This is a question I have heard many times in my nearly 40 years as a physician assistant. The answer lies in the study of how illnesses progress and how traditional medicine defines illness.

In general, we could name three stages of health:
First stage: healthy and well means having enough vital energy every day to do the things we desire to do with no limitations. This is the stage of health that is ideal for all of us.

Second stage: functional condition is limbo-land in which we feel bad, have a lot of symptoms, but yet nothing shows up on medical tests. Many people find themselves in this stage.

Third stage: pathological conditions mean that diseases and illnesses have been recognized by observation of damaged tissue and abnormal results on lab tests and x-rays. Because these illnesses have names, have been studied, and have evidence-based diagnoses, practitioners of traditional medicine can deal with them.

Remember: “It is not your age; it is just your mileage.” Each time we have an acute illness, an injury, or an emotional shock and do not totally recover from those insults, we experience a reduction in our overall level of health. As a result, we start to see signs of stress on our genetically weakest systems. Long before actual tissue damage occurs, we enter this area of functional condition.

This functional stage is the condition in which nutrition, homeopathy, and natural health are most beneficial. Eating good food, avoiding the toxic additives, drinking adequate water, getting daily exercise, getting a massage, using herbs to cleanse and build, and taking supplements will help us return to the stage of being healthy and well.

Case Study: KJ, age 35, felt ill for 18 months. Beginning two weeks after having had a flu shot, her symptoms of fatigue, joint stiffness, and muscle aches were sometimes debilitating to the point that she was often bed-bound. Recognizing that her symptoms were caused by her overactive immune system, which thought she had the flu rather than just controlled exposure to the flu virus, we treated her with a homeopathic Gelsemium 200C, a natural treatment for influenza, twice a day for five days. She fully recovered within a few weeks.

We need to learn to read the signs. The little aches and pain, the heartburn, the blurry vision, the occasional headache, the urinary troubles, the PMS are all signals from your body that changes need to be made. These symptoms are not diseases. They are simple signals. Learn to stop, look, and listen. Pay attention to what your body is telling you. Learn to fix the functional conditions before they become pathological problems that require prescription medicine and surgery.

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