History of Wellness

During my search for facts on the history of this now prevalent subject, I stumbled upon this well written article on the history of wellness. The more I read it, the more I wanted to just copy and paste it in to my post. Why attempt to re-write something that is so well written, right? Enjoy this extensive historical read wellness from a no better source than the Global Wellness Institute.

Wellness is a modern word with ancient roots. As a modern concept, wellness has gained currency since the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, when the writings and leadership of an informal network of physicians and thinkers in the United States largely shaped the way we conceptualize and talk about wellness today.  

The origins of wellness, however, are far older – even ancient. Aspects of the wellness concept are firmly rooted in several intellectual, religious, and medical movements in the United States and Europe in the 19th century. The tenets of wellness can also be traced to the ancient civilizations of Greece, Rome and Asia, whose historical traditions have indelibly influenced the modern wellness movement.

THE EVOLUTION OF WELLNESS

ANCIENT WELLNESS

3,000-1,500 BC: Ayurveda – originated as an oral tradition, later recorded in the Vedas, four sacred Hindu texts. A holistic system that strives to create harmony between body, mind and spirit, Ayurvedic regimens are tailored to each person’s unique constitution (their nutritional, exercise, social interaction and hygiene needs) – with the goal of maintaining a balance that prevents illness. Yoga and meditation are critical to the tradition, and are, of course, increasingly practiced worldwide. 

3,000 – 2,000 BC: Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), one of the world’s oldest systems of medicine, develops. Influenced by Taoism and Buddhism, TCM applies a holistic perspective to achieving health and wellbeing, by cultivating harmony in one’s life. Approaches that evolved out of TCM, such as acupuncture, herbal medicine, qi gong and tai chi, have become core, modern wellness - and even Western medical - approaches.

500 BC:  Ancient Greek physician Hippocrates – is possibly the first physician to focus on preventing sickness instead of simply treating disease, and also argued that disease is a product of diet, lifestyle and environmental factors.

50 BC: Ancient Roman medicine emphasized disease prevention, adopting the Greek belief that illness was a product of diet and lifestyle. Ancient Rome’s highly developed public health system (with its extensive system of aqueducts, sewers and public baths) helped prevent the spreading of germs and maintained a healthier population. 

19TH CENTURY INTELLECTUAL & MEDICAL MOVEMENTS

In the 19th century new intellectual movements, spiritual philosophies and medical practices proliferated in the United States and Europe. A number of alternative healthcare methods that focus on self-healing, holistic approaches, and preventive care – including homeopathy, osteopathy, chiropractic, and naturopathy – were founded during this era and gained widespread popularity in both Europe and the United States. Other new philosophies were more spiritually oriented (such as the “mind-cure movements,” including New Thought and Christian Science) and were instrumental in propagating the modern idea that a primary source of physical health is one’s mental and spiritual state of being.

While some of the beliefs espoused by the thinkers behind these movements have been discredited, or seem “wacky” today, these movements did popularize ideas about regaining or maintaining one’s health through diet, exercise and other lifestyle measures. The philosophies embodied in these 19th century systems – that a healthy body is a product of a healthy mind and spirit – are now considered precursors to the current, thriving wellness and self-help movements. In addition, although these approaches fell out of favor with the rise of modern, evidence-based medicine in the mid-20th century, several of them are now regaining favor within the mainstream medical community and the general public.

1790s: German physician Christian Hahneman develops Homeopathy, a system that uses natural substances to promote the body’s self-healing response.

1860s: German priest Sebastian Kneipp promotes his “Kneipp Cure”, combining hydrotherapy with herbalism, exercise and nutrition. The New Thought movement also emerges, around Phineas Quimby’s theories of mentally-aided healing.

1870s: Mary Baker Eddy founds spiritual-healing-based Christian Science. Andrew Taylor Still develops Osteopathy, a holistic approach grounded in manipulating muscles and joints.

1880s: Swiss physician Maximilian Bircher-Benner pioneers nutritional research, advocating a balanced diet of fruits and vegetables. The YMCA launches as one of the world’s first wellness organizations, with its principle of developing mind, body and spirit.

