We’ve all been there. We go to the doctor with a concern and leave with yet another prescription—and another list of potential side effects.
Why do we keep managing our health this way? You can’t see me but I’m shaking my head and sighing at the same time.
I think, in part, it’s a habit. It’s the model we’ve become accustomed to: identify the symptom, find something that makes the symptom quieter, and move on. It’s how medical reductionism works. It always has. There is a time and a place for everything.
Sometimes that is exactly what we need. Medications can be incredibly valuable. They can stabilize a condition, relieve suffering, prevent complications, and save lives.
But managing a symptom and understanding why the symptom is happening are two very different things.
Symptoms are information. They are signs that something in the body deserves our attention.
Fatigue. Constipation. Brain fog. Joint pain. Reflux. Headaches. Poor sleep. Anxiety. Weight that suddenly becomes difficult to manage.
These aren’t diagnoses by themselves, and they don’t always point neatly to one underlying cause. But they are communication. They are our bodies way of communicating and when we treat the symptoms we are basically telling it to shut up.
When our only goal is to make the symptom disappear, we can lose our curiosity about what contributed to it in the first place.
That’s the habit I think we need to break.
Instead of asking only, “What can I take for this?” we also need to start asking the following:
What are you eating? Are you getting enough nutrients to support normal physiology? How are you sleeping? Are you moving your body? What is your stress load? How is your gut functioning? What does your physical environment look like? What are you being exposed to at home, at work, through your food and water? What medications are you already taking, and could any of them be contributing to what you’re experiencing?
Seem overwhelming? Figuring out the true cause of a problem often is.
In my book Destination Real Food: Navigating Our Food System and Restoring the Soil to Improve Health, https://www.healthislocal.com/books I go deep into the statistics around poly-pharmacy and our consumption of medications over prescription of real food and an active lifestyle. The average American is taking over 5 prescribed medications and has never seen a dietitian for a nutrition and lifestyle related diagnosis. Some folks are taking closer to 20. No, I'm not kidding. Why? For many reasons but mostly because physicians don't refer enough to dietitians for the very thing that keeps people out of the hospital. Behavior change over prescriptions I always say.
Don't take my word for it though. I advocate wholeheartedly for people to do their own research. By this I mean, pull the statistics yourself from the sources that publish them and ask the hard questions for yourself. Here is a link to the CDC morality statistics in America for 2024 https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr75/nvsr75-07.pdf?CDC_AA_refVal=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cdc.gov%2Fnchs%2Fupdates%2Ffeature-2.html Why are Americans living longer than every before on more medications than every before, sicker than every before?
A lot of folks think it's conspiratorial. Doctors get kickbacks for using medications, right? It's important to know there are laws protecting consumers against this. I'm not saying it doesn't happen anyway but more importantly they are not taught how to use nutrition and lifestyle as an intervention. While I'm not sure how, the average MD has not had a single class in nutrition. Seems some well placed education for them is in order.
We need to change our approach regardless. Treat the symptom when it needs to be treated. Rule out disease. Use medication when the benefit warrants it. But don’t automatically stop asking questions simply because the symptom has become quieter.
The "we" needs to also include the consumer of medical advice. We need to educate ourselves about whats going on rather than just accepting what our doctors tell us. When you go to any expert, you get the expert's advice within that field. Don't go to surgeon unless you want to be cut on, if you understand my meaning.
Because quieting the messenger isn't always the same thing as resolving the problem. It’s easier to be curious when you feel better. Don’t ever forget that you haven’t corrected the underlying problem. Stay curious even when he fire has been put out.
After more than 35 years as a dietitian, I’ve become increasingly interested in what happens when we look at the human body as a biological system rather than a collection of isolated symptoms. Our gut doesn't operate independently of our brain. Our liver doesn't work independently of our digestive tract. Our hormones aren't disconnected from sleep, nutrition, stress, or metabolic and immune function. And none of those systems exist separately from the environment we live in.
That is the Living Systems Approach I teach. Why is your system overwhelmed?
It asks us to widen the lens. Not to reject medicine. Not to throw away prescriptions. But to remain curious enough to ask better questions:
What does my body need me to pay attention to?
Because sometimes the prescription is part of the answer.
It just shouldn't automatically be the end of the conversation.
If you want to learn a different way of understanding your health, join the Detoxed Life Membership here——>https://www.healthislocal.com/products/254363
Or book a Discovery Call to see if you are a fit for one of Health is Local's programs https://www.healthislocal.com/cellular-detox-discovery-call
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