Health knowledge made personal
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For the most part, the kids I knew were pretty healthy.
Sure, there was the occasional asthmatic kid and I knew one boy with a peanut allergy. (Now that I think about it, he had asthma too). As far as behavioral issues went, I was in a classroom with 35 kids and one teacher; there was no ADD, ADHD, ODD. Nobody had an IAP. Yes, there were kids who were slower and kids who were brighter, and there was the occasional disruptive kid, but for the most part, school was school and everybody did what they could. But over the course of the last 20 years, things have changed dramatically in terms of the health, vitality and behavior of our children. The statistics are astounding: Autism:
Current estimates show that one in every 150 children in the US is now autistic. It is considered to be the fastest-growing developmental disability Asthma:
One out of every four Americans suffers from asthma and allergies. That means that more than 20 million Americans have asthma, including nine million US children under 18. Food and environmental allergies/multiple chemical sensitivities:
Approximately 11 million Americans live with food allergies, and one in every 50 children has a potentially life-threatening allergy to peanuts. This number has more than doubled since 1997. Behavioral disorders (ADD, ADHD, ODD, etc):
More than 3.5 million American children suffer from ADHD and its related diagnoses; a 400% increase in the last 20 years. (No wonder American children consume 90% of the world’s Ritalin!) Is it possible that we are like the fabled frog in the pot of water? The story goes that if you want to boil a frog and you throw him into a pot of boiling water, he’ll jump right out. But if you put him into tepid water and slowly turn up the heat, he’ll make the necessary adjustments until it is too late…
Have there been such insidious changes over the last 20-40 years that we have actually reached the boiling point?
And if so, to what can we attribute this de-volution, how can we understand it, and what can we do to preserve our health and wellbeing? My belief is that that there are a great number of factors affecting this decline of overall health and wellbeing. From a more processed food supply (Michael Pollan’s book In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifestois a must-read) to increased numbers of childhood immunizations (in 1980 infants were vaccinated against 4 diseases, while in 2008 theCDCrecommends 19 shots, inclusive of 10 different vaccines for 15 different diseases by the time they are 12 months old) we are definitely changing what we put into our bodies. On top of that, we now have untold numbers of chemical compounds inundating our environments in the form of household cleaners, fragrances, bath and beauty products—not to mention reduced air quality and environmental pollutants—that are increasing the toxic load on our bodies.
So it is no wonder that we are seeing the ill effects of this on our children. And we see it in ourselves as well: increases in cancer, autoimmune disorders, diabetes, obesity, hormonal disorders, fibromyalgia, depression, infertility, erectile dysfunction, the list goes on and on. So why aren’t we doing anything about this? I have one word for you:Viagra. Ladies and gentlemen, I am here to tell you that the pharmaceutically-enhanced erection is the bottom line problem.
I have always maintained that if deleterious changes in our environment stopped men from having erections, things would come to a screeching halt. But, true to form, we have found yet another way to look past the underlying problem and apply a band-aid (or (forgive me), two popsicle sticks and some tape) to the problem. When we treat symptoms, without regard to what actually causes them, we have a problem: “suppression.” And suppression is the one causative factor in this pot of soup that has yet to be heralded in the mainstream media.
Suppression is best understood as treating the symptoms instead of the cause. In other words, every time we take an “anti-“ anything, we are probably performing some sort of suppression.
If you have inflammation, you take an anti-inflammatory. For fever, take an anti-pyretic (like Tylenol or Advil). Depressed? An anti-depressant. But are these drugs actually dealing with the root of the problem? Unlikely. Symptoms are the body’s way of letting us know that there is something wrong, an imbalance. Making the symptoms disappear through medicinal suppression is not a cure. (I know I’m repeating myself, but this is a very important concept). Imagine that the body is like a balloon being slowly filled with water. If this balloon continues to be filled, at some point it will spring a leak. The leak will occur on the weakest point of the balloon. Should a band-aid be placed over that leak, ostensibly reinforcing the weak spot, it will stop the leak—but as long as the water continues to fill the balloon, the problem remains the same and the next weakest point will be affected. Patch up this spot, and you’ll move to the next weakest point. So it is with the body. What the body wants is to achieve balance (akahomeostasis). When something is out of balance the body reacts by producing symptoms. When we shut off this “vent” for the imbalance (i.e.: “curing” eczema through use of a topical steroid) it is not unusual, after a time, for a new symptom picture to present itself.
If, for example, a child has eczema, and this eczema is “cured” through the use of a topical steroid, it is not unusual for this child to develop asthma. The asthma represents a deeper manifestation of the original imbalance. What do we do?
We stop trying to cover up the problems and we go deeper to the core of the matter. How exactly do we do it?
Stay tuned… |
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