(Dr. Chad Note –
This month’s newsletter was inspired by a message delivered by Dr. Robert
Brooks in “The Power of Upper Cervical” documentary)
Have you ever been in a situation where you saw someone
that you loved spiraling out of control?
Maybe it was one of your children when their grades started slipping or
your spouse when he/she seemed to be frequently coming home from work acting as
if it that day had been the worst in a series of horrible days in
succession. Maybe it was your college
roommate going out every night and getting into a habit of addiction. Do you recall when it was that you deemed it
necessary to intervene?
It was a slippery slope, was it not? Intervening in someone’s life should be a
process of careful, calculated decisions.
You have to know when the right time to do it is. At the wrong time, the “OK, look at what
you’re doing to yourself” talk where you simultaneously offer your help might
actually make matters worse. Often, we
choose a role of non-interference instead.
Non-interference ranges from stepping back and hoping that the person
will recognize the area of his/her life that needs changing or subtly hinting
in such a way that gets them thinking about it.
Intervention is a last resort.
Non-interference the preferred, first option.
In modern healthcare, “when and when not to intervene” is
a rare discussion. More often than not,
patients are categorized into a series of diagnoses for their various ailments
and an intervention is offered. While
there is care taken to not misdiagnose, the evidence suggests that very little
mind is paid to determining whether or not an intervention is necessary. Go to the doctor with a chief complaint of
pain, for instance, and you will likely receive one of many potential
prescriptions for analgesics (painkillers), with often just the most serious/catastrophic
reasons for pain ruled out in the “fact finding” process that leads to your
trip to the pharmacy. As a result,
Americans consume 80% of the drugs produced worldwide. In the vast majority of cases, health
problems can be resolved through methods that adhere to the same principles of
“non-interference” described in the life scenarios above. If you have pain because your hips are out of
balance, it is a signal alerting you to the fact that something needs to change
(i.e. getting your hips rebalanced). A
foundational shift where the head and the neck converge around the brainstem
causes a structural adaptation in the hips.
Identifying the fundamental discrepancy in physical health and making
the specific correction necessary to return the body back to normal is more a
case of, as Dr. Robert Brooks states in “The Power of Upper Cervical”
documentary, “finding what’s wrong in my life and getting that out of my life”
(non-interference).
As my colleague, Dr. Tom Forest, states in the same documentary,
“I wouldn’t go the dentist (for an invasive procedure) without Novocain.” That would be an obvious example of when an
intervention is necessary. Failure to
numb the mouth when a cavity is being filled would extremely painful and not
worth the emotional turmoil, one could argue.
Most health related problems, though, are simple deficiencies in one or
multiple areas that can be overcome through a non-interference-based
approach. Diagnosed with high blood
pressure? Your heart is working too
hard, so find out what is causing it to work harder than necessary and remove
it. Intervening with a blood pressure
lowering drug merely slows down the heart; it does not change the fact that
your brainstem (which regulates your heart) may be pressured by the same
foundational misalignment that caused your hips to be out of balance, creating
for disruption of the signals down to your heart that govern your heart’s
ability to function normally; nor does it change the fact that you might be too
sedentary and/or eating poorly to cause you to gain weight and prompt your
heart to have to pump more blood through your body.
Too much intervention and not enough non-interference has
been the primary culprit in the United States ranking 40th out of 40
amongst industrialized countries in the world in health statistics. It is time to revisit the manner in which we
make choices. Far more scrutiny need be
used. As is frequently the case in life
situations, intervention before the time has truly come to intervene can be a
major setback in progressing toward the ultimate objective – and, it comes to
health, the objective is to be well. As
of now, we’re being told to intervene at every sign of discord in the human
body. With deaths, hospitalizations, and
the like from adverse reactions / side effects of medications and surgical
errors at an all-time high, it is time to scrap the current model and build a
new one from the ground up that deemphasizes medical interventions and stresses
the importance of non-interference (getting things out of your life that stand
in the way of health).
Thinking good things for you,
-Dr. Chad
