Chapter 7
Staying Healthy Principles
The Wheel of Health
Your health is like a bicycle tire. You have a bunch of loose
spokes and your wheel (health and wellness) is going “the-thump-
the-thump-the-thump.” Not a smooth ride! You have been told by
one bike mechanic (doctor) that it is one spoke, and when he or
she just focuses on that one spoke, you might get a little bit of tem-
porary improvement. You see another bike mechanic, and he says
it’s another spoke that’s the problem. He just focuses on that one.
Same thing: a little improvement, but it’s not enough. You go to
another mechanic, and he says, “Hell, let’s get rid of the whole darn
tire (body part) and just get a new one!”
This is how some health professionals have been looking at
your health. Why? They were trained not to look at the whole tire or
fix multiple spokes. More importantly, physicians are reimbursed
not for keeping all the spokes tightened and moving smoothly, but
for fixing one individual broken spoke that they know a lot about.
They also have no economic incentive to maintain the other spokes,
tire, wheel bearings, air in the tires, and on and on—even though
that spoke is going to continue to break because the rest of the
wheel is ignored. They get their economic reward for all their time
and education for fixing the broken spoke.
We have a lot of brilliant spoke fixers in the United States, many
of them much smarter than I am, but—are you catching my train
of thought? This is a critically important concept if we are to fix
our healthcare system. The economic incentives in the past (and