Symptoms: What Are They? A Holistic Perspective When something is not right in the body, you may feel pain, or have a fever, a dry cough, a wet cough, a discharge, headache, lower back pain, high blood pressure, or a rash. Whatever you feel is called a symptom. If other people and your doctor can observe rashes and high temperature and coughs it is a sign. However lay people use the words interchangeably and for that reason we will call everything symptoms. Symptoms are indicators that something is wrong in the body.

‍Modern Medicine Manages Symptoms: Common sense would tell you that treatment should involve the removal of whatever is wrong, but you will find that allopathic medicine focuses on controlling symptoms. If your blood pressure is high, it is a sign that either you have stress or your blood vessels are filling up with plaque. Yet your doctor prescribes medication to lower the blood pressure, which is just a symptom and does not address the cause. Later when you develop heart disease you get more medication and you end up taking half a dozen meds. The root cause of the problem is not addressed and therefore the high blood pressure never goes away. This is why a lot of people are on chronic medication. When they start taking the meds they probably believe that the condition will improve, only to find that the symptoms are under control as long as they take their meds, daily, for life. Later they develop side effects (new illnesses caused by the meds) and they simply get more meds. It is a costly existence and it robs people of the joys of good health.

‍Take Control of Your Health: It is up to you to understand how the system works and to acknowledge that you must take control of your health. Lifestyle is the major cause of health problems and lifestyle is what you must change to regain your health.

• Eat healthy. Learn how various foods affect your health, then avoid those that damage your health, e.g. processed foods, and eat more of the foods that enhance your health, e.g. organic foods. This will solve the majority of your problems.
• Get fit. Move your body more often, going for walks or jogging several times per week, stretching your body, practicing yoga or training with weights.
• Go natural in personal care products, cleaning and laundry products. Commercially made products contain harmful chemicals that accumulate in the body and cause health problem. To reduce the intake of chemicals in the body, make your own natural products or buy from amazon.com and other online stores.
• Manage stress. Do not allow a job or a relationship to rob you of joy and kill you with stress. Stress destroys your health, brings on chronic fatigue and accelerates aging. Either manage the situation to reduce stress or leave. Your health is worth it.
• Emotional and mental health is also important. If you have long-held hurts, anger, hatred, envy and jealousy, the negative energy of these feelings will manifest in your body as cancers and other illnesses. Forgive and let go of what happened in the past because you are the one who benefits from forgiveness.
• Detox your body once or twice a year.