Written by: Melissa Deally, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
In our world today, the real epidemic is the rapidly increasing number of people being diagnosed with chronic illnesses. In other words a doctor tells them “you have X, and we can’t really help you recover, but here’s a pill you need to take for the rest of your life”. The problem with that, is that the pill isn’t actually helping the body heal, it is simply “masking” symptoms, and because it’s not what the body wants or needs, the body will soon trigger another symptom that has you back at the doctor’s office, getting another pill to mask that symptom. Before long you might be on 20 + prescriptions as the chart below shows.
This is “sick-care”, not “health-care” as nowhere in this process is anyone trying to get to the “root cause” of the symptoms, to find out why we have those symptoms, and then re-balance the body to alleviate them. This is not what our medical system looks at today, because it is not in the interest of Big Pharma who drive the system. They care more about optimizing shareholder profit than human health and as a result their aim is not to help you recover from your illness, but rather have you take their drug(s) every day for the rest of your life. If you want to gain a deeper insight into how Big Pharma drives our “sick care” system to optimize shareholder profit, I recommend you read “Our Daily Meds” by Melody Petersen and/or “Bottle of Lies” by Katherine Eban.
Don’t get me wrong, our acute medical system is excellent, and our doctors mean well, but the system is broken and our doctors are not taught about the lifestyle factors that impact our health, such as sleep, stress, nutrition, toxins and exercise, they are only taught the symptoms that match the prescription they need to write. Nor are they given enough time to really understand your health history, because they get 7 - 15 minutes with you, which simply isn’t enough, and in that time they are expected to assess and write a prescription and send you on your way.
If you are one of the lucky ones who has a doctor that truly wants to help you get to the root cause of your symptoms, stick with them, as they are a rare breed these days. The reality today is that 6 in 10 Americans have been diagnosed with 1 chronic illness and 4 in 10 have 2 or more, and many of them are struggling to find the support they need to regain their health.
What is chronic illness? Chronic illness is an umbrella term for a number of illnesses such as Type II diabetes, heart disease, Alzheimer’s / Dementia, auto-immune diseases, leaky gut, obesity, and some forms of cancer. ALL of these can be reversed with changes to the lifestyle factors mentioned above. Once we remove the toxic build up, understand the deficiencies the body is struggling to cope with so we can replenish it, the body will come back into balance at which point it will heal itself, exactly as it was designed to do.
Our body is always trying to guide us, but as our world has become more complex, and we got busier (and more distracted with our phones) we stopped tuning in the way we are designed to. When we have a symptom, it is our body’s way of talking to us. Too often though, we “normalize” those symptoms as aging, or seasonal allergies or our genetics, and ignore them, so we can keep going in our daily lives. Symptoms are literally our body’s way of asking us to do something differently. We are not supposed to suffer, we are not supposed to feel worse as we age, but when we ignore our symptoms, that is exactly what happens. Until they are so bad, we can’t ignore them anymore and end up in a doctor’s office getting a diagnosis of a “chronic illness” and being told we’ll have it for the rest of our lives.
Toxins are a huge factor impacting our health today. Since WWII, we've had 144,000 man-made chemicals introduced into our world. Let’s take a look at the change in our health over the past century since many of these toxic chemicals have been introduced into our world.
Obesity has seen a 35 fold increase in 115 years – from 1.2% of the population in the 19th century to 42.4% of the population being obese as of 2021 – that isn’t just overweight, but obese!
Heart Disease has gone from 8 known worldwide cases of heart attack deaths in the 19th century to 1 in 3 dying of heart disease by 2010 in the US alone.
Diabetes has seen a 25 fold increase in 80 years – from less than ½ a percent of people had type II diabetes in 1935 to almost 10% having it by 2015.
Cancer has seen a 62 fold increase in the last 200 years, from 1/188 deaths in 1811 in Boston, to 1/17 deaths by 1900, to 1 in 3 deaths by 2010 in the US and we’re expected to reach 1 in 2 by 2030.
What else has changed over the last century to cause these massive increases in these types of chronic illness (and other types too?) Our soil systems have changed and due to mass farming, our soils are now nutrient deplete, so our bodies aren’t getting all the vitamins and minerals they need in order to thrive, and have a strong immune system. Therefore our food supply has changed, even for our whole foods! You now need to eat 9 oranges in one sitting to get the equivalent nutrients as your grandmother got from just 1 orange back in the 1930s! We also have so much processed food now, laden in sugars, chemicals, poor quality oils and GMO ingredients, all of which are negatively impacting our health.
