I have a concept that I'm truly excited about sharing with you today! We have a saying that we use in the office that good is the enemy of great in other words if you're willing to settle for good you'll never achieve great and this is a concept that relates to your health. This is a concept that I think is just important for us to embrace in our life in general but the reality is that if you're willing to settle for a good marriage you won't have a great marriage, if you're willing to settle for a good relationship with God you won't have a great relationship with God, if you're willing to settle for a good career you won't have a great career. So let's look at that as it relates to our health. If we're willing to settle for good health we will never achieve great health. You know the things I've learned in the years of taking care of thousands of people is everybody wants to come to me and say what do I do?, just tell me what to do? But the reality is it doesn't work because they just do it for a little bit of time then they quit doing it and so what is really more important is to transform our thinking about health, well-being and what it is we're really trying to accomplish. Your health impacts every aspect of your life and therefore having great health gives you the opportunity to have a better relationship with your wife, a better career. a better relationship with God, be able to partake in the things that you enjoy without limitation and so I want to go through some of these things because really what we're talking about is not settling for average. I hear people say sometimes that they just want to live the average American life. Well in the big context of the world the average American life is phenomenal. The reality is in the context of health in America the average American life is not so great when we look at it in the perspective of our health and well-being. So I'm going to reference some things here just so I can make sure the information I give you is accurate. Over half of the entire population of America has a chronic illness; over 80% of our workforce has a chronic illness. Chronic illness is responsible for nine days of absenteeism per employee per year and up to 91 days of lost productivity per employee per year. Chronic illness is the leading cause of death and suffering. 80% of our population is dying and will die from chronic illness. The Black Plague only killed 30% of our population, that's a quote I get from Dr. Chestnut. The reality in understanding that is that we're not living an abundantly healthy life in America. When I say chronic illness, what is that you say? It's heart disease, it's diabetes, it's cancer, it's Alzheimer's, it's dementia, it's psoriasis, it's lupus, it's all of these illnesses that are affecting everybody. All the autoimmune diseases, they're rampant. Let me just give you some other stats and this is not to be negative but there's a certain reality that I think that we need to connect with to understand where this motivation and desire to get better comes from in two decades. Meaning in 20 years we went from 11th in life expectancy to 42nd in life expectancy in the world. 26% of American children are taking a drug. Autism is somewhere around one in 68 kids in America right now. One in two American children have a chronic health condition lasting more than a year one and two American children have a chronic health condition lasting more than a year. Asthma, ADHD and development delay are at all times highs. The U.S. ranks last out of 13 countries studied in a recent study of infant mortality. One in two Americans get cancer. The reality is with all that going on we spend almost twice as much per person per year on health care. Meaning we're getting more health care, more checkups and more physicals. We're spending more money on health care per person in this country than any other country in the world. So if giving people more health care was the solution to this epidemic we should be the healthiest country in the world not continually declining. What does that have to do with you being here and being in our office? Because the reality is you have to decide you're not going to settle for good health anymore, that you want great health and great health means that you're just not going to be able to wake up and do what everybody around you is doing because what everybody around you is doing is giving us these statistics right here. You have to do something above and beyond that which means maybe everybody isn't coming in and getting their regular chiropractic adjustments to keep their spine and nervous system healthy. Should they? Yes. But maybe they're not and that's why these statistics are the way they are. Maybe everybody isn't eating in a way that's healthy and produces vitality in their body and that's what's producing these results. Maybe we're not moving our bodies and exercising enough and that's what's creating the statistics that you're reading. Maybe we're not doing things to invest in our relationship with God and building that spiritual relationship and understanding why we're on this planet and what it is we're here to do and how we can be a value and be of service to fellow human beings. You see all of these things are part of health, health isn't just about the X's and O's it's about how we think about our existence and then what actions we take to do that. So a wellness lifestyle is critically important to you changing what your health looks like at 30, 40, 50, 60 and 70 years of age. I hope this empowers you to make a shift and you're thinking which empowers you to make a shift in your actions I look forward to seeing you on your next wellness adjustment!
