Health & Wellness
Adventist Health Simi Valley is built on a tradition of health and wellness inherited from our parent organization, Adventist Health. While we are always here to care for our patients during times of illness and injury, we are equally committed to creating a healthier community and preventing disease and injury through proper nutrition, exercise and a safe and healthy lifestyle.
Education is an important part of our commitment to promoting a life of health and wellness. The following resources will help you and your family learn more about how to live the healthiest possible life.
Our Legacy of Health & Wellness
Viewed from perspective, health care is a technologically focused, highly structured and regulated industry where science and safety rule every decision regarding patient care. Hospitals and other health care facilities scrutinize their interactions with patients and follow best-practice protocols to ensure the most positive outcomes.
It’s a wonder, then, to reflect on what the practice of medicine looked like just a century and a half ago. Substances and procedures we would consider barbaric today were routinely used to treat illness: blood-letting, ingestions of mercury (which we now know to be viciously toxic), breathing the smoke of burning tree sap, urine mouthwash, doses of crushed insects, mold scraped from skulls, and ground-up shoe leather—to name just a few of the things people did in the hope of recovering from illness and disease.
Even the venerated establishments of health care we put our trust in today were not nearly as evolved in that era. In the late 1800s, hospitals often sequestered the ill for weeks or months in stuffy, germ-laden rooms. Tobacco smoke was sometimes prescribed to treat lung conditions. One medical “expert” even believed that bathing caused disease.
At that time, doctors frequently received degrees from questionable medical schools after nine months or less of study. Druggists—with absolutely no medical oversight—diagnosed illness and concocted cures from an unregulated supply of materials.
Given this health care environment in the late 1800s, it is not an overstatement to call the reforms brought about by Seventh-day Adventist Church founder Ellen G. White revolutionary. Her health care philosophy blended spirituality and wellness and focused on natural restoratives: proper nutrition (which was based on a vegetarian diet), clean air and water, sunshine and exercise.
In 1866, a group of Adventists opened the Western Health Reform Institute of Battle Creek as a model of White’s focus on nature-based wellness and whole-person care—body, mind and spirit. Later renamed the Battle Creek Sanitarium, the facility’s most well-known leaders were Dr. John Harvey Kellogg and his brother, W.K. Kellogg, whose invention of a tasty and nutritious breakfast cereal provided a healthier alternative to the popular meat- and fat-based breakfasts of the era and launched the Kellogg’s brand.
It is on this tradition that Adventist Health Simi Valley's commitment to not just treat illness but to promote health and wellness is built.