The Definition of Health

By Dr. Ben Lerner

Almost no one knows what the definition of health really is. Therefore that which they believe about health cannot be true. Dr. Ian Grassam

To have a true wellness revolution, you must first answer the most important question:

What is wellness? The term has been badly abused. Clinics offering abortion often call themselves Women's Wellness Centers, and doctors and hospitals offer "wellness visits" through which they provide expensive exams and tests in an effort to create "early detection" of disease.

Unfortunately, "early" is still after the fact, and the treatments involve more prescriptions and surgery. Injectable drugs and prescriptions are given even to children and the elderly in the name of "wellness."

To know what real wellness is, you have to first define what health really is. Most people would say they're healthy when they have no pain, no runny nose, no headache. In other words, "I'm healthy when I feel good." In today's fad-diet-and-home-exercise-infomercial world, health has also come to mean losing weight or looking good.

There are three problems with this. First, when you think health is feeling good, what do you usually do when you feel bad? You take a drug to feel good, then assume you're healthy. Yet, as you now know, you do not automatically become healthy when a drug eliminates your symptoms. In fact, you may be even sicker.

Second, when my father died of a heart attack at the age of 52, he died without prior symptoms of heart disease and had passed previous medical evaluation.

His doctor told us, in more than two-thirds of people who have a heart problem, the first sign is a heart attack. Then, in two-thirds of those, people die. Or, for the majority of people, the first sign that you have a heart problem is that you are dead. As my family discovered, that's a little late to begin looking into it.

I could go on with story after story of people I've seen in my clinics who chose to not follow through with care based on the fact that they felt fine, only later to discover disease that was so far along by the time they discovered it it was too late.

By the time you actually know you have cancer, Alzheimer's, diabetes and other physical problems, these conditions have typically been ravaging your body for years. The same is true even for spine and extremity pain. By the time it hurts, MRIs and X-rays often show massive arthritic degeneration or disc damage that's been developing for years.

Third, there's the "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" myth. Thinking "If I have no symptoms of a disease, then I don't have to worry about disease ..." is one of the most colossal errors in judgment you could ever make concerning your health.

You might not have a diagnosed disease, but dis-ease can go on for years without warning before being discovered as disease. This type of thinking will, without argument, eventually shorten your life.

The following is a list from the Merck Manual of Medical Diagnosis. These are only some of the most common diseases we face today and are all present in the body without any signs or symptoms noticeable to the victim:

Seeking freedom from symptoms is easy to do and may even guarantee those results. The only thing it can never bring you, however, is health. In fact, as the Merck Manual shows us, being free from symptoms may just cover up signs of dis-ease and keep you ignorant of your perilous predicament.

Dr. Ben Lerner, along with Dr. Greg Loman, owns Teach The World About Chiropractic, a Chiropractic training company. They have helped build the largest spinal correction clinics in the history of Chiropractic. For more information, read Dr. Lerner's book, Body by God: The Owner's Manual For Maximized Living.