Beyond Diagnosis: Naming Disease vs Resolving It
Who is helped by the designation of more than 90,000 diagnoses? Who is hurt?
Contents
Naming Constellations of Symptoms vs. Identifying Root Causes
What’s the Impact from Having More than 90,000 Diagnoses?
Who Benefits?
It’s Your Choice Where to Apply Your Energy
To Heal, Address the Cause of Illness
Key Principles of Healing
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Naming Constellations of Symptoms vs. Identifying Root Causes
For healing to happen, logic demands that the cause of disease be resolved. But in most cases, a medical diagnosis is simply a name for a constellation of symptoms with no concern for the cause. [dictionary]
A diagnosis of chronic disease is not an understanding of the foundational cause and resolution. In fact, medical literature is rife with diagnoses for which the cause is “unknown” and there is “no cure.”
You can verify this for yourself by examining how establishment medicine defines diagnoses for depression, autoimmune disease, chronic pain, OPLL, and so on.
For example, a diagnosis of Hashimoto’s disease or depression or IBS is a description of symptoms with a complete disconnection from underlying conditions that cause the symptoms. The underlying conditions and root causes can certainly be discovered (e.g. microbiome imbalance, chronic stress, chronic inflammation, excess toxic load, vitamin D deficiency, etc.) but the diagnoses themselves are a superfluous naming exercise and inadequate for defining and addressing the causes.
*Some may claim that the purpose of getting a diagnosis is to “rule out something more serious.” This may be a valid argument in a few cases involving high-risk symptoms of the heart, for example. But in many cases, it’s reasonable to consider different courses of action that you would choose based on different diagnoses, and begin to test the body’s response to some of them now. If experiencing symptoms of sciatica, what is the effect from gentle, progressive strengthening of the low back? And what is the effect of stretching the piriformis? If sciatic symptoms disappear, no diagnosis was necessary to determine and resolve the cause, and less time, energy, money, and attention was diverted from healing. If the symptoms do not resolve, more information has been gained in the search for resolution.
What’s the Impact from Having More than 90,000 Diagnoses?
Allopathic Medicine uses the World Health Organization (WHO) classification system for diagnoses called the ICD-10-CM (with “10” referring to the 10th edition). [source]
This is a list of diagnosis codes, broken into 22 chapters and 288 sections, each section containing multiple diagnoses. [source]
When I last checked, the total number of possible diagnoses was 97,296*. [source]
The U.S. Dept of Health & Human Services (HHS) takes another 115 pages to document “a set of rules” to “accompany and complement” the ICD-10-CM.
This prompts considerations of fundamental importance to humanity:
How much time and money has been required by people in the medical establishment to understand 97,000 possible diagnoses and 115 pages of related rules, and to track and report on them with every single person in their care? Who has that benefited?
How has this diagnostic process impacted the amount and quality of attention individuals have received from doctors?
Specifically, how has this system affected the intention, motivation and capability of doctors in their role of determining the cause and course of action best suited to healing?
*Medical Diagnoses
From here:
Certain infectious and parasitic diseases (1,307)
Neoplasms (2,093)
Diseases of the blood involving the immune mechanism (415)
Endocrine, nutritional and metabolic diseases (1,222)
Mental and behavioural disorders (1,086)
Diseases of the nervous system (912)
Diseases of the eye and adnexa (3,447)
Diseases of the ear and mastoid process (871)
Diseases of the circulatory system (1,789)
Diseases of the respiratory system (461)
Diseases of the digestive system (1,076)
Diseases of the skin and subcutaneous tissue (1,064)
Diseases of the musculoskeletal system and connective tissue (8,633)
Diseases of the genitourinary system (1,037)
Pregnancy, childbirth and the puerperium (3,023)
Certain conditions originating in the perinatal period (565)
Congenital malformations, deformations and chromosomal abnormalities (1,051)
Symptoms, signs and abnormal clinical and laboratory findings, not elsewhere classified (937)
Injury, poisoning and certain other consequences of external causes (53,944)
External causes of morbidity and mortality (10,573)
Factors influencing health status and contact with health services (1,785)
Codes for Special Purposes (5)
Total: 97,296 diagnoses
Who Benefits?
This system of diagnosis is arguably only beneficial to a system corrupted by industry, focused on having as many diagnoses as possible to match to as many profitable drugs as possible.
Doctor: “You don’t have Parkinson’s, Mr. Jones. At this point, I’m not even sure I know what Parkinson’s is. But I can tell you this. You have Lead-in-Water Brain Damage Disease. You’ve been drinking water with lead in it. That’s how you caught the disease.” Imagine that happening. Or how about this? Doctor: “Mr. Smith, you have Roundup Disease. Your nervous system has caught the disease from the pesticide.” No. The people who come up with names of diseases—they’re in the business of covering up poisoning. – Jon Rappoport, The great medical cover-up link
To validate Rappoport’s conclusion, examine the well-researched harms from toxins and the Root Cause Index.
It’s Your Choice Where to Apply Your Energy
To be aware that a diagnosis is typically just an exercise in describing symptoms — disconnected from the underlying causal conditions — may inspire people to direct more of their limited energy toward resolving the underlying issues and restoring health.
For example, having a misguided sense of the value of diagnosis makes it easier to identify with the label rather than focusing on identifying and resolving the underlying causes. To focus on a statement such as, “I have diabetes” (or high blood pressure or osteoporosis or depression or Crohn’s disease) can lead to believing the verifiable propaganda of pharmaceutical companies that benefit from customers who accept such conditions as lifelong burdens rather than seeing the symptoms as a prompt to identify and resolve causal factors.
