Eating a vegetarian diet, walking (exercising) everyday, and meditating is considered radical. Allowing someone to slice your chest open and graft your leg veins in your heart is considered normal and conservative.
Interpretation
The quote highlights how natural health practices are often viewed as extreme, while invasive medical procedures are considered standard.
In this quote, Dean Ornish contrasts the perception of healthy lifestyle choices like a vegetarian diet, regular exercise, and meditation with the societal acceptance of aggressive medical interventions such as heart surgery. This suggests a critical view of how society prioritizes conventional medical solutions over holistic and preventive health measures, encouraging a discussion about what constitutes 'normal' in health practices.
In practice
In a speech about holistic health, I might use this quote to emphasize preventative measures.
When we understand the connection between how we live and how long we live, it's easier to make different choices. Instead of viewing the time we spend with friends and family as luxuries, we can see that these relationships are among the most powerful determinants of our well-being and survival.
Your body has a remarkable capacity to begin healing itself, and much more quickly than people had once realized, if you simply stop doing what's causing the problem.
I've found that if I tell somebody 'Eat this and don't do that,' it's not only not helpful, it's counterproductive because even more than being healthy, we want to feel free and in control, and as soon as somebody tells us to do something, there's a tendency to do just the opposite.
If we can reach populations in developing countries and help them understand the value of their indigenous diet and lifestyles rather than copying ours, perhaps we can reverse the exponential rise in cardiovascular disease that is plaguing them.
Whether you're six or sixty, if you go on a diet and lifestyle program and feel constrained, you're likely to go off it sooner or later. Offering a spectrum of choices is much more effective; then, you feel free and empowered.
People who are lonely and depressed are three to 10 times more likely to get sick and die prematurely than those who have a strong sense of love and community. I don't know any other single factor that affects our health - for better and for worse - to such a strong degree.
Until you've looked a parent in the eye and told them their perfect child has a preexisting condition no insurance company will cover, you can't tell me the Affordable Care Act isn't worth fighting for.
When I go to my health club, and it's in the basement, you have to take the elevator down. And this drives me crazy. Why can't there be a stairway? At least make it as easy to exercise as it is to not exercise. It's in society's interest for me to take the stairs.
If we do not allow for a rhythm of rest in our overly busy lives, illness becomes our Sabbath— our pneumonia, our cancer, our heart attack, our accidents create Sabbath for us.
If you would seek health, look first to the spine.
Illnesses which occur because of physical causes should be treated by doctors with medical remedies; those which are due to spiritual causes disappear through spiritual means. Thus an illness caused by affliction, fear, nervous impressions, will be healed more effectively by spiritual rather than physical treatment. Hence, both kinds of treatment should be followed; they are not contradictory.
If I have to be at work at five A.M., I will get up at three and work out. I run. I do weights. I'm very toned. I'm like every other woman. I'd love to be 10 pounds or 20 pounds lighter. If I'm not, I'm OK with that, too. I'm good as long as I'm healthy.
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