Parents, listen up! It’s no fun to watch your child deal with an illness—but be sure to think before you act.
First, ask yourself: what is the condition, and what are the symptoms? Fever, sinus drainage, congestion, and lethargy are all symptoms that trigger the immune system to employ its defense mechanisms. They are perfectly natural signs that your child’s body is hard at work destroying bacteria and viruses, or eliminating toxins, as it seeks to restore balance. The body is pulling together all available resources to take care of the underlying condition, and the last thing you want to do is stop the healing process.
This is a good thing! You don’t want your child’s body to be unaware of illness or unable to mount a defense. Taking a pill to suppress a fever or dry up congestion may remove the symptom, but it also slows down the healing. (This course of action is occasionally appropriate, but we don’t have time to address those issues here. Take this post as an introduction to personal healthcare options rather than advice or direction.)
In the end, you want to make sure that your child’s body—and your own—is capable of responding appropriately to illness. The more resilient your body, the quicker it will adapt to health challenges. This is why building healthy choices and habits into your lifestyle is so important to making sure your body is ready and able to defend itself.
We need to eat well to give our cells the right chemicals and conditions they need to work correctly. We need to sleep well to help recharge our bodies. We need to move well to maintain the function of our muscles and joints. And to conduct this incredible symphony, we need the nervous system—the MASTER system of the body—to function at its highest level.
It’s your responsibility to keep these lifestyle factors on track. But there’s so much confusion out there when it comes to proper nutrition that we could all use a little help. Start by finding a practitioner near you who has been trained in whole food nutritional healing using products such as Standard Process. A well-trained doctor who offers (as we do in our office) Nutrition Response Testing can help you choose the right combination of supplements to meet your specific needs, helping you save precious time and money.
To help your nervous system work properly, there’s no substitute for a well-trained chiropractor. This is the only profession trained to detect and correct specific issues in the spine, allowing better communication and function in your body. This helps strengthen your immune system to become more resistant to those germs.
I wrote The Night Before Wellness to introduce these ideas to kids and parents alike. There’s a time and place for medical interventions, but I believe we should all consider the safer, more natural, and less-expensive options for maintaining health. Get this fun, informative, and thought-provoking booklet for you children, yourself, and your community.
Trust nature. Trust your body. And listen to your body because your body is listening to you!
Image from iStock/Alexeg84 (main).
Dr. David Kolowski is a chiropractor, speaker, and author in Loveland, Colorado. His booklet The Night Before Wellness gives the Big Idea of natural healthcare to readers young and old. Dr. Kolowski describes his mission as helping people ask better questions while seeing the bigger picture. You can find him at Inside Health.
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