If you think you are sick because you aren’t taking the right drug or haven’t had the right surgery, consider that the real cause is often found at a deeper level.
People are generally sick due to physical, emotional, and mental stresses, or environmental and chemical traumas and exposures. People are not getting sick because they are deficient in antibiotics, and they’re not having heart attacks because they are deficient in open heart surgeries. There is also no such disease that causes a pain pill deficiency. People are sick because their bodies can no longer keep up with the demands placed on them, and something has got to give. Generally, that “something” results in an illness.
Symptoms are how the body lets you know what it needs. They are like flashing lights that you should pay attention to before you develop a chronic illness or pain. Hunger and thirst are symptoms, but that doesn’t mean they are bad; they mean you need to eat and drink. Sleepiness is a symptom, but that doesn’t mean it’s something negative; it means you need to rest. Without these symptoms or feedback, you would not survive. You would starve, burn out from exhaustion, or die from dehydration.
Drugs and surgery do not address the physiology behind the chronic disease. They merely change the indicators of disease—they decrease blood glucose for diabetes and decrease lipid levels for high triglycerides. Arteries are mechanically cleared with surgery versus addressing why the arteries are clogged in the first place. Drugs and surgery will never be a fix for chronic health problems because they don’t change what created the problem in the first place.
Drugs never cure disease. They merely hush the voice of nature’s protest, and pull down the danger signals she erects along the pathway of transgression. Any poison taken into the system has to be reckoned with later on even though it palliates present symptoms. Pain may disappear, but the patient is left in a worse condition, though unconscious of it at the time.
– Daniel H. Kress, MD
Fresh Ideas to Extend Your Expiration Date
Learn to examine the real cause of pain and disease. It will change your mind-set when you have symptoms. For example, instead of reaching for a pain reliever for a headache as a short-term solution, determine to find the underlying cause. It may be a reaction to a smell you are sensitive to, hormonal fluctuations, something you ate or didn’t eat, something you drank or didn’t drink, muscle tension, stress, or something going on in your neck. It is not an aspirin, pain pill, or drug deficiency. Use this same system of evaluation before treating pain with “Band-Aid” cures, which are only masking a deeper problem.
This evaluation can be used for any symptom.
- Acknowledge your symptoms and begin to think of your aches and pains as intelligent signals instead of something to be silenced.
- Identify what may be the underlying cause of your symptoms.
- Address the factors that may be contributing to the cause of your symptoms.
- Prevent the factors or the environment that creates the symptom from even occurring. As Benjamin Franklin said, “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”
Learn More
The website, drhyman.com has an insightful blog that addresses the evaluation of symptoms. Check out the blog post titled “Why Treating Your Symptoms Is a Recipe for Disaster.”
Ultraprevention: The 6-Week Plan That Will Make You Healthy for Life, by Dr. Mark Hyman and Mark Liponis, has an innovative look at what it really means to be well and what symptoms represent.
