Listen to “Do You Need Medicine or Lifestyle Change?”.
Living in a consumer culture, we expect to be able to buy an immediate fix to any problem. It is in our nature to try to take short cuts and expend the least energy necessary to solve any problem. We have busy lives and only it’s natural to want quick fixes to difficult problems.
Medications are widely used in current health care to treat diagnosed diseases, relieve pain, or change moods and behaviour. However, medication is often a band-aid approach rather than a cure.
We have all been conditioned to think that taking medications will solve our problems. Just find the right pill and you’ll be cured. Drug companies are only fulfilling a need that already exists in modern society. We ask for quick fixes and they try to supply them.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of things medical science can’t fix. It’s not that drug companies are hiding some special cure from us. Rather, it’s that our perception seems to be that medicine can do a lot more than it can.
There are some things medical science can help us with, like blood pressure and cholesterol levels. However, often lifestyle changes can help these things better, without the negative side effects.
If you have a serious medical condition that requires medication you should of course use it — but too often, we use medicines to treat the consequences of things like obesity, when lifestyle changes would be safer and more effective.
Pills can be lifesaving, but they have adverse side effects and they aren’t always the most effective way to solve a problem.
Why is everyone so quick to take a pill for health problems? Why don’t we try lifestyle changes first? Here are some of the reasons:
- Health is just one of the many aspects of our lives. Most of us have other things to worry about such as work.
- Most of the lifestyle habits which contribute to chronic disease have been drilled into you since childhood.
- Change means moving out of your comfort zone. It’s challenging and can be scary.
While doctors routinely advise patients about their options for lifestyle changes, patients often disregard their suggestions. This is largely because the amount of lifestyle change that is needed is quite substantial, and many people would simply rather take a pill or say it’s incurable.
However, by shifting to an attitude of curiosity about the meaning of our symptoms and slowing down to listen, the information we get could lead us to a treatment that is more effective than a quick, prescribed fix.
Prescribe yourself a healthier lifestyle
If you want to avoid the need for prescription medication or even surgery, you will need to put some focus and discipline on your body and mind, your personal fitness and overall well-being.
Think of your body as a machine. It needs to be maintained. It needs fuel. It needs positive emotions and less stress. It needs traumas to be resolved and released.
All illnesses are messengers which have positive and negative aspects to them. Our bodies are fragile, sensitive and extremely responsive to everything that happens inside and/or around them.
Our bodies are constantly communicating with us every moment of every day. From an aching back to tiredness, anxiety, tension, painful joints, diarrhoea, headaches, colds, rashes and so on. All of these are messages from our bodies telling us essential information.
The essential information our bodies provide us with is always with the intention of leading us back to a harmonious state of living.
If we choose to ignore the more subtle messages that our bodies give us at first, then of course they will have to slowly turn up the volume and the intensity of the communication until we listen. This can result in illness or disease or a ‘stop moment’ of some kind.
When you start treating your health and yourself differently, you will notice a difference. The same is true on a global level. When a pandemic strikes the Earth, there is an important message for her inhabitants. And when it’s a pandemic, I can’t help but think the message is for the whole global community.
