Family Lifestyle Choices

Current perception in Medicine is that DNA is the source and controlling factor of our body's functions—all function being reduced down to this basic component. Enabled by technology, medical research looks microscopically at tiny pieces of our bodies—trying to gain access to what might be the elusive controlling factor of disease itself, DNA—at least in theory. A different paradigm is found in the natural medicine system, which is largely practiced by doctors of chiropractic, and other licensed practitioners. In the natural medicine system, the emphasis is on preventive lifestyle choices, the interrelationship between the major organ systems in your body, and their integration by your nervous system: "the big picture." In fact, very few chronic diseases are proven as truly genetic in nature. New research demonstrates that our genes are responsive to their environment. In other words, the environment around your genes can make your genes react. Therefore, chronic diseases that were previously thought of as "genetic" can be influenced by cellular environment. One of the cornerstones of the natural medicine system is the concept that lifestyle choices influence your own internal environment, and that lifestyle choices can be used to prevent chronic disease.

In the natural medicine system, disease is seen as the biological response to many possible factors, but the causes of the disease are the main focus, not the symptoms that the disease causes. Address the multiple causes of chronic disease, and there’s no more reason for the disease to progress, or even persist. Analogously, in a line of stacked dominos that start to fall, the domino representing disease is almost the last one to fall, not the first; symptoms are at the end. Whether DNA is part of that sequence or not, the key is that chronic disease is a natural and logical response mechanism. If the last domino gets pushed and it falls, the problem is not that it has fallen, but instead why the first domino became off balance in the first place.

Conventional medicine is excellent at crisis care: addressing and labeling the fallen domino (the diagnosis), but as we know, statistically, it is dismal at finding the first domino—45 percent, or more of all Americans have chronic illness! That is where the natural medicine system can be used for your family. It is outside of the medical paradigm, and it gives us and our families a better chance than the nation’s statistics for chronic disease. Each system has its role for your family’s health. One does not replace the other, but for prevention, now you can make more informed lifestyle choices for the type of care needed to prevent chronic disease in your family.