Canadian Lifestyle Health Care
By Dr. Victor Jean Ouellette, DC, MS, DNM,
RNP
Canadian Lifestyle Health Care is focussed on healthy health care offering solutions in a self-help format with
options for individual customised help. Canadian Lifestyle Health Care is distinct from the common term 'Health
Care'. The term 'health care' implies everything the medical profession uses to supply services from emergency care
to long term supportive care for chronic diseases. Health care is in actuality disease care. Prevention is usually
structured to find diseases early and then treat appropriately. This type of prevention also incorporates concepts
on immunization that aim to truly prevent diseases.
What does Canadian Lifestyle Health Care entail?
It entails a lifestyle measurement via the Canadian Holistic Online Consultation, a Lifestyle
Report of Findings, a Recommended customised Lifestyle Action Plan, and Lifestyle Counselling instruction help. It
is above all a Self-Help active program to help people help themselves.
Although healthy living is also stressed within the traditional medical health care paradigm, the focus in
the medical system is clearly on disease care. There is such great cost involved with supplying disease care that
the system is highly stressed. Some provincial governments have separate ministries for health promotion designed
to educate the public on healthy living strategies. These commendable strategies use marketing to educate the
public on disease prevention starting with mandates that governments decide their focus will be centred around.
Large companies place great effort with their government lobby to position themselves to their own advantage.
Rarely do these companies recommend self-help as a solution to disease. We believe self-help should gain
momentum in the media, as it is one very good solution to healthy living.
In Canada government providers are leaning more and more to providing basic emergency care and basic disease
care within the government-mandated "health care for everyone" structure. Newer research showing the effectiveness
of new strategies for health and prevention, take a long time to filter into general accepted usage. Sometime they
are quite costly as well. Governments tend to shy away from every new trend that comes down the research road. The
public is left on their own to discover and analyse health services and products that are in the current
development stages. Marketing hype and advertising publicity bombard the public daily with new discoveries that
come apparently from scientific research.
Unfortunately, it is buyer beware as the rule for much that is on the market now days. What one company
considers good research a health care professional may consider as only preliminary and inconclusive. Some things
are becoming clear though. Nutrition, exercise, rest and relaxation, attitude and perspective in life and spinal
health, are all very important to optimal health. We call these pillars of optimal health because they are the
scaffolding structure that holds up the body. Miss out on one of them and the body weakens. Getting a good concept
of where you stand on each one of these is a worthwhile endeavour for people looking for pain relief and/or optimal
health and wellness.
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