Why Pharmaceuticals Are Not Always the Answer for Youth, Vitality and Health
Think about some of the commercials that we see on TV. There are all these fast food ads about fun and convenience and amazing deals on foods that are essentially terrible for us. Alongside, there are ads for medications – because in this country, ads from pharmaceutical companies are allowed. These are ads that claim to cure some ailment, or promise to make us youthful and full of energy again. Is it any wonder that we are persuaded to make the wrong food choices and even take medications that we don’t need? I recently spoke to my friend Chad about this, about integrative medicine, and more specifically, about the work of Dr. Shanhong Lu.
Why is there no integrated approach to medicine?
Dr. Lu is an MD, trained in and practicing western medicine. However, she has a heritage of traditional medicine(her grandmother was a practitioner of Chinese medicine). As someone with this dual exposure, Dr. Lu has noticed certain limitations in western medicine. For instance, she wonders why it is that the root cause of disease often escapes healthcare practitioners here. A person with symptoms undergoes a host of tests but they are not able to detect the real issue. It is also seen that a person’s disease remains undetected and untreated until it is at a very advanced stage, by which time it may already be too late!
Another important issue that Dr. Lu speaks about, which indeed we should also be speaking about, is the underlying stress that we all seem to be living with. She speaks about the primitive reptilian part of the brain that reacts to environmental stress, which we cannot consciously control. It is this constant state of stress that causes so many people to self-medicate, and to opt for other harmful habits such as substance abuse, bingeing, not getting exercise and so on. As my friend Chad says, with all this stress, it is as if we have forgotten what it felt like to be happy, full of energy, and just healthy.
Is it a cultural thing?
While the world recognizes the value of practices like meditation, breathing exercises, humming and nasal breathing, we don’t seem to value these or consciously include these in our daily life here. We just seem to be an overly stressed society that seems to place little or no value upon self-care, taking time off and so on. In fact we celebrate working overly hard. Compare, for instance, the earned holiday days that European employees are entitled to versus those in the United States!
While there is some research to show that we are really productive for only about 4 hours a day, our minimum working day is 8 hours. There are people who work 12 and 16 hours a day, and actually boast about this; wear it like a badge of honor.
And what about the environmental toxins that surround us 24×7 – what impact does all the radiation from gadgets have on us? Electromagnetic fields(EMFs) are invisible forms of energy that we are exposed to all the time. Join us to know about all this, as well as 5G, the BIODOT gadget, and more. And stay tuned for my next interview guest Alessandra Montana as well.
