The Time is NOW
BY: DR. MELINA ROBERTS
Health isn’t something you put on the back burner and say I’ll take care of it later when I have some time or when a problem arises. You don’t want to wait until a health challenge emerges and then start paying attention to your health. Unfortunately, it just doesn’t work that way. This is the way most people in our society approaches health and that’s exactly how the conventional health care system has trained us to think about health — don’t come in to see us unless you have a problem. Our current health care system is designed to ignore our health until we see some sort of lesional problem or pathology and then you go to the doctors, get diagnosed, then start to think about our health. We think our body has turned against us but you haven’t been paying attention and listening to all the signs and symptoms that were telling us that we were out of balance. The time to listen to our bodies is NOW.
When you are tired, when you are not sleeping well, when you have gas, bloating, irregular bowel movements, if you get a skin rash – these are signs and symptoms that your body is out of balance. We need to listen when our body is talking to us.
The goal when I work with any patient is to work towards getting their body to operate at optimal capacity on its own without reliance on supplements or medications. This means your body is able to work without restrictions on its operating system and is able to easily access our innate ability to self-heal. This isn’t trying to access utopia, it’s how our bodies have been designed to work. We weren’t designed to be reliant on medications for the rest of our lives, or have surgery to solve our health problems or for our bodies to deteriorate as we age. Medications and surgery should be reserved for emergency, life-saving situations, it is not a way to maintain health and wellness. If all of the systems in your body were able to function properly without restriction or stresses then all the systems of our body would have the ability to heal themselves. Health would inevitably prevail and disease would not be able to take hold within your body.
I see conventional medical system as an insurance policy that I may need in emergency situations. In contrast, I see naturopathic medicine as a living health plan, a way to regain or retain proper health for a lifetime. If I get hit by a car, I want to be taken to a hospital and treated by the conventional system. BUT if I have any kind of chronic symptom, I want to know what’s causing this symptom, remove the cause, allow the body to function properly and regain my health — this is what I do as a Naturopathic Doctor. Naturopathic Medicine is understanding human functional physiology and helping the body to regain proper physiology.