Coolangatta Gold

Its been no secret I have been battling with health a bit this year. I can see this is really on three fronts.

1. Illness – My immune system has been down, causing me to get sick quite regularly, particularly when picking up my training load.
2. Injury – I am still getting intermittent injuries – mainly lower legs and in my left shoulder.
3. Stress – Just general life stuff which saps energy, motivation etc

One thing I have really noticed though when seeking advice on these issues, from friends, health professionals and qualified medical practitioners, is that 95% of the time the approach to healing seems completely wrong. The approach invariably seems to be focused on adding something into the mix to try and create a new balance, rather than finding the cause of the problem, removing it and thereby reinstating the natural balance.

A great example is with my recent illnesses. I personally think it is a food allergy at the moment, which was exposed by the pressure I put my body under when training for the Gold last year. Now, I’ve seen a local doctor two or three times about this over the course of the illnesses and firstly I was prescribed anti-biotics – with the disastrous effects the week before the gold. Second I was tested for asthma and I was tried on Ventolin. On my third visit, I asked him about nutrition and food allergies. This visit was really insightful to me as the doc and I had a really great discussion on how “nutrition” and other such therapies works in the Australian medical world.

A big problem that currently exists in the Australian medical world is that if a doctor cannot make a treatment “medical”, they cannot get the treatment through to the client without pressure of some kind from Medicare. Now – this is all heresay, just from my conversation with the doctor, so I do not know what the whole story is or anything like that, but the impression I got is that Medicare’s approval of treatments govern much of what the doctors these days can do. And medical change (understandably I must say) being so slow, treating illness with things like “nutrition” is still a little “voodoo” (his words not mine) in most medical circles.

So the result of this is that I walked into the doctors with asthma like symptoms, for the first time in my life as a 37 year old adult,  and rather than find what caused the reaction and remove it, I was prescribed Ventolin as the first option.

Speaking to many others about the issues I’ve been battling with, the same thing happens. Not so much on the prescription side of things, rather on the supplement side of things. The number of supplements I’ve been recommended have been as numerous as they have been varied. Boost immunity, fight bacteria etc – they all must be good, but still they seem to be fighting symptoms, rather than the problem. This became really clear to me in speaking to Kerry from the health food shop across the road. She has been helping me try and suss out what is causing the inbalance in the first place, by gradually removing and reintroducing things from my diet. By finding what is causing the reactions though and removing it, the body works as it should do and may not need the other stuff.

I’ve been kind of lucky this year too in that I have started long term Chiropractic work with Grant Phillips. I have had structural issues with my back and neck, causing shin splints, spasms, injuries all over the place, for as long as I can remember. Grants philosophy as I understand it is quite simple. At the back of your spine, there are no muscles to pull the spine back in alignment. So if it gets out of alignment in that direction (as all of our spines do with age) it needs help going back into balance. Incorrect alignment is what creates all the injuries. So correcting alignment will prevent the injuries from occuring.

When I remember all the other professional treatments I have had, they have all recognised the misalignment, but rather than correct that they created a treatment based on building muscle in different areas of the body to try and pull things back into place. In other words, they have been about creating an un-natural compensation to rebalance, rather than removing the original misalignment.

Stress is the same too isn’t it? Meditation, yoga, exercise, burn it off. Its probably way more healthy just to correct the source of the stress – but that’s probably the longest term thing to correct for all of us isn’t it.