Provided By The ICPA
You Aren’t Sick, You’re Adapting
We should look at symptoms and diseases as the body adapting in a very functional way to circumstances.
In an article called “I Treat Stories,” I talked about the spectrum between perfect “health”—perhaps better defined as “potential”—and disease and death. I talk about functional conditions like insulin resistance and HPA axis dysfunction or estrogen dominance, IBS, depression, and anxiety, as conditions in which functioning is impaired in some way, or the person doesn’t feel like themselves.
I want to correct this. I don’t believe that these conditions, even most diseases per se, are the result of the body malfunctioning. Instead, let’s look at symptoms and so-called pathologies and diseases as the body adapting in a very functional way to circumstances that might be challenging or malfunctioning.
Depression and anxiety are terrific examples of this.
In these conditions, patients are told that they have an inborn malfunction—their brains don’t work properly. They might be told they have a chemical imbalance, or something to that nature, and that they require a lifetime of medication.
This couldn’t be farther from the truth.