I have a love of life. My life has not been perfect; I have had many ups and downs, but my love for life has never changed. One of my goals in life is to become a centenarian. When talking to my mother one day, I shared this with her. Her response was that she had no desire to live to be 100 because she saw herself living in illness. She assumed that to be that old you would have to be ill. When I envision living into my old age, I see myself having a good quality of life, as anyone would want. We should all believe it is possible to age in a healthy way that allows us the quality and richness of the life we desire.
As a dentist, I have always been frustrated with how our Healthcare System viewed the oral cavity like it is not even part of the body. The mouth, so it may seem, exists on its own, unaffected by the rest of the body. It doesn’t stop there either. Medicine likes to treat our body systems like they are simply pieces of a puzzle, treating each part individually, without considering how the treatment affects the whole. I see patients that are on several medications, targeting different symptoms that they have presented with, while often causing new symptoms, or a general sense of dis-ease.
Because of the big business of insurance and pharmaceuticals, doctors are trained to prescribe medications to treat symptoms, rather than look for the root cause of their patients’ illnesses. This treatment only places Band-Aids on our problems, which often end up being temporary. I am here to tell you that all diseases come from one of three places: from an issue with genetics, inflammation, or digestion. The problem is that disease presents itself at each person’s weak link. We are all unique and everything is connected. It takes time to discover this root cause for a patient and because of how our physicians are forced to practice medicine, they don’t have this time. It is up to us, as individuals, to take responsibility for our own health. I have done this many times over the years when I can’t get answers from conventional medicine. I have been forced to take control of my own health. It takes some experimenting. Unfortunately, there is no magic pill to solve our health problems, and what might give us energy at age 30 might be something different at age 40. Life and health are a continuous experiment.
In my upcoming book Stop Feeling Like Crap: How to get to know your body and give it what it needs, I will share stories of how I continue to stay diabetes- free, despite having the gene for it, how I cured my autoimmune disease and chronic fatigue, and how I went through menopause and came out feeling normal on the other side. I will address the 3 non-negotiables of good health and teach you the best ways to conduct some healthy experiments of your own to help you feel your best.
Chronic disease is on the rise and, for the first time in history, our life span is shortening. I am writing this book to teach how disease comes about and steps you can take to help your body heal itself. As a Health Coach and Functional Nutrition Counselor I have found doing this work with people one on one very gratifying and filling that gap between physician and patient is exactly what our healthcare system needs. If you have not been feeling like yourself, if you have a chronic disease that you thought you had to just live with, or if you have an autoimmune disease that you have been told there is no cure for, you might want to read this book and get ready to feel better.