Hey, guys. It’s Dr. Ryan from Whole Family Chiropractic, your community resource center for optimal health and healing. Today we’re gonna talk about what are symptoms. To put it simply, symptoms are the outward manifestation of inner physiological dysfunction. What does that mean? That a region of your body just isn’t working right and it’s telling you so. You suddenly feel, see, or experience something that may not be normal for you. Now, most people think that symptoms are, “Well, I just have this pain, or this headache, or this high blood pressure, or this diabetes, and this is just the symptom I have.” So they go to a doctor and the first thing they do is they label that person’s dysfunction, their symptom, without really telling them what it means or in many cases, what truly causes it, and options that they have. Then they get their recommendations for a certain medication or a referral to a specialist for that dysfunction, and they leave, not really getting an explanation, but just a permission slip to continue to do what they have been doing all along that got them into this mess in the form of a prescription slip. That’s right. The medication, whatever it is, isn’t given to you because you’re deficient in it. It’s not removing the source of the problem such as the stress from your life or purging your body of a toxin, or nourishing your body where it’s deficient.
That pill isn’t getting the body moving or reducing nerve interference in the spine from subluxations. It’s just allowing you to mask that symptom. That pill, that potion, that lotion only covers up the symptoms so that you don’t feel it or sense it anymore by completely commandeering your physiology. A pain pill doesn’t know how to go to your thumb because you hit it with a hammer. It doesn’t send more white blood cells to clean up the debris and lay down new scar tissue. It has its effects further up. You see, people too often think that when the symptom goes away, the cause of the problem goes away. Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth because let’s say you go on a vacation or you leave the house on a dinner date, or you go to the movie and you happen to forget that medication, what happens to the symptom then? Yeah, it goes right back up full force.
You see, symptoms are like fire alarms going off in your body. When a fire alarm goes off in your house, it’s telling you that something much more dangerous is going on. In that same way, a symptom in the body is the body’s way of screaming out, “Hey, you aren’t making enough healthy choices and I need help.” Don’t get me wrong, sometimes symptoms will result from a major trauma. Those are not the ones we’re referring to. People are getting sick in this nation at an alarmingly accelerated rate. The numbers don’t lie. You guys can Google the stats. More people are on opioids for pain, more babies are being born as addicts daily, more cancer, more heart disease, more obesity, more dementia, more allergies, more autism. These stats are related to a number of things, including massive miseducation and misinformation that allows people to continue to live a death style that produces symptoms and dysfunction in the body instead of a lifestyle that produces health.
Look, if a baby has a headache or it’s constipated, or it’s tired, or it’s hungry, what does it do? It screams, it cries. It’s just like that fire alarm going off, something isn’t right. Now, you have a few options. You can let the baby cry, you can give it a medication, you can give it surgery, or you can figure out what’s going on and get to the cause of the problem. Maybe it’s hungry and needs to be nursed. Maybe it’s tired and just needs to go to sleep. Maybe it does need an invasive procedure, but you wouldn’t just give a drug to the kid without figuring this out. So why do so many adults do this day in and day out? As kids, many of us went through the DARE program only to grow up with a huge medicine chest of what? Drugs. That do what? Mask symptoms, but why are we allowing ourselves to hurt our bodies even more by not taking care of the cause of the problem?
We all inherently know that drugs don’t cure the body. We know that symptoms aren’t meant to be covered or masked. You would never take the batteries out of the fire alarm and the firefighters wouldn’t break down to your door with their axes, start chopping at the fire alarm, and then suddenly leave because what would happen to your house? It would burn down and you’d be ticked. You also would never put tape over your check engine light or just let that engine rattle and smoke, and think, “It’ll probably just go away.” Because what will eventually happen? That car that you depend on every day to get you from point A to point B, and pick up your kids to take your dog to the park, to shop, to work, to live will break down. And then you have a crisis on your hands that’s going to cost more money, take more time to fix, and possibly damage your vehicle beyond repair, and you’d be ticked.
So why do we take our own bodies for granted? Look, when it comes to the human body, the one body we get that we absolutely 100% cannot replace, what are we trained to do in society when we have a symptom? Simply to cover it up and mask it. Take this pill to keep working and don’t think about it. Take this shot to get back on the field and don’t think about it because for some strange reason, if we can’t feel it and we aren’t thinking about it, it means we’re fixed. Again, nothing could be further from the truth.
Billboards, commercials, they try to convince us all to ask your doctor if this is right for you. Well, I’m a doctor and I say no. No, it’s not. People often mask their symptoms with a surgery, a drug, a pill, a potion, or a lotion. But the most important question that no one seems to ask themselves is this, “Is the problem I’m taking this pill for still there when I take this pill or is this pill making it actually go away?” Well, of course, the problem is still there. People think they are buying time with a pill, but they are losing time in the long run. It’s like we said earlier, if you go to the doctor and he or she diagnoses you with high blood pressure, they’ll prescribe you a medication to make your blood work look pretty again. But what happens when you go on Hawaii on your vacation and they lose your luggage, what happens to the blood pressure? It goes back up like we said. So you are just managing a condition, not correcting the cons. It’s not taking care of the fire, it’s taking care of the smoke alarm, and eventually like we said, the building burns down and your body will inevitably develop a crisis as a result.
