5 Steps to Being Your Own ‘Doctor’

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In the days of packed hospitals, burned out health care workers, and no legitimate answers to chronic health concerns, it’s time to consider becoming your own doctor. Now, before anyone goes off the deep end and defends the system as the only option to improve your health, let me be clear upfront that the current medical system is excellent at trauma and emergency care and those services are clearly the best options in those scenarios. However, when it comes to helping people reverse disease and maintain a healthy and high quality of life, the conventional medical model has putrid results, and the stats prove it (like being the 3rd leading cause of preventable deaths, through medical errors and improperly prescribed medications).

Anyone who has become very healthy, knows that it comes from educating oneself and being dedicated to providing a healthy atmosphere for themselves and their family. The reason the hospitals are so packed and overwhelmed is that this education has been completely lost, and as a result people make poor choices around their food, environment, mindset, and other lifestyle factors. It also doesn’t help that “authorities” in these generally trusted industries perpetuate sickness, by refusing to address the gaping holes in their practices.

I’ve said it once, and I’ll say it again, health is complicatedly simple. Nature made it relatively simple, but greedy and short-sighted men have made it complicated with their egotistical interference. Let me clear out some of the cobwebs, and make your health an easier path to understand and navigate.

Step 1: Nail your nutrition

Arguably the easiest and most rewarding step to being your own doctor is to really understand the importance of nutrition and how to use food for healing and optimal health. With a multitude of highly marketed diets floating around, with little to no long term results to show they indeed work, it can be very confusing and frustrating to land on the right food for you.

Let me make this simple…the best foods for you are the ones that resonate with you and your current condition. Let me explain that further.

At no time will synthetic, highly processed, irradiated, and chemically treated foods resonate with your body. They are unrecognizable, and poisonous, and are a large reason why so many people are sick today. The food industry has synthetically made them addicting, which makes coming off them even more difficult, but certainly not impossible. Make no mistakes though, the further these foods are from their original format, the more toxic and less nutritious they become.

The optimal food for your body for healing, is that which is produced by nature and enjoyed as close to it’s original, untainted format as possible. Now, unfortunately, due to the slow destruction of your gut microbiome, liver, and other areas responsible for food assimilation, some otherwise healthy foods now will NOT resonate with your body. This has led to more confusion and many books claiming that the nutrients in these foods are poison, when in fact, it’s just that they don’t match your frequency right now, and that can be reset with the proper diet that helps eliminate the issue (because many of these foods have very beneficial properties).

Keeping that in mind, plants overall have the most health benefits, when properly selected, prepared, and assimilated. They should make up at least 75% of your diet, depending on your current state of health (the unhealthier you are, the more you would benefit from a higher ratio of plants), and one needs to be careful about the “low carb” or “high fat” diets, understanding that carbohydrates are plentiful in fruits and vegetables. I would also be remiss if I didn’t communicate that high fat diets are hard on digestion, the liver, and the gallbladder, and can’t be sustained long term. All macronutrients are important, but the ratio is where people get mixed up that costs them their health.

Step 2: Master your mindset

Another critical area that so many people neglect, is mindset. It’s become difficult for people to even recognize chronic stress or brain-related issues, because it has become so commonplace that these issues have become normal. However, for those that have started to mitigate their stress and have managed to find their happy place more often, they have seen the dramatic results it can have on their overall health.

So to be your own doctor with mindset, you simply need to understand that thinking and focusing less on the things you don’t appreciate about your life, and focusing more on the things you do want in your life, is the general prescription for everyone. This can break down into a daily meditative practice, gratitude journal, yoga, vision boards, nurturing relationships, laughing, volunteering, or putting more time into hobbies you are passionate about.

It’s also important to note that mindset issues can be due to nutrient deficiencies and toxicities that hamper the proper function of the body and the brain. Your adrenals may be shot, brain riddled with fluoride or heavy metals, and gut health over run by unfriendly microbes and toxins. In any of these cases, a focus on restoring function is through cleansing and nutrient loading, so your mindset can be improved.

You’ll be pleasantly surprised how quickly your health will improve and be maintained with a healthy mindset.

