| REAL Health - Does Your Child Have It? |
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| Written by Dr. Sue |
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Now imagine that her mother sits on one end of the teeter-totter. Thud! She’s stuck, or is she? If she adjusts herself from the middle toward the other end of the teeter-totter she can get the motion started again. When her mother gets off...whoa...she adjusts herself again towards the middle and voila...she’s still in motion, balancing herself. REAL health is exactly that - dynamic balance. As your child’s environment changes, she changes. She adjusts herself to ensure her stability. In medicine, we call this balancing act homeostasis. It’s the body’s ability to physiologically regulate its internal environment in response to changes in its external environment. An easy example is shivering when you’re cold to increase your body’s temperature. So if that’s REAL health, what’s disease? Disease is fixed imbalance. From our teeter-totter example, disease is when your child is stuck! Someone sits on one end of the teeter-totter and your child doesn’t adjust himself to compensate. He’s stuck, fixed in an imbalanced position. For whatever reason, he is not able to change his position and rebalance. In medicine, we call this homeostatic imbalance. The body loses it’s ability to regulate its internal environment to ensure its stability and survival in response to it’s external environment. Loss of stability leads to disease, and loss of survival is death. An easy disease example is diabetes. The body regulates blood sugar with the hormone insulin. When blood sugar rises after eating, your child releases insulin from her pancreas to pull the glucose into her cells for energy, maintaining her blood sugar within a normal range. Your child’s cells only need so much glucose for energy; if her cells have reached their glucose limit, blood sugar rises producing more insulin. Yet despite more insulin, more glucose doesn’t enter her cells because her cells are full (insulin resistance). With time her pancreas tires from having to produce insulin surges to normalize rapid spikes in blood sugar, and less insulin is secreted (insulin deficiency). The result is diabetes, elevated blood sugar. What happened? The body lost it’s ability to regulate it’s blood sugar in response to overeating (too much glucose). The body became imbalanced and couldn’t adjust itself to compensate. The result? Disease. Fixed imbalance. In this case of sugar imbalance, the disease is diabetes. However this analogy can be applied to other diseases as well, such as allergies, asthma, eczema, ADD/ADHD, anxiety, depression, heart disease, and cancer to name a few. But my child doesn’t have any of those diseases, is he healthy? Does my child have REAL health? He may, or he may still be imbalanced. Disease doesn’t always come with labels such as diabetes. Look at the word dis-ease - it means not at ease. Not flowing easily, back and forth, stuck in an un-easy pattern such as constipation, diarrhea, recurrent tummy aches, frequent headaches and rashes, or a nagging cough. These too are dis-ease. A state of fixed imbalance. But as a parent we can’t stand to see our child “stuck”. It pains us. As a pediatrician, I feel the same way with my patients. How can I help this child rebalance himself? I hold that image of REAL health for my patient, envisioning him on that teeter-totter grinning ear to ear. Flowing, happy, and at ease. Unfortunately today, many children don’t have REAL health they have “Band-Aid Health”. Band-Aids (medications) are placed on boo-boos (symptoms) to make them go away. Yet, every parent knows that Band-Aids don’t make boo-boos go away. Band-Aids cover the boo-boo so your child can’t see the boo-boo. Out of site, out of mind, right? Well maybe for a simple cut, where the body can heal and rebalance itself easily. For childhood chronic diseases, it’s a different story because once you remove the Band-Aid (medication), the boo-boo (symptom) returns. Wheezing for asthma, rashes for eczema, and stuffy noses for allergies. Take away the stimulant medication and the inattention or hyperactivity return. Why? Because by treating symptoms we have not addressed the root of the disease. Imagine you have an apple tree, firmly planted in the ground, secure and stable. Initially the apple tree grows gorgeous beautiful ripe juicy apples. Nothing better! Every year that follows more and more apples are “bad apples”. So you toss those apples. Within a few years, the only fruit your tree bears are bad apples. They’re all bad! Why? You never addressed the root of the problem. Did you nourish your tree? Did you water it? Did you enrich it’s soil with organic compost? Did you protect it from wind or prune it? Did you plant another tree next to it to ensure its pollination? "If you want to change the fruits, you must first change the roots. If you want to change the visible, you must first change the invisible." ~T. Harv Eker If you want REAL health for your child, you need to examine her roots. Discover some possible reasons why she is stuck, or imbalanced. Nourishing those root causes will push your child back into motion, to REAL health. Think of your child on that teeter-totter. It may take a few pushes, from a few different angles, but try and try again. Once you hit a major imbalance and nourish it - your child will MOVE. The body inherently knows how to fix itself, we may just have to give it a nudge from time to time. How do you do this for your child? We’ll take a look next week. ~ Dr. Sue |
Health is not the absence of disease. We want REAL health for your child, for all children. What is REAL health anyway?