Levels of Health And Available Treatments

This interesting and informative article will give you a general overview of the various levels of bodily health and corresponding treatments available.

For specific conditions treated at Dr. Player's offices, see Conditions Treated.
Levels of Health

As far as the body is concerned, life can be viewed as a series of good times, not so good times, and bad times. Good times are when you give your body plenty of what it needs to do its various jobs: Things like sleep, nutrition and exercise are abundant and of quality.

Not so good times are when you place some stress or extra demands on your body's systems. Like when you told yourself you did not have time to eat or sleep right so your body would just have to get along with cat naps and corn chips.

And then there are the bad times when your body must summon all its resources to immediately handle a life-threatening situation or injury. Examples of this are getting thrown from a horse when you were ten and not being able to rotate your head fully to the left ever since. Or if you were in a car accident, lost some blood and spent three weeks in intensive care.

Your body stores whatever excess resources it can during the good times and uses them up during the not so good and bad times. During a period of increased stress on the body, it will adapt. That is, the body will draw upon whatever stored up minerals, sugars, proteins and fats it has in order to replace what it is not getting currently from your diet. It will re-channel resources to heal an injury.

The body will also cannibalize itself to a greater or lesser degree to continue handling these situations when there are no "good times" in sight. If your diet suffers long term or you continually expose your body to some toxin, it will adapt by tearing down tissues of the less essential systems.

If the liver is being overloaded with the task of eliminating some toxic substance, the body will allow the reproductive system to degenerate before it will allow the liver to stop its vital functions. The body will adapt.

So, if the good times are not that good to begin with or are too far apart, the body will slowly begin to degenerate. Crisis after crisis, emergency after emergency, the adaptations add up. They form a pattern of progression down a scale from healthy and energetic to disease and death (see scale at end of article).

It is a tribute to the design, efficiency, resourcefulness and sheer pluck of the human body that the road down this scale takes so long. But it is assured that if you withhold what the body was needing for each successive adaptation, you will wind up with a whole slew of incomplete repair actions in the body.

It may be working on one or several at a particular time until some new stress is introduced to shift the priorities. Each new layer of stress hangs up some or all of the work being done to fix up the previous layer. These inner layers, like those of an onion, are generally not returned to by the body until the outer ones are corrected.

The uncorrected previous layers of adaptation leave weakened body parts and systems which produce inferior products or performance. The body takes longer to heal, doesn't recover as quickly from exertion, isn't as responsive to your demands, and has more symptoms and less energy.

Methods of Treatment

Corresponding to the Levels of Health Scale is a scale of available treatments. Viewing these two scales side by side, one sees that very little intervention is needed to handle or assist a healthy, vigorous body to overcome some added stress.

You should also be aware that applying methods from the high end of the treatment scale can have profound effects on all levels of the health scale. A positive attitude will help a patient with cancer. Good nutrition and lots of rest will help overcome the effects of drugs and surgery. But it is crucial that you apply the correct treatment before things progress into the lower bands of health.

It usually isn't until one progresses down the scale to severe symptoms that most people even begin to consider seeing any type of health professional.

The patient who walks into my office who wants to merely maintain a healthy, vigorous body is a rare but welcome arrival. That patient has made my job easy by allowing me to correct habits or recommend lifestyle changes before additional "layers of the onion" are added.

I can help that person maintain excellent health for a long time with minimal intervention. After an initial evaluation my first priority is to educate my patients on the lifestyle changes that one can make right away. Many of these are simple and can be implemented gradually.

Frequently, diet and postural changes make a big difference. Specifics such as shoe heel height, pillow shape, the angler of their work chair seat or sleeping position may be evaluated.

Once the majority of new stresses are being eliminated, we can get to the job of progressively correcting each accumulated incomplete repair action. Improved health, fewer symptoms and greater energy are the results!