Selfcare – a revolution in healthcare
“Better to properly maintain your vehicle than to wait for it to breakdown. It’s a lot less complicated and a lot less expensive in the long run” Brett Elliott
The other day I was thinking about health insurance. I used to have it – the conventional type that is.
When I arrived in New Zealand over 20 years ago I stopped my annual health cover and never really thought much about it after that. And then the other day I was musing upon what exactly is health insurance?
In conventional terms, it seems to me it’s about paying for the assurance that if you need some expensive surgery, treatment or medication, you will be covered financially.
This is all well and good. But what about if you took active steps to avoid having to need those things in the first place. Wouldn’t that be a type of health insurance?
When I rebranded my business 2 years ago, I came up with the name ‘Art of Health and Science of Wellbeing’ – based on the premise that there is an art and science to avoiding illness and staying healthy. In Qigong, we call this understanding and following the laws of health. Indeed, in ancient China, you paid your doctor to keep you well, and if you became ill you didn’t pay!
As human beings, we are part of nature, and are subject to the laws of nature. This is to say that there are certain laws we need to follow in order to stay healthy, and if we break those laws, we will become ill. As my colleague and mentor Richard Moat says, when you break these laws “sooner or later nature will present its bill”.
I learnt this the hard way, through unknowingly breaking those laws for many years until I was so ill I could no longer function. And it’s taken me a long time to learn what these laws are, and still takes ongoing, daily commitment to follow them, because old habits die hard.
There is little no doubt in my mind now that the best health insurance is mindfully and actively taking care of oneself on a daily basis so that illness never has to occur. I do believe it’s possible, although it does take effort.
Go well!
Kim
Transformational solutions for optimal wellbeing
Comments 4
This is really the paradigm that I believe societies need to adopt. It’s an aside, but apart from investing in our physical and mental health in our everyday ways of living and working, I think it would be great to develop some way for people to pay into their own investment account for those times they might need emergency or elective treatments. I look at my grandparents who’ve paid hundreds of thousands into insurance funds which they haven’t needed and I imagine how much more prosperous they could have been.
Thanks for your thoughts! Excellent idea.
wonderful publish, very informative. I ponder why the other experts of this sector do not understand this.
You should continue your writing. I am sure, you have
a huge readers’ base already!
Thanks, really appreciate the feedback!