1890s: Daniel David Palmer develops Chiropractic, focused on the body’s structure and functioning.

1900s: John Harvey Kellogg (director of the Battle Creek, Michigan Sanitorium) espouses a healthy diet, exercise, fresh air, hydotherapy and “learning to stay well.” Naturopathy, focused on the body’s ability to heal itself through dietary and lifestyle change, herbs, massage and joint manipulation, also spreads to the U.S. from Europe. Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner develops the spiritual movement of anthrosophy and the holistic system of anthrosophical medicine. Another Austrian, F.X. Mayr, develops “Mayr Therapy”, a detoxification and dietary modification program.

1910: The Carnegie Foundation’s Flexner Report, a critique of North America’s medical education system for lack of standards and scientific rigor, questions the validity of all forms of medicine other than biomedicine, resulting in most alternative systems (homeopathy, naturopathy, etc.) being dropped from mainstream medical education, and setting the stage for our modern disease-oriented, evidence-based medicine. 

20TH CENTURY: WELLNESS SPREADS AND GET SERIOUS

Our modern use of the word “wellness” dates to the 1950s and a seminal – but little known – work by physician Halbert L. Dunn, called High-Level Wellness (published1961). Although Dunn’s work received little attention initially, his ideas were later embraced in the 1970s by an informal network of individuals in the U.S., including Dr. John Travis, Don Ardell, Dr. Bill Hettler, and others. These “fathers of the wellness movement” created their own comprehensive models of wellness, developed new wellness assessment tools, and wrote and spoke actively on the concept. Travis, Ardell, Hettler and their associates were responsible for creating the world’s first wellness center, developing the first university campus wellness center, and establishing the National Wellness Institute and National Wellness Conference in the U.S.

From 1980-2000, the wellness movement begins to gain momentum, and get taken more seriously by the medical, academic and corporate worlds. For instance, Hettler’s National Wellness Institute caught the attention of Tom Dickey and Rodney Friedman, who then established the monthly Berkeley Wellness Letter (1984), designed to compete with the Harvard Medical School Health Letter, pointedly using “wellness” in the title as contrast. This influential academic publication presented evidence-based articles on wellness approaches, while also debunking numerous health fads. More medical establishment validation: in 1991 the U.S. National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) was established, as part of the government-funded National Institutes of Health.

More government-sponsored programs to promote healthier lifestyles launched in U.S. cities/states. The modern concept of wellness also spread to Europe, where the German Wellness Association (Deutscher Wellness Verband, DWV) and the European Wellness Union (Europäischen Wellness Union, EWU) were founded in 1990.

At the latter end of the 20th century, many corporations began developing workplace wellness programs. The fitness and spa industries globally experienced rapid growth. And an ever-growing line-up of celebrities and self-help experts started bringing wellness concepts to a mainstream audience. However, despite all these disparate developments, this momentum had not yet coalesced under the formal banner of a “wellness industry.”

Several Key Moments: 

1950s: J.I. Rodale, one the first advocates for organic farming in the U.S., launches Prevention magazine, a pioneering publication in promoting alternative/preventative health.

1950s-1960s: Physician Halbert L. Dunn presents his idea of “high level wellness” in 29 lectures, and then publishes these ideas in his influential book by the same title.

1970s: Dr. John Travis, influenced by Dunn, opens the world’s first wellness center in California, and publishes a 12-dimension wellness assessment tool, The Wellness Inventory (1975) and The Wellness Workbook (1977) – the latter both in use today. Don Ardell publishes High Level Wellness: An Alternative to Doctors, Drugs and Disease (1977, referencing Dunn’s work). The University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point (UWSP), drawing on Travis’ materials, establishes the first university campus wellness center, with campus wellness centers spreading throughout the U.S. in the 80s. In ’77-’78, Dr. Bill Hettler of USWP organizes the National Wellness Institute and first National Wellness Conference.

