Secrets to be Simply Healthy

American jazz musician Charles Mingus, speaking of songwriting, once said, “Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, is creativity.”

A Fox News Health article, “4 Secrets to Never Getting Sick” gives us four simple ways to stay healthy:

1)   Get plenty of fresh air

2)   Relax

3)   Wash your hands

4)  Get plenty of sleep

The article reminded me of Robert Fulghum’s bestseller (7 million copies) from the mid-eighties, All I Really Need to Know I learned in Kindergarten.

Fulghum’s simple wisdom struck a universal chord and reminded us that we have a choice. We can either surrender to the theory that life is chaotic, complex and confusing, or we can focus on the simple rules of living that tend to make us healthy and happy.

The Fox News article, although couched in the simplicity of four easy steps, is actually based on scientific research from Yale University and the University of Michigan, as well as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

And it made me wonder whether we haven’t made health care more complicated than it needs to be. We seem to have become a nation that relies too heavily on expensive, drug and surgery based medicine instead of simple, healthy living principles.

But this is beginning to change.

According to everydayhealth.com, “About 40 percent of American adults currently use some type of alternative therapy to relieve stress, help manage health conditions, or just promote general wellness.”

The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine confirms that more than 85 percent of those alternatives involve some sort of prayer.

USNews reported in 2008 that, “In recent years, a growing number of rigorous studies have shown that spirituality—including prayer, meditation, and attendance at religious services—benefits health in ways that science hasn’t fully explained. Among other effects, regular worship and other spiritual acts appear to lengthen life expectancy, strengthen immunity, improve the body’s response to stress, and boost other measures of physical health.”

Indiana State Rep. Vanessa Summers, writing for the IndyStar this past September, told us that, “The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation recently studied the future of health and health care in America and forecasts the gradual adoption of an expanded view of health by the medical establishment. This view incorporates social, mental, and spiritual factors.”

So where does this leave us? Moving in the right direction—away from over-dependence on crisis oriented, drug and surgery based medicine that we can no longer afford, and toward preventive health care that harnesses the affordable simplicity of healthy thinking, healthy living… and prayer.