One Family‘s Path to Holistic Health

April 5, 2006

Winter is nearly gone and I say good riddance to the colds and fever and sinus infections. My family has just been dripping with germs and we crumbled under their power this year.
This is why a beautiful girl in my 10-year-old daughter’s class caught my attention recently. Day after day, Callie came to school with no Kleenex, no doctor appointments, just showing up with a little healthy glow and organic lunches.
I talked to her parents, Greg and Lyn Chappell, and it turns out they devote a great deal of energy to their family’s health. Part of their interest owes to their profession. Greg is a chiropractor with a wellness approach and works with his wife, Lyn, a life coach.
They believe that the body is naturally healthy and self-healing. It can stay that way with a properly aligned spine for a good nerve supply, by eating organic food, and exercising a lot, and by having a positive mental attitude. Otherwise, it may slip into sickness and disease.
Yet the medical model in our country focuses less on wellness and more on medical cures, prescription drugs, and genetic research. The reason: the medical industry and, yes, the federal government, are intimate bedfellows and don’t always have our best interests at heart, Greg said.
The Chappells’ advice: Think of yourself as your own doctor. Whether you realize it or not, you make decisions every day that move you toward well-being or shift your body toward sickness and disease.
The cost of ignoring this message is getting high, especially as health coverage declines and premiums skyrocket. Twenty years from now, an average couple in their mid-60s will spend a total of $200,000 out-of-pocket for medical expenses, according to a Fox News report. Now that’s enough to make you sick.
Here’s what the Chappells do to keep themselves healthy.

NE: You believe that stress breaks down the immune system. So how do you get rid of stress, short of becoming a hermit?
Greg: The first step is getting people to recognize their stress levels and to give them tools to reduce it. We’re not just talking about emotional stress, but also physical stresses like bad posture, subluxation (which means a misaligned spine), sedentary lifestyles, sitting at a computer all day long. And there’s also biochemical stress -- bad diet, pollution, toxins, different chemical exposures like out-gassing from new carpets and buildings.
Emotional stresses encompass any of our relationships with our world -- relationship with self, others, our higher power or what some people call universal intelligence or God. So we need to look at the balance of those things.
Lyn: Some of the biggest sources of stress are negative self-talk, what you’re reading, what you’re watching on TV, relationships. A big stress issue is that we don’t take the time to observe and reflect with writing or walks through nature. A lot of people have not created meaning in their lives. When I listen to people, I am not like a Dr. Phil who will tell them, “Now here is the thing to do.” I believe we all have the answer from within, but sometimes we need outside eyes.
Greg: A deficiency of omega 3 definitely affects your mood and depression (it’s found in deepwater fish, dark greens, walnuts and flaxseed). There’s a lot coming out on this; they’re mega-dosing schizophrenic and bipolar patients with good results. In pregnancy, the baby pulls DHA, part of which is omega 3, out of the pregnant mom. She becomes depleted and that’s why you see postpartum depression. One of the elements of hyperactivity, and that’s a huge topic itself, is a lot of kids are deficient in omega 3.
Lyn: Winter is really hard on people because the lack of sun. It causes people to slow down. You can do lights, but you also have to realize that you’ve made a choice to live in Northern Michigan. Greg and I want to go outside every day. It’s empowering when you take action. You’ve taken a step toward giving to yourself.

NE: Were you sick this winter?
Lyn: We were very healthy all year. We have lifestyle choices that carry us through the stresses. We get up, meditate early, Greg meditates at 4 a.m. I don’t do 4. I get up at 5:30. We exercise in the morning, anything from running to walking to snowshoeing. We walk and run in the rain, in the snow, all the time. We lift weights -- we have machines at home. In the summer, we swim. It’s one of the first things we do.
Greg: When the joints are moving they are firing information into the brain, and that improves immune function, hormone regulation, stress and anxiety, not to mention memory and learning. There’s a lot more than that; I’m just giving you a sample.
We’re also feeding our bodies to align with the way we humans have evolved over tens of thousands of years. We’re set up to drink two things -- water and mother’s milk. Organic milk is okay, but production milk has the hormones and antibiotics. All the other drinks with corn syrup and fructose and chemicals are basically poisoning people’s systems.
Getting back to our genetics, we’re set up to eat raw vegetables and fruits, seeds, nuts, fish and wild meat. Beef that is grass fed, not grain fed. Commercially raised, grain-fed animals don’t have the same nutrient value and do have antibiotics and hormones, which can damage human health.