1980s-2000s: Workplace wellness programs, the fitness and spa industries, and celebrity wellness and self-help experts take off – bringing wellness into the mainstream. 

21ST CENTURY: THE TIPPING-POINT

A 2010 New York Times article on the word/concept of wellness noted that when Dan Rather did a 60 Minutes segment on the topic in 1979, he intoned, “Wellness, there’s a word you don’t hear everyday.” But “more than three decades later,” the NYT notes, “wellness is, in fact, a word that Americans might hear every day…” And it’s more than Americans, because in the 21st century, the global wellness movement and market reach a dramatic tipping-point: fitness, diet, healthy living and well-being concepts and offerings proliferate wildly – and a concept of wellness transforms every industry from food and beverage to travel. 

By 2014, more than half of global employers are using health promotion strategies, while a third have invested in full-blown wellness programs (Bucks Consultants report). Medical and self-help experts who promote wellness (like Mehmet Oz, Deepak Chopra or Andrew Weil) become household names. "Wellness," essentially, enters the collective world psyche and vocabulary, and firmly arrives with the media and more medical institutions and governments.

With a chronic disease and obesity crisis raging worldwide in this century, leading to unsustainable healthcare costs, the traditional medical establishment and more governments are shifting the focus to prevention and wellness. For instance, if, in the 90s, most academic medical centers had an adversarial stance towards complementary medicine, now many of the most elite institutions in the world feature Integrative Medicine departments. In 1999, in the U.S., eight medical institutions (including Harvard, Stanford, etc.) convened at a historic conference, “The Consortium of Academic Health Centers for Integrative Medicine,” and today their membership spans 60 esteemed institutions like Yale, Harvard and the Mayo Clinic. In Europe, respected, large institutions like Charité University Medical Center (Berlin), the Karolinska Institute (Stockholm), and the Royal London Hospital have large Integrative Medicine centers. In the U.S., fast-growing federal and foundation research funds (close to $250 million annually just from NCCAM and the National Cancer Institute) are dedicated to research on complementary medicine, wellness and prevention. The American Board of Physician Specialties, which awards board certification to medical doctors, announced that in 2014 it will begin accrediting doctors in Integrative Medicine in 2014.

2014: The Global Wellness Institute (GWI) launches, and releases research that the global wellness industry is a $3.4 trillion market, or 3.4 times larger than the worldwide pharmaceutical industry. The GWI research also benchmarks the ten sectors comprising the global wellness market: Beauty & Anti-Aging ($1.03 trillion), Healthy Eating/Nutrition/Weight Loss ($574 billion), Fitness & Mind-Body ($446 billion), Wellness Tourism ($494 billion), Preventative/Personalized Health ($433 billion), Complementary/Alternative Medicine ($187 billion), Wellness Lifestyle Real Estate ($100 billion), Spa Industry ($94 billion), Thermal/Mineral Springs ($50 billion) and Workplace Wellness ($41 billion). -Global Wellness Institute

What's your history of wellness? How long have you been on a wellness journey? What are your wellness practices?

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Emotional Wellness

The Emotional Dimension is part of the greater continuum of wellness. Building emotional wellness is a commitment to listening and becoming fully aware of your feelings in regards to your physical, emotional, social, spiritual, environmental and financial well-being. It involves intently observing your actions and reactions and asking yourself why you behave and feel the way you do at any given time.

Building emotional wellness is an intense ongoing process of change and growth. It demands alertness and a keen awareness to your thoughts and feelings. It requires taking responsibility for your own behavior and doing your best to be proactive instead of reactive to the feelings that move through you at any given moment.  Emotions are an integral part of being human. They impact how we think and behave. Emotional wellness involves choosing healthy ways to express the rich range of emotions that make us human.

