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Why health suggestions don't work. Gag me with a yoga mat! Are you tired of being sold on your friends' latest health system? Have they been trying to get you to drink the Koolaid, I mean Goji Juice? Is your doctor trying to convince you to spend the rest of your life in the pharmacy?

Here's how you can leverage your desire to do your own thing against their desire to be "helpful." Explain that each health suggestion you get from a "helpful" friend or therapist (or doctor) works only within its own context. To get the benefits of one health system you must also accept all the limitations, parameters, boundaries, conditions, and assumptions that were part of developing that health system. If you try and blend two systems, you start to get different results than each intended separately, and it complicates the outcome.

Recognize any of these health SYSTEMS that work for a friend but not for you?
♦ cardio every workout
♦ there's an herb for that
♦ flu shot or you'll get sick
♦ only bottled water will do
♦ low-carb is the way to go
♦ meditate or you can't unwind
♦ daily aspirin for your heart
♦ only the spa can relax you
♦ my shrink is a genius

As an example, if you're following the alkaline diet AND the blood type diet, you're actually working against yourself. The alkaline/acid diet follows one set of beliefs about how your body functions and responds (which is correct within its boundaries) and the blood type diet follows a different set of beliefs about how your body functions and responds (which is also correct within its boundaries). The alkaline/acid diet (several versions starting with Dr. William H. Hay in the 1920's) bases your health on the pH of your body as controlled by your food choices, preferentially choosing pH-raising foods and beverages for better health. In the blood type diet, Dr. Peter D'Adamo works to identify the most compatible foods with your body according to blood type, again avoiding certain foods and choosing ones that are more compatible with your individual body. These two systems do overlap in that they are both food-sorting diets, but they do NOT work together, nor does any other combination of SYSTEMS of healing.

The healing systems that you hear about with their descriptive names are all what would be called CLOSED systems. That means the outcome of using the system can only be predicted when you comply with all the established pre-set conditions that the system refers to, assumptions that were made about your body, and patterns of thinking that ensure you accept the belief in that system. This applies to prescription drug therapies and to surgeries too. For success, you have to stick to a regimen that follows specific guidelines and agree to the common rationale as to why they work.

Here's a more mundane comparison. All cars go places. Some cars run on gasoline, others run on ethanol. They still share "fuel" and "engine" and "passenger travel" in common, but if you put ethanol in a gasoline vehicle, it will eventually eat through the fuel hoses and break down. If you put gasoline in an ethanol vehicle, it will run, but not quite as well.

From the outside, you can have several identical-looking cars, the same shape, the same color, the same model year, but until you start analyzing the engine, you don't know if gas or ethanol will make it run best. And you can put gasoline in both and have them run, you can even put in different grades of gas, but which is ideal? Until you know the SYSTEM the car was designed for, you'll have unexpected results. Until you understand how a specific human body was designed and all its compatibility quirks, your degree of success with one therapy or another is more a matter of luck than whether the treatment actually is a good treatment plan.

The same goes for healthy diet systems. The premise of the alkaline/acid diet is rational, but still it doesn't work for many people. The premise of the blood type diet is also rational, and still it too doesn't work for some people. Try doing both at the same time or mix bits of them together, and the combination becomes irrational, with even more unpredictable results. Deciding what system to use means you need to understand what system is compatible with the design of your specific body and your specific life.

There are lots of health SYSTEMS: homeopathy, surgery, bodywork, acupuncture, energy balancing, various diets, various sorts of drugs, etc. Each work independently for some people because they match the parameters of the SYSTEM in which the style of healing was designed to work. But even within a single system, combining components reduces the predictability of success (like taking additional drugs to counteract the side effects from the first drug).

Unfortunately there is no single system that works for everyone, because we're all driving different "cars" and live with a different reality that works for our own specific bodies. In talking with local acupuncturist Helen Hudson, L.Ac. about the dozens of allergy elimination seminars she has taken, we came to an agreement that at some point the path of one health system gets too narrow and each system breaks down, which is usually what spawns a new system with some different ideas. For allergies good therapy was thought to be inoculation therapy, then NAET, now NMT, and probably something else in a few years.

It's not a complete failure of a particular system. The alkaline diet "system" works fine for the purpose it was designed and for the people who can function within that system. If it doesn't work for you, it is more likely that the complete set of parameters that ensure success are not all ones that agree with your body's needs. You haven't failed either, just been mismatched to some degree.

A system to perfectly address your body's needs may not be one of the pre-defined systems. And that is part of the health exploration...developing a "new" system that applies to your unique body and your experience of reality.

But wow! Creating your own health system and all the rules that govern it sounds like a lot of work.

That's only because we share the perception that these predefined health systems are complicated or difficult to invent. Creating a new system, the "Pat L. Smith system" as an example, is really no more different than your handwriting. We all learn to write, and we can all read (most of) other people's handwriting. But each is unique and characteristic of the person holding the pen. Health systems are very much like that. They have broad principles or "language" which share common points with lots of people. And if your body is close enough to that "dialect" then it gets a clear understanding and predictable outcome within that system/language. When you are not quite as close a match and the system takes on an "accent" that makes it not quite comfortable for your body, it doesn't work nearly as well and the outcomes are not nearly as predictable.

Even doctors and therapists are recognizing the challenge of strictly sticking to one system. Out on the west coast, Chiropractor Stephanie Greenall talks about why she has multiple practices, and how some patients see results with one kind of therapy and never get introduced to the fact she is also a massage therapist, hypnotherapist, NLP practitioner, Matrix Energetics practitioner, and also practices Native American healing arts. She even keeps separate offices to see different patients, because some patients who feel great with her as a chiropractor would be distressed to visit her as a Matrix Energetics practitioner. Each SYSTEM works great for the patients who are comfortable in those therapies. That's because each patient is working entirely within that single system's boundaries where a restricted set of conditions are met, and that produces predictable results. When they agree to all the rules of one "system" it is very logical that doing so would exclude other systems from working.

Please don't give up because of your bad experiences, or accuse a health system of being a failure. They were really only designed to work for the people who created them, and some others whose bodies operate in the same mode as the creator's. Try to understand that the helpful suggestions offered by any one health system operate with complete success only when each of the conditions that were a part of creating that system also exists. It's no different than someone suggesting you relax, when precisely what you may need may be to have an emotional outburst. Have confidence that your body is telling you what it needs, and when you allow your body to be honest with you, it is likely you will hear more clearly how it needs to be cared for and what will keep it healthy and thriving.