Is Balance in Life Really Possible? (Installment 2)

TAB’S BLOG:  IS BALANCE IN LIFE REALLY POSSIBLE?

Installment 2

To continue on balance in life:  I have definitely discovered (the hard way!) that, in life & health, there truly is no quick fix or instant gratification that produces lifelong results.  If you or I want to be healthy, body, soul, & spirit, it will cost us.  It will cost us time, effort, money, and possibly pain & heartache as we face our stuff and deal with it.

We must face and get rid of all of our excuses for not doing what we know will bring us long term Optimal Health.  Every day I hear excuse after excuse for why people can’t be healthy.  “It cost too much.”  “I don’t have enough time.”  “I can’t take that many vitamins.”  “Nobody will help me.”  “My husband doesn’t support me.”  “I’m too tired.”  I personally have used them all except the husband one! J

On my balance journey, I’ve realized the truth:  people make time for what they want to have time for and they have money for what they want to have money for.  When a patient is sitting beside me saying that being healthy costs too much while drinking their Starbucks Latte, flashing their professional manicure/pedicure, using their iPhone and iPad, talking about their recent shopping trip, I find it hard to believe they don’t have enough money. 

The above may sound harsh but it’s a truth I’ve had to deal with myself.  I’ve had to put myself on a budget in order to head towards Optimal Health.  Financial problems are one of the biggest stressors in people’s lives.  I love my luxuries (all of the above are luxuries by the way!), but I’ve had to make a choice not to partake in a Starbucks Latte daily and instead pay a personal chef to cook 7 meals a week for me because I need to spend my time elsewhere right now. 

Daily choices on how we spend our time and money dramatically affect our long term health.  When everything in your life is out of balance, it can be overwhelming just to even think about making a change much less doing it!  But you have to start somewhere.  I started with carving out time in my schedule to daily have a quiet time and to exercise routinely.  That decision meant that I had to get up 30-60 minutes early (4 AM!) in order to accomplish it.  I then started keeping a daily gratitude journal.  Then I put myself on a strict budget that I monitor routinely.  I constantly battle with eating healthy and avoiding stress eating but I keep fighting that fight! And my journey continues!

I’ve been studying business principles recently and learned about Parkinson’s Law.  Parkinson’s Law observes that “work expands to fill the time available for its completion.”  The speaker was talking about how there was no “balance” between family and work.  Family is always first and takes precedence.  He stated that you must schedule your time with family first and not compromise that schedule, and then your work will naturally expand or shrink to fit into whatever time you have left. 

I think this “law” applies in life as well.  What are your priorities in life?  Are these priorities firmly and uncompromisingly fixed into your schedule?  There is one sure fact in health and that is that if you don’t take care of yourself, no one else will.  So, is taking care of your health one of your firmly fixed schedule priorities?  If you set your personal health as one of your schedule priorities, everything else will be forced to fall into line.

I encourage you to take a hard look at your life and schedule and what you are spending your time on.  Figure out your first step towards balance and take it.  Not easy but doable.

“Right now you are one choice away from a new beginning.”

Oprah Winfrey

Sincerely,

Tabetha Smith, FNP-C

Your Fellow Sojourner on the “Daily Choices Matter” Journey

Is Balance in Life Really Possible?

TABS BLOG: IS BALANCE IN LIFE REALLY POSSIBLE? 

Installment 1

So, as I’ve been trying to figure out my life over the past months, I’ve been pondering “balance” in life.  My work/life balance has been way out of whack for several years now and it has led to some negative consequences in my physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual life.  I’m finally starting to get my life realigned; and, in the next few blogs, I’ll be sharing the things I’ve learned that have helped me.

Unless you’ve been to one of our seminars in the past year, you may not have heard our bottom line mission statement at Insight and Restore.  We are here to partner with you to help you reach Optimal Health where your health span equals your life span.  We are not here to do all the work for you; we are here to help and guide you.  But most of the work is up to you just as most of it is up to me for my own health!

Life Span:  The length of time from birth until death, including some years at the end of life which may have some level of disability that reduces the quality of life.

Health Span:  The length of time from birth until you become disabled.  Ideally, you want to be functional & independent and able to enjoy life until the day you die.

