Disease – Our Misunderstood Friend

By Neill Abayon

Our body is equipped with the most extensive and intricate defensive and healing system. When we violate the elementary laws of health or subject our body to severe stresses or other adverse environmental factors, our body reacts with self-defense. With various defensive acute symptoms, such as pain, fever, diarrhea, fatigue or loss of appetite, the body will signal that it has taken the defensive action aimed at restoring the condition of health.  But in our ignorance, we totally misunderstand these warning and healing symptoms, calling them “disease”. Instead of letting the fever, the proper rest and temporary abstinence form food accomplish the health-restoring goal for which the body had initiated these symptoms, we suppress the fever with medicines, we eliminate the pain with drugs and we try to feed the sick with as much “nourishing food” as possible to get him well soon. Thus, we counteract and break down the body’s own defensive and healing efforts and cause it serious damage. Now the condition may have changed from the acute into chronic. As we continue to interfere with the body’s own healing activity, the more serious chronic condition such as elevated blood pressure, inflammations, immobility of joints, hardening of the arteries, skin eruptions, even tumors, may develop. Even these conditions, however, are not “disease” as we understand them – the negative conditions that must be suppressed or eliminated – but are our body’s own, often desperate, but nevertheless positive and beneficial attempts to cope with increasingly adverse conditions and protect the organism from the total destruction.