COVID-19 has cast a pitiless spotlight on the importance of preventative lifestyle approaches, and how our future health will depend on a new alignment between wellness and healthcare. In the past, these health models have been seen as two separate areas of health and well-being. Western healthcare standing as the clinical, cold face of sick based medicine and wellness as the warmer, very often trend led daily healthcare. So does this mean, finally, an exciting movement towards the convergence of healthcare and wellness.

At the Global Wellness Summit, 2020, experts discussed how the pandemic has provided painful, incontrovertible evidence that “we need to shift our healthcare system away from profiting from sickness and gear it towards preventing it” – forecasting that we will see a combination of functional and conventional medicine across community and economic lines, with telemedicine (and tele-wellness) playing a much bigger role. So, perhaps 2021 will be the year we start to shift the language and the focus of medicines towards an empowered preventative approach to healthcare.

Moving towards an Empowered Lifestyle Medicine:

Aaron Antonovsky, a professor of medical sociology, theories reject the "traditional medical-model division of separating health and illness". He described the relationship as a continuous variable, what he called the "health-ease versus dis-ease continuum. He coined the term Salutogenesis, which is a medical approach focusing on factors that support human health and well-being, rather than on factors that cause disease (pathogenesis). The word "salutogenesis" comes from the Latin salus = health and the Greek genesis = origin. Antonovsky developed the term from his studies of "how people manage stress and stay well". More specifically, the "salutogenic model" is concerned with the relationship between health, stress, and coping. In his 1979 book, Health, Stress and Coping, Antonovsky described a variety of influences that led him to the question of how people survive, adapt, and overcome in the face of even the most punishing life-stress experiences. Therefore, a shift in attention to the attributes or behaviours that support us through inevitable stresses rather than the treatment of the end result of stress - disease. Considering scientists have started to track that 95% of most illness are derived from stress, this appears a sensible empowering move.

An Empowered Structure for Lifestyle Medicine

When myself and Emilia set up Escapada, we had one absolute focus and passion, it is within your ability to create your own empowered natural toolbox that will support you throughout your life. We both come from a strong background of Western medicine and have the utmost respect for its diagnostics and acute medicine. But at the risk of becoming painfully repetitive, the gold lies in the integration of Western medicine and natural medicine, and the greatest gold lies in the concept that your daily lifestyle is your medicine.

Bruce Lipton, developmental biologist, whose pioneering research on cloned human stem cells presaged today’s revolutionary new field of epigenetics. Epigenetics is a new type of science that is growing in popularity and promise in the scientific world. It is the study of cellular and physiological traits, or the external and environmental factors, that turn our genes on and off, and in turn, define how our cells actually read those genes. So effectively the interplay of our bodies and imbalances, and the influence of external environment and more importantly lifestyle factors. So slowly but surely, science has started to track and provide a scientific language for the long standing health sciences and philosophies of Chinese Medicine and Ayurveda. The further we move forward with our careers, the more we gain respect for the long standing and solid nature of Chinese Medicine and Ayurveda. They don’t chop and change information, they live on solid principles and when adopted give individuals a life long individualised health and self care system with a preventative approach at its core.

moving Forward:

Let us make 2021 the year we start to reframe how we talk about health, how we think about health and start having meaningful conversations moving away from a sick based healthcare model to an empowered preventative healthcare model. Examine as individuals how we view our health, what it means to you and how empowered do you feel and trust that you can make informed decisions in times of imbalance. We urge you to feel empowered in starting to build your own empowered individualised healthcare system. We invite you to start using lifestyle and natural medicine as a first port of call, and only when needed, Western medicine. Start inviting other methods of treating imbalance into your life, for example, use acupuncture instead of antibiotics for your sinusitis, get your seasonal tune ups, adjust your eating habits as we move through the year.

Girr, at the Global Wellness Summit, predicted that while healthcare has been quite sterile, and “wellness has become the cool kid on the block,” that the future is an unprecedented convergence, where innovative, new models that bring health and wellness together symbiotically “becoming the global cultural north star.” She argued that new integrations will give healthcare the pleasurable, aspirational qualities of wellness while wellness will increasingly get the science-backed credibility of the medical industry–and the players and brands that execute on this (and it’s already happening) will “win big.” Having many years of experience of both medicines, Chinese medicine and Ayurveda have been winning big for many, many years, we are just waking up to it.

We hope you enjoy and feel empowered, as we continue to bring you the wisdom but simplicity of Chinese Medicine and Ayurveda, it is the sum of all of these small adjustments that bring you the biggest strength and resilience.