The Absence of Symptoms Does Not Mean Good Health


A black and white image of an artistic symbol.Good health is not just about not being ill; it is also about being happy and feeling whole from physical, mental as well as spiritual perspective. To be healthy, popping some medicines only when unwell or taking action only after you see the symptoms is not enough. You have to take care of yourself proactively to prevent illness from reaching you.

But, we do the exact opposite. We think that health problems are the sudden onset of a disease we unsuspectingly acquired, when actually the problems are a matter of degree of symptoms. This is why the use of pharmaceutical drugs to suppress symptoms definitely provides short term relief, but it also tends to make the problem worse over the long run. The same pharmaceutical medications then invariably fail to even control the symptoms because the underlying problems begin to worsen, and the drugs are no longer able to contain the symptoms for which they were first prescribed.

When we push ourselves too much, be it physically or mentally, our bodies have their own ways of telling us that something is wrong. For instance, we may experience a headache when we are extremely stressed. Our standard procedure to counter it is taking acetaminophen. It helps. It makes the headache fade away. But, the actual cause of the headache is still there, without even being identified. Thus, sooner or later, the headache will resurface again.

Please don’t make the false notion that I am against the use of pharmaceutical drugs. I am not. There are numerous good medications out there that help ease symptoms. I am only against the misguided belief that drugs used to suppress symptoms are curing you. They are not. This is the fact where we are in denial on a national scale.

It is ironic that a large number of people, who are ready to take full responsibility for all the problems that life throws at them, have their head in the sand when it comes to health problems. We cannot define health as the absence of symptoms. We have all heard of or know of the person who feels great, had a great check up with the doctor only to have a sudden heart attack or stroke shortly thereafter. He didn’t have any detectible symptoms, but he was obviously not in good health. It is, therefore, not dependable to rely on the correlation of symptoms with the underlying causes of ill health.

Ever wondered why the United States health care system is ranked so low by the World Health Organization? After all, we can sew on our finger, transplant a kidney, replace the cochlear fibers in the ear of a 2 month old baby yet we still rank incredible low. It is because we have delegated the responsibility for our health and well-being to pharmaceutical intervention without a plan to address the underlying causes of the particular health decline. An integrated approach is vital in this particular situation. Isolating and managing symptoms together with a strategy to correct the underlying causes is the need of the hour.

Nutritional Response Testing, a system which focuses on health restoration using the instinctive intelligence of the body to identify vital whole food supplementation to restore health, can be of a great help!

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