THE PROBLEM WITH SYMPTOM SUPPRESSION

How come the US medical system has such terrible statistics? (see Medical Stats)

 

Many centuries ago, superior Chinese physicians were only paid when their patients were well and not paid when they were ill. So they treated combinations of symptoms in such a way that, rather than suppressing them, they worked to re-balance the body so that it could heal itself.

 

Imagine if US medical doctors were held to the same standard - they'd be broke!

So, what are the major errors that US medical doctors routinely make, as a direct result of the extraordinarily blinkered and narrow band of healing knowledge in which they are trained, that result in so many people becoming medical wreckage with bodies plagued with increasingly degenerative diseases?

 

These days the three major areas that US medical doctors specialize in are a) prescribing drugs, b) surgery and c) radiation.

 

The primary error behind each of these (putting aside their often extraordinary destructiveness, for the moment) is that they attempt to suppress symptoms instead of looking for, finding and treating causes so that the innate healing abilities of the body can come into play to fix itself, as it is fully capable of doing unless damaged by any of the above 3 activities.

 

Unfortunately the "symptom-handling" disease is not limited to medical doctors as there are numerous alternative health practitioners who also take this approach, completely missing the importance of finding and handling causes. At least they don't try to handle symptoms with drugs (which are chemical poisons, by definition) that cause more and worse diseases.

 

But the synthetic vitamins (nutraceuticals) that currently make up 95% of the vitamins sold in health stores have been found to create numerous problems of their own due to their missing so many of the essential co-factors that are the essence of the workability of a true vitamin.

 

And even alternative health practitioners can cause significant further long-term problems when they attempt to handle symptoms with supplements rather than finding actual causes.

 

SYMPTOM SUPPRESSION

 

So why is addressing symptoms so destructive?

 

Because addressing symptoms usually leaves the cause both undiscovered and unhandled. And it forces the body to create other symptoms and side-effects, especially when drugs and even health supplements are used to bypass the body's innate healing processes. And so the patient embarks upon a dwindling spiral of ill-health. Just as they've "handled" (suppressed or masked) one thing, another "mysteriously" appears.

 

Imagine a dam where a feeder pressure valve breaks and causes water to be pumped through the dam with so much pressure that leaks occur in the dam wall. The symptom is the leaks and if these are shored up and the dam is made leak-proof with double-walled metal, will that handle the problem?

No, because the cause is still unhandled and eventually will cause enough pressure to be created to blow up the dam. Thus it is with symptom-handling whether by drugs or natural supplements if you don't also correctly identify and treat the cause. If you do correctly address the cause, the body can now heal the problem itself, which will also cause the symptoms to vanish.

 

Imagine also a nuclear power plant where an instrument panel has a section that goes into the red when dangerous levels of radiation are present and where instead of handling whatever is causing the radiation levels to rise too high, the engineer just covers up the instrument panel so that the red warning can’t be seen. Not exactly smart, but this is exactly what is being done when you suppress or mask symptoms and leave the cause unhandled.

 

But it goes deeper than this because more times than not the location of the symptoms is NOT the location of the cause of those symptoms. Yet many medical doctors insist on trying to "handle" the symptoms at their location.

 

A classic case is an enlarged prostate. Many times what is causing the prostate to be stressed to the point of enlarging is a problem in the kidney - such as a virus or a heavy metal (mercury, aluminum, gold etc.) and in order to truly fix the prostate you have to fix the kidney, at which point the prostate shrinks back to normal since the stress has been removed.

 

But doctors rarely do this, instead they usually try and address the location of the symptoms - the prostate - unfortunately with extremely destructive "treatments" such as radiation, drugs or surgery which give the patient a legion of other problems during the rest of their lives.

 

Another simple example is so-called "restless leg syndrome". These particular symptoms are actually often caused by the person having heart trouble and when they lie down there is much less circulation in their legs than when walking and so the heart tries to jump-start the legs into creating the circulation it needs.

