Jan 10, 2012
When asked what matters most in a therapy or a health-related product, most practitioners will answer: “effectiveness.” That makes sense, certainly, because we are looking for different effects than we are seeing in the case of a diseased condition! However, the quest for ‘effectiveness’ can be misleading as well, because just creating a different effect is not necessarily helpful.
Drug-based therapy is often effect-oriented. Symptoms are targeted as the ‘cause’ of a given problem rather than as indicators of what is usually a less obvious matrix of cause. Managing symptoms and balancing the array of side effects from “being effective” becomes a large part of the process of modern health care. Iatrogenic disorders form probably the majority of the reasons for ongoing treatment. We now have a self-sustaining industry based on treatments for the effects of previous treatments!
Intervention or Interference?
As health care providers, it is our business to intervene – to come between the patient and his or her problem, to assist in resolving health issues with knowledge and tools not available directly to the patient. Generally, of course, patients are concerned about symptoms, and they may or may not have any substantial awareness of the reason for those symptoms. Also, patients have been trained to see practitioners as symptom solvers – “this treatment or this substance for this symptom.” “Just give me a pill, a shot or even a surgery to make this go away.”
Part of the challenge we face is to find the ways to help our patients with their immediate discomfort or disability while never losing sight of the responsibility to address the deeper causes of their conditions. Otherwise we are likely to be interfering with the body’s strategies for healing, rather than cooperating with those strategies.
Cooperative Intervention
For instance, a strategy commonly used by the body to compensate for a variety of problems is the strategy of inflammation. Of course, inflammation itself becomes a problem over time when causes are not addressed, so we may have to deal with inflammation, and yet we recognize that the inflammation itself arose from something else – perhaps a dietary or lifestyle problem, perhaps even a chronic emotional tension. Many chronic illnesses are the final result of years of balancing one intervention with another while the cause of the original problem was never identified.
Numerous examples could be given, but this is an ongoing problem we all face as naturally-based practitioners. Unfortunately, many even in our field fall prey to the temptation to “one up” the allopathic approach, just substituting ‘effective’ natural remedies for corresponding drugs, for instance, still missing the causative elements, or even choosing to ignore them. Sometimes these “silver bullets” seem to work for a time, but generally they work until they don’t, because the symptoms are themselves just effects of an underlying causative condition.
A Two-phased Approach
At Energetix we supply many products that have a proven record of “effectiveness.” And sometimes that is just what we want as practitioners, particularly where there is an immediate need to be addressed. However, we always emphasize in our training the importance of finding the patterns of cause that may be specific to a given condition so that we aren’t just patching over deeper problems.
Usually there are two phases to a program of natural treatment. The first phase involves ameliorating the immediate or symptomatic problem, not through suppression but by balancing the immediate factors as much as possible. The second phase involves a process of investigation and discovery, where we look into the patient’s background and predispositions, seeking the means of re-establishing fundamental balance for that particular person.
Tools for Assessment
In case you haven’t seen them, we’ve created a variety of charts to help you to work on these simultaneous levels, finding the remedies and strategies that will best help your patients both short- term and long-term. Call if you’d like help finding these, if you have other questions, or if you would like to enroll in one of our specialized classes. Visit our website: www.goenergetix.com for more information.
Grant Clarke | Energetix
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