Americans commonly use symptoms as the yardstick or barometer to measure their state of health. As a result they believe that if they have no symptoms they must be healthy. This is not always so.
There are thousands of people who were asymptomatic yesterday; today they will find themselves in a doctor’s office with a degenerative illness, in the hospital with a heart attack or we may even read their names in the obituaries. Obviously these people could not have been healthy 24 hours ago.
Disease is not a sudden event. It is a process that can be broken down into two phases: the asymptomatic, silent phase and the symptomatic, expressive phase. So it is clear that we can have an absence of symptoms and still be very ill and dis-eased.
There is another belief that is just as erroneous.
It is the belief that if we have symptoms we must be sick. Naturally, in some cases the presence of symptoms is a sign of illness. But it is estimated that in 85% of the cases symptoms are a sign of an intelligent biological adaptation to changes in our external or internal environment. Such symptoms are necessary for the body to restore balance. They should be welcomed –not suppressed. Those symptoms are healing, adaptative, cleansing symptoms or messages to change life style.
We frequently view symptoms as abnormal response to what we consider a normal life style when in reality they are normal response to an abnormal life style.
Indeed, interfering with such symptoms can have a long-range detrimental effect on our health. Consider, for example, the symptoms that accompany food poisoning. The vomiting and diarrhea, if suppressed, would cause the body to absorb rather than reject the toxins and soon one wouldn’t be around to tell about it.
The more we learn about the human body the more we realize that if we have no symptoms we could be healthy- or ill. Conversely, we could have many symptoms and be ill- or healthy.
Shocking? Or just common sense?
It’s time to dumped the “symptom” gauge and take care of our health throughout our lives whether “sick or well.”
That is the philosophy behind ongoing Chiropractic well-being care.
