cropped shot of senior woman with walking stick sitting on hospital bed
We are a pharmaceutical nation – and that might be what ails us most of all.
You’ve likely had or heard of a “medicine cabinet” as a fixture in the family bathroom. Think about that. “Medicine cabinet.”
Today, it is all too common to have enough medicinal substances at your fingertips as to require this self-ascribed storage bin in which to house them.
Prescriptions and pain relievers, remedies and resuscitators, not to mention therapeutic devices like braces, wraps, heating pads, etc. But what really heals your body? Your body, or those medications?
It should be said that the “miracle of medicine” is verifiably lifesaving or life sustaining for many, and in those cases, what medicine can do is to be celebrated. But even then, it can be supplemented and supported in a way that makes your body and all its integrated systems work in favor of itself.
The world of pharmaceuticals can be credited with lengthening the overall lifespan of human beings over the past century as we’ve seen major medical advances and modern miracles. Now for the first time in history, though, life expectancy has begun to decline.
We’re finding as a population that we’ve placed our healthcare ladder against the wrong wall and when we get to the last rung, we’ve lost time, money, and sometimes hope.
As we get more comfortable in, and dependent upon the support of medication and sticking a Bandaid on what’s truly troubling us, we’re seeing our collective health go backwards and, in many cases, decline. If we were getting it right, that’s not what we’d be seeing.
We’re forgetting how to heal ourselves.
Pills are a fundamental assumption that our bodies are getting it wrong and need extra help. Though necessary in some (or many) cases, there are also a wide variety of scenarios where they’re not needed, and where patients can benefit from a fully revitalizing plan of care that won’t keep them tethered to a proverbial pill bottle.
Most important is this haunting factor: Things can get way worse when we just codify with chemical treatment, placating rather than resolving the problem. Our bodies can be worsening under this pain-numbing approach, and hiding imperative information needed to let healing begin.
Your body knows what’s good for you! It just needs guidance on where to begin. Experience a restorative rediscovery of personal strength that multiplies the more you let your body do what it does best.
Dr. Heather Hinshelwood, MD is the Medical Director at the Fraum Center for Restorative Health and has been practicing medicine for almost 20 years. Fraum.com.
