What is the road map to health in MS?
Health Multiple Sclerosis
When we’ve been diagnosed with a devastating disease such as multiple sclerosis, it seems that health is a dream from the past. Something not to ‘hope’ too much on. We are told that it’s ‘just the way it is’ and, what’s even worse, that it will continue to progress!
What if we decided that we are going to achieve health? No matter what, we refuse to go down that depressing progressive path and we chose to head back in the direction of health?
In order to do that, you must understand what health is. If not, it’s just a pipeline dream that you might wish for but never even take the first effective step in getting to.
We begin the series of Creating Health in Multiple Sclerosis reviewing the road map to health. What is it? Where is it? Without a clear understanding of what is health in multiple sclerosis and in general, we will not get there. ‘Hope’ is not a very accurate road map to creating health but clearly understanding what it is can be.
What is Health?
To define what is health, let’s refer to the World Health Organization (WHO). For most of its history, medicine viewed health as a lack of disease. In 1948 WHO proposed a clearer definition:
In essence, health is not just the absence of disease; it is the ability to respond to the challenges of life and still feel well. Understanding this definition, we can begin to break down what all is needed to restore our bodies to health.
There is a lot of studies and information regarding regaining physical well-being. Holistic therapies such as Functional Medicine or Integrative Medicine has produced a lot of material and studies on how optimizing our nutritional intake, improving sleeping habits, detoxing, and doing moderate exercise can improve our physical well-being.
What is less researched and less material on is how to improve our mental and social well-being. Eva M Clark will be dedicated each post to those two aspects of creating health from multiple sclerosis and inviting other holistic practitioners to provide material for physical well-being in the series. Health for multiple sclerosis is not just one diet, one exercise, or one hypnotherapy program. It requires working through any physical, mental, and social causes that could contribute to the disease and its progression. By addressing all underlying causes of MS, we can attain true health.
