Why It May Take Time to See a Result From Taking Herbs
In our culture we have been trained to expect things to happen fast: Instant gratification, fast food, instant symptom relief, etc.
We don’t even hold the opinion that you can start something you like, but are terrible at, and develop through hard work, consistency and diligence, spectacular ability. We think you either have talent or you don’t. In school you are not encouraged to compete with yourself and get better and better over time, but you are set in competition with your classmates with immediate result, with no idea of ever improving, except with “studying harder” for tests.
Our forms of entertainment hardly ever show the nitty gritty, grueling hard work put in by the professional athlete, artist or businessperson, or the number of failures they had before you got to hear of their name. All that took time and nobody realizes how long it all took. You just see the instant appearance.
When you go to an MD with a problem, the doctor first of all doesn’t have training in health, only in disease. So, you present a symptom and he tries to fit it into a category or disease and then he tries to remove the “dis” to bring about “ease”. But “ease” is built on health, not on the absence of symptoms. But if that doctor doesn’t get rid of that symptom pronto, you think he failed and you look for another doctor.
Do you know that your body systems are rigged to keep you feeling healthy? A body can take hits to health, getting more and more unhealthy over a long time without one bad symptom showing up. Back when I worked for Dr. Conroy, a chiropractor in N Plainfield, NJ, he had loads of studies showing that, on average, a whopping 80% of function had to be gone in an organ before any sign of sickness emerged. See, it’s a long-term affair. Getting healthy and getting sick both take time.
Dr Conroy was big on education pointing out that the root word of “doctor” meant teacher. And he went by genius inventor Thomas Edison's quote: “The doctor of the future will give no medicine but will interest his patients in the care of the human frame, in diet, and in the cause and prevention of disease.” Not to mention, the Hippocratic Oath of Medicine which contained the “First, do no harm” idea.
I just looked up the spelling of that and inadvertently discovered that Medicine has gradually, step by step, done away with the original oath and half the medical schools had their own self-crafted oaths by 2015. And a 2017 Academic Medicine study showed that the trend is now for students to choose or craft their own oaths, creating a personalized declaration of what it means to be a physician. How touching. So there isn’t even a standard standard of ethics anymore. Maybe you might see by this, that it is more important than ever to take responsibility for your own and your family’s health? I hope so.
Anyway, Dr Conroy used a metaphor to explain that time and symptoms do not have the relationship to health that we have been educated to assume:
Suppose a department in a company normally had five people working and producing necessary products to keep the company running fine, but one calls in sick? Well, everybody would reorganize to pick up the slack and still produce the same amount or even more (no symptoms) but with a lower level of health. Right?
Then, being a little overworked, another calls in sick. Three can still organize to do all the work, but even more stress and a less healthy department. (No symptoms)
So, another calls in sick. Then you have two people scrambling. Total stress and much more unhealthy, but with great teamwork they manage to do it all (No symptoms).
But then it’s too much and one of them calls in sick and Boom, everything cannot be done by ONE person and you get your first symptom. By that time, it is pretty darn unhealthy. 80% gone.
Well, that’s the way it works with your internal organs, and body systems, too. And the road back to real health where things are optimum and vibrant can take some time.
The road back to health can vary. You might take an herb and feel better right away. Antioxidants work pretty fast like that. But what if the problem is structural or if a delicate balance has to be reestablished? What if it was like losing 4 out of 5 workers? Or one person with superior ability could rejoin the department and you get no symptoms again, but is that 100% healthy? Can it be sustained and improved over time or is it a strain that can’t hold its consistency? You probably have had symptoms in the past that come and go, right?
You see the time isn’t always instant and "no symptoms" doesn’t always mean health. And it doesn’t mean you are not healing even if you don’t have good symptoms, which we call improvement.
Healing with herbs addresses the real problems at their source, which can take time. Mainstream medicine is focused on activating or blocking body processes that have to do with that symptom, whether that change is healthy or not, but it’s fast.
Much more often than not, it isn’t healthy and it seems to be designed to create future problems that keep doctors in business. The double-edged sword kills the enemy but cuts you, too. Do you know anybody that started out with one problem and now they are on multiple drugs for multiple “side effects”?
You think that the doctor cured you and made you healthy. That was the fast result. But underneath you don’t see the monkey wrench thrown into your system that may be causing your next health problem because it takes time to develop.
Or you don’t see that the strain is draining your overall health because you have been in effect poisoned and your normal ability to cleanse the system is overworked and impaired. It could be wiping out workers in that system or a totally different organ or system. It can affect your overall health, even if you are not feeling it.
Sometimes an herb can have a fast result because it addresses something that can be fixed fast, like giving you more energy or calming down a raging system.
But sometimes an herb works on rebuilding structure or rebuilding a balance between systems or sometimes there needs to be a buildup of a substance, like a stock pile before normal function resumes, or maybe there will be a cleaning out which could cause you to feel worse before you feel better, like with a rash, headache or a stomach ache or any number of symptoms. Three days of difficulty could be the key to long term success in that case. No one ever said natural healing was easy. It can take real guts sometimes. But it is true and permanent healing that does not create future business for the doctor. But in any of those scenarios an herb needs more time to work.
I hope I have given you some things to think about and that you will have enough patience to give herbs a chance to work for you. As has been said, “Good things come to those who wait.” And I wish you those good things.