Are You Sabotaging Your Health?

Posted by: E Tully Categories: Chiropractic Nutrition Pain Relief

He who has hope, has everything.

So the proverb goes. But do you really think about your health? Many of my patients consider themselves healthy even though they are taking multiple prescriptions or have borderline conditions.

When I go over a patient’s health history, I ask them many questions about their complaint and the conditions and medications they listed on my forms. Mind you, most patients come to me with a pain complaint without realizing how diet, obesity, prescription drugs and even food allergies can contribute to all kinds of conditions, including joint pain.

More and more I hear patients comparing themselves to other people instead of a healthy norm. A few months ago a man came in for a nutritional consultation about some abnormal blood work he had received. It seems he had suffered from high cholesterol all his life. Because he was not overweight or diabetic, he did not think it had anything to do with his diet.

“How is your diet?” I asked.

“No worse than anyone else’s,” he answered.

I find this interesting for a few reasons.

1. If you are paying a doctor to consult with you about your diet, why are you even mentioning what anyone else does? This may seem counter intuitive, but just because you know someone who eats badly and ‘gets away with it’, doesn’t mean you can.

2. Having a long-standing problem, should not exclude a cure. What I mean here, is that if you have had a problem since you were young, maybe you have been inadvertently causing that problem in some way you are not aware of. In the example of the patient above, his doctor had finally given him an ultimatum due to his age. But his age was not the problem. His consumption of carbohydrates was. This led to his so-called ‘unhealthy’ cholesterol level. (For why I don’t believe the Cholesterol Myth, click here.) His refusal to recognize that his diet could be improved was also part of his problem.

3. There are no Free Lunches. While in school, my Endocrinology professor often started a lesson with this statement. Then he would go on to teach us about the many hormones in the human body and why you must play by the rules that nature has given us. The one story that stands out in my mind was of a male medical student who had a situation in a very sensitive area ‘down below’. It seems he had a problem with itching and found that the use of a topical cream containing cortisone helped the itching. Instead of seeking a diagnosis, he continued with the cream for a long enough time that he began to suffer a side effect of the hormone: thinning skin. Since this area of the body already has thin skin, the excessive use of a hormonal treatment caused the skin to thin even more. And bleed. He did not consider the delicate balance of hormones before, but he certainly did after he gave himself a difficult-to-reverse condition.

So what does the ‘Free Lunch’ have to do with anything? Just this, you can fool yourself, but you can’t fool your body. If you fell off your best friend’s car in a high school game of ‘chicken’, just because you didn’t tell your mother, does not mean your spine didn’t get injured. You would be amazed at how many ‘I’ve had it all my life‘ pain complaints can be traced back to an accident or injury that was ignored because the patient didn’t have to go to the hospital. Your body knows it’s injured even though you don’t have the sense to figure it out.

4. Doing something the same way every day does not mean it’s NOT hurting you. This may seem indistinguishable from my comments above, but it is slightly different. For example, a well-known side effect of statin (cholesterol lowering) drugs is muscle and joint pain. When I see one of these drugs on a patient’s drug list, I usually mention this fact. Almost invariably the patient replies, “That can’t be it, I’ve taken it for years.” Unfortunately, the longer you take this class of drugs, the more likely you are to have side effects.