For the last twenty-five years, I’ve traveled this country reporting on full spectrum health—health care that embraces and includes all options in health practice—because we need all effective approaches to attain good health.

In conversations with leading health experts, top hospital administrators, and world-renowned doctors and scientists, they’ve all told me one thing:

“We’re helpless. Consumers alone have the power to transform our health care system into one that truly serves health.”

The bottom line is: You have the right – and the responsibility to choose your health care. Through the Health Journalist ezine and blog, my goal is to empower, inform, and connect you with the community of consumers and healers who choose Proactive Health.

Proactive Health:

• Clarifies options to give you, the health consumer, the know-how and authority to make health decisions
• Includes full spectrum health options, rather than excluding traditional and innovative approaches
• Goes beyond symptom management to address causative factors
• Protects the right to consumer health choice
• Builds connection to a community of consumers and health experts

Proactive health options can tip the balance towards health and away from disease. Join me and leading health experts in our upcoming blog and forum to change the conversation about health care to a proactive and empowered one.

Both health and disease are connected in a dynamic process of inter-relationship on-going all the time.

We become aware of this process and seek out healing when the body signals a health imbalance and manifests symptoms.

There are four styles of relationship with your health process:

• Proactive: Actively enacts full spectrum health choices that build and maintain health process before symptoms manifest
• Responsive: Gets health wake up call and seeks out options to reverse the disease process and regain health process
• Suppressive: Chooses health options that control symptoms without addressing causative factors and permit (or increase) development of disease process
• Reactive: Develops advanced disease processes with reduced options for disease management

Without choice and information, people are driven into the Reactive style of health care. When you wake up and become Proactive, you access (and assure) a full spectrum of health care options.

Proactive Health Principles:

• Consumer rights and authority to make health care choices
• Addressing multiple factors that contribute to disease process
• Accessing multiple synergistic approaches that contribute to health process
• Health programs tailored to the individual
• Health and disease process are linked to environment (physical, social, societal, and global)
• Health options are made available through responsive consumer-oriented socio-economic structures and public policy

Proactive Health means joining together to assure societal systems that serve health first.

Integrative Health Care Reform

As we transform our system, we also need to look at results. Many highly effective, lower cost, health-enhancing methods are needlessly excluded from consideration and coverage. The end result is poorer health at higher cost to all.

Click here to see how Deepak Chopra, Andrew Weil, Dean Ornish, and Rustum Roy see the future of health care.

With so many treatments out there, no practitioner can possibly be expert in them all—but just because your gastro-enterologist doesn’t know yoga doesn’t mean that yoga lacks value. Instead of letting Ford have the say-so over Chevy, we need to include every form of expertise by supporting public policies and insurance plans that assure our right to full spectrum care.

Leave the Sinking Ship by Deepak Chopra Andrew Weil, MD and Rustum Roy, PhD also contributed to this article.

On December 26, 2008, the Wall Street Journal published "The Touch that Doesn't Heal," an article by Steve Salerno. Without discernible professional credentials in health reportage, the writer opened his piece by pledging allegiance to "scientifically proven, evidence-based medicine." We predict that while they may try to dismiss us, the Wall Street Journal writer and editors will find they can't dismiss a burgeoning field of medicine currently saving and improving millions of lives worldwide.

Read, circulate, and comment on their recent Huffington Post blog in response to the attacks from the Wall Street Journal. Read on by clicking here.

Write Tom Daschle: Join Citizens for Health's action campaign to assure the right to integrative care in the coming health care reform by going to www.citizens.org You can sign up and participate in their letter writing campaign