The WHY of Chronic Disease

There are more and more diseases that are simply "managed" but not resolved. Everyone has someone in their family that is suffering with symptoms that may come and go, but never truly go away. This is the bread and butter of pharmaceutical companies. Much of the research that is done, which is funded by pharmaceutical companies either directly or indirectly, is focused towards medications. This doesn't truly help us understand the why of disease. In fact, more and more of my clients are coming in saying that their physicans (because of course now everyone has multiple specialists) are never answering the why. They are simply writing out a prescription.

Natural medicine begins with the why. We are curious and we not only want our clients to feel better, we want their symptoms to resolve. So exploring the "why" is the only way to make that happen. First illness begins with the onset of symptoms. This is generally referred to as the acute phase. If these symptoms don't resolve within a few days to two weeks, then we consider them chronic. This is an important distinction because chronic means that the body's function has changed to accommodate the illness. It is no longer fighting the same fight, it is trying to make peace. So by the time we look at the illness, it is generally not the same acute condition with which you started. It also means that any testing is going to point towards your current condition, not necessarily the one you started with.

Conventional medicine is predicated on diagnosing a disease. This is the reason for numerous tests, scans, bloodwork ... all to attempt to come up with a name, a little box, that you will fit into. This is what determines your treatment and how much of that your insurance will pay. There is no room for the why, particularly if you don't fit neatly into your box or if the treatment is worse than the disease.

Natural medicine starts with the belief that the body is never doing anything wrong, it is simply attempting to resolve or live with the effects of the disease process. For this reason, we don't need to diagnose a disease or give a name to your condition, we simply want to understand the why. Your symptoms are how the illness affects you, the personal you, you individually. The way in which it affects you is not just the illness, it's the environment within your body in which the illness is happening and the pre-existing weaknesses, habits, capacities and history that your body has. This means that one particular pathogen won't act exactly the same way in each person. What's more important is how the pathogen is acting in your body which then leads us to the why.

Conventional medicine does not have time to understand your body's internal environment. Time is also what promotes the idea that the goal is simply to give a name to the disease process. This method of treatment is also how insurance companies can simply approve or deny coverage. The box you are in equals the medications that will be approved, the surgical options that will be considered and the length of time you will be "permitted" to have symptoms.

Natural medicine does not base our approach simply on testing and we don't spend time looking for a handy box to put you into. We spend a lot of time understanding your body's internal environment, especially your history of illness. This gives us much more information to help us make sense of your illness. Testing is helpful, but to automatically assume that the results are the why is another thing. Just because you test positive for Lyme doesn't mean that Lyme is the reason for your current symptoms or the why of the illness. Taking antibiotics may make you feel better because you're lowering one burden (bacterial) to the immune system, but this is a short-lived victory. The reason chronic illness tends to recur and continues with symptoms is because it adapts and changes within your environment often evading your immune system and living off of your body resources. This is why chronic fatigue is an illness. It may not be pathogenic, it may not even be a disease, but it is certainly an unresolved illness process. In fact it is often the most common chronic symptom of illness throughout the population.

So paying attention to the why is the key and there are two parts to focus on. Why this began in the first place, the initiating factor, may not be the most important thing, but it does provide a starting point. Focusing on the initiating factor as the "reason" can be very deceptive and mislead you through numerous treatment failures. This is because the second part of the why can often be the real reason for your illness. Your stress level, your diet and nutritional state, the number of burdens to your immune system, your toxicity level, your fluid movement, your organic health, your glandular balance, your daily water intake, your oxygenation capacity ... these are all examples of the things that actually determine not just how you will weather an illness, but whether you will be ill at all.

This also means that prevention needs to be a daily ritual. Your diet, your water intake, your stress level, your toxin exposure, where you live, how you live ... the list goes on. Just as we spend time and money repairing our house, changing the oil in our car, repaving our roads, treating a wood deck, weeding a garden ... we have to do the same with our body, our mind and our health. So resolving the "why" of chronic illness means paying attention to more than a diagnosis.

Karen Clickner, C.C.H.,  is a Nationally Registered Naturopathic Physician. She provides natural evaluations and treatment at Conscious Body Natural Medicine clinics in central Massachusetts. She has been specializing in autoimmune disorders for more than 35 years. You can get more information at www.consciousbodynatmed.com