Through this intense process you will:

• Learn to cope with stress effectively
• Gain an increased awareness of your emotions
• Learn to recognize conflict as being potentially healthy
• Learn to manage your feelings effectively
• Learn to express yourself freely
• Gain a realistic assessment of personal limitations
• Learn the value of interpersonal support and assistance
• Form interdependent satisfying relationships based upon mutual commitment, trust and respect
• Become aware and accepting of a wide range of thoughts and feeling in yourself and others
• Learn to be self-aware and self-accepting while remaining flexible and open to personal development
• Learn to make personal choices or decisions based upon the integration of feelings, cognition and behavior
• Learn to maintain a generally positive approach to life that is rooted in one’s sense of personal responsibility
• Gain the ability to manage life in a personally fulfilling manner
• Feel positive and enthusiastic about yourself and life
• Develop autonomy
• Become optimistic
• Gain self-confidence
• Smile and laugh more often

Through this broad dimension on your journey to wellness, you will come to find that taking responsibility for your actions and managing your feelings and your life in personally rewarding ways will help you to see life as an exciting, optimum adventure.

How do you manage your emotions?

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Dimensions of Wellness

The word wellness commonly invokes thoughts of nutrition, exercise, weight management, etc. However, wellness is multi-dimensional, and although the physical dimension is one of the broader dimensions, it is only one of many. The exact number of dimensions is debatable but the majority of the wellness culture uses and follows these seven most common dimensions: Physical, Emotional, Social, Intellectual, Spiritual, Environmental and Occupational. It is recommended that the seven most common dimensions are implemented into the new-found balance of life on your journey to wellness. However, one must decide if it is necessary to add one or more dimensions to suit their own personal needs, preferences, lifestyle and overall journey to wellness.

Even though the long list of possible dimensions are debatable, they all ultimately fall into two broader components, being emotional and physical. With the physical dimension usually being the first to come to mind, the emotional dimension is often overlooked. The relationship between each of the dimensions is complex, thus they are all independently codependent of one another; meaning that they each individually play an important role in achieving total wellness but that they must be in balance with one another and be functioning at the same pace. It is because of this complexity that we must diligently maintain a healthy balance between the dimensions, both individually and collectively.

It is important to note that you do not have to be physically fit or free from disease to strive for an increased state of wellness. Much like success, wellness is a journey, not a destination and you must decide for yourself the quantity and quality of life that you want to achieve along the way.

In no particular order, the following are all of the possible dimensions of wellness:

Emotional Wellness
Environmental Wellness
Family Wellness
Financial Wellness
Intellectual Wellness
Medical Wellness
Mental Wellness
Occupational Wellness
Physical Wellness
Social Wellness
Spiritual Wellness

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A Culture of Wellness

After reading this article written by James Strohecker (www.healthy.net), I found it necessary to implement it into the structure of my blog. It is a topic I am very passionate about and I feel that if more people were educated on the topic we could find resolution to this chaos. I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I did.

Creating a Culture of Wellness

The Wellness-Illness Culture Wars
We are currently experiencing a wellness crisis in our culture, what some may call a wellness culture war. This crisis that has two faces. One face is a culture that approaches health through a focus on disease management rather than teaching the fundamentals of healthy living. This culture has led to health care costs spiraling out of control as it glorifies and promotes unhealthy lifestyle practices, immediate gratification (the quick fix—a pill for every ill) and the consumption of chemical-laden foods and toxic products through slick media advertising; a rapidly deteriorating level of public health with epidemic levels of obesity, diabetes and heart disease is the result. Sadly, this culture has seemingly unlimited resources and controls our major media.

The other face is a smaller but growing culture that looks to the fundamental principles of healthy living to lead us to a higher level of personal health and well-being. This culture creates services which are rarely covered by our health insurance system; promotes consumption of organic foods grown without chemical fertilizers and pesticides and lifestyle products which do not contain harmful or carcinogenic chemical additives; displays a higher level of health and well-being; and suffers less from the epidemic lifestyle and stress engendered illnesses than the members of the “illness culture.” This culture has had limited financial resources and difficulties in getting their message out through our major media.

