Wellness-plank-Rauterkus

* We should ensure that all people have their basic needs satisfied, so that they can live in dignity, in healthy communities, while having the minimum adverse impact on natural systems, now and in the future.
== Healing our heart and headstrong for preventative medicine.==
The City of Pittsburgh can't even deliver curb cuts in its sidewalks. Installing curb cuts was to be done a decade ago. Enough is enough.
It is time to raise the bar. 
Where are the AEDs at our swim pools, Rec Centers and other public buildings? 
Who grows the best zuccini in our community gardens?
There is much to do in these areas of wellness. 
===Insights===
I coach swimming and youth sports. My wife is a professor at Pitt's School of Health and Rehab Sciences and is a Director at UPMC. My mother and mother-in-law are nurses by training. My sister and brother-in-law are Medical Doctors. I've published dozens of cutting-edge how-to books on sports performance, sports psychology, and fitness. I've been a stay-at-home dad.
====The concept of wellness matters greatly to me.====
An over-arching ambition is to thrust wellness into the spotlight. A deep rooted desire is to make wellness a civic understanding and goal.
The adage of an ounce of prevention being worth more than a pound of cure is a simple understanding that gets little consideration in our public life. Talk about the cost of perscription medicine and importing pills from Canada is expected. But, seldom do we dwell about lifestyle ways for lowering our blood-pressure to avoid those costly pills. 
Everyone has a relationship and experiences with health and medicine. We all have different reactions and perceptions. Spending time and thought on what it means to be healthy and well can be most valuable. Let's be more preventative in our solution building and less reactionary.
=====Health is simply the slowest possible rate at which you can die. =====
Status quo politicians in Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania have made careers on the spreading of their bad health policies. Choices are made between good health and bad health. The easy pathways are often not the most healthy. Stop-gaps and band-aid solutions are often easy choices and lead to poorer health.
Another worry is the deployment of cures for the cancers that plague our public systems. Cures often cause more harm than the original ills. Toxic medicines can battle the ills but cause damages to the systems and other vital organs. Pittsburgh's region does not need a facelift. We don't need a civic transplant and be some other place that we're not, like Atlanta for instance. We don't need shock treatments, high risk vaccines nor chemical cocktails. 
This platform aims to set the course where the priorities are to stop the bleeding, awaken some sanity, and move to a pathway of wellness. Let's flush away the dirt, the corruption, and those that injure. Let's be self-reliant and begin to heal and mend in a way that is open, calm, sustainable and without hyper interventions. A blast of chemotherapy, now, as the region is at the brink, might be more deadly and destructive.
The wellness planks give positive moves to new opportunities.
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Pittsburgh's political health is frail. Pittsburgh's public finances are such that the entire city operation has been experiencing a scary near-death experience. Our budget process is sick. There has been a lot of rapid decline and decay at our parks and with recreation. The city's been living on a life-line from Harrisburg.
We have two oversight boards and they are much like care-takers at the ICU (intensive care unit). Pittsburgh could perish yet. Limbs have been lost already, if you look at the cuts and the removal of employees. 
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Pittsburgh needs rehab. I'm hopeful I can direct that process.
Health and wellness, for me, opens up a discussion of being holistic. Not wholistics, as the the way of the past administration, all-or-nothing. We've gone the do-or-die route and are nearly dead. My style and leadership efforts are going to be more organic and caring. We need to be soft on the people and hard on the poor health habits. We need to change our ways and priorities. 
Both denial and lazy efforts are lingering hurdles. We need to be aggressive in our rehab and wellness. With an urgency and iron will for proactive wellness, Pittsburgh's region can become stronger than ever as we come out of the decade of miss-management of old-party rule. 
With wellness, the health of the Pittsburgh region can rebound and soar. Pittsburgh's urban center and inter-ring suburban communities can return to the most liveable status. But first, we need to decide upon our course of treatments for healing. 
We need to face the facts with past decisions. We need to chart this course of rehab and recovery. We can force ourselves to do the right things for the just, long-term reasons. 
We need urgent attention to mend our kids and youth quickly as possible. The kids can't wait around. If we loose another generation, our nearly impossible work will be hopeless.
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Pittsburgh has to pull its own weight, and it has to do it for the kids. 
Pittsburgh's wellness efforts is going to take a team approach. One specialist isn't going to have the keys to unlock the total dynamics. We need a generalist at the helm. We need a coach to wear many hats, yet talk to all the departments, interest groups, populations and sectors of the overall region.
category:Platform_Planks_from_Mark_Rauterkus