Maverick Collective Holistic Medicine
Maverick Collective Holistic Medicine
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How to Measure Health
The answer to this question has evolved over time, shifting from traditional measures like the prevalence of chronic diseases, life expectancy, and lifestyle factors such as alcohol consumption, smoking, and physical activity levels. Vancouver, being a progressive city, increasingly embraces a more holistic approach to and definition of health. Here, health is defined not just by individual factors, but also by the relationship between the individual and their environment.
The holistic model
The individual factors of the holistic model include our physical, emotional, and mental health. Physical health encompasses fitness levels, nutrition, sleep, and presence of injury or disease; emotional and mental health link in with personal philosophies and mental frameworks, experienced and inherited trauma, stress levels, psychological and emotional disorders.
The environment we exist within impacts our health as each person has a unique relationship with the world around them. These environmental elements are our community, friends, and family; our workplace, culture, political and economic systems, access to healthcare, and the natural environment.
We have identified two categories of individual and environmental factors in the concept of holistic medicine, and though they are defined groupings there is a lot of overlap and interconnectedness which means not only do the individual factors influence our health, but each of the factors also impacts the others. For example, our nutrition is influenced by our society and economic environment: what we consume is influenced by what is customary in the culture, available, and affordable in the region.
Stressors
This term has long had a negative association with health. Stressors in our lives can also be categorized, with the broad classifications being chemical, physical, mental, and emotional. Chemical stressors include foods consumed, toxins in our environment, and pollution; physical stressors include injury, exercise, and lack thereof; and mental/emotional stressors include job satisfaction, trauma, and meaningful relationships. Stressors are a product of our internal physiology and process, and our interactions with our environment.
As suggested above, just because something is considered a stressor does not mean it is inherently bad. Consider strength training to build muscle: this is a stressor that stimulates an adaptation in the body leading to health benefits such as improved metabolism, increased bone density, resistance to injury, and reduced pain. Therefore, there are stressors that stimulate a positive change in the body and improve adaptability and resilience, and there are stressors which reduce our adaptability and resilience and bring us closer to injury and disease.
As we go about our days, we experience both positive and negative stressors and their cumulative effects. When the impact of the stimuli that increases our capacity outweighs that which depletes us, this is considered a net gain in health. When our system is taxed more than it is replenished, over time we will start to experience symptoms as signals that the body is using to tell us we have overheated in some way. When we reach this point, we need to act to create capacity for our body to adapt to the demands placed on it and heal: this may include increasing hydration, sleep, getting our difficult emotions out on paper or through dialogue, and bodywork.
Adaptability and capacity
Measuring health can be complex given the number of variables that influence us each day. A simple way to help us maintain and improve our health is to consider it from the perspective of adaptability. What are the practices we use to fill us up and create capacity to continue to adapt to the more challenging stressors in our lives; to qualify this further are these practices sufficient to keep us free of the signals of symptoms that indicate our health is compromised. Bearing this in mind, small behaviours or rituals done consistently to create capacity can have a powerful impact on our wellbeing, and are a sustainable way to create positive effects on our health.
