Sick Care or Self-Care

|

dave

Sick Care

The medical industry is deeply flawed. They are in the business of making money and only indirectly care about your health. That’s not to say doctors and nurses aren’t there to help you get better, they are. The corporations they work for, independent doctors are rare these days, are all about profit. Keeping you not quite healthy means they make more money. Treating your symptoms with drugs that have more side-effects than the symptoms they are supposed to “cure” is a huge money-making scheme.

Doctors receive very little instruction on nutrition, so asking them for dietary advice is no better than asking a random person on the street. Most docs will parrot the government guideline – lots of grains, vegetable oils, processed foods, vegetables, and a little meat.

That is a prescription for diabetes and poor health. Red meat is NOT bad for you despite what vegans, vegetarians and the companies that make fake meat want you to believe. The truth is, the fake meats have more harmful ingredients in them that any natural food, including red meat.

All the vegan/vegetarian packaged food you see in the stores are highly processed, full of chemicals that are harmful to your health.

Grains aren’t all they are cracked up to be and cause be one of the reasons you are having gut issues or joint pain.

I tell people to avoid processed foods as much as possible because your body has a hard time dealing with the ingredients used in the making of those “foods”.

Stress – All chronic stress causes health issues. Stress is not just worries about work, relationships or money. Stress is increased by too much strenuous exercise. Stress is increased by poor dietary choices. Stress is increased due to exposure to environmental toxins such as air pollution, second-hand smoke, the chemicals in your make-up, soaps and shampoos, cleaning products, etc. Long-term exposure to environmental toxins slowly poisons the body and makes it even harder for your body to clear them from the system

But, if you go to your regular doc complaining about headaches, stomach aches, being tired all the time, not being able to sleep, strange skin rashes and other vague symptoms, he or she will give you prescriptions for all your symptoms. You may feel better in the short term but over time the symptoms will come back, stronger than ever.

Self-Care

Wouldn’t you rather solve the problem by tracking down what is really causing it? Don’t you want to feel better and not have to take medications for the rest of your life?

Learning to heal yourself means you no longer have to be worried about someone glossing over your health complaints, telling you it’s all in your head or writing you a generic prescription that may cause more issues with its side-effects that it actually helps solve.

If you could work with someone who listens to you, takes time to investigate and correlate your symptoms and then gives you the roadmap so you can heal yourself, would you?

You would work with me to uncover the underlying causes of your dis-ease. We would start by digging deep into your health history to find all the areas where are having issues. Then we would run labs to see what is happening in your body. We use the labs to correlate with your symptoms. That gives us the information we need to build a plan for your self-healing.

I don’t treat those symptoms; I go after the reasons why you have those symptoms in the first place.

The Plan

Most “illnesses” are caused by poor diet, lack of exercise and sleep! Modifying your diet to include more fresh, whole, in-season foods instead of processed and packaged foods is the best place to start.

Clean up your diet – get rid of processed and fast foods, cut out the sugar, eat whole, fresh foods and lots of vegetables. You may want to consider running a food sensitivity screen. You may be sensitive to foods, spices or chemical additives which increase internal inflammation and can cause leaky gut and Irritable Bowel Syndrome.

Get some exercise – 3 or 4 sessions a week for about 60 minutes each. Your exercise should be focused on building muscle with some conditioning. Building strength will help you burn more fat and will help prevent a host of age-related issues.

However, if your stress levels are high, you should keep the workouts more moderate. Exercise is stress. Too much high-intensity training can make things worse.

Improve your sleep. Start by getting off all your electronics at least an hour before bedtime. The light emitted by your computer, phone, or tablet decreases the amount of melatonin produced by your brain and your gut (most of your melatonin is produced in the gut) which will make getting to sleep and staying asleep difficult.

Alcohol will also negatively impact your sleep. It may make you get to sleep quicker, but you’ll wake up in the middle of the night and will probably have trouble going back to sleep.

Stress reduction – this can be tough but take time to be alone and quiet for 5 to 10 minutes a day. Meditate, pray, whatever, just chill out.

If you are tired of never feeling quite right, of never having any energy or are always complaining about gut and digestive issues and your doctor isn’t any help, or tells you to take Prilosec or other Proton-Pump inhibitors, or prescribes some other acid-reducing drug,  you owe it to yourself to contact me so we can discuss your health issues and how work can together so you can heal yourself, naturally.