The word wellness probably conjures up the image of a spa in your mind�s eye. The smell of massage oil and the sound of relaxing music wafting through the air as you sip calming ginger lemon tea. In other words, wellness invokes a sense of time spent away from life�s daily stresses to revitalize.
An effort at wellness can indeed be a good massage and herbal tea because nothing helps to relax your muscles and to rehydrate you better. But your quest for wellness doesn�t have to end there.
Wellness is an active process of moving towards a better physical, social, mental, emotional, even spiritual, state of being. Thinking about wellness is a far more positive experience than worrying about illness and disease. Yet if the World Wide Web is a measure, we seem to be more occupied with illness and disease than we are with wellness and well-being. A Google search on the words disease and illness yielded 684 million hits, while the hits on wellness and well-being were fewer by 135 million, at the time this column was written. Read More
Sujata Kelkar Shetty, PhD, writes on public health issues and is a research scientist trained at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, US.