Introduction to Wellness

Welcome to our Wellness topic area, which is all about how people can enhance the quality of their lives and avoid serious illness by making simple but sometimes surprisingly difficult changes to their lifestyles. Wellness is a broad topic that includes disease prevention (the taking of steps to avoid getting ill at a future date), stress reduction, and even personal, social and spiritual growth.

At least as applied to healthcare, wellness is a new idea. The western world's healthcare establishment has historically always focused on illness, and curing illness. Until quite recently, very little attention was ever paid to helping people who are not ill, disordered or diseased in some way learn how to further enhance the quality of their lives, or prevent the onset of future illness. To this day, medical doctors, psychologists and other health professionals are primarily taught categories of disease and how to fix those diseases. The healthcare insurance system is geared almost completely towards paying for interventions designed to fix disease. It is easy to get an insurance carrier to pay thousands of dollars for coronary bypass surgery. It is much harder to get them to pay for gym memberships and nutritional counseling that might have helped avoid the need for such surgery in the first place. Awareness that an "ounce of prevention is truly worth a pound of cure" is only slowly dawning. You can get ahead of this curve by reading and taking seriously the following information: