You can't afford to get sick, and you can't depend on the present health care system to keep you well. It's up to you to protect and maintain your body's innate capacity for health and healing by making the right choices in how you live.
Interpretation
Health is primarily an individual's responsibility, not solely reliant on healthcare systems.
This quote emphasizes the importance of personal responsibility in maintaining one's health. Andrew Weil suggests that while the healthcare system plays a role in our well-being, the ultimate power to stay healthy lies in the choices we make in our daily lives, including our diet, exercise, and lifestyle habits.
In practice
During a wellness seminar, you might quote this to encourage participants to take control of their health.
There's no limit to what working with the breath can accomplishmy own first-hand experiences with this natural healing method have convinced me that breathing well may be the master key to good health. I recommend breath work to all my patients.
In my view, prescribing antidepressant drugs is too often a quick and easy substitute for developing treatment plans that address the totality of health concerns and lifestyle factors that have an impact on wellness, including emotional wellness.
Imagine that each time you inhale, that the universe is breathing into you, and as you exhale it is breathing out of you.
Dreaming is a phenomenon of purely individual consciousness, and consequently impossible to thoroughly deconstruct by a community of researchers. But dreaming matters.
Imagine a world in which medicine was oriented toward healing rather than disease, where doctors believed in the natural healing capacity of human beings and emphasized prevention above treatment. In such a world, doctors and patients would be partners working toward the same ends.
I have argued for years that we do not have a health care system in America. We have a disease-management system - one that depends on ruinously expensive drugs and surgeries that treat health conditions after they manifest rather than giving our citizens simple diet, lifestyle and therapeutic tools to keep them healthy.
I have never felt more confident in myself, more clear on who I am as a woman. But I am constantly thinking about my own health and making sure that I'm eating right and getting exercise and watching the aches and pains. I want to be this really fly 80-90-year old.
It is bad enough that people are dying of AIDS, but no one should die of ignorance.
Truly affordable but high-quality health care tools and services are the only means by which quality health care can be provided to all.
People tend to think of overweight and obesity as strictly a personal matter, but there is much that communities can and should do to address these problems.
We can make a commitment to promote vegetables and fruits and whole grains on every part of every menu. We can make portion sizes smaller and emphasize quality over quantity. And we can help create a culture - imagine this - where our kids ask for healthy options instead of resisting them.
Fasting is the greatest remedy-- the physician within.
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