A patient goes to the doctor's office experiencing a set of specific symptoms, they are diagnosed with a particular ailment or disease, and they are prescribed a prescription to help eliminate pain, anxiety, depression, and the like. This is how typical Western medicine operates. The approach may work by eliminating these specific symptoms for a sort period of time, but what we often witness is the same patient refilling their Rx whenever they run out of their medication.
Western medicine has made us dependent upon these drugs because we feel better when we initially take them. But what this approach really fails to address is the root causes of what is actually happening at the cellular level. Most ailments may be prevented before they even begin. However, we are stuck in this medicinal paradigm and have trapped ourselves into following suit with evidence-based science.
Integrative health approaches such as meditation, cognitive therapy, yoga, music- and aromatherapy are all viable approaches that are often underutilized because they don't fall into the evidence-based category. Thus, we don't see these techniques being readily utilized. More and more individuals are beginning to learn and trial with these types of complementary and alternative approaches, but referral rates for such services are still much too low.
Even further on the primary prevention side rests something that still many fail to talk about in the medicinal domain. Emotions such as fear and loneliness cannot be ignored in the health equation. These feelings release toxic chemicals that traverse through the body and have an immediate negative effect, which leads to a heightened risk for chronic illness later on in life.
Our bodies are highly complex and they are constantly taking note of what we do every second of every day. A new wave of genetics has shed light on the power of epigenetics and the implications that may arise from our moment to moment feelings, actions, choices, and behaviors. We have this misconception of "good" and "bad" genes. In reality, we are the controller of our genes depending on how we choose to go about our daily lifestyle tendencies.
The food we put in our body, the thoughts that we think, the air we breathe, and the people we surround ourselves with all have immediate effect on our epigenomes. If we eat an unhealthy diet, think negative thoughts, breathe contaminated air, and immerse ourselves in toxic relationships, then our epigenomes mark our DNA via a process called DNA methylation. The more "marks" presented on our DNA, the greater the risk for specific disease onset, often times genetically based. On the contrary, however, if we choose to go about the healthy version of each of the above examples, our bodies are constantly responding and regulating DNA methylation.