Today many, many of us have moved ahead of traditional medical practices in recognizing that health is not defined by the presence or absence of disease. Far beyond simple freedom from disease, we want robust, energetic, high performance minds and bodies. In our quest, we spend billions of dollars every year with alternative care systems. Why? Because alternative systems have recognized wellness problems that exist between disease and health and treat them, albeit with varying degrees of success.

But the mechanisms of these treatments, even when successful, are hard for most people to understand. Given the choice, most of us would prefer treatments founded on hard science; treatments that are based on physical understanding, verified scientifically, provide predictable results, and whose side effects are well known.

The bad news is that with so much disease to cure, Western medical practice has largely ignored wellness outside the research institutions. The good news is that along side of and with disease research, wellness tools and techniques have been simultaneously researched and developed. These wellness tools and techniques are available to practitioners today, and it simply remains for practitioners to learn about them and incorporate them into their practices.

We should expect great strides in the prevention of certain diseases as well as significant improvements in the mean quality of people’s lives as the concept of wellness takes hold and these tools are made more available.