BUT, It simply doesn’t have to be that way! You can re-take control of your health, instead of being at the whim of your food and environment. If you work with a practitioner that can educate you in optimizing your health and help you run at-home lab tests in order to understand the toxicities and deficiencies in your body, you will start to understand what has gone wrong and the steps you need to take to re-balance your body. It won’t happen overnight, but the body is a miracle and in most cases can be rebalanced in about 6 months time, which is much less time than it’s taken you to get where you are at. When we create the environment for it to heal, it will take over and do so! When it is too depleted and deficient of key nutrients, and bogged down with toxins, it simply doesn’t have anything left to work with to heal.
I guide my clients through a process of detoxing and then lab testing to understand the deficiencies and then provide all natural healing protocols to re-balance the body, at which point it will take over and heal itself. I am not a doctor, I do not diagnose, I do not cure, I simply look at WHY you are having the symptoms you are having and then provide tried and true protocols developed by my mentor, Dr Stephen Cabral who wrote the book “The Rain Barrel Effect”, and has a client base of over 250,000 happy clients who have been able to recover from their chronic illnesses. In fact, Dr Cabral was diagnosed at age 17, with 3 chronic illnesses himself. He was a varsity highschool athlete until he wasn’t, and at the point that his doctors told him they could do nothing to help him, he couldn’t get himself out of bed in the morning.
He had a pity party and felt sorry for himself as this wasn’t how he imagined his grade 12 year going, but after a while he decided he wasn’t willing to accept this as this life’s journey. He started reading books and trying to figure out how he could heal himself. He decided he’d find the best medicine in the world so that he could recover. That took him on a 10 year journey of becoming a doctor of Naturopathic medicine, and he studied Ayurvedic medicine, Chinese Traditional medicine, Bioregulatory medicine and Orthomolecular medicine! He figured out how to heal himself and also discovered that there is no “one” best medicine, but you can take the best from each of these in order to support the body’s imbalances, along with detoxing and then optimizing sleep, stress, nutrition and exercise. Today, Dr Cabral is over 40 years old, feels better than ever, and is helping thousands around the world and training other practitioners to use the same labs and follow the same protocols to help millions more recover from their chronic illnesses. My greatest joy is watching my clients regain their health, energy, vitality and tell me they feel better than they ever remember feeling!
So if you don’t want to accept your diagnosis as a “life-sentence”, please reach out and book a complimentary call with me.
And if you have not been diagnosed with a chronic illness, congratulations!!! You are in the minority, but what are you doing to ensure you NEVER get diagnosed with a chronic illness? Prevention truly is the best medicine and one of the best solutions to prevention is educating yourself on the lifestyle factors of toxins, sleep, stress, nutrition, and exercise. If you are interested in learning more in these areas, you can check out my podcast, “Don’t Wait For Your Wake Up Call!” and go back to episode 1 to get a lot of the basic content that will be very helpful to you.
If you’d like specific help customized for you, then feel free to also click the link above and book a call with me. Running your labs as a “baseline” when you feel great, is a wonderful way to have some data about your body for comparative purposes, if/when you do have symptoms that are signalling that you need to do something differently!
Melissa Deally, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Melissa Deally is an Integrative Health Practitioner & Registered Health Coach, dedicated to helping her clients get to the root cause of their health issues and truly heal. Melissa’s business is 100% virtual, and she works with the entire English-speaking world. Melissa uses a 2 prong approach:
Discover your toxic load and lower it
Discover your body’s imbalances and support them with natural supplements and herbs so the body can come back into balance, at which point it will heal itself. This is done through the use of Functional Medicine lab tests, mailed to your home!
Melissa offers a very high level of support, to ensure her clients’ success, as we navigate the path of bringing the body back into balance while creating new lifestyle habits to ensure lasting results.
Melissa is the winner of the 2021 Quality Care Award by Businesses From The Heart and has been featured in Pursuit 365, and Fresh Magazine, featuring 365 Canadian Women who lead by example in the everyday pursuit of success, happiness, and achievement. Melissa is also the host of the “Don’t Wait For Your Wake Up Call!” podcast, a podcast offering practical education around health, which ranked in the top 5% of Global podcasts by Listen Notes in the first 3 months of launching.
