Dr. Shemuel Israel

This article was published in the North Lawndale Community News, July 2001

What can be done to improve the health status of African Americans? This is a question that is being asked more frequently in the black community – and for good reason. Without going into all of the statistical data, we know that African Americans are at a greater risk of developing a wide range of diseases and health conditions. We have more heart attacks, diabetes, high blood pressure, and cancer than the general population. What factors are responsible for the poor health status of African Americans as a group? There are a flood of explanations. Some say that because of our low socioeconomic status, access to affordable health care is limited. Others say that it is due to racism and white supremacy. “We must not lose sight of the fact that the health status of individuals and groups is more dependent upon the organization and environment of everyday life than it is on the formal institutions of medical care that periodically inject themselves into our daily lives,” says Dr. Clovis Semmes, a sociologist whose interest is in non-medical health beliefs and practices in the Black community. Could it be that our poor health status as a group is due to a culture of lifestyle habits and attitudes that contribute to the development of illnesses?

African American culture – at one time focused on harmony and oneness – is now deeply embedded in struggle and conflict. We seem to stand as a group pitted against nature, against other peoples, or as individuals against our neighbors, against our bodies, against our spouses, and against our children. And, we lack a fundamental understanding of how life works both at the individual level and the group level. When we look at our everyday thought and action we can -see that our attitudes are laced with struggle. Many African Americans have selected the “fight disease” approach to health care. Even our language reveals the struggle and conflict that is so pervasive in our lives. When talking about illness we use metaphors like the “victims of AIDS” or the “crusade” against cancer. One significant aspect of the “fight disease” approach is you must wait until you have a diagnosable “condition before your insurance will cover it.

Two other approaches are the “prevent disease” approach and the “health enhancement” approach. Most prevention programs focus on early diagnosis and treatment of disease. And other prevention programs like smoking cessation, alcohol abuse cessation, immunizations, mammograms, and screenings for hypertension are covered by some insurance plans. How many African Americans are engaged in a health enhancement program?

Knowing and honoring yourself is the guiding principle of the health enhancement approach. This approach includes changing your lifestyle, acquiring new knowledge and skills regarding your body and its functions, and recovering your life’s energy. Which approach to health do you currently use?

1. Fight disease (covered by insurance)
2. Prevent disease (some programs covered by insurance, most are not)
3. Health enhancement (not covered by insurance)

Health is not something that can be purchased; it is not something that someone can give to another. It must be earned. It begins with a healthy state of mind – cheerful, confident, and interested enough to work for it. If we want good health, we must be committed to working for it in the same manner that we work for money or any other accomplishment in life. Everything begins with our consciousness. Everything that happens in our lives, and everything that happens in our bodies, begins with something happening in our consciousness. In essence, the body is a printout of consciousness. When we dispel the inner mind set of negative beliefs, doubting self-image and fear of outside forces that dominate and limit our consciousness, our body will work wonderfully. And that is how it’s supposed to work. Problems that we face in our lives are rooted in our own inner being. The holistic approach provides a way for us to find the source of problems where they originate. Dr. Richard King, a practicing psychiatrist based in California, provides one historical example of changing one’s mind in an article entitled “Uraeus: From Mental Slavery to Mastership.” He writes,

Consider the transformation of Malcolm X from street hustler to national leader; a process wherein he studied a dictionary in great detail to reprogram his mind. By studying ideas for their relevance to his soul, he no longer took ideas to mean that which others said they meant; thus beginning to extricate himself from his social conditioning. True freedom has not been achieved today because most African peoples and their leaders are virtually excommunicated from their souls. They are not in continual contact with their inner selves nor with nature.

Malcolm moved from pimp to convert to zealot to believer after the Haj experience.  So how can we improve the health status of African Americans?

The essence of being healthy is commitment, control, and challenge. First, you need to be committed to understanding who and what you are. To do that, we must be willing to look inward into our own mind, to examine our memories, our beliefs, self-image and our patterns of perceiving, thinking, feeling and doing. The price for exacting real improvement in our lives is paid through dedication to who and what we are for our own betterment. Can you make a commitment to honesty and growth?

Honesty is the epitome of health. We can create honest advantages for ourselves by integrating and maintaining biological, psychological, social, and spiritual integrity. In the pursuit of integrity, one must know what one is and who one is. You are a perfect being, separate from any identity you might assume at any time. You can and do assume different identities for different purposes. And, you have the power to expand those identities or shed them at will. An identity is a separate self that is created by you. This self consists of emotions, beliefs, ideas, and evaluations. An example of an identity might be a “husband” or “wife” identity. Or, it can be the “parent” identity or a job-related identity such as “doctor” or “salesman”.

Accordingly, one must know which specific identities have value, ability, and integrity, and when to use them. You value an identity when you agree with the ruling intention that lies behind it. You have the ability to perform as an identity when you can fulfill its ruling intention. Finally, your identity has integrity when you make decisions that lead to actions consistent with what you are, who you are, the identities you have assumed, and the idenities you want to assume.

Life is a continuous process of growth and expansion. If you are not prepared to invest yourself totally in your own growth and success, no amount of extolling your positive values will move you in the direction of growth and expansion. Instead, you will slowly move toward spiritual, intellectual, emotional, and physical death. Dr. Alfred Ligon, a Los-Angeles metaphysical dialectician and developer of “the Black Gnostic Studies,” often admonished his student to move toward a spiritual and psychological rebirth. Called initiation during the time of the ancient Egyptians, the students (initiates) of these mystery schools were expected to rise from the dead, to repent, to be reborn, and to enter heaven.

Rising from the dead means not hanging on to the skeletons of the past. Repenting means turning completely around so that one could stop gazing at those old skeletons. Being born again means forgetting the old and accepting the new. If you are still thinking of how you use to live and how much you use to earn, you are still dying in the old life.

Entering the heaven of expansion means expanding out beyond what you have had, out beyond your old self and its old activities, out beyond your old ideas of the past.

Second, we can only control the energy that animates our bodies. Can you control yourself rather than letting outside forces control you? The essence of conscious life is control – the ability to control our present and our future. If we lack control in our lives, we will find patterns of people and conditions controlling us at all phases in life. The people may change from time to time, but the pattern remains. No one can experience growth, prosperity, and happiness while under the control of others. Imagine being in control – purposely determining and affecting the nature and quality of the events and relationships in your life. Imagine having your desires fulfilled rather than opposed. Imagine having ongoing health and abundance, freedom, peace, success in your endeavors, trusting relationships, and loving relationships all around you. Are these happening to you now? If not, you can control your life by being responsible to and for yourself, by caring for yourself first, by setting your own standards to live by, and by loving and appreciating yourself.

Third, and here is the challenge, can you make your life more secure, more knowledgeable, more prolonged, more affluent, and more pleasurable?