When thinking about your health it is common to focus on the name of the condition or diagnosis that you have been given. While this can provide information about symptoms, it doesn’t often speak to the “why or how” this condition arose and ultimately, what to do about it.
All chronic conditions have three main areas of underlying distress or imbalance:
Mental/Emotional
Chemical Structural
How much imbalance will vary from person to person, but all are affected to some degree. This is because everything is interrelated. If one area of the triangle is affected, it is affecting the whole. Our tendency is to compartmentalize our condition, and think, “oh, I have indigestion, it must be something that I ate”, when it could be more an issue with the amount of emotional strain or stress that you are experiencing that is at the root of the digestive distress. It is important to take a step back and look at all the influencing factors that could be contributing to health imbalances and not just the ‘tip of the iceberg’
The Chemical piece of the triangle refers to the processes occurring in the body influenced by internal and external factors. Some of the external factors include diet, environmental exposures, medications, supplements, viruses, bacteria etc. Keep in mind that everything your body comes into contact with, it has to process and your ability to do this efficiently can vary greatly. Internal factors mainly refer to how your cells, tissues and organs function and the subsequent byproducts that are produced. These byproducts also have to get removed so that they don’t accumulate in your tissues. In light of this, improving your body’s biochemical ability involves:
- reduce our exposures (ex. eat organic, fresh, seasonal food)
- make organ systems work better (ex. improve how you digest and absorb nutrients from food)
- Efficiently remove what we don’t need (ex. eliminate waste products regularly)
Often, in order to improve your internal functioning requires that you avoid something (ex foods that you react to) for a certain amount of time, or, that you add something into daily regimen such as drinking more water to help kidney function. I may suggest something for you to do such as castor oil packs or hydrotherapy which encourage the removal of impurities from your body. The bottom line is that whatever the condition, as we focus on improving how your body’s chemical processes, you will move towards improved health. But this isn’t the whole story. In future posts I will discuss how mental/emotional and structural imbalances affect your over all health.
Nina Paroo, ND