I love to tell the story about the medical student who was taking a course on diseases. One morning after class, he said to his professor, “With all these diseases, I don’t understand how anyone can survive.” The teacher replied, “When you study how the body works, you’ll wonder how anyone can get sick.”

Our bodies were designed with the ability to make repairs and to even defend against illness or injury. We are, in truth, self-healing creatures. You’ve seen the proof many times yourself. If you nick yourself while shaving or scrape your knee, you can see the healing start almost immediately. Inside your body, specialized blood cells, called platelets, seal up the wound through clotting to stem the flow of blood. White blood cells are dispatched to the area to fight bacteria that might enter the body through the broken skin. And red blood cells arrive on the scene to nourish the healing tissue with oxygen. Over the next few days, the tiny wound scars over and finally disappears—thanks to the body’s own natural team of “cellular paramedics.”

And if you’ve ever broken a bone, you’ve experienced self-healing in action, too. After being in a cast for a few weeks, what happens to that bone? It heals itself with new, natural bone in quite an amazing process of repair. That’s why when your doctor removes your cast and says, “You’re as good as new!” he or she isn’t kidding!

Likewise, a sprained ankle, pulled muscle, or a painful back will usually heal with rest. And while over-the-counter medicines will relieve the symptoms of a cold, it is your own healthy immune system that brings you back to health.

And just as miraculously, your body fights against cancer. Several times a day, a normal cell in the body might mutate into a cancerous one, but your body recognizes this and its natural defense mechanisms actually knock out that cancer cell. There is healing going on every single moment of our lives.

The Power of Self-Healing

Each one of us is different in so many ways—physically, emotionally, and spiritually—and we all have unique needs when it comes to our health care. Ideally we should be treated based on our individuality, yet medical science prefers to treat the disease with standard protocols or treatments, rather than treat the whole person.

Of course, we are conditioned to run to the doctor after symptoms occur and get a prescription for a drug, which may or may not work. We want the symptom treated, and we ignore that perhaps the underlying cause should be treated. I believe, too, that we relegate most, if not all, of our decision-making authority to our medical doctors. All this does is foster dependence, and it undermines our personal responsibility for gaining and keeping our good health.

Dependence on third parties is not the best possible path to health and self-healing. It’s up to us—as individuals—to be the keepers and protectors of our own health. Statistics prove my point: the health-care system affects only about 10 percent of our health outcome; the remaining 90 percent is determined by lifestyle choices, and how and where we live. Health-care providers have little control over those things, but we certainly do! And I am on a mission to help people everywhere realize that health and healing is within their own grasp.