NE: Is there anything that you definitely avoid during flu season?
Greg: Sugar is the big time bad news; it depresses the immune system. If kids are fighting sniffles, get them off the dairy and get them off sugar. And fast food makes people seriously sick. That was obvious in the movie Supersize Me. We very seldom get sick, but when we do, it’s very mild and we move right through it.

NE: How about coffee?
Lyn: I drink coffee, Greg comes and goes. We usually drink Juice Plus shakes for breakfast. Callie has fruit and soup a lot for breakfast, organic toaster pops. We take a lot of supplements -- omega 3, multi-vitamins. We’re also getting adjustments for the nerve supply. We drink eight glasses of water everyday. Your body is about 70 percent water, so water is vital. Most people are definitely dehydrated.

NE: You’ve mentioned organic whole foods to avoid the stress of toxins and pesticides, but what about the stress of affording it?
Lyn: When you start eating whole foods, you eat less because your body gets what it needs. Over time, you need less food. When you eat empty calories, your body craves more and more food. Part of the reason for obesity is that people don’t get the nutrients they need so they never feel full. Callie eats well. For lunch, she loves doing the salad bar, or she’ll take a bean burrito one day a week or has California rolls for lunch.

NE: I blamed our colds on the germs our two-year-old brought home from daycare. Was Callie ever in daycare and was she sicker then?
Lyn: She was in daycare, but she didn’t get sick. When other kids were getting sick, we’d increase her supplements and adjust her subluxations more often to make sure her nervous system was in good working order.

NE: Do you get flu shots?
Lyn: Never, and Callie has never been immunized. We believe in the body’s ability to have its own strong immune system. She’s had half a dose of Motrin once in her lifetime. A low-grade fever is nothing to worry about -- in fact, a fever is a good thing. It’s the body’s way of turning on the immune system to fight pathogens.

NE: Would you ever use a doctor at all?
Lyn: In an emergency situation, of course, because that’s what our medical system is good for -- emergency and crisis care. But it hasn’t happened. We took her to a doctor when we brought her back from China after adopting her. We had to be processed through a pediatrician to complete the adoption process. Since then, Callie went once to a nurse practitioner for a homeopathic remedy.

NE: She’s never had an earache?
Lyn: Not really. If she said, “Dad, my ears are bothering me,” then he’d adjust her and put warm garlic oil in her ear to reduce the irritation. This is typical in our field. We are the average chiropractic family and it’s the way most of us live.

NE: Have you had any health problems?
Lyn: As a child, I had asthma and lots of allergies and my immune system was compromised. I had migraine headaches everyday and was quite sick. A lot of dizziness. But Greg turned me onto chiropractic and my life changed dramatically. The migraine headaches are gone and my health is excellent. I do have stomach related issues -- I picked up bacteria, probably from eating something in China, and the symptoms get worse with stress. You can take very, very strong antibiotics to get rid of it forever, which I won’t do because of the side effects. When I get stressed out, it will heighten so I supplement and get adjusted, and then it calms down. I also manage it with aloe; Native Americans have used it forever.

NE: How about you, Greg? Health problems?
Greg: Let’s see. I filled a prescription six years ago for a sinus infection.

