I had this friend in college. She was the queen of the post nasal drip. Her nose was always running! She was consistently replenishing the supply of facial tissue she kept in her purse, car, pocket, etc so she could be prepared to catch the drip on the end of her nose at a moment’s notice. I asked her one day “did you know that noses aren’t supposed to drip all the time”? Her reply was “I don’t know, I’m just used to it”.

That attitude is the answer to so many little aches and pains we experience on a day to day basis. They are, culturally, so common or we are just so used to them being around that we begin to see them as a normal part of physiology. I have met so many women who believe it is a normal part life to have premenstrual syndrome or painful periods. This is simply not true! Painful periods are representative of underlying pathology. This pathology may not, yet, be medically significant, but it does exist and should be treated, rather than disregarded.

It has become acceptable to go through life with everyday aches and pains, which we just place into the “part of life” category. We believe that aging is automatically accompanied by pain, fatigue and substantial loss of physiological function. I hear statements such as “it sucks being a woman” because we automatically assume that it means we have to spend a week of every month is discomfort for the majority of our adult lives!

We are not meant to live our lives in discomfort! Pain is the body’s way of signaling that something is wrong. Don’t ignore it! We should be aiming to feel vibrant, full of life and pain free for our whole lives! Everyone gets sick from time to time, this is an inevitable part of life. But sensation of illness should be experienced for a relatively, fractionally, small period of time, compared to the rest of our days, which should be spent enjoying our bodies.

So how do we reach this seemingly impossible goal? It’s very simple. Live a life aimed at preventing disease. Follow these suggestions and you will be well on your way.

Eat well

Get enough sleep

Take quiet time for yourself

Minimize toxicity

Moderate your stress levels

Move your body daily through exercise

If you feel pain or discomfort, don’t accept it and definitely don’t mask it with medication! Find natural modalities of treatment such as Chinese Medicine to treat these minor upsets before they become major pathologies.

Make your body and your health your number one priority.

You and only you can make the choice to live your life pain free and feeling well! Make the choice to live the life of a healthful person. It’s momentous in that once you change one area of your life and start to feel well, you will want to live healthfully in all aspects of your life! Life is short, so let’s make sure we feel well enough to enjoy it!

By Michelle Stevenson RDH D.Ac

This entry was posted on October 17, 2011 at 4:55 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

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