The first culture is focused on illness. The second culture is focused on maintaining wellness. The illness culture is a very modern phenomenon, growing rapidly since the advent of the pharmaceutical drug industry into our current “medical-industrial complex.” The roots of the wellness culture are very ancient. The systems of ancient Chinese, Ayurvedic, Greek, and Islamic medicine (Unani) viewed health as a state of balance and illness as the result of not living in accordance with natural laws—what I to refer to as “the human operating system.” In these systems good health and longevity were the primary focus of medicine, and the secondary focus was returning people to good health when they became ill.

Moving to a Culture of Wellness
To bring about an expansion of the “culture of wellness” in our society where it becomes the prevailing culture will require a new type of leadership from our federal government, the medical industry, and corporate America, that looks beyond the limited vision of special interests that are not in the common public interest. Our government must put out a clear and positive message about health and wellness and take the food, medical, pharmaceutical, and other industries to task when their products present a public danger and threaten public health.

Corporate America needs to step up to the plate and begin to direct their R&D efforts toward creating products that support health and wellness and do not increase the strain on our overtaxed health care system. Corporations must recognize that their advertising campaigns can either enhance the emerging culture of wellness or support the culture of illness—fast food, alcohol, cigarettes, sugar, processed foods, and chemical additives that lead to epidemic obesity, diabetes, heart disease, fatigue, and stress-related illnesses. For an average individual to pursue a wellness-based lifestyle in the midst of a culture of illness promoted through TV, radio, print, and Internet advertising, it is an uphill battle.

Although there has been some positive movement at government and corporate levels, it is far more realistic that we will begin to see more support occurring on the grass roots community level—in churches, YMCAs, hospitals, employee wellness programs, yoga centers, and fitness centers—since the whole community can directly benefit from a higher level of health and wellness of its members.

The real focus of change, however, will need to be on the individual level, as the increasing level of motivation from upwardly spiraling health care costs and failures of our health care system will lead people to continue to take more and more responsibility for their own health and well-being.

Making a Long-Term Wellness Strategy Medical insurance premiums continue to rise beyond the affordability of ordinary consumers, and today a family may spend $1,000 per month in health insurance. Over five years that equals $60,000, a sizeable investment with little to show for it. A good question to ask is this: What does this $60,000 buy me? Will my general level of health and well-being improve or diminish in 5 years? Am I basically buying emergency protection and still having to pay out-of-pocket for most medical services?

Here is a new idea. What if we were to create a five-year plan to improve our general level of health and well-being? If we explore this idea, it might look something like this:

Commit to Working with a Wellness Coach Wellness coaching has made great strides in the last year and appears to be poised to play a prominent role in the new culture of wellness. A wellness coach will help you determine the areas of your lifestyle, attitudes and behaviors that you are most motivated to change, help you create a wellness action plan to create the necessary change, and then motivate you and keep you accountable for reaching your goals of increased health and well-being.

After you have worked with a coach and feel a level of comfort and compatibility, explore the idea of setting up a long-term coaching program. If you are ready to make an investment in your health, consider a five-year program for high-level health and well-being. The program may call for more intensive work at the beginning of each year (January–March) with two coaching sessions per month. After that time you may choose to have one session a month or one every six weeks. The idea is to create the framework that enables you to receive ongoing coaching to help you reach your health and wellness goals. (To find a wellness coach, contact wellness@healthy.net.)

Use an Online Wellness Program Many wellness coaches are now working with the Wellness Inventory program, a whole person assessment program designed to help individuals gain personal insight into 12 dimensions of physical, emotional, and spiritual wellness in their life. The program offers guidance and tools to transform this new awareness into lasting changes in their lives through use of the personal wellness plan, my wellness journal, e-mail reminders, and the wellness resource centers. Working with a wellness coach who can keep you motivated and accountable for your agreements to reach your wellness goals amplifies the power and effectiveness of the Wellness Inventory many times over. (To experience the Wellness Inventory go to: www.WellPeople.com and enter the promo code “totalhealth.”)

