One of the first things that many people ask me when they find out what it is that I do is “what kinds of things to you recommend?” First, I explain to them that we start by looking for the cause or causes of imbalance in the body and then use natural healing techniques to address those imbalances. That usually involves dietary, lifestyle and/or supplemental recommendations.
At this point, I usually get something along the lines of “You’d want me to change my diet?! I don’t know if I could do that.” To which I respond, “You’d be surprised what you can do with the right motivation.”
Change is usually perceived as difficult. Interventions that rely on changing personal behavior are always fraught with the issue of “compliance”. In fact, one of the reasons many clinicians give lifestyle therapies the cold shoulder boils down to something like, “Sure, it might work, but my patients won’t/can’t sustain those kinds of changes for very long.” This is very similar to the reaction of most people that I speak to that are just finding out about how it is I address the conditions we see. This is a key reason why it is so important to take a multi-faceted approach when dealing with health and healing – so that people see tangible results in a timely manner.
This is why we focus on dietary, lifestyle and supplemental recommendations with most of our clients. While dietary and lifestyle intervention is at the heart of everything that we do, we need to incorporate strategies that will fill in the gaps while these lifestyle interventions are put into place. We often need to augment this lifestyle-based approach with therapies that are specific and targeted to complement the mechanisms of those lifestyle changes. This multi-faceted approach can dramatically speed up the progress toward health and act as a potent prevention against chronic disease progression.
What exactly are these other therapies? They can include a host of intervention strategies such as nutritional supplementation, nutraceutical therapies, chiropractic and related therapies, certain detoxification protocols, physical therapy and a host of other techniques and modalities.
When we understand each person’s underlying root cause(s) of imbalance, we can show them exactly how the body turns the many signals it receives from their diet and lifestyle into either health or disease. Once more, it is often necessary – i.e., it is an absolute necessity – to use this multi-faceted approach, as it is the ONLY way for many people to reach their goals of prevention and intervention in a timely fashion.