Step 3: Connect to the elements

Many health enthusiasts would agree that connection to the elements is a critical component of doctoring yourself on a consistent basis. The most important elements to consider are the sun, earth, water, and air.

It’s important to respect the power of the sun, because without it, life ceases to exist on this planet. However, you also need to ensure you don’t over expose yourself as it can also cause health concerns. With the hype around using sunscreen to prevent cancer, few have to worry about the potential damaging effects of the sun, but rather, the products and action they take to avoid absorbing its beneficial rays. To fully harness the sun’s benefits, ensure you get out into it for at least 15-20 minutes a day, or until you turn slightly pink, then getting out or covering up appropriately. Load up seasonally in regions where the sun is scarce, to help carry those vitamin D stores into the cooler months. A vitamin D deficiency can cause all kinds of symptoms, depression and cancer to name a couple, so you want to make sure you enjoy the sun, foods, or supplements that keep this vital nutrient in abundance.

Another emerging habit that has plenty of health benefits, is grounding or earthing. This is the simple act of physically connecting to the surface of the planet with bare skin, and it has profound health benefits, especially in a world being dominated by EMFs. In the warmer months it is absolutely free, and in cooler months there is technology that can ground you inside your home.

A habit most people tend to focus on is drinking enough water, but before that, the focus should be on finding a clean source. Too many people are drinking chlorinated or fluoridated water which can have dramatic consequences to your health. If you have chosen to filter your water, keep in mind that many filters are poor and don’t do a good job of purifying this vital element. To learn more, you can read my water comparisons.

Finally, placing yourself in an environment that has a clean air supply is so important. You eat food on average 3-5 times a day, but you breathe in vital air every 3-5 seconds. There’s a reason you can only survive around 4 minutes without oxygen, before serious damage occurs. Take that as a sign and improve your air quality with plants, essential oils, air purifiers, or a jaunt in nature.

Step 4: Tune in and recognize symptoms

One thing that many of us fail to do is tune into our body and translate symptoms in a way that you can identify where the issue is originating from so it can be addressed. Whether it is joint pain, energy loss, skin issues, headaches, or bloating, linking it to food intake and other environmental factors is something that needs to be done in order to fine tune your level of understanding with your body.

Some issues are more obvious than others (bloating, headaches), but many are not directly tied to the area itself. For example, joint pain could be related to a digestive issue or systemic toxicity that did not originate in the area currently suffering, and skin issues can be a result of a compromised liver. On the other hand, you can often link pain in certain areas to organs or glands being taxed, like lower back pain (kidneys), upper middle back discomfort (liver), and even neck pain (thyroid).

The body leaves clues, and educating yourself or plugging into a mentor who has experience in recognizing the symptoms, will go a long way to choosing the right antidote.

Step 5: Know your remedies

Although the hospital is the best resource for certain emergencies and trauma, we tend to use it’s services far too much for things that can be quite easily remedied at home.

For example, one of the biggest trips to the doctor is for suspected bacterial infections, in which antibiotics are often prescribed. A very high amount of cases could be taken care of at home with a natural antibacterial solution like my Antibiotic Tonic. There are certainly other remedies that can work as well for bacterial, viral, and other infections like oil of oregano, colloidal silver, manuka honey, elderberry syrup, essential oils, homeopathy, vitamin C, and much more. The beauty of these remedies is that there is little to no risk of damage to the digestive system and liver when taking them, unlike antibiotics.

Even if you don’t know if it is bacterial, viral, or parasitic in nature, many home remedies will address all of those issues in one or two solutions without any negative consequences when used as directed. So when you get your hands on some of the top home remedies and keep them on call for these situations, more often than not you can knock out the source of the issue inside the walls of your own home. What’s even better is this allows you to do it more quickly, which is of high importance when removing an infection, because waiting a few hours or days for a prescription can make removal even more problematic (aside from it’s inherent toxicity).

Bottom line, every time you are able to stay out of the hospital and avoid prescription medications, you get one step closer to obtaining health sovereignty, by staying healthy long term and avoiding deterioration that is a given when using these drugs.

This article was originally published on HealingTheBody.ca