why the medicine was not working and he said, it will take time and the difference between the conventional medicine and herbal one is exactly this. Holistic medicine, he said, would treat the root cause of the disease instead of just killing the pain, and relieving the symptoms like conventional medicine does which he believed to be just a mirage.
The real reason some alternative medicines take time is because we have an immune system and in a week or two it will treat the colds even if you do not take any medicine at all. This is the reason they sometimes say: ‘We are using the body’s natural energy to heal’, because in essence, their medicine is just a placebo or is unrelated to the given condition and their denial in the inefficiency of their medicine results in an argument like this. And the reason people go to these people is the hope they give that every disease can be treated, while conventional medicine practitioners would bluntly point out the dangers, and people like to be hopeful.
Back to the story, sometimes even his medicines would aggravate the existing symptoms so he would explain to me that it means the disease is putting up a fight and the medicine went to the right place.
Training in these kinds of excuses and theories that would seemingly explain the situation and buy more time along with the anecdotal evidence and stories of people who would have been treated by them successfully (their regular customers) strengthens their profile.
Why it happens
So who is to blame? It is us who, when buying a car, study it carefully to maintain it to the fullest health but don’t care or study the working of our bodies and mind. Sometimes people might try, but the knowledge of these domains is so much filled with jargon and complexities that they cannot understand a bit whereas alternative health theories explain things in easier terms, hence the reason for their popularity. The neglect is on us. We have to know ourselves and how to maintain ourselves to live a fuller life, and we are to blame.
My goals
This blog has the sole purpose of making things easier so we can have practical effects in our lives and enrich the minds of readers with scientific yet easier to understand concepts regarding well-being, not just health. There is no prejudice regarding the alternative wellness theories, rather they should be considered with care and studied for their acceptable benefits. The example I quoted above is only about quacks, not about genuine health and wellness practitioners.
By incorporating everything that is good, cleansing the existing concepts of incoherent elements and providing a general framework for enhancing the quality of life is possible. Please keep in mind, wellness is not focused on diagnosis and treatment, instead it focuses on understanding and prevention for the longevity of the calm and the eventual unlocking of goals in a carefully designed framework where one is their own evaluator. This is the ultimate empowerment one can have over themselves.
Stay tuned for a series of posts exploring wellness, and the basic understanding required to know yourself better.