Health, Misinformation, and You

I

talk to people everyday who are concerned about their health. Maybe even worse.

They are overweight, sick, and tired. And sick and tired of the misinformation that is out there in traditional western medicine and pop culture.

For the last 3 years, I have been reading everything I can get my hands on about health, and the deeper I get, the more contradictory the information I find.

It’s enough to make you dizzy, then very upset. After many of my friends and family saw my concern for those struggling to get in shape, or stay healthy in general, they encouraged me to write about it.

Here is an excerpt from an email I received last year:

I was wondering if you had some time to give me some health and fitness pointers … I’m at a standstill in my work outs and weight loss and am so frustrated! I feel like I’m never going to get this weight off and it’s SO discouraging.

Talk about heart-wrenching! I have a heart for helping people achieve their best in life, and you certainly need a healthy body as step one.

Sadly, health is easy in theory but rocket science in practice for most people. Just look around in public today.

Millions strive to make more money, find their soul mate, rise in their careers, or get famous in bodies that simply hold them back.

Physiological needs — breathing, drinking, eating, and excreting — are on level one of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Food is foundational.

Building a successful life on a poor foundation is foolish. Somewhere between not wanting to eat our broccoli growing up and feeling like junk today, we forgot our stubborn passion to stop all flying forks containing anything foul from landing in our mouths! Hrmph!

We are simply letting too much garbage into our bodies. We need to bring back that passion from childhood to combat the unhealthy foods we eat today.

The question then is, what is unhealthy?

Do doctors have the answer? While they want to heal us, many times they help cure the symptoms, not necessarily the root cause of the disease or ailment.

Since we are very impatient people and our bodies usually take a longer period of time to heal or recover than we desire, doctors have resorted to chemicals (pills) that unnaturally speed up the process or affect the body to reduce the symptoms.

It also emotionally feels better to get a magic pill and start to see results immediately. Our bodies rarely work this fast on their own.

Once you realize that doctors mainly focus on symptoms, you conclude that you are the only one in charge of finding the root causes and the true cures. You can then use doctors’ knowledge about the body and how it reacts to certain foods and environmental conditions to your advantage, for your unique body.

Now, since many times, we are fed false information and damage our bodies unknowingly over long periods of time, we may be left with doing our best to live with the results of that.

We may also have been born with or predisposed to certain conditions that we must learn how to handle properly. Doctors can usually help us with these conditions amazingly.

The key is to know that our habits and lifestyles are not what doctors are trained to treat. They cannot help us there.

Regardless of our circumstance, we can choose to be the best we can possibly be with what we have been given. We’re not here long, so let’s make it count.

As you read articles you find online to educate yourselves, keep in mind that some may be selling something (which could be good or bad), some may be sharing experiences that pertain only to their body type or make-up, or some may be swept up in a craze and taking sides they know nothing about.

On another front, doctors who are prescribing you medication are also selling their services, they are being influenced (positively and negatively) by the medical industry, and they rarely do their own in-depth research on the drugs they give their patients. They don’t have the time.

If it works for the majority of their patients, and the pharmaceutical research looks good, they use it.

One tool I use to keep my perspective and see both sides of controversial websites, people, and issues that are rampant in the area of health, especially in a country where there is a lot of money influencing the lawmakers and mainstream media a certain way, is Quackwatch.

I also look for non-profits that aim to give non-biased information on health like the Environmental Working Group.


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