Posts by Ruthann Russo
Healthy Eating: More About Lifestyle and Less About Dieting
The 7 Sources of Health can connect you to healthy and mindful nutrition and make the practice of healthy eating more of a lifestyle and less of a diet. Your WHY Research shows that people who know their “WHY” or life purpose are likely to live 7 years longer than those who do not know…
Read MoreSelf-Care Before Patient-Centered Care
Self-Care is the foundation for Patient-Centered Care. Patient-centered care should respect each patient and take full account of our values, stories, fears, worries and hopes and respond to our emotional, spiritual, and social needs in addition to our physical needs.[1] Before a provider can do this, the question for each of us as patients is,…
Read More10 things to do at your desk to improve your health and balance your nervous system
10 things to do at your desk to improve your health and balance your nervous system Breathe: Breathing is the only bodily function that is both conscious and unconscious. You breathe whether you think about it or not. However, if you think about your breath, you can alter it. It is this ability to alter…
Read MoreYouLab: Researching Yourself
YouLab is a skill that acknowledges you as the research scientist of your own life. As with any experiment, you are looking for a cause and effect relationship. For example, what happens when I don’t eat sugar for a day? When I opt for the stairs instead of the elevator for a week? It’s…
Read More6 Evidence-Based Practices for 8 Common Chronic Conditions
According to the CDC 90% of healthcare dollars are for people with chronic and mental health conditions. The eight most common chronic conditions linked to high employer spending are depression, increased blood glucose, high blood pressure, obesity, tobacco use, physical inactivity, anxiety, and chronic pain. Self-care, practices individuals take to maintain or improve their health…
Read MorePopulation Health: Managing Populations vs. Populations Managing Themselves
In a recent interview, the CEO of a large health system described population health as having, “an interest in you as a person and in being responsible for your health…” While a noble feat, what if health systems instead (or additionally) created partnerships aimed at empowering community members to manage themselves? This partnership, called a…
Read MoreGroup Treatments: A Viable Solution for Health Systems?
Chronic conditions are responsible for 86% of healthcare costs in the United States. Stress is at the root of most chronic disease. And, self-care practices, such as meditation, yoga, acupressure, guided imagery, and qi gong can be used to manage both stress and chronic conditions. The problem? These interventions are not covered by health insurance.…
Read MoreChronic Pain is MORE Than the Pain
The annual cost of chronic pain is as high as $635 billion a year, which is more than the yearly costs for cancer, heart disease and diabetes. In 2014, Integrative Medicine Journal published an article I wrote about options for treating chronic pain that complement conventional treatment. The research supports interventions such as biofeedback, guided…
Read MoreWhat is self-care?
You know how at the moment we become a parent we think to ourselves, no one ever taught me how to do this, no one ever taught me how to be a parent? We’re just supposed to “know” how to be a parent. The same is true for self-care, it’s something that is assumed to be…
Read MoreWhat is Value-Based SELF-Care?
The concept of self-care can sometimes feel illusive or just so basic that it hardly seems appropriate to use self-care and the current US healthcare crisis and drive for value-based care in the same sentence. The bottom line? Self-care is the foundation for all care. The cause and effect of a Sustainable Self-Care Initiative If…
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