I’ve been thinking about symptoms differently for a long time.
We tend to think about the body in a fairly simple way: something goes wrong, a symptom appears, and our job is to get rid of the symptom. Headache? Get rid of the headache. Heartburn? Stop the heartburn. Anxiety? Calm the anxiety. Pain? Get rid of the pain. Fatigue? Find something to give you energy.
This approach certainly makes sense, as when you’re suffering, you want relief. But here’s the question I think we don’t ask nearly enough:
What if the symptom isn’t actually the problem?
What if the symptom is the result of the body doing exactly what it has learned to do in response to everything you’ve been asking of it? That changes the conversation quite a bit.
Think about what happens when you’re under stress; your heart rate changes, breathing shifts, digestion slows, muscles become more prepared for action, attention becomes more focused on what might be a threat, sleep is disrupted, appetite can heighten, hormones fluctuate. None of those things are necessarily “broken.” They’re simply adaptations in response to your body trying to help you deal with something.
The problem is that the body doesn’t always know when the emergency is over, and this is where things can get really interesting.
Maybe you aren’t sleeping poorly because your body has forgotten how to sleep; maybe your system has become very good at staying alert. Maybe your digestion isn’t simply “bad digestion”; maybe your body has spent so much time in a state of stress that digestion has repeatedly been pushed down the priority list. Maybe your fatigue isn’t because you need more stimulation; maybe it’s because your body has been spending enormous amounts of energy trying to maintain balance. Sometimes what looks like a failure of the body can actually be an incredibly intelligent adaptation that has simply gone on for too long.
That is a very different way of looking at symptoms.
It also explains something I see quite often; someone comes in and tells me they’ve been doing everything right. They’re eating well, exercising regularly, taking the supplements, have improved their sleep, read the books, and have essentially done “all the things”. Yet, despite all the effort, focus, and healthy practices, they still don’t feel well. Commonly, the response to something like this is to add something else; another supplement, protocol, restriction, test… another thing to “fix.”
But sometimes I think the more useful question is: Why isn’t the body responding? Because that’s a totally different question.
If you’re giving your body good food and it isn’t responding, that’s information. If you’re getting eight hours of sleep but waking up exhausted, that’s information. If you’re doing all the “right” things but your system still behaves as though you’re under threat, that’s information. If you feel fantastic on vacation and terrible three days after returning home, that’s information. The pattern itself is telling us something. Subsequently, this is one of the reasons I think ones personal health history matters so much, as I don’t just want to know what symptoms you have today. I want to know what happened before they appeared. What was going on in your life? Were you sick? Did you go through a major loss? Did your relationship change? Did you have a child? Did your job change? Did you stop sleeping? Did you start taking a medication? Did you go through a period where you were simply doing too much for too long? Oftentimes, the beginning of a symptom makes much more sense when you understand what the body was being asked to deal with at the time.
There’s also another piece that I find fascinating: The body doesn’t necessarily wait until something is seriously wrong before it changes how it functions. Rather, it can compensate for a remarkably long time. For example, you can be functioning, going to work, raising your kids, exercising, getting things done and looking perfectly fine from the outside, while your physiology is working much harder than you realize to keep everything together inside. Then one day, something changes. Maybe you get sick, have a particularly stressful year, stop sleeping, or feel you’re simply ‘getting older’ and the reserve you once had isn’t quite the same. Suddenly, the thing that you’ve been compensating for all this time, finally becomes noticeable.
Often time, people say, “I don’t understand, I was totally fine until this happened.” However, in reality, you weren’t actually fine, as you were coping. It’s very important to realize that ‘feeling fine’ and ‘coping’, truly aren’t the same thing.
And that is a distinction that is incredibly important.
Because if the body has been compensating for years, simply suppressing the final symptom may not address why the system reached that point in the first place.
And this is where I think we need to become a little more curious about health. Instead of constantly asking, “what can I take for this?”, we should be asking “what has my body been trying to accomplish by doing this?”, “what is it protecting me from?”, “what has it been adapting to?”, and “what would have to change for it to no longer need this adaptation?”
Those questions don’t mean we should ignore symptoms or refuse treatment. Sometimes a symptom needs immediate attention, medication or conventional investigation. However, relief and understanding don’t have to be opposites. Rather, we can help someone feel better while remaining curious about why they became unwell in the first place.
That’s the part of medicine that continues to fascinate me.
The human body isn’t a collection of disconnected parts. It’s constantly making adjustments. Sometimes those adjustments are obvious, while other times they’re happening quietly beneath the surface for years. This is often why the first thing people notice is a symptom. Therefore, I don’t think we should always look at a symptom and ask “how do I make this go away?”. The better question is often to ask “why did my body need to do this in the first place?”. Once you start looking at symptoms that way, they can become something completely different; a message.
And if we’re willing to listen closely enough, the symptom is telling us exactly where to start.
~Dr Jeremy