Healing from the Bottom Up

Magazine

A young woman, in her early 30's, walked into my office the other week. She suffered from incapacitating migraines that seemed to be getting progressively worse. She was receiving regular acupuncture treatment, was taking various herbs prescribed by a herbalist and dosing up on Evening Primrose Oil as she was told that the migraines were caused by the hormonal shifts during the menstrual cycle. The problem was, that despite all these treatments and a diet that cut out all "offending" foods, the situation was becoming more chronic.

This is not an isolated case. Regularly I see clients who are taking an array of treatments to very little avail. These treatments may cause a reaction or a stimulus at a superficial level but in many cases they fail to cure the existing problem.

It's a fact, that nowadays the more that is wrong with you, the more you are given in an attempt to get on top of the situation. This is true in the medical field where you begin taking a drug for one complaint, then another for a different complaint until you end up taking drugs for the side-effects of the drugs. Similarly, even with alternative medicine - if you have a complaint you are given something for it. To me, this is looking at disease, or imbalances, from the top down rather than the bottom up.

Healing is about taking the stress off the system and encouraging a return to natural conditions within each cell. It is only when the cell is cleansed and re-hydrated that true healing can occur. This is working from the bottom up - changing the environment through non-manipulative and non-invasive methods that raise the natural vitality of each and every cell independent of the original complaint. When you work from the top down, you are in danger of increasing the stress on the body - even with natural therapies. For unless the body is cleansed, additional input into a toxic environment creates chaos and stress.

In my experience, cleansing does not occur without major dietary changes. Acidity and toxicity cannot be drawn from the cells without a diet of high vegetable content. The body's cells are not coaxed to re-hydrate without an intake of 2.5 litres of fluid (vegetable juices and water) daily. Unless these fundamental changes occur then no long-term healing is possible. You cannot rely on pills from a bottle to instigate the type of changes required at cell level to initiate healing.

Nowadays, I see clients from all walks of life. A proportion of these clients have undoubtedly followed diets which are nutritionally deficient, however many more clients are very health-conscious and have adopted good eating practices over the years. Yet these clients may still be suffering from "deficiency" symptoms in spite of the fact that they take additional nutritional supplements. I call these "pseudo-deficiency symptoms". In these cases imbalances do not occur from dietary deficiencies. They can easily occur through nutrient excesses (particularly calcium and sodium) but more importantly, we are often looking at a situation where the nutrients cannot be located or used by the body. It is easier than one suspects to accumulate toxicity in a system that is not regularly cleansed. Once this occurs enzymes (the little proteins which catalyse reactions) in the cells straighten out and do not take up the minerals and vitamins crucial to their activity. So regardless of how many nutrients you take in the diet, if the environment within the cells is toxic, they will not be used and these psuedo-deficiency symptoms appear. If you treat these symptoms as nutrient deficiencies - then you are working from the top down. If you change the environment of the cell - then you are working from the bottom up.

Re-hydration of the body is absolutely critical. The body cells will not function in a thickened, viscous environment. All too frequently we respond to thirst signals with fluids, such as tea and coffee, which ultimately lead to greater losses of body fluids. Our thirst mechanism does not respond in the same way that our hunger signals lead us to eat when hungry. In fact thirst signals are usually only aroused in response to a high salt load in the diet or a sudden loss of fluids as in heavy exercising. Thirst is not stimulated in response to cellular dehydration and so we must learn to interpret the first signs of illness as a signal of dehydration and treat it accordingly - by increasing the fluid intake and not resorting to medication, natural or otherwise. Some of my greatest successes have followed this simple remedy.

In order to encourage detoxification and rehydration we need to work on all levels simultaneously: reduce the acidity and improve the capacity for rehydration by eating foods high in natural fibre such as brown rice and other whole grains (although not wheat bran), pulses and vegetables/salads. Then disease really starts moving to the outside and providing enough work has been done to prepare the eliminative channels you should be able to detoxify with the minimum discomfort.

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