Health is more than the absence of pain, disease or symptoms. Health is balance. Health is harmony.

Vibrant health is like playing on a teeter totter.

When two kids (or young-at-heart grownups) are playing on a see saw, the fun is in going up and down…up and down. What fun would it be if the see saw remained motionless – in a perfect state of balance – with both kids hovering at an equal height above the ground. That might be a fun challenge for a moment or two, but it would get boring pretty fast and they would go right back to teeter tottering. You might say that their enjoyment comes from existing in a constant state of imbalance.

Or you could look at it a different way: that their ebb and flow – their cyclic exchange of energy – is really a state of harmonious, dynamic balance.

That is the way health works. For example, you may believe that if you catch a cold, you are out of balance. This is the conventional view of what a cold represents. This view holds that if factors in your life get out of balance, you are more susceptible to disease because of suppressed immune functioning, and that the purpose of the immune system is to fight germs and disease.

Under Dr. Mark’s teeter totter theory of health, a cold isn’t an illness. Colds are cool! When you are experiencing the fever, coughing, sneezing and runny nose of a cold, that shows that your immune system is working perfectly – just as Nature designed – to keep you in a state of harmonious, dynamic balance with your environment.