"He who cures the disease
may be the skillfullest,
but he who prevents it
is the safest."
Thomas Fuller, 1608-1681

Getting Healthy implies that you are not considered healthy at this time but you want to regain your health and vitality. When you google the tem you'll find that getting healthy is an even more ambiguous concept than "staying healthy". The basic question is, where you come from. Apparently excess weight is one of the starting points, so the Harvard University, School for Public Health web site may have some useful advice. Anyway it seems that for Google "getting healthy" means getting off the couch and start exercising. This may be an important step for all those people living a sedentary lifestyle, but that is - of course - only part of the story.

Most people that read this column are recovering from an illness or injury and are interested to regain their health as quickly as possible and they tacitly define health as Vitality and Energy. If you are one of those people, you are in the right place, because drug-centric medicine cannot get you there. Drugs are designed for and can do a good job in making the symptoms vanish, i.e. get rid of the signs of the disease, but the cause may not subside and still be there when the symptoms are gone. If so, it is just a question of time until other, possibly worse symptoms will occur. So this is a good time to analyze what has made you sick in the first place and then develop a program to build up your immunity, as the first step towards regaining your strength.

Unfortunately, few people are aware of the significance of identifying the cause of disease, particularly when it seems to be over. But having no symptoms does not mean it's over and it rarely is. For example, a survivor of chemo-therapy may celebrate victory, but the immune system is now destroyed and the subject is vulnerable to even the weakest attack. It is vital to build up resistance immediately to ward off any attackers, meaning that the lifestyle has to be adjusted to avoid exposure to toxic elements wherever they occur, in food, water, air, environment, personal care and household detergent products.

The incumbent may be simply overtaxed with the task, but Naturopathic Clinics staffed by NMD's, or ND's are specialized to analyze, remedy and coach the person to regain his or her original strength and vitality. Very often we meet people with so called "unexplained symptoms", that is when the doctor sends you home because there is nothing wrong, but you just feel miserable. These conditions are more serious than what meets the eye, a patient implicitly accused of faking a disease, just because drugs-centric medicine fails to diagnose a cause, may suffer from stress, depression and low self-esteem and these conditions do not help in the healing process.

In any case when you feel "not healthy" - don't wait for it to go away, it is a situation to take action in order to avoid worse things to come. If you have seen doctors that were not able to give the answer, there is no reason for despair, it could be that standard healthcare were analyzing symptoms and they couldn't find any. But we know that many diseases make you feel miserable for no apparent reason, long before any symptoms show up, and when they do, they seem to be unrelated to the cause. A good example is a digestive disorder that you may not know you have, but it causes periodontal disease which, when it occurs is treated as an oral bacteria problem and fails to heal.