Did you ever notice that as soon as you are diagnosed with a disease the discussion immediately jumps to the treatment which could be a medication, a surgery, or both? While it is important to begin treatment as soon as possible, the more important thing to be done, before any prescription is written, is to try to figure out all the reasons why the disease happened, and THEN start figuring out a treatment plan.
So for example, many people I see have been diagnosed with fibroid tumors which are creating excessive menstrual bleeding, so either a prescription is written for hormones to hopefully stop the bleeding and if all else fails surgery might be required to remove the fibroid(s).
Or if someone has been diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, prescriptions are immediately written for medications such as methotrexate and prednisone to stop the pain and inflammation.
Or if someone has had a fungal infection on the skin, anti fungal creams are given.
These are typical scenarios I see everyday in my practice. But in most of the cases I see, no attention at all has been given to the REASON they got the fibroid. Or the rheumatoid arthritis, or the fungal infection on the skin.
Which means that treatment is given even before anyone understands WHY it happened in the first place.
Which makes you then think that we are not really getting to the root of the problem.
The ancient doctors of India who cognized Ayurveda said that before any treatment plan is written up you must first figure out what is causing the symptoms or the disease and make sure the patient stops doing those things. By ignoring this very important first step you run the risk of improperly treating the patient or developing the same set of symptoms all over again once the remedy is removed.
In Ayurveda we have identified 6 stages of a disease process that someone goes through as they work their way toward a disease you can name. In the first two stages, there are no symptoms, but several physiological changes could be taking place even in the absence of any symptoms. If you let these imbalances continue on, in the third and fourth stages you can develop symptoms, but no disease can be diagnosed just yet. But again, if you don’t stop the downward spiral and progression towards disease by reversing these trends as they arise you might develop a disease which you can now name as you enter the 5th and 6th stages of the disease process.
And what we find is that each person usually has numerous, sometimes dozens of underlying root causes that need to be addressed, and these root causes are different in each person. Which means that you could line up 100 people with rheumatoid arthritis and the treatment plans will be different in each case.
This is different than the current medical model where each disease has its own established treatment modalities specific to each disease, and every patient diagnosed with a specific disease basically gets the same treatment protocol.
I try to help the patients think outside the box and gain a deeper perspective on their problems when I see them and they tell me their symptoms or the names of their diseases. I always stop and ask them why they got the disease and what did their doctors say was the underlying cause of the disease. In most of the cases they tell me that the doctors didn’t discuss the underlying causes or when they were asked they replied they didn’t really know what was causing it.
Many tell me that the doctors say the underlying cause of their disease was due to genetics. But then I wonder why in the last several decades the incidence of that disease has skyrocketed. Surely genetics alone can’t account for these types of increases. And some doctors tell the patient there isn’t anything they did wrong to cause the cancer, or the asthma, or whatever disease it might be — that it’s just the luck of the draw. It just happened out of the blue.
In tall these cases I roll up my sleeves and play detective, starting with when they were in utero, and then scanning their early childhood years and beyond trying to pinpoint the various insults to their physiology through the years so we can then target those specific problems with a treatment plan designed just for them.
Let me give you an example of what I mean. Many women are diagnosed with fibroids which cause heavy bleeding, so they remove the fibroids once all other treatments have failed.
When they contact me I work my way backwards and try to figure out all the reasons the estrogen became high, which allowed the fibroid to grow in the first place. It could be from adrenal gland stress, from a weak thyroid which causes the estrogen to go high and the progesterone to go low, which will cause a fibroid to grow. Then we have to figure out and treat all the reasons that the thyroid is weak, and then strengthen the thyroid.
Next we have to give proper treatment to the gall bladder which gets weak when the thyroid goes low. The bile that the gall bladder squirts out carries out the estrogen each day, so if the bile isn’t flowing the estrogen just sits there and instead of squirting it out into the bowel movement where the body can get rid of it, it just reabsorbs back into the bloodstream and builds up, creating a growth such as a fibroid. Which means we also need to thin out the bile so it can flow out of the gall bladder while at the same time we need to recalibrate the ratio of estrogen to progesterone. And THEN we use the herbs to shrink the fibroid.
But see in this last case, if we just used the herbs to shrink the fibroid without doing all the other work to fix all the reasons why the fibroid grew in the first place, then our efforts to help that patient will be thwarted. But yet, this is how it is done, even with all the technological advances we have made in modern medicine. To just remove the fibroid or give hormones to take the period away isn’t doing enough. No attention is given to all the underlying imbalances that caused the fibroid to grow.
You can use this example as a model to treat any health problem you can think of. It takes a while to break the habit of jumping right to the treatment when you have a particular symptom or if you have just been diagnosed with a disease. Even in Ayurveda it is easy to make that mistake. Many people ask me: “What do you have for this or that disease?” And I tell them, it’s not as easy as just popping a pill to take away the symptom. Or they might say they took Ashwagandha for their thyroid gland because they heard that it’s good for the thyroid gland. Which it is. But first we have to see why the thyroid gland got weak in the first place, treat that and THEN we can use the Ashwagandha.
Usually the patient is so relieved to know that someone is finally focusing on these very important deeper aspects of their health, trying to see what has happened in their body creating their symptom or disease.
It takes a little while to break the habit of going straight to the treatment with each and every symptom we have instead of asking why we have it in the first place and what should we do about it. But once you break that habit, you’ll realize that finally you will be treating your health at a much deeper level and will also be much happier with the results you are receiving.
I hope this information helps you as you strive to reclaim your health.
Thank you,