By, Daniel H. Chong, ND

Illness, acute or chronic, is a multi-faceted event. Even a simple cold needs more than one condition in place in order for it to occur. You must do more than simply come into contact with a virus. If contact with a cold virus was all you needed to do to catch one, everyone would have colds all the time, as cold viruses are ubiquitous in our environment. In addition to viral exposure, your bodily terrain must be a place that a virus is able to overrun, meaning a place that is worn out from stress or fatigue; a place that does not have the level of nutrients available to it from a good whole foods diet to be able to fight off a virus; a place that simply can no longer resist disease.

The same conditions and often more must be met for chronic disease to develop, but they must be in place for much longer. If this is true of the nature of disease, why would healing be any different? If numerous conditions must be met in order for acute or chronic illness to occur in your body, why wouldn't numerous conditions need to be met in order to heal?

Six Fundamental Areas

There are six fundamental areas I believe must be addressed in order to heal from a chronic condition. I call them the six foundations of healing. These areas are nutrition, detoxification, structure, genetics, thoughts & emotions, and spiritual health. Sometimes only one or two of these areas may be involved, but more often than not, they all affect the illness on some level or another. If these areas are not investigated and subsequently treated, if necessary, the illness will likely linger.

A typical conventional medical approach addresses none of these areas, but instead focuses on identifying and suppressing symptoms, often with powerful drugs or surgery. Both of these treatments can be dangerous and may potentially add to the level of stress the body is under. This can, in turn, compound the original problem at some point later on. The only healing that occurs in cases where extensive drugs or surgery are used tends to happen in spite of these treatments, not because of them.

Nutrition

If you have read anything on mercola.com, you are likely aware of the importance of nutrition to attaining, or maintaining, health. You are also likely aware that by nutrition I don't mean multivitamins, soy isoflavones or whatever the next miracle supplement may turn out to be. I mean food. Whole food. The type of food you are likely to find on the outer rim of a typical grocery store, rather than in the middle aisles--the type of food that will spoil in a week if you don't eat it.

However, you may not be aware that nutrition not only involves healthy, whole, organic food, but much, much more. Nutrition involves everything in this world that nourishes your body. The most obvious form of nourishment is food, but pure water, air, sunlight and auditory and visual stimuli all fall under this category as well. Anything that comes in contact with one of your five senses is 'feeding' your body.

Pure water and air are hard to come by these days, but doing your best still counts. Get a water filter and an air filter if you need one. Open your windows. Try and take a trip into nature, away from the toxic, city air most of us breathe everyday. At least take five or 10 minutes out of everyday to stop what you're doing and JUST breath, deeply and evenly. You'll be surprised at how much better this makes you feel.

Unfortunately, for many or us sunlight may be a difficult thing to come by this time of year, and I don't recommend artificial tanning booths either. However, sunlight is extremely important to you as a human being, and we should all try our best to get a little of it as often as possible. Spending some time outdoors everyday, regardless of whether or not you can see the sun through the clouds, is helpful, as some sunlight still gets through. Dr. Mercola's articles on Vitamin D are a must-read for everyone in this respect, and talk in depth about the positive affects that sunlight has on all of us.

If you are in a place where sunlight is not very available, you should also consider including good sources of vitamin D, such as cod liver oil and high-quality organic eggs, and raw cream, kefir, yogurt, butter and cheese from organically raised, grass-fed and finished cows and goats, in your diet.

Like food, auditory and visual stimuli are types of nourishment that can also come in many different forms, and by no means are they all good for you. For example, watching the news every night might not be the best thing for your health. The stories told, and images shown, are rarely positive and often times leave us feeling horrible about the world we live in. This is certainly a form of stress and is not very conducive to healing. If you are a nightly news watcher, consider decreasing your normal viewing, and maybe even cutting it out all together.

If you must watch television, pick a sitcom. Laughter never hurt anyone. However, television watching of any kind is really a poor choice for visual and auditory stimuli. A great option for positive auditory stimuli is the Insight CD highly recommended on this Web site. It can provide numerous benefits to your mental and physical health.

The best choice for good auditory and visual stimuli is nature. An earlier article on this site mentioned that studies actually show exposure to scenes of nature, real or in pictures, can actually have a positive effect on your health and ability to perform daily activities. So again, I encourage everyone to take a day, a week, even just half an hour a week, to step outside, go to a park, to the ocean, or to the mountains, and just look around. Oh, and while you're there, PLEASE REMEMBER TO BREATHE!!

