Treat ME... not my SYMPTOMS!

It is rare in my life that I don't trust someone or something. I tend to pretty much believe what I'm told and go along with it. But there are a few things, especially in the past year or two, that I've really started questioning, and it actually bothers me that more people don't question them.

The biggest example I can think of deals with modern medicine. Today's MDs are so quick to give us a drug to treat what ails us. It's so easy to prescribe an antidepressant, or a statin drug, or a pain killer to relieve the patient's symptoms. Not that I can blame the docs, really. Our society is all about instant gratification. No one wants to work for anything. We just want it handed to us. We need money... we use credit. We need pain relief... we take a drug. Who cares if it's not fixing the SOURCE of the problem... at least it's fixing the immediate symptom.

But I think there's something drastically wrong with this system. It's as though we are a society of ticking time bombs, ready to explode full of crazy disease at any moment. Cancer, diabetes, heart disease... you name it... it's on the increase in the U.S. And I think our medical system is failing us. Our government is failing us. WE are failing us.

Every drug we put in our bodies has some sort of side effect on another part of our bodies. So we take a drug for that... and have a side effect... so we take a drug for that... and so on and so forth. What if we stopped the cycle and just started taking better care of ourselves? What if we ate food that nourished our bodies rather than just kept us satiated? What if we considered WHY we're aching before we tossed a few more pills down our throats to kill the pain? What might a world like that look like?

I think for me, it all boils down to something pretty simple. I don't honestly think that our bodies were designed to fail on us. Should they age? Yes. Are they going to get sick sometimes? Yes. But I think we have way more control over our health than any of us think we do anymore. And I thinks we put WAY TOO MUCH trust in the medical community to KNOW exactly how to fix us, because, frankly, they too are just people... and they actually DO make mistakes. And unfortunately modern medicine in the US doesn't look at the whole picture.

I don't understand why a doctor out there doesn't combine nutrition, homeopathy, and things like acupuncture with the long list of successful treatments in Western medicine. Wouldn't it behoove all of us if they used ALL the tools in the arsenal rather than just half of them? Doesn't it make more sense to have a balance of these two worlds of thought rather than having to rely on one or the other?

Or, I suppose we could just go on trusting that everything our doctors tell us is the truth. They must know more than we do... they've had so much more school. They've done so much more research. They've seen so many people with our same symptoms. And after all, it's so much easier to just take what they prescribe than it is to research our condition, get a second opinion, or change the way we live to heal ourselves.

Bah... it's just so frustrating. And that's my rant for today.