Think about it like this, if the root cause of your problem represents the fire and you’re masking it, taking the batteries out of the fire alarm, what’s going to eventually happen to the building which is your body? It’s going to burn down and it’s going to die early. So by the time you have a symptom, it already means that those nerves are extremely inflamed and you’re already in a crisis. It doesn’t necessarily tell you about location or severity. You could have back pain that’s a result of an issue in your neck, you can have foot pain that results from an issue in your back, you can have eczema because of poor liver function, you can have blood pressure issues because of kidney trouble, you can have erectile dysfunction because of stress and malnourishment. Many of these symptoms also have more of a biostructural cause, such as spinal dysfunction and posture weakness that leads to organ problems. But you can also have toxicities where you’re getting too much of something that doesn’t serve your body well and deficiencies where you aren’t getting enough of something that your body needs. This can produce a host of symptoms from a biochemical origin also like too much gluten creating symptoms of IBS or not enough healthy fats leading to postpartum depression in new moms. You could have emotional stress, or overactivity, or a sedentary lifestyle causing your symptoms.
Let’s say one day you or a friend of yours has neck pain. Those nerves are inflamed. You feel it as pain, spasm, numbness, tingling, or a combination of them. Let’s say you have heart problems, an arrhythmia, high blood pressure, or thyroid problems, or immune system problems. You don’t feel your heart, you don’t feel your thyroid, so just because you don’t feel them functioning poorly doesn’t mean there isn’t a problem. Inflammation is there and your body is in a crisis enough to shut down the function, and now it’s leading to disease. When there is a back problem, a heart problem, a hormone problem, a thyroid problem, a lung issue going on, what that symptom represents is that there is less than 100% function in the body and anything less than 100% function is not health. It is illness and disease.
If you recall from our other videos, health is the optimal functioning of your body mentally, physically, spiritually, and not merely the absence of sickness or disease. So just because I might look good or I might feel good, or I might talk good, and just because I’m not sick doesn’t mean I’m healthy. On the other hand, as we’ve discussed today, disease is less than optimal function. It is a disordered or incorrectly functioning organ, part, structure, or system of the body. It results from the accumulation of dysfunction over time, whether it’s unknown or whether it’s ignored. Things have been going crazy on the microscopic cellular level for long enough that you now have an emergency at the larger level, the one where you can now sense it. So you have options, ignore it, mask it, cut it out, or my favorite, correct it.
Disease in its most simplified context results from a part of the body that is not functioning correctly. That’s it. That’s all it is right there. A disease process is not something you can feel until there’s enough cell tissue damage that occurs, until all of a sudden there goes the flares, there’s the pain, there’s the sickness, and there’s the symptom of this disease, or the worst symptom of all which is early death because you never felt it. So the biggest killers in our country today are not the ones that you feel, it’s the ones you don’t feel. Can you feel diabetes catching up on you? No. Can you feel high cholesterol? No. Can you feel dementia or Alzheimer’s stealing your mind? No. Can you feel cancer destroying your tissue and weaving its way through the body? No. What it comes down to is that you cannot base your health on how you feel or how you look. If you have a symptom-based healthcare practitioner, it’s never going to be the best move for the healthcare decisions for you and your family because the only time they can help you is when you’re in a crisis and you have a symptom. A symptom-based mindset leads to enhancing the effects of a sick care system, more sick people, more costs, more time lost with loved ones. But a function-based approach leads to a healthcare system with more freedom, more experiences, more strength, and better, longer lasting results.
You wanna be proactive, not reactive. The difference between the two being that reactive care is what we’re taught in this country, I have a problem and I react to it, versus being proactive which means you take care of your health now, and you get to avoid all those things down the road so you’re not reacting to a tremendous disease crisis. So remember, when you feel or see symptoms whether it’s pain, headache, fatigue, shortness of breath, sexual dysfunction, blurry vision, allergies, fever, it’s already a warning signal that something is not working right and something more dangerous may be going on. So get to the cause immediately.
Thank you for your attention. Thank you for your commitment to your health. All I ask is to share this message, spread this truth. Help us reach more people who are not living the life that they deserve because they haven’t been told how to be and how to stay healthy. Please, tell your friends at work or show them this video. If you see people that are rubbing their neck or saying that they’re taking a pill for this or that, or chugging down Monster drinks and Red Bull because they’re self-medicating their fatigue, take the authority and be a lifesaver, and a hero, and say, “Listen, I know that you think that that’s just a headache. I know that you think that’s just a neck pain from working,” but tell them that the nerves in their body are already inflamed causing the disease crisis in their body right now, and they need to make it a priority to find the cause of that. Don’t let them take the batteries out of the fire alarm and don’t let them put tape over their check engine light.
My responsibility was to get this to you. Now, yours is to get it to them. To each one, teach one. Be proactive and take care of your health for the rest of your life, and help others to do it too. As the saying goes, “To the world, you may be one person, but for one person, you may be the world.” Look, the best way to take care of your most important asset is by finding someone who could help you function at your highest level each and every day. For those of you that would like to learn more about how you can be free from symptoms, function at your best, and reach your God-given potential through a healthier structure so you can get more to life with the people you love and care about, call our office today or click on the link below. I’m Dr Ryan, your friendly neighborhood chiropractor, wishing you a happy day and a healthy life.
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