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By Mark Lundegren

We all have our truths – ideas we believe to be accurate descriptions of ourselves and the world around us.

This is an overall or general fact of life. But it also applies more specifically (and often more critically) to our attempts to improve our health, well-being, and quality of life. And this fact begs the question, how do we know when our health-related truths are actually true?

The answer of course, as my title suggests, is by testing our truths. By this, I mean treating our health and well-being proposals as hypotheses, or as ideas or predictions that must be confirmed by objective information – and that must prove valid across varied and repeated tests of this kind.

Back From My Recent CAT Scan, Wondering What The Results Will Be

In practice, the testing of various health hypotheses takes at least three important forms: 1) research and analysis probing information that might both validate or invalidate our thinking, 2) short-term experiments that directly test key aspects of our health hypotheses, and 3) making and time-testing longer-term predictions about ourselves and the world.

Unfortunately, in health as in life, we often proceed without adequate testing of our truths, with two critical consequences. One consequence is that we may live with false health ideas, and thus sub-optimally and below our potential, perhaps throughout our lives. And we may promote our ideas through our actions, encouraging others to live as we do and in less than ideal ways.

A second consequence of inadequately testing our health ideas is that they naturally tend to multiply in number, and then conflict in content, since new health ideas are generally easier to create than dismiss. In many ways, this multiplicity of ideas aptly describes both the health and natural health fields today. In the name of health, we are now routinely admonished to eat, exercise, live, and relate to one another in widely different ways.

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