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with Richard Linchitz, MD By: Alex Lubarsky My incurable, chronic, life-altering and debilitating disease called psoriatic arthritis is CURED! Wait—can we say that? Our government has a law stating, “Only a drug can cure, prevent, or treat a disease.” But I didn’t use any drugs, and yet my disease is no longer there. It’s definitely a little confusing. So perhaps it wasn’t “cured” but my body simply reverted to its pre-disease state of optimal wellness! O well. Our focus, however, was never the disease, but rather it was identifying the fundamentals of disharmony in my body, and once the balance was achieved, the “incurable condition,” like hunger pangs after a good meal, simply disappeared.
Welcome to the other side of a Functional Medicine approach to lifelong wellness. It begins in a place so powerful, so unlimited, and so full of possibilities that after thousands of years of evolution, humanity is just scratching the surface of its incredible potential. This journey begins…in the mind. Of course, the quality of the water you drink and bathe in, the things you ultimately choose to call “food,” the potency of your supplements, what you do to regularly detoxify and de-stress, how (or perhaps whether) you exercise, and, most importantly, who you choose as your expert guide in getting you back on the road to true wellness are all indeed vital, but ultimately they are only tools, tools that are useless without a blueprint to guide and motivate you in the direction of optimal living.
There is a Russian proverb that says: “He who doesn’t smoke or drink will die healthy!” Unfortunately, this has become the blueprint and driving philosophy behind the daily decisions of many of my comrades from the former Soviet Union. In fact my wife’s school friend from Ukraine came to visit us recently with her husband. They lived with us for about three weeks as they took in the sights of our beautiful city. The husband, who is in his late 30’s, is about 150 pounds overweight, and every day for breakfast he would go out to the backyard, crack open a beer and smoke a cigarette … or three!
That is the natural action for this imbedded belief. But that cute and seemingly innocuous quote, which actually rhymes in Russian, says nothing about how those who live this destructive philosophy spend the last 10 or 20 years of their lives—how they suffer, how much they miss out on, and how much emotional, and at times financial pain they unintentionally inflict on those closest to them. So perhaps a more accurate way of saying it would be: “He who doesn’t smoke or drink will die healthy, but those who do, will die sick and take 10 years to do it.”
To begin building your wellness philosophy, you have to understand that health is the foundation of life, including everything you love and think is important, and that the best way to cure, prevent, and treat a disease is to focus on establishing the foundations of lifelong wellness. Ideas like these, deeply implanted in your thinking, will eventually weave into the beliefs that will naturally drive your daily actions. These in turn will influence your habits and ultimately deliver a life lived to its fullest possibilities, enjoyed completely, with an ending as beautiful and natural as the beginning.
But let’s stop for a moment and look at today’s reality. What kind of a destiny can one expect from sitting in front of a television set for four hours or more every day, watching “free” programming that bombards your beautiful mind with self-destructive ideas aimed at the pleasure sensors, instant gratification buttons, sugar addictions, and the only established, and acceptable answer to all health problems … drugs, surgery and hospitalization? To answer this question, all we need to do is look at the modern-day ‘black plague’ of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and cancer in this country, or at the mass graves dug for the millions of Americans who have lost their battle with today’s herd-mentality medicine.
When I realized this, the first thing I did to stop the infiltration of this self-destructive philosophy into my thinking — was to disconnect my cable TV!
That’s radical, I know. But here is what Dan Millman, a former world champion athlete and author of Way of the Peaceful Warrior, says about moderation: “Moderation? It’s mediocrity, fear, and confusion in disguise. It's the devil's dilemma. It's neither doing nor not doing. It's the wobbling compromise that makes no one happy. Moderation is for the bland, the apologetic, for the fence-sitters of the world afraid to take a stand. It's for those afraid to laugh or cry, for those afraid to live or die. Moderation...is lukewarm tea, the devil's own brew.”
Amen, Mr. Millman!
So now, after stopping the self-destructive ideas from influencing my thoughts, here is the most important part. For the last few years I have been, very deliberately, wrapping my mind around some of the best wellness-oriented practitioners in the United States, those who every week come on our radio program to educate, motivate, and inspire our listeners and me to pursue optimal health and lifelong wellness. I also attend our biannual NAVEL Wellness Expo, where I learn from the speakers, the exhibiting companies, as well as from those who attend as guests. Listening to all of them, I allow their philosophy, wisdom, and ideas to permeate my own thinking, strengthen my beliefs, guide my daily actions, and build my habits, so that I can embark on a destiny of my own design.
This is radical power living—and I’d have it no other way.
Alex Lubarsky is the founder of Health Media Group, the company that produces the NAVEL Wellness Expo. He is also the host of the NAVEL Talks, a weekly radio talk show on Radio AM 1240 WGBB that airs every Tuesday at 6:30 PM.
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