My great aunt fell from a horse and landed on a rattlesnake. I know very few details other than that she recovered. Somewhere along the way, she developed one of the worst cases of rheumatoid arthritis her doctors had ever seen. I’ll never know whether one led to the other. What I do know is that she couldn’t lift a dinner plate, yet she lived on her own, ran her own business, laughed heartily, and loved her animals. She was strong and sick at the same time.
Bodies are like that. Something knocks them off balance, and they adapt. They find a way to keep you going. But an adaptation isn’t always balanced, and it can show up years later as something no one connects to the original shock.
That may be why so many of us live with problems that don’t fit a neat diagnosis. Chronic conditions like autoimmunity and mental illness have replaced acute illness as the main health challenge of our time. Our medical system was built for emergencies and accidents, and it does them well. Slow-moving problems with unknown origins ask for something different.
Silencing a symptom isn’t the same as answering it
A drug is generally designed to target one symptom or one pathway. In urgent or serious situations, that can be exactly what’s needed. But it works by overriding a system, blocking or activating a receptor to force a particular result, and the body then has to work around that intervention. That’s one reason side effects are so common. And for a long-running problem, the pattern is familiar: we quiet the symptom, and a few months later it’s back, because no one asked what it was doing there.
Picture a farmer whose garden is being overrun by pests. In the short term, he can spray something harsh that kills the beneficial insects along with the pests. Or he can ask why the pests came. What about the soil makes this garden inviting to them? What is deficient and needs amending?
I take the second stance, using supportive approaches. They don’t force a response. They offer the body something it can recognize and respond to, nudging it back toward balance and self-regulation.
The question I start with
So I don’t begin with “What’s wrong with you?” I begin with a different question: What is your body trying to balance?
To answer it, I look at history. When did you last feel truly well? What was going on around the time that changed? Does anyone in your family have the same pattern?
From there, my job is to help your body do what it does best, instead of trying to do the healing for it. The goal is that you come out of this stronger and more resilient.
Listen early
Many of the things we call symptoms are the body’s own efforts to adjust to a stressor. Suppressing them may bring welcome relief, and sometimes that’s appropriate. But if suppression is the whole plan, the question of why never gets asked.
The body usually whispers long before it shouts. It might be the little upset every time you have spaghetti or red wine. It might be waking every night at 2:30 a.m., or lying awake until 2:00. These are the body telling us the soil needs attention. That is the best time to act, while there’s still room to ask why and gentle support is all that’s needed.
Your body has been working on this far longer than you’ve been worried about it. You don’t have to wait for it to shout. If you’d like help understanding what it’s been trying to balance, I’d love to hear your story. Schedule a Discovery Call and we’ll start there.
The information provided is for educational purposes only and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease or health condition. I am not a licensed physician and do not practice medicine.
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