Engaging and Empowering Our Communities
Plain and simple, we are here to care for you in the best way possible. Empowering you with information and engaging you with ideas plays a big part in how we help you live well.
Still, with the loads of information at our fingertips today, many of us are more confused about what we’re eating or doing or taking than we have ever been. Here’s why:
- Food industry — they’re only interested in selling you more stuff. To do that, companies willfully confuse or ignore important issues, mis-label products, and bombard you with advertising, all in an elaborately orchestrated and never-ending attempt to get you to consume more. They are powerful, and they are not on your side. And what we eat is the number one driver of our personal health and wellness.
- News media — What we see and hear and read about health is shot from a cannon by news outlets vying for eyeballs. What you get (mostly) are sensational headlines and lots of very brief reports on the latest findings. You may also see compelling stories of triumph and cure as well as heart breaking news of tragedy and illness. Medical science, as it’s reported and consumed, is murky and confusing. Often the real science is removed altogether because it’s not as interesting as the click-inducing headlines. Or it doesn’t sell products. Far too often it exploits our fears and anxieties and plays on our naive hopes for easy and instant results. Through such a lens, it’s a daunting challenge to make decisions.
- Family & culture — no matter what our background, we all inherited a set of cures and cares from generations past. Some of these may be helpful. Many have little to do with science, and most are unproven.
- School — we are taught about our bodies in school, and somewhere along the way, some of us have a biology class. What we learned 5 or 10 or 20 years ago may need an update. New science emerges every day.
- Osmosis — with all the information available to us, we tend to cultivate ideas about how to best feed and nourish our bodies, and more generally about what constitutes healthy living, on a collection of all of the above. A little like osmosis, we take a bit that we like from here and another bit from there, and we discard or ignore bits that don’t fit with our personal views. Unfortunately, that’s not very scientific either.
Do I starve a cold? Feed a fever?
The five points above are powerfully dis-empowering circumstances. The antidote rests in engaging and empowering people. The challenges we as a health care provider have in helping you get well and live healthier also depend on engaging and empowering people. That’s why we offer this website, including these media pages.