How
do you approach your health?
In today's world of ultra high-Tec medical techniques, expensive
equipment and cutting edge research it is often difficult to step
back and think what is the best way to be healthy.
The definition of health, should be viewed in much more than the
absence of disease, but instead defined as the presence of high
energy, good mental, emotion and physical health and the absence
of both disease and sub clinical features. E.g. headaches, skin
rashes, susceptibility to colds etc.
The approach to achieving this health is being done in two ways.
Using a holistic or a symptom based approach. Holistic medicine
has been practised for many thousands of years e.g. Chinese, auyverdic
medicine, where emphasis is placed on obtaining the right nutrients
as well as balancing the energy of the body to promote health and
remove ailments. Symptom based approaches treat a specific ailment
e.g. a rash, pain, swelling etc, and use a certain treatment protocol.
E.g. to remove a headache you take headache tablet, to get over
a bout of illness you take a course of antibiotics.
Modern medicine is very much a symptom based only approach. With
almost every ailment or disease, treatment only begins when the
signs of the disease presents itself. The most common method of
treating a condition is to give a drug aimed to kill the bacteria,
virus or troubled cells. Modern medicines is very effective in the
treatment of acute medical problems e.g. accident victims, heart
attacks, where advanced technology is used to repair serious trauma
, tissues and help maintain organ functioning. It's weak points
are in treating degenerative disease, modern medicine has poor record
in treating such things as asthma, MS, arthritis etc where there
is no known cure.
The holistic approach to medicine is aimed at preventing disease
and focusing on the individual rather than any specific ailment.
The alternative health world, which is now used by a large percentage
of the population, looks at building a base of health from the bottom
up. The lack of fancy equipment and concrete research is often the
source of hostile criticism by the symptom based medical community.
To understand the merits of both we first need to understand the
origin of disease. Our whole body is made up from millions upon
millions of cells. Each one has a specific function to do and needs
to be given the right foods and oxygen to perform this. When the
cells do not get the nutrients they need they become inefficient,
this can cause the tissues which the cells comprise to become faulty.
If certain tissues are performing badly the whole organ may suffer
e.g. if the beta cells of the pancreas become faulty the functioning
of the whole organ can suffer therefore causing disease e.g. diabetes.
It may seem obvious that the best way to treat disease would be
to prevent it. How is this done? As can be seen above the origin
of disease comes from the cells receiving inadequate nutrients.
We obtain our nutrients from our food. The genotrophic approach
to medicine states that good health can be attained by giving our
body the unique nutritional demands it needs. It is no coincidence
that as the nations food intake has worsened over the years our
disease rates have gone up.
To achieve true good health we must not only obtain the right nutrients
for our body but also address other lifestyle factors. These include
exercise, emotional & spiritual health and other key lifestyle factors.
There are also many pollutants that can contaminate and adversely
affect our path towards true health. These pollutants need to be
minimised wherever possible.
The future
More and more people are turning to alternative health methods to
treat disease, as people want to avoid the drugs often given out
by their doctor. The prevalence of drugs amongst society belies
common sense. If you are getting headaches everyday, how does taking
a tablet to relieve the ache ever address the reason why you got
that headache in the first place.
The rapid expansion of the alternative health community does not
mean all things alternative are necessarily good. Practitioners
using certain foods to treat specific ailments are merely using
a symptom-based approach to medicine but exchanging food for drugs.
Many practitioners also claim things that have no substantiation.
The only way to secure good health is to find out your unique and
individual nutritional demands and provide your body with such.
This is answered by the science of metabolic
typing. Combine this to the other essential healthy lifestyle
factors and only then will you be able to be in true good health. |
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