Practices to Promote Health and Well-being Your personal wellness plan may include a range of lifestyle and mind-body practices to support maintaining a higher level of health and wellness and it will change over time to focus on the areas of your life you are currently most motivated to change. Some of these practices carry little or no cost, while others carry heavy costs. For example, paying attention to how you breathe, move, eat your meals, process your feelings, communicate with others, and taking daily walks, carries no costs. Other practices, such as yoga, Pilates, qigong, tai chi, and some fitness routines, can first be learned in class and then later practiced on your own (or with video instruction). These have small up-front instructional costs and sometimes some ongoing costs if you enjoy the class environment.

Finally, there are practices with heavy associated costs, such as fitness club memberships and dietary supplements, as well as trips to your massage therapist, acupuncturist, nutritionist, energy healer, naturopath, chiropractor practices, or holistic physician to help monitor your state of health and wellness and help bring you back into balance if necessary. Most of these costs will be in the first 12–18 months of your plan as you are learning and choosing the wellness practices that you would like to integrate into your life.

The beauty of this approach is that you are investing time and money in your health and well-being by creating a longterm, strategic wellness plan which allows you to see the holistic health practitioners you most trust to guide you to a higher level of health and well-being, and to pursue the wellness practices which address the areas of your life you are most motivated to change. Your greatest reward will come from the wellness practices you pursue on a daily basis until they become part of the fabric of your life.

The idea of a five or ten-year wellness plan may first seem extreme to some—a six month plan may seem more reasonable. However, as health care costs and insurance premiums continue to rise out of sight, the wisdom of taking our health and well-being into our own hands through enlightened selfcare, wellness practices, and holistic health care may prove to be the most prudent investment we make in our lives. Health is your greatest wealth, and it is worth cultivating. - James Strohecker

What would be the first change you would like to see take place within the health-care industry?

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Defining Wellness

More than ever before, Wellness has become a prevalent word in today’s society. We see it in magazines, on TV, on billboards and it has even become a popular topic of conversation. But what exactly is Wellness? How is it defined? Wellness is an inspiring and powerful word. However, it is one of the least understood words of the English Language and therefore, there is no universally accepted definition of Wellness.  In most thoughtful attempts to define Wellness, we commonly see a reference to a “state of well-being”, which is vague, to say the least.

The truth is wellness is a tough word to define because it exists on a continuum and is unique to each individual person based on our individual circumstances. With that being said, here is my definition of wellness: “Wellness is a multi-dimensional state of being which is oriented toward maximizing the potential existence of positive health in an individual exemplified by maintaining a continuum of balance and purposeful direction within the environment.”

First and foremost, wellness is a choice. It is a choice to assume responsibility for the quality of life that you want to live. It starts with a conscious decision to shape a healthy lifestyle. Wellness is a pre-disposition to adopt a series of key principles in the various aspects of life that lead to high levels of well-being and life satisfaction.

Once an individual has chosen to commit themselves to a life of wellness, it becomes a process. It is a never ending, conscious, deliberate process that requires a person to become fully aware of all the aspects of life and to make positive changes for a more satisfying, successful existence. Wellness is also a process of creating and adapting patterns of behavior that lead to improved health in each of the wellness dimensions. Everyone has individual needs and preferences. Therefore, each individual must find a balance of the dimensions that satisfies their needs and preferences.

• It is a never ending process because improvement is always possible.
• Being aware means that we are continuously self-educating and seeking ways to improve.
• Before making changes, we must consider a variety of options and select those that are in our best interest.
• Success is determined by each individual to be their own collection of life accomplishments.

While traditional (Western) medicine is focused on alleviating disease, the wellness approach to things encourages an individual to take responsibility for his/her own personal well-being. Wellness is much more than the simple absence of illness and/or disease. Wellness is a proactive and preventative approach that is designed to provide optimum levels of health, emotional and social functioning. Wellness involves our recognition that we have psychological, physical, spiritual and social needs that are necessary for us to have higher levels of functioning. Wellness emphasizes the whole individual. It’s the integration of the spirit, the body, the mind and the environment in which we function; and the understanding that everything we do, feel, think and believe has a direct impact on our state of health and overall happiness.

What does wellness mean to you?

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