Are Symptoms Bad?

From the time when we were born, we were told that symptoms generally mean that we are unhealthy and that the absence of symptoms meant that we were healthy. I feel sick. I have a running nose or a cough. That means I’m ill. If I don’t feel pain or sickness, then I must be healthy.

The problem with that is that the top two killers in our society are heart disease and cancer. For the most part, they have no warning signs before you’re diagnosed – meaning that 24 hours before you have a major heart attack, you might not feel ill at all. That does not mean that you weren’t sick. It just means that you didn’t have any symptoms.

On the flipside to that, when you’ve got a cold or a flu and you’ve got a runny nose and cough, you might have a fever or feel sweaty, that doesn’t mean that you’re sick, although that’s often what we call it. Those symptoms are a sign your immune system is functioning normally

“We need to stop basing our health on the presence or lack of symptoms.”

When you’ve got a bacteria or a virus inside your body, you want to have mucus being produced. You want to have a cough so that you can expel that from your lungs. You want to have a temperature or a fever so that you can raise the body temperature to the point where the bacteria or virus can no longer survive within your body.

We need to change our mindset around what symptoms are. They aren’t a good indicator for whether we are healthy or sick, and they’re not often a good indicator for where the problem may be.

Going back to heart attacks, for instance, if you have arm pain during a heart attack, the problem is not your arm, though that’s where the pain may be. We know we’re having a heart attack. We know that one of the common referral sites for that cardiovascular event is arm pain, but that’s not the issue. You wouldn’t apply Neurofen or ibuprofen gel to numb the arm because that’s not the issue. The issue is the cardiovascular event you’re about to have.

Furthermore, people don’t associate headaches with the spine, but some of the most common types of headaches, such as tension headaches, migraines and cervicogenic headaches, can be influenced by spinal health and posture.

Moving forward, we need to stop basing our health on the presence or lack of symptoms. We need to constantly strive for and create better health in our lives – a healthy diet, meditation, looking after our spine and nervous system, exercising, and getting enough rest.

What really bringing our society’s health down, is the misconception in our minds about what sickness is and how it presents, and then the lack of understanding of how important our daily habits are in moving us towards sickness or creating health