Healing a Condition
A good daily diet isn’t always enough to fully correct a condition, manage a disease, or recover from injury or surgery.
Eating a healthy daily diet gives you the strong foundation you need to help heal or manage any remaining conditions, symptoms or unforeseen health challenges. For any of these, you may need a plan for recovery that includes dietary adjustments, supplements and useful home treatments to target the condition. Once you implement the plan, we assess how it’s working and make whatever adjustments or refinements are needed. It’s surprising how many chronic conditions can be corrected or better managed with a little extra help.
3 Key Steps to Healing a Condition
1. Identify the real cause or causes.
Too often, the real causes of our health conditions are not accurately identified. A dramatic example is heartburn. A significant percentage of people with heartburn have too little stomach acid, and yet the standard treatment is to suppress stomach acid. Recent research shows that heartburn medications often aggravate, and can even cause, chronic heartburn! Although it sounds counterintuitive, re-establishing normal stomach acid is often one part of fully correcting the condition.
2. Choose the right foods, supplements and treatments.
The next step is to identify the specific foods, supplements and remedies that will best address your condition. Constipation is a good example of a condition that can have several causes, each having a different “best remedy.” The right approach could be more fiber, more water, avoidance of an allergenic food, liver-gallbladder cleansing, or a reduction in calcium supplementation. If excessive calcium supplementation is the cause of constipation, more fiber and water may not correct it. If it does correct it, you still haven’t treated the underlying cause of excessive calcium intake, which is a risk factor for hardening of the arteries.
Give your recovery the time and attention it needs.
Healing a condition, especially one that’s long-standing, requires time to implement your plan and allow your body to respond. Sometimes a condition such as headaches or constipation will correct in just days. Many conditions such as lowering cholesterol will take weeks or months of improved diet, supplements, and any helpful home remedies (e.g., a liver cleanse). But, as soon as you see your first positive changes, your confidence and motivation grow, helping you to stay engaged with your plan and move ahead to recovery. Whether it’s restoring thyroid hormone function or recovering from surgery, my clients’ doctors often comment on their improved condition or speedy recovery.