 

The medical approach is to give drugs (with all their attendant side-effects) to "control" the leg tremors when one actual solution is so simple as to be laughable. A simple heart tissue-rebuilding supplement that costs less than $15 can cause "restless leg syndrome" to vanish, and without the side-effects that the drugs create, because it handles the correct cause.

 

One also has to then go further and ask why did the person's heart become weak and also fix that (often it turns out to be the typical American diet and getting them off that can often fix their heart fully). But it will be whatever it will be - the point is you have to look, not just mask the symptoms with harmful drugs.

 

Another typical example of symptom rather than cause-handling is when a person has thyroid trouble - either hyper or hypothyroid. In hyperthyroid, the thyroid is pumping too much thyroxin into the system causing the body to rev way too high resulting in anxiety, sleep problems and a generally stressed-out state. This can be caused by many things and sometimes also turns out be mercury that has leached out of fillings or vaccinations and lodged in the thyroid.

 

Logic dictates that one would investigate to find out WHY the thyroid is pumping too much thyroxin into the system but instead most doctors prescribe drugs to suppress the amount of thyroxin being produced (causing the body to then have to find some other way to get relief) and when that doesn't work (because it's handling the wrong problem), they resort to burning it (radiation) and even removing some or all of the thyroid! (bodies happen to need thyroid glands)

 

Unfortunately, alternative health practitioners also often put the patient on thyroid supplements which, while usually being somewhat safer than harmful medical drugs, are again addressing the wrong problem and will over time create their own problems, as they leave the cause undetected and unhandled.

 

Since the thyroid is part of a system that includes the adrenals and the heart, the patient can end up with undue strain on the heart which can lead to much more serious problems, as an all-too-typical example.

 

In their inability to find actual causes, they resort to instead creating lists of symptoms and labeling them to the point that if you look up on the web the various symptoms of hyperthyroidism you'll actually find the cause listed as "Graves Disease" - which is just a name for the collection of symptoms - and no name ever caused anything.

 

There are also many such lists of symptoms/names that mimic MS, and of course harmful drugs for all of them, and once again all these symptoms can be eliminated by finding the true causes (often food – especially diet sodas - and/or chemical-related).

 

Acute diarrhea is the body's way of getting rid of toxins/poisons (guess why so many drugs have diarrhea as a side-effect) and yet people mistakenly try to stop diarrhea with over-the-counter drugs instead of letting the body flush out the toxins/poisons.

 

Trying to treat joint problems, as another location example, with topical or herbal supplements targeted at that specific area, while they may bring temporary relief in some circumstances, will have little long term beneficial effect if the problem is coming from a malfunctioning organ or gland or even from eating wheat, as is sometimes the case.

 

I could list hundreds of such examples. but you get the point (I hope).

 

Sometimes the situation is simply that the person’s body is blocked from healing itself (by such things as heavy metals, chemicals - including sadly, prescription drugs - food allergies, scars etc.) and merely unblocking the person’s body causes the symptoms to completely vanish. Medical “science” unfortunately knows nothing of this and in its ignorance causes immense and sometimes irreparable damage in its tail-chasing symptom-masking.

 

So, for those who still go to medical doctors. I challenge you next time to ask them when they give you a "diagnosis", "Yes, but what is the actual *cause*? And can we treat that instead?" and see what they say!

 

A good test of a health practitioner's real understanding of physical healing is to ask them something like, "What's good for (fill in the blank)?" and see what he/she says. If he/she says, "It depends upon what's causing it.", you've found yourself a jewel.

 

Fortunately the human body can put up with a lot of abuse, especially while it's younger, and many of the above medical errors can be reversed given time and good well-targeted nutrition. It's only when a patient has received too many surgeries or radiation or been on too many prescription drugs that they eventually become "medical wreckage" and when they reach that point not even great and brilliant nutrition can help them as there's just not enough functioning body systems left to support the necessary internal repairs.

 

There are a number of other key errors that I will explain in the next article but the above is the key reason why a wholistic approach that looks at the totality of what is happening with a body and its interconnected systems is so necessary to true non-destructive healing.