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It has been my observation that most people define sickness and health based almost exclusively on symptoms.  That is, most people have the concept that if you have symptoms, you’re sick, and if you don’t have symptoms, you’re healthy.  But is that actually true?

Let’s consider for a moment the person who has no symptoms and “feels fine” who suddenly suffers a massive heart attack and dies.  In fact, let’s take it a step further and consider the situation where that someone with no symptoms goes in for an annual physical exam and gets checked out by a doctor, gets an EKG that comes out perfectly normal, and the doctor gives that person a “clean bill of health”, only for that person to walk out of the doctor’s office to suffer that massive heart attack right there in the doctor’s office parking lot.  This happens from time to time.  So what’s going on here?  Was that person REALLY healthy?  Did they go from healthy to extremely unhealthy (also known as dead) in the span of a few minutes?  Or is it possible that the person was unhealthy for some time and just did not show any signs or symptoms?

Let’s look at the other side of the coin now.  Let’s say you happen to eat some food that, unbeknownst to you, has become spoiled.  After eating some bad food, most people get sick - with vomiting, diarrhea, or a combination of the two.  Unpleasant as this is, should we consider that reaction to be a sign of sickness or health? After all, the body is doing exactly what it needs to do to expel the toxins and bacteria as quickly as possible.  In a person who was not very healthy, they might not have such a violent reaction initially, and the bacteria in the spoiled food might do far more harm to them overall than they would to a healthy person who had the normal reaction of getting violently ill.   

Now let’s take it one step further and look at a situation where our attempts to suppress symptoms (with the thought that we are making ourselves healthier), actually undermines our health.  A prime example of this is to use medication to suppress a fever.  Now wait a minute!!  Didn’t your doctor tell you that it was important to keep a fever “under control”? Yes, probably so.  But with the exception of the rare case in which a fever goes higher than 105, suppressing a fever is actually counterproductive.  In fact, it shocks me that most medical physicians instruct their patients to use medication to suppress fever.  Most medical doctors have had a considerable amount of education in chemistry and one of the most basic facts of chemistry is that nearly all chemical reactions proceed faster with heat - this includes the chemical reactions that are involved in the immune response.  Fever is the body’s way of making the immune system work more efficiently.  Suppess the fever, suppress the immune response.  Suppress the immune response, stay sick longer.  It is that simple. 

 Getting back to the title of today’s post:  Sick Or Healthy?  That’s not such a simple question, is it?

Stay tuned to my natural remedies blog for more “deep thoughts”…

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