Responsibility vs. Response-Ability

Responsibility is an interesting word.

I like to think of it less as respons-ibility and more as response-ability. In other words: How response-able are you?

Are you able to respond in a way that reflects both your freedom and your liability? Do you have the energy—mentally, emotionally, physically—to make decisions that require true thought and consciousness?

Because if you're not response-able… can you actually be responsible?

Response-Ability and Medical Decision Making

I’ll tell you a story…

I once had a patient who was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. Her doctor and family pressured her into surgery. Driven by fear, doubt, and urgency, she gave in. The surgery was performed. But afterward, they discovered there was no cancer.

Only now, the thyroid is gone. It can’t be put back. She’s irreversibly changed and will likely need medication for the rest of her life. And the justification she was left with?

"There was no way of knowing it wasn’t cancer anymore."

This is where responsibility meets liability.

Where Health Truly Begins

True health and healing begin with understanding who the healer actually is—who is responsible for healing, for making decisions, for honoring their body, taking action, and communicating clearly on their own behalf.

At the end of the day, your ability to be healthy starts with you.

You were born with a brilliant, dynamic immune system. You have a built-in ability to heal. But patients often follow their leaders—especially doctors—and find themselves pressured into quick decisions: take this drug, cut this out, radiate that.

My job is to remind people of their brilliance, to enhance their response-ability so they can navigate their environments, ask better questions, and make more response-able choices.

And I see this brilliance every day when I adjust patients.

I also see, with a heavy heart, the medical pitfalls people fall into—just like my patient who lost her thyroid unnecessarily. That’s why it’s so important to me to put the power back in your hands—to help you understand where true health comes from so you can make empowered decisions with full awareness and multiple perspectives.

Because we don’t just treat symptoms. We treat the whole person.

The Power is in Your Hands

So how do we turn the power back over to you? By reminding you that:

1. You are already brilliant.
2. Your body is capable.
3. You have the tools you need to choose for yourself.

When we live in an environment that constantly puts us in contact with fear-based thinking, messages from the media, socially conditioned beliefs, it’s easy to become less responsive. And when we become less responsive, we lose our response-ability and our power to act in alignment with our truth.

So here’s my challenge to you today: 

Improve your responsibility by improving your response-ability.

Start speaking up when something doesn’t feel right or when you have questions—especially when it comes to your health. Start noticing where you’ve given your power to authority figures in your life and shift the focus back to you. You are your own authority.

The goal is not control. The goal is self-empowerment, so we may live from a place of connection to ourselves and trust in our ability to respond accordingly.

To go deeper, check out my blog on narrowing down your guiding principle and operating as your own authority in the health world.

You are brilliant!