The final of our five senses is smell. Your sense of smell often times gets overlooked, but is extremely important nonetheless. Positive olfactory stimuli can again come in many forms, but the most important and easiest to come by is good-smelling food. There is something very special about walking into your home and smelling the wonderful aroma of a good quality home-cooked meal cooking in the kitchen. Unfortunately, with the growing popularity of microwaved meals and fast food, this is something that less and less people are experiencing these days.

Years ago cooking used to be an all-day event. There was always a pot of soup brewing on the stove, and usually something cooking in the oven. Cooking used to be a common human pastime, but in these days of double income households and working overtime, the art and pleasure of cooking are quickly becoming things of the past. This situation can be turned into an entire article in and of itself, but for the purpose of this article, I will simply say that we should all start or restart the hobby of cooking, if not for the smell of it, then for the taste! **For a wealth of information on the lost art of traditional cooking please see the wonderful book Nourishing Traditions, by Sally Fallon, president of the Weston A. Price foundation.

Detoxification

Most of us are aware that we live in a very toxic world these days. For example, Dr. Mercola writes at length about the horrible state of seafood these days, and how most of us would do well to simply avoid the majority of this type of food altogether. Not only is this a sad thing for the poor animals that can't escape their saltwater homes, as well as for those of us who enjoy good seafood, but also it speaks to the urgency of the entire situation. The ocean takes up the majority of space on our entire planet. If it is almost universally toxic, what else is left?

With the state of toxicity in our environment at an all-time high, it has become increasingly important for all of us to be sure that our bodies are as capable as possible at dealing with all of the chemicals we come in contact with. The better our bodies are able to process and eliminate the various toxins we accumulate, the better our bodies will function, and the stronger and more resistant to disease we will be. In situations where one's health has already been compromised, any treatment, regardless of what type it is, will be more effective if the body is 'cleaned out' first, using one or more forms of detoxification.

One of my teachers liked to compare this idea to putting a new coat of paint on your house. When it comes time to do so, do you just buy some paint and start slathering it on there? Of course not! First you have to scrap off the old stuff, and clean off all of the dirt. Doing so will help to ensure that the new paint will stick better and last longer, or in essence, that it will work better. If you are chronically ill, and you want to heal up and become shiny and new again, you also need to clean out the gunk that has collected in your body first! After all, most of this gunk is what has likely contributed to your problem in the first place. Doing so will help any subsequent treatment you undergo to work better, and ensure that its effects are long lasting.

Fortunately for us, even though our environment is as toxic as it is, there are a huge number of detoxification options available to us. Everything from detox books, to detox clinics, to detox teas are out there waiting to be used, and many of these options can be quite helpful. I consider some treatments to be essential in my practice. The treatments I typically recommend to my patients are the castor oil pack and constitutional hydrotherapy treatments, one- to three-week cleansing programs using one of a variety of cleansing kits available at most health food stores and naturopathic clinics, and homeopathic drainage, which is a powerful treatment used to affect detoxification on the deepest of levels in your body.

Exercise, yoga postures, water drinking, deep breathing exercises, and dry skin brushing are additional detoxifying measures you can actually incorporate into your daily life to not only help treat chronic disease, but to help prevent it as well.

Finally, some detoxification treatments can be as helpful in acute disease as they are in chronic disease. In many cases, an acute illness is actually just a way for your own body to detoxify itself. The symptoms of a cold may just be your body's method of choice for eliminating certain toxins that it has accumulated. At the very least, they are there to eliminate the virus, which has settled in during favorable conditions.

Taking suppressive medications like antihistamines, aspirin, and even some herbal medication during a cold is really only hindering your body's efforts. Instead you should choose treatments like hydrotherapy, homeopathy, and herbal medicines, which support your immune system rather than suppress symptoms. These treatments do nothing more than assist your body in what it is already trying to do. Classical naturopathic medicine employs this approach to treatment, although some naturopaths these days are simply suppressing symptoms using natural treatments instead of drugs. Classical naturopathic medicine is really just a highly specialized way to assist your body's own healing efforts, much of which is based on its ability to detoxify.

Stay tuned for Part II in our next newsletter!

Dr. Daniel Chong is a licensed naturopathic physician practicing in Canby, OR. His practice focuses on the management of "functional health conditions" such as digestion problems, hormonal imbalance, diabetes, fatigue and allergies. Aside from his private practice in Oregon, Dr. Chong is also available for consultations via telephone and the internet. He may be contacted at:

178 SW 2nd Ave.
Canby, OR 97013
503.266.4329
NaturalMedicineConsultations.com

The Forgotten Art of Hydrotherapy, Part I

Self-Healing: Brief Psychotherapy and Other Approaches

Breathing Exercises and Self Healing

How Sound Can Promote Health and Healing