True Death = Life Span – Health Span

Optimal Health:  Health Span = Life Span

Our mission is to help you reach your personal level of Optimal Health where your Health Span is the same as you Life Span.  As part of accomplishing this huge goal of reaching Optimal Health, each of us has to work on our body, soul, and spirit and try to bring balance in each area.

In order to reach Optimal Health for yourself, you have to permanently change your daily lifestyle choices and your paradigm of health.  Over the past 50 years, our health care system has devalued what health and health care should really be for you and be worth for you.  The system and our culture have created a “get fixed quick” attitude that costs you very little. 

Here’s the current health care culture and belief system.  You gain weight and your cholesterol goes up.  You go to your health care provider; and, for your “huge” co-pay of less than $30 for most plans (and some of the current subsidized plans have a co-pay of $5!), you get a 5-15 minute visit for your “quick fix” which is to be prescribed a drug to treat your symptom.  If you are lucky, the health care provider might say lose weight and exercise but give no details on how because he/she has no time.  You might also get referred to a “medical weight loss” program that also includes a drug treatment as well as a diet plan that includes shakes that you could never continue forever (i.e. no real lifestyle change).  So, in the end, your treatment cost you very little (low cost) in time or money or in effort.  The “health care” that you received seemed to be easy and quick but possible worth very little (low value).  However, in the end, are you actually healthier or is your symptom just relieved?

Here’s what has to shift in all of our thinking about health care and about our own health or else we will never accomplish permanent lifestyle change that leads to Optimal Health. You must change the thought processes behind your paradigm of health:

• There is NO real “quick fix” if you want to increase your health span.
• There is NO “instant gratification” on the pathway to Optimal Health.
• Being Optimally Healthy in this culture will cost you a lot in time, money, and effort.
• You must make daily choices that lead you away from premature death and aging and towards Optimal Health. 

I too have to choose to not buy a Starbuck’s Vanilla Latte and choose to buy some fresh vegetables instead.  I too have to choose to go to bed early so that I can get enough sleep to optimally function the next day.  I too have to get up early and exercise because I know that, if I wait till the end of the day, it probably won’t happen.  I too have to spend a lot of money on vitamin and herb supplements because I’d rather take a hundred a day instead of even one prescription drug.  And the list goes on of the DAILY choices I have to make in order to pursue my personal goal of Optimal Health.

Well, that’s the first installment in my blog series on balance.  Changing our thoughts on the value of health is the first step we all have to make.  Be encouraged, it is doable and you are not alone.  There are lots of compatriots (including me!) out there choosing this path as well.  YOU CAN DO IT!

Sincerely,

Tabetha Smith, FNP-C

Compatriot on the Journey to Optimal Health

Disclaimer: We make no claim of providing superior services, nor do we guarantee any specific outcomes from the services we provide. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food & Drug Administration.  The information, opinions & products on this site are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.

Marketing & the Healthcare Industry

TAB’S BLOG:  MARKETING & THE HEALTHCARE INDUSTRY

So this blog is a little bit different than my usual blogs – not so much about health improvement but about a soapbox of mine as well as about where Insight and Restore are headed. 

This past year at Insight has been particularly difficult for us.  With the changes that are coming about with the Affordable Care Act and with where our nation’s healthcare system is headed, we have been hit particularly hard.  We have been labeled by several health insurance companies as “poor quality”. 

When we called to find out why, we were told that we don’t see enough patients (i.e. doing 5-15 minute appointments and herding people through) and that we don’t prescribe enough prescription drugs.  For instance, they consider us giving poor quality care when we diagnose someone with high cholesterol but they don’t see the patient go to the pharmacy and buy a cholesterol lowering drug.  They are tracking this kind of stuff and the accepted “standard of care” is to prescribe a drug to treat a symptom.

Well, that’s not what we do at all!  Synthetic prescription drug therapy is so far from the mission of Insight Family Health Center that it is almost laughable.  We are all about preventing disease and partnering with our patients to get them off prescription drugs and headed towards their personal level of optimal health.

