We’re Back for Another Year!

I hope you had a happy holiday season and a great start to the New Year. I’ve got plenty of great things planned for 2025 designed to help you get and stay healthy, and I’m going to start by reinforcing the Memo I sent a week ago in a slightly different way.

About 60 years ago, a new wellness movement was just beginning. I read an article about it and was fascinated. It was written by the then director of the Department of Vital Statistics in 1959, and while the article is several pages long, it was summarized in a chart.

Here’s the main idea. Traditional wellness relies on people taking care of themselves through diet, exercise, stress management, etc., if the environment allows it. Traditional medicine relies on treating disease through medications and surgeries. They are not opposites; optimal health requires both approaches, not the exclusion of one over the other. The key is that they both must be based on science.

The Department of Vital Statistics is now part of the Department of Health and Human Services. Whoever becomes the head of that department must understand that the wellness of the nation depends on continuing health and medical research; there can be no pauses or time outs. That person must also understand that wellness includes both approaches; we need to know more about personal health and the necessary healthy habits, but we also need continued research in medical approaches to treat disease. They are both critical to the health of our nation.

For your part? Your wellness begins with making healthy diet, exercise, and supplementation a part of your healthy habits, in addition to seeing your medical professionals on schedule. It all begins with one question:

What are you prepared to do today?