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Suppression
and its Effects
By
Christie Keith
It's
important to remember when dealing with any kind of illness
or disorder that symptoms are not the enemy! Symptoms are
the messages of the body, telling us what and where the problem
is. They are the best efforts of the body to restore health
and balance. By suppressing them, we simply drive the disease
they are trying to cure deeper. I have seen this again and
again over the last 15 years. I have seen honest-to-goodness
cures of both acute and chronic disease, and of injuries,
without resorting to suppressive therapies. When looking at
treatments like antibiotics, steroids, and antihistamines,
you are looking at allopathic medicine. Allopathy is quite
literally the practice of opposing, or suppressing, symptoms;
that is what "allopathy" means.
What suppression does is something
like this: A child is being picked on by bullies at school.
She goes home and tells her mother, who is busy and doesn't
want to be bothered. She tells her to shush and not bother
her. So the little girl shuts up. She has to deal with the
bullies in some way, and she sees that she isn't going to
get any help from mom. So she learns not to discuss her problems
with her parents, and a problem of mistrust and inability
to open up develops.
We HAD a little girl with a fairly
simple problem: bullies. We now have a little girl with a
problem of mistrust and inability to communicate which will
most likely plague her for her whole life. Suppression of
symptoms is like that mom: shush and go away, don't bother
me. It's just cutting the wire to the warning light, and figuring
you have solved the problem, which now goes on to get worse.
True holistic treatment, by whatever
modality, gives the body what it needs to complete the efforts
it has made itself. Homeopathy does this by giving the body
minute, potentized doses of natural substances which will
cause similar symptoms in a healthy person. (I don't know
why this works, but I assure you, in the right hands, it does.)
If you have an itchy dog, and you give it steroids to suppers
the itch, you have told the body to shut up and go away. The
body had successfully externalized the disease to a very non-critical
location, the skin, and with a fairly benign (albeit distressing)
symptom: itching. The body will ALWAYS push the disease as
far out as it can, and keep it in as inessential a place as
it can. Skin symptoms are a GOOD sign; they are the least
serious of all symptoms. But we just RUSH to silence them.
Steroids for the itch, special diets for the intestinal problems,
synthetic thyroid for the glandular disorder, drugs for the
kidney failure, lasix and dig for the heart problem, put the
dog down for the nasty temperament, or give up because of
the depression... how many times does this predictable cycle
play itself out, whenever suppression is practiced? Of course
we need and want to give our pets relief from painful or distressing
symptoms. But getting on an endless and ever-escalating treadmill
of suppressive treatments is, in the long run, not doing them
any favors at all.
Christie
Keith
Caber Feidh Scottish Deerhounds
Holistic Husbandry since 1986
http://www.caberfeidh.com/
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