It may be oversimplified but simple is better right. There are really only 3 types of conditions one can have. They are acute, chronic, and permanent. Health is your body’s current state of function and these categories are progressive. Your health can decrease due to 3 main stressors, thoughts or emotional stress, chemical or toxic stress, and physical or traumatic stress on your nervous system. And there may not be any symptoms or warning signs at first. Notice that conditions are not just named symptoms. We generally view symptoms as being a bad thing that we try to treat or cover up, but really symptoms just are what they are. They can and should be used as indicators of dysfunction that point to the problem. Treating symptoms is like putting tape over your cars engine light, the light isn’t there anymore but is the engine fixed?

We just had our first presentation about neurodevelopmental disorders in children last week. We looked at the factors that decrease health and what these children are more susceptible to. But we do not focus on covering up a symptom or treat disease. The disease or disorder appeared due to lack of health. Remember there may not be any symptoms at first, and if there are no symptoms you cannot name a disease. So the real problem is the decreased health. We talked about ways to improve the health of these children because it is a multifactorial problem causing the decreased health, which is then labeled a disorder based on the symptoms. Everything is processed by the nervous system, so to improve these factors a properly functioning nervous system is needed.

Acute conditions happen fast and are usually more intense. These conditions may have a known incident such as an accident. Some of these accidents are out of your control, but most of the time there has been a decrease in health and function that led up to the accident happening. Such as when you bend down to pick something up and you back goes out. It wasn’t that particular motion that caused your back to go out, it was the dysfunction that built up over time that led to your body to not be able to perform that simple motion. If you do not get the right care or enough of it, the original problem that led up to that point is still there and not corrected. You may feel better after some treatments but like most of you know, your back keeps going out every so often. And it is not just your back that’s what’s worrying. It is all of your organs and everything else that is affected from the nerves in that area of your back.

This then leads up to what is called a chronic condition. That means it has been there for a long time. Symptoms that return, such as your back going out over the years are an indicator of this. If this continues, over time your body will degenerate and you may be nearing the permanent condition stage. Permanent health problems result from simply treating symptoms when they arise without taking the time to address the underlying cause of the malfunction in the body. People often use medication for the rest of their lives to try and bring comfort to a malfunctioning body. Unfortunately, this only buys comfort…not health. And, this practice usually causes health problems to progress from acute to chronic to permanent, but initially would have been easy to correct.

It is for these reasons that we so strongly recommend spine and nervous system evaluations be performed regularly in Abingdon and North Tazewell…not just when symptoms develop. It is also why we say that, “It’s easier to grow healthy children than to repair damaged adults.”