Our business model of seeing a patient every 30 minutes to 1 hour and accepting insurance reimbursement has always been tenuous financially.  We have struggled a lot just to stay afloat and some years we’ve gone in the hole.  Trust me; you make a lot more money seeing a patient every 5-15 minutes!  Scarily, you can do enough in 5 minutes to qualify for the same reimbursement that you get for a 30 minute visit.  Been there, done that.  Felt guilty for doing it and opened my on practice so I could spend more time with my patients.

The whole idea that quality healthcare is tied to seeing more and more patients and prescribing synthetic prescription drugs is frightening.  It scares me for your future.  It scares me for my future.  I tell people frequently to stay healthy and not need the doctor as much as possible.  I also say frequently that I’d rather take a hundred vitamins just to avoid taking even one synthetic prescription drug.  I never want to be dependent on the healthcare system as it is now or as it is going to be if we keep going in the same direction.  I want to be healthy and vital and active till the day I die and I want to spend my life helping my patients do the same.

So because the care provided at Insight is such “poor quality”, the plan of the health insurance companies is to penalize you for coming here (higher co-pays) and to penalize us by cutting our reimbursement rate.  Considering that they barely pay us enough now to stay afloat, if they make cuts, we are in deep trouble.  The cuts are starting in January.  L

So we are forced to figure out what else we can do to stay open and provide the type of care to you that we do.  I really don’t want to be part of a system that thinks “quality” care is seeing a patient every 10 minutes and just prescribe drugs.  I worked in that system before and realized I couldn’t give the type of care that actually helped people change the course of their health for the better in 10 minutes!  That’s why I opened this office in the first place! 

Over the next months you are going to be receiving lots of emails and Facebook posts and advertising.  Just like a lot of offices in this town, we have to increase our services that are not dependent on health insurance reimbursement in order to keep the doors open.  What I want to ask of you is that you read all of it and share it with your friends and help us survive.

I’ve struggled with the concept of advertising in healthcare and of advertising extra services that are offered in this business.  And because of that inner struggle, I’ve not been consistent with our advertising.  But now, I either advertise and grow the business in other ways or close down.  And growing the business can’t be within the health insurance system because they are just planning to cut our reimbursement.

It seems a little yucky to advertise in a business that is about caring and healing people.  But the bottom line is that I do what I do because I love helping people heal themselves but I also have to support myself and pay my staff.  I can’t keep running a business that is not breaking even much less making a profit.  Insight is not a non-profit or grant supported business.  We didn’t even qualify for any subsidies provided by the government to upgrade to electronic records.  We live by what we make.  Period.

So, as we go forward, as I said, you will be receiving lots of advertising from us.  Please read it, partake of our services, and share it.  Our guarantee to you is that we don’t provide and won’t advertise any service through Insight or Restore that will not help you or that has any great potential for harm.  For the most part, the staff at Insight partakes of all of our services so that we can reach our optimal health goals.  I often experiment on myself with a particular treatment before offering it to our patients.  Trust me, we won’t offer anything that we haven’t tried or think isn’t helpful!

The great thing about natural therapies is that they usually only help and never hurt.  So there won’t be any disclaimers at the end saying “this treatment may cause cancer, heart attack, stroke, arthritis, etc….” like many of the pharmaceutical drug commercials do.  Those remedies are synthetic and have great potential for harm.  The treatments we offer are natural and have little potential for harm.  Sadly, because we live in such a litigious society with an FDA and medical board that doesn’t like anything natural, we do have to put a general disclaimer on everything we do.  L

At this time, we only offer 1 service that is 100% just about vanity and that is the VI Peel.  Total vanity that I personally take great pleasure in partaking of.  I often tell patients that I’m not completely natural in everything because I really do like to not have wrinkles and spots on my face and hands!  Getting ready to start my winter face peel series in October! J

So, I wanted to be up front and honest with each of you.  I want you to understand what’s happening and why we are doing what we are doing when it comes to advertising.  I hope you will continue to help us grow but more importantly allow us to partner with you in reaching your optimal level of health.  Our patients rock and we love helping you!

Sincerely,

Tabetha L. Smith, FNP-C & Wanna Be Advertising Guru J

September 2014

*Disclaimer: We make no claim of providing superior services, nor do we guarantee any specific outcomes from the services we provide. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food & Drug Administration.  The information, opinions & products on this site are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.