Forget Your Drugs, Sort Your Lifestyle! - a podcast by Michael Lingard BSc. DO. M.DOC Cert.WPNut. Orthopath Buteyko Educator Plantrician

Hi, I’m Michael Lingard , Orthopath, Buteyko Educator and Plantrician introducing Podcast 12 entitled “Forget Your Drugs, Sort Your Lifestyle!”

Forget Your Drugs, Sort Your Lifestyle!

Almost all chronic diseases and most acute illnesses are the product of years of many lifestyle stressors on the body. It is wishful thinking or just ignorance to believe we can take a single pill to fix a disease. Let me emphasise the fact that some people may be totally dependent on certain drugs, this podcast is about the rest of us.

This trust in the drug based solution has been driven by two main forces, the commercial profit motives of the pharmaceutical companies supported by the modern reductionist medicine and the demands from patients to be given a pill for every ill rather than accept the need to make changes in their lifestyle supported by a failure of health promotion education for both doctors and the public at large.

I am not deriding the enormous advances that have been made in drug treatment that are keeping millions alive and in a functioning state that without their use and without any significant change in lifestyle most would suffer far more and meet an early death.

So what are the factors that might ensure most of us would live a long, active, disease free life? What evidence is there to support this concept? Essentially, could it be true that vibrant health is the normal state of affairs and that diseases should be the remarkable exceptions?

Health is based on normal structural integrity (almost ignored in modern medicine yet the fundamental tenet of osteopathy that recognizes the fact that “structure governs function”), health is founded on the optimal diet (once again a factor almost ignored by modern medicine despite the fact that 90% of chronic diseases are closely related to diet, “we are what we eat”), health is dependent on normal breathing (few doctors routinely check their patient’s breathing despite the fact that almost all diseases are linked to dysfunctional breathing and that most people in the West suffer from over-breathing or chronic hidden hyperventilation), health is dependent on an adequate level of physical activity (our sedentary lifestyle and increasing reliance on wheels over legs has become a major issue), health is severely damaged by stress or our mental outlook and state (this is the most complex factor affected by our childhood, our family, work, education, emotional traumas etc., so it would seem pretty unlikely that such a complex, multifaceted problem could be fixed with a drug or two), health is dependent on our environment (this is for most of us outside our individual control, pollution of the air we breathe or the water and food we consume along with many other toxins found in our modern lives, there are few drugs that can eliminate or neutralize these poisons to our body), the list could be extended indefinitely for the simple reason that health is connected to, well, everything, as I expand on in my book entitled

“Connection- towards a broader understanding of health in medicine.”

As a first small step in this direction I offer a short Skype Course “ Optimal Health Lifestyle Course” that addresses the three most important factors, diet, breathing and stress.

Download details as pdf: http://www.totalhealthmatters.co.uk/Skype%20Lifestyle%20Course.pdf

All this is not new but can be found in the growing interest in “functional medicine” that tries to find the causes of ill health, where the body’s functioning has gone astray and then to address these factors. Looks very much like the above, don’t you think!

Further episodes of Your Health in Your Hands!

Further podcasts by Michael Lingard BSc. DO. M.DOC Cert.WPNut. Orthopath Buteyko Educator Plantrician

Website of Michael Lingard BSc. DO. M.DOC Cert.WPNut. Orthopath Buteyko Educator Plantrician