Treat the Symptom Or Find the Root Cause?

A Silly Scenario

Picture this scenario: The water is overflowing from the bathtub. The bathroom floor is flooding. There's a woman with a mop in her hand. She's mopping up the water as fast as she can and squeezing it into a bucket. The faster she mops more water spills over from the tub.

Well, she can mop for forever and still get nowhere - because the faucet is on full blast!

While this seems pretty silly, this is a very good allegory to describe health care in America. (Even the term health care is a misnomer. It's really sickness and disease care.) Always looking for the quick fix, this society wants a pill or cream or potion to take care of any adverse symptoms that might crop up. These can range anywhere from acne medication to cough syrup to weight control to blood pressure medicine to heart pills. The list is literally endless.

It seems that very few people are willing to take the responsibility, or the time and effort, to get to the root cause of the problem. The sad thing is, the longer a problem is masked by fighting the symptoms (mopping the flooded bathroom floor) the worse it becomes. Plus the fact that medications have numerous side effects which can cause even more medical problems.

Scary Statistics

To illustrate the point further, here are a couple of statistics:

There are more than 100,000 OTC drug products on the market today encompassing about 1,000 significant active ingredients

- Consumer Health Products Association (CHPA), 2001

On top of the $532 million spent every year on over-the-counter drugs, consumers spent $90 billion more on prescription drugs last year than the $64 billion that was spent just six years ago.

These numbers boggle the mind and stretch the imagination. Millions and billions of dollars spent for hundreds of thousands of drugs - many of which are relatively ineffective but highly advertised. (Mopping the floor.)

Sickness and Disease = Big business

It's no secret that medicine - drugs and prescriptions - is big business in this country. The pharmaceutical companies have more lobbyists in Washington, D.C., than there are congressmen and representatives combined. Americans need to stop looking at "wonder drugs" through rose-colored glasses and look clearly at the facts and statistics.

The big question is: do you want to treat a disease? Or prevent it? Think of the changes that would happen in this country if everyone opted for the latter! (Get to the root cause of the problem - turn off the faucet!)

Consider Chiropractic Care

This is where chiropractic comes into the picture. By its very nature, chiropractic goes straight to the root cause of any malady like a well-aimed laser light.

Chiropractic focuses on the spinal column in the human body where all of the nerves originate. The spine is designed to protect the nerves in the body. From here the nerves go out to every muscle, organ, and tissue in the entire body. The healthier the nerves are (the freer they are to function correctly) the healthier the entire body will be.

I like to explain it this way: the spine is similar to a circuit breaker box in the body. Simply put, chiropractors fix the switch. Since the spine affects every nerve in the body, the key is to eliminate the subluxations in the spine. (A subluxation is a slight dislocation or biomechanical malfunctioning of the vertebrae.) This then allows the spine and the nerves to function properly.

When a patients comes in to Personalized Chiropractic they may come in because of an aggravating symptom such as ongoing headaches, or low-back pain. Our goal is not to simply alleviate the symptom and send them on their way. Our goal is to educate our patients on the importance of keeping all parts of the body in tip-top working order. All the time. Every day.

True Optimum Health

Contrary to popular belief, good health is not simply the absence of disease or illness. Good health (optimum health) is so much more. Optimum health equates to high levels of energy, a calm demeanor, restful sleep, and an overall sense of well-being. Additionally this means one rarely catches the flu or a cold, and experiences freedom from ongoing bouts with allergies, digestive upsets and the like. It's a sad indictment on our culture that few people can say they have ever experienced true optimum health.

I've never seen it to fail that once a person's spine is in proper alignment - and pain and fatigue are replaced with energy and vitality - these individuals make every effort to maintain that level of optimum health.

Nutrition

Returning to my opening point about the quick fix - the partner problem in this sad scenario is that not only do people want to treat symptoms (fast), but they are unwilling to make needed changes in their eating habits. Americans notoriously feast on soda pop, caffeine, junk food, and processed foods, and then seem surprised when they have no energy and catch every bug that comes along. But why change your diet when you can always pop a pill to make it all okay? Right?

Wrong. It's never okay to abuse your body because sooner or later there comes the day of reckoning. The human body is extremely forgiving, but only for so long.

As I see it, nutrition and chiropractic go hand in hand. I not only want my patients to feel better by receiving adjustments to correct the subluxations in the spine, I want to see them respect their bodies by eating foods that are nutrient rich. Foods that will take them on down the road to optimum health. For this reason I go the extra mile to offer this type of ongoing education at my Pacific Beach practice.

It is the choice of every individual whether to continue to treat symptoms (which masks the true problem); or take steps to get to the root of the health problem and then do whatever it takes to eliminate those problems for the long haul.

I'm doing my part the best way I know how! It's my goal to make Pacific Beach the healthiest community in San Diego!

Robert Walcher, D.C.