We are Health Detectives, but what does that mean? There are two ways I like to explain it:
Like a puzzle. Today in modern medicine when you go to see your PCP or specialist, they want to know “what one thing are you here for today?” Period. They don’t have time for a lengthy dissertation of what is going on with your health, and neither will the insurance companies pay for more. One health issue, one visit – it’s the way it is today in many, if not most, doctor’s offices around the country. We, the Health Detectives, are different. We WANT to know ALL that is going on with your health. We WANT the details! We know that your health is like a puzzle. Every symptom is a piece of the puzzle. You may want that symptom to go away, but more importantly, you want the causative factor to go away. To find the causative factor, we have to know more than just one or two symptoms.
You see, the body has more than one way of telling us something is wrong. Many symptoms, such as fatigue, can be a red flag for dozens of different conditions. If you add another symptom, such as body aches, you’ve narrowed down a possible causative factor. Add another, like difficulty concentrating, and you’ve narrowed it down even more. The more symptoms you can identify, a picture starts to form. A Health Detective is looking at the totality of symptoms in order to treat the PICTURE, the PERSON, not just a scattered symptom here and there.
In medicine today, we are fractionalized. We have specialists for everything. We even have subspecialties within specialties: Urology, for instance, is a specialty. Within that, you have urologists that subspecialize in just prostate diseases, in cancer, in kidney stones, or kidney transplants. There are about a dozen subspecialties just in that one specialty. This is just one example. As a result of a system of fractionalizing our health, specialists don’t get to see the full picture of what is going wrong with that person’s health.
For example, the symptoms of heartburn, kidney stones, gallstones, arthritis, cataracts, psoriasis and osteoporosis all seem like totally different health conditions, necessitating at least 6 different specialists, yet all have the same underlying etiology. While you can take drugs, have surgery or do a number of procedures, you are just chasing symptoms. If, instead, you treat that underlying etiology, you get rid of a host of symptoms.
A Health Detective looks at health like peeling an onion. Each layer reveals something important. We dig deeper and deeper, asking “WHY?” at each step, until we find the initiating problem that set off the slew of symptoms that followed. Most times it wasn’t a single factor, but an accumulation of factors that finally coalesced into what we now call a disease. If you want to be truly well, and not just symptom-masked, see a Health Detective who will treat YOU, not just your disease.
©2020 Holly A. Carling, O.M.D., L.Ac., Ph.D.
