A Clinician's Viewpoint

We are all blessed by our sophisticated health care systems. We now enjoy new medical breakthroughs for complicated and serious conditions.

Over against this good news are the facts that the systems will be chronically over budget for the foreseeable future. Added to that is the even bigger challenge – the needs are outstripping our growing capacities.

There is no end in sight for this bind since we all want the latest from medical research and the highly trained specialists.

There is an even greater challenge on the horizon. It is called wellness. Sadly, medical successes don’t lead to family wellness. A cure just returns us to our previous state of wellness or unwellness. Medical treatments do not produce wellness.

Wellness however is on the happy side of things. It often prevents illness. In other cases it eases treatment and recovery. So, why is there not more wellness?

There are several reasons why wellness is in the shadow of big medicine.

First, medicine has all the money locked up in the hands of specialists and their equipment. The health care budget for community family-based health care services is hardly visible.

Second, wellness is beyond the reach of the systems because the personnel are schooled in illness.

The big third is that wellness is the exclusive work of the family. The health care establishment doesn’t recognize this central fact. It even gets in the way of increased family responsibility for their own wellness and illness.

Wellness is in a different world from illness. It comes from within families. It is a positive lifestyle. It focuses on building family strengths. The professions have yet to learn how to help families with their wellness. Of all the professions, public health nursing comes closest.

Family wellness calls families for seriously altered lifestyles. Strangely, our debt crisis will help us change from debt styles to saving; from problem focus to wellness.

So, where do we go from here? Families need to get solidly into wellness practices. To do this they need new kinds of professional supports. They also need funding for research to examine family wellness.

PS. A well trained friend points out that in this illness/wellness imbalance, veterinary practices are a decade ahead of our health care systems.

Authored by Robert C. Shaw, B.A.Sc. B.D. M.S. W.

President of the Markham Institute for Human Services

Please see: www.themarkhaminstitute.org

Contact Robert at: rcecshaw@aol.com