Are you suffering from a chronic illness or are you taking long term medications?
I am a specialist anaesthetist. As an anaesthetist, I meet many patients who suffer from chronic illnesses requiring medical and surgical treatment repeatedly.The pattern I have been observing for many years in my career is that chronic illnesses do not go away with medicine or surgery until the underlying cause is removed. Medications and surgery help temporarily until they develop another illness.
The current systems of health care services are designed for damage control and not to prevent or to cure diseases. There are a number of reasons I can see why it is.
Medical education has drifted from the approach of treating the whole person towards focusing only on the physical part of us. Your doctor may do a physical examination, physical investigation and give a treatment to relieve a physical symptom. But the underlying cause may not be in the physical body but may be it is in our thinking style, behaviour or in the environment. The body is not designed to be ill but to be well. The body has its own healing and defense mechanisms against illness. It is a self organising and self correcting system. The person using the body has the responsibility to care for it and provide raw material and optimum conditions for the body's systems to work. But
We have not taken this fundamental truth into account in designing the health care model. Medicine has branched out and divided into medical specialties that specialise and take care of each organ or system of the body. You will see a cardiologist if you have a symptom related to heart and you will see a gastroenterologist if you have an issue in your gut and so on. This division overlooks the overall integration and interaction between each system to keep the whole body well and balanced.The organs in the body do not work in isolation in the way that specialties do.
Pharmceutical industries are funding medical education, medical research and health care institutions. They influence government policies and culture of people through media to take medications for their symptoms indirectly covering up the real cause for illness. Chronic illnesses make great profits to pharmaceutical industries. It would not take a fraction of the cost of health care industries if we educate people about the real causes of illnesses and how to recognise early warning signs before they become chronically ill.
Symptomatic drug treatment temporarily suppress the symptom that was a warning sign of some underlying issue. Until we get to the bottom of the underlying cause no amount of drugs are going to cure the illness. They only mask the root cause.
There is evidence in literature and in first hand experience of people that chronic physical illnesses such as obesity, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, ischaemic heart disease and certain cancers are caused by multiple factors outside the body such as unresolved psychosocial stress, exposure to chemicals and pollutants, lack of adequate sleep and rest, unhealthy diet, lack of exercise, excessive alcohol intake, smoking, drug abuse, unhealthy living conditions and behaviours etc.
All these external factors are to do with the person's behaviour and not the physical body. Person's behaviour depends on the thinking style, personality and knowledge and skills of the person about health and disease.
There is a gap in current health care services that behavioural aspect of the person is not addressed in taking history for diagnosing and treating illnesses.
A person is not just a physical body. Health of every person is influenced by the way he or she thinks, feels, eat, drink, move and live life. Yet, medical diagnosis only involves physical examination and physical investigations only.
Psychosocial stress has an enormous impact on physical health because our thoughts and how we perceive ourselves, others and situations. Perception creates emotions that connects mind to the body. Emotions affect our autonomic nervous system which is connected to every cell of the body either directly or indirectly. That is how our blood pressure goes up when we are angry, nervous or frightened.
Every emotion creates physical changes in the body some are harmful and some are beneficial. The chemicals released in the body as a result of stress. These chemicals are harmful and causes inflammatory reactions and cellular damage.
Therefore, correcting our error in perception and thinking style to manage stress is an important part of the treatment of all illnesses. Obesity, chronic pain, multiple organ dysfunction, anxiety and depression are all related to one another stemming from the same root cause. Managing our ignorance and thought processes will immensely help to reduce the incidence of chronic disease and to improve quality of lives.
Learning the art of mindfulness is the most effective way to manage our thought processes and stress. You can find free resources by clicking the link below.
http://living-from-inside-out.blogspot.com.au/
How you can benefit by participating in research
You can volunteer for a research project and benefit at no cost.
All you need to do is to be open to learn a new way of thinking.
Please send your comments and enquiries.
Comments
Post a Comment