To Heal, Address the Cause of Illness
Practitioners of holistic health modalities such as naturopathic medicine, functional medicine, Ayurveda and TCM among others, seek to identify and resolve the root causes of illness. They typically have many tools to relieve symptoms as well, but not to mask them in the name of disease management, which does nothing to stop the continuation and escalation of disease.
With chronic disease, when we look deeper than the names (diagnoses), it becomes clear that there are a few common underlying conditions that produce an extravagant number of possible symptom combinations.
In other words, one way to look at symptoms is to parse apart combinations until you can separate them into 90,000 names; another way is to find what unites them by identifying what causes them.
As it turns out, there are five underlying conditions that lend tremendous insight into resolving symptoms at a causal level for an untold number of diseases. Those are listed below.
But before getting to those, it may be helpful to consider that there are various perspectives one can take when identifying causal factors. For example, disease can be viewed as the result of:
An imbalance in three fundamental physiological forces, called doshas. (Ayurveda)
A malfunctioning of cellular physiology, caused by deficiency or toxicity. (See below: Cellular Health)
Issues related to the key inputs of water, food, toxins, and electromagnetic fields. (See below: Four Vital Inputs)
The existence of a few key chronic conditions that lead to various symptoms. (See below: Underlying Conditions)
To seek healing at the root level: remove obstacles, stimulate healing, strengthen weakened systems, and correct structural integrity.
As a naturopathic doctor, we have something called the Therapeutic Order of Health and Healing, which is broken down into a few parts. One is removing obstacles to health. The natural state of the body is health and what is leading to disease is these obstacles such as stress, poor diet, digestive disturbances, and so forth. The second is stimulating self-healing mechanisms. This is done through modalities such as homeopathy, and natural nontoxic therapies. The third is strengthening weakened systems. Is your weakened system the immune system? Is it the digestive? Is it the emotional thoughts and conflicts and traumas in life? What are they? Let’s strengthen that weakened system. The fourth one is correcting structural integrity, which can be done with things like acupuncture, chiropractic, and structural adjustment… [for] aligning the body so the flow of the energy is not [blocked]. And then we use natural substances to restore and regenerate the body. I say all this to [explain] the difference between conventional and integrative oncology. [In conventional medicine] we’re not attending to the body’s needs when we focus strictly on chemotherapy, radiation surgery, or even the more recent targeted gene therapies and targeted therapies… [and] we’re not addressing the reasons for the development of that tumor. – Dr. Antonio Jimenez, Cancer Epidemic: The Alarming Rise in Post Vaxx Turbo Cancers – And How to Reverse Them link
Key Principles of Healing
Learning factual, verifiable information about the following subjects can bring powerful inspiration to the healing process.
#1 Genes don’t determine health. (And neither do germs or other pathogens.) Lifestyle choices do.
As it turns out, only a teensy-tiny percentage of diseases are actually “caused” by a genetic defect. Genetic determinism was completely disproved in 2003. Diseases may run in the family, but not because of genes.
99% of diseases manifest due to “the environment.” The environment is our lifestyle, especially our levels of stress and our diet.
The environment is quite similar to what is called the “terrain” in the terrain theory of disease and health. This model explains why some people exposed to the same pathogen don’t get sick when others do, and why holistic treatments such as yoga and nutrition heal chronic disease.
#2 The body’s capacity to heal and regenerate is miraculous.
We witness this every time a wound closes and heals or we recover from a cold or flu. But it’s happening constantly in ways we don’t typically realize.
“On a molecular level, every cell in your body is undergoing a constant process of coming into and out of being, much like the flicker of a flame, and doing it so perfectly that we only experience ourselves on a macroscopic level as immutable, relatively unchanging organisms. Yet there are trillions of changes and microadjustments occurring every moment in each cell, completely regenerating damaged and diseased tissue. On the most basic level, regeneration follows from removing what the body does not need and adding back what it does.”— Sayer Ji, Regenerate: Unlocking Your Body’s Radical Resilience through the New Biology link
#3 Chronic stress halts the body’s natural healing process. Balancing the nervous system restores it.
Activating the parasympathetic nervous system restores the body’s natural healing processes.
#4 The immune system is adaptive, and the majority of the immune system is in the gut. Chronic inflammation and microbiome imbalance overwhelm the immune system. Relief restores its capability.
The immune system is adaptive and creates synergistic relationships with microbes.
A great amount of immune activity begins in the intestines where the health of the tiny life in our microbiome is key to the body’s health or disease.
Physiologically, this is activated via the gut-brain axis, which relies (as do all systems of the body) on nervous system balance.
Inflammation is an indicator of the body’s immune response being activated, but chronic inflammation overwhelms the immune system. Chronic inflammation indicates a need to address the cause (as opposed to suppressing symptoms). It’s an indicator of imbalance that needs to be addressed, not suppressed. The tremendous power of the body’s regenerative capability is unlocked when chronic inflammation is addressed at its root.
Where people get their information has a tremendous effect on their belief systems, and therefore the quality of their lives. How different would our world be if most people had been taught life-supporting information such as that of the power of the nervous system; microbiome vs genetic determinism; and the terrain vs germ theory? Simply through empowering students with yoga techniques, you can serve as a model and bridge to support others in freeing their mind (and life) from the hopeless, helpless victimhood stemming from false paradigms, awakening their interest, perhaps, in discovering such truths for themselves.
Identifying Root Causes & Conditions
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