Prevention
One of my greatest delights is when someone books an appointment not because something is wrong, but because they want to stay well.
Jean Dow
Medical Herbalist & Functional Medicine Practitioner
One of my greatest delights in functional herbal practice is when someone calls to make an appointment, not because they have an area of concern, but because they want a health MOT. It’s unusual enough that I’m writing about it.
It’s bizarre really. We take prevention as a matter of course in other areas of life, but not in the most important one: our health. We would never run our car into the ground and then expect to fix it back to full function. Nor would we ignore our teeth until they rotted and then expect them to serve us. Yet we frequently only address our health once we no longer have it, or things start to go wrong.
01
It’s an interesting phenomenon that symptoms are the last thing to appear when the body becomes dysregulated, yet this is how we gauge health. We think that if we have no symptoms, we have no illness. We know this simply isn’t true.
A question I ask regularly is: “When was the last time you felt fantastic?” That is what good health should feel like, not just an absence of symptoms.
The aim of the herbalist is as much about keeping you in good health as it is helping with poor health. Imagine if you could prevent disease happening. Well, guess what: we can.
02
Our bodies are full of wonderful mechanisms for telling us when something isn’t quite right or needs attention. If we learn how to listen to those messages, we can prevent disease and ill health.
I tell all my patients that if they learn only one thing from their consultations with me, it should be how to listen to their body’s messages:
These are all messages your body is trying to convey. If you learn to listen, you can act before any further dysfunction happens.
It’s incredibly life-affirming to remember that our body’s default mode is to heal and repair. If we get there early enough, in many cases no further dysfunction needs to happen.
Our health system mostly only wants to see us when things have gone wrong. I do it differently. I want to see you when things are going great too, so we can log and remember what that feels like. Sometimes it takes someone outside yourself to ask those questions and go through things in fine detail to keep things on track.
03
Functional testing in clinic lets us act preventatively too.
Did you know that Type 2 diabetes can be predicted 6 to 10 years ahead simply by testing insulin levels? This isn’t routinely done on the NHS, but I do it. Many years before your HbA1c (a three-month glucose measure) becomes dysregulated, your insulin levels begin to creep up. If we check this, we can do something before diabetes develops.
It’s the same with gut microbiome testing. We can check the health of the bowel, gallbladder and pancreas, plus inflammatory markers and much more, and be ahead of the game rather than waiting for ill health to appear.
When the opportunity arises, be proactive. Think prevention.
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This article is for general information and isn’t a substitute for personal medical advice. Please don’t start or stop any medication without speaking to a qualified practitioner.
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