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 stopped smoking. When I stopped smoking, my voice changed... so drastically, I couldn't believe it myself.
Addiction is a chronic disease of the brain and it's one that we have to treat the way we would any other chronic illness: with skill, with compassion and with urgency.
The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don't want, drink what you don't like, and do what you'd rather not.
One of my rules is pay more, eat less. You do get what you pay for, and if you're willing to pay more for pastured eggs or grass-fed beef, you're getting something that's more delicious, and you'll feel better about eating it.
Exercise is really important to me - it's therapeutic. So if I'm ever feeling tense or stressed or like I'm about to have a meltdown, I'll put on my iPod and head to the gym or out on a bike ride along Lake Michigan with the girls.
I read somewhere that when a person takes part in community action, his health improves. Something happens to him or to her biologically. It's like a tonic.
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