NE: Does your philosophy about health roll over into child rearing?
Lyn: Well you know, we trust nature. We have beliefs that Callie has a lot of knowing already. She has come into this world with great intelligence and spiritual understanding. We have always believed in her. We never baby talked to her. We have always given her the respect to know. We give her the opportunities in life to prove to herself that she has capabilities to do whatever she wants. We are there to guide her and to make good choices in life.
We did the family bed when she was little. I nursed her for a year. As the mother of an adopted child, I didn’t naturally have the milk that birth mothers have, but the process of suckling creates milk; a lot of it was bonding. The reason I did that was that we believed so strongly in building the immune system. I wanted her immunity for America. She got good and bad from me because of where my body was. We put her right on rice milk. She couldn’t get all of her nutrition from nursing and we gave her whole foods.
Greg: When we first saw her in China, she was beet-red on fire with a fever. We put her in a lukewarm bath, adjusted her, got her on Echinacea; that afternoon her fever subsided and her normal color returned.

NE: You’ve mentioned adjustments quite a bit. I’ve never been to a chiropractor, although my husband has seen one occasionally for back problems. What’s the science behind it?
Greg: It’s a different paradigm of health. Getting rid of neck and back pain is a nice side benefit, but there’s much more to it.
Your nervous system directly or indirectly controls all functions of the body. Spinal misalignment can stress the nerve tissues, which interferes with nerve signals going from the body to the brain and the brain back to the body. If the messages cannot get through, the body systems don’t work as well. That’s because the brain interprets what’s going on in the body and sends out signals for the body to adapt to that perception. It’s kind of like a corporation. The different divisions have to be able to talk to teach other -- manufacturing, shipping, ordering, they all need a flow of information for the greater good of the corporation.
Aligning the spine affects the immune system so you can better fight off bacteria, viruses and cancer; it affects hormone levels, anxiety, learning, memory, right down through the list.
This contrasts to the medical school model that we are slaves to our genes. Genes are actually dynamic and listen to the environment. They have the ability to change their architecture and shape—and to make things happen depending on what the brain perceives.

NE: I know that you believe X-rays are important to better assess spinal problems, but aren’t they detrimental over the long haul?
Greg: With our high-speed screens, the exposure is minimal. I don’t discount that it accumulates over a lifetime, but the diagnostic information is well worth it.

NE: Callie told me that your Siberian husky nearly died of liver cancer recently. How is he doing?
Lyn: He really crashed a few weeks ago. His liver wasn’t producing any protein. He couldn’t walk -- the vet at MSU said there was nothing we could do for him. We brought him back and started feeding him a lot of green algae foods, brown rice and salmon and clean chicken, with no hormones, no antibiotics, and supplementation three times a day. He’s doing great and getting better every week. He’s going for runs and we’re adjusting him too. We have all along. We’re doing a lot of visualizations. We visualize the tumor getting smaller and we do some prayer work together. We call him our miracle.
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NE: All that you do sounds a little overwhelming.
Lyn: We believe in nature and as human beings, we actively make choices. You start by doing little by little and realize you don’t have to be perfect. You need to make good choices, small choices, day in and day out. We really have no control over anything, but we can make choices that can add to our happiness and health.




DID YOU KNOW?
Fatalities from medical care such as adverse drug reactions, surgeries, staph infections, and medical error are the third leading cause of death, according to Barbara Starfield of the John Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health (Journal of the American Medical Association, 2000).
Antibiotic use has declined in recent years, yet almost half of patients with upper respiratory tract infections in the United States are still prescribed antibiotics. According to the Centers for Disease Control, 90 percent of upper respiratory infections, including children’s ear infections, are viral and should not be treated with antibiotics. This is important to note because Americans are developing an increased resistance to antibiotics.
The United States spends more on its health system as a percentage of gross domestic product than any other country, yet we rank 37 out of 191 countries when evaluating how the health system contributes to good health. The United Kingdom, which spends just six percent of its GDP, ranks 18th, according to a 2000 World Health Organization report.
Our water supply is increasingly tainted by drugs that we take for ourselves and give to our farm animals. Every body of water tested contains measurable drug residues.

Source: Death By Medicine, Gary Null, Ph.D., et al., 2003