Disease Timeline

When do you go see your doctor? Most people tell go to their doctor when they have a pain, symptom, or some condition going on in their body. That approach to health is very degenerative. Let us explain it by looking at the disease timeline. The disease timeline is the time when disease starts in your body to when the disease ends. There are some things that begin to happen through this process that we need to begin to understand. We all know what the end results of having a disease can be. So what happens at the start of disease? Many times people don’t know, because most of the time you have no idea that disease has started in your body.

How do you feel when a disease starts within your body? A lot of times you’re going to feel just fine. Let’s take heart disease for example. Have you ever known somebody that has a heart attack and they didn’t know they were going to have a heart attack one second before that? Sure. We all know of somebody like that. Has anybody known somebody to have cancer and that person not know they had cancer in their body? Sure. We’ve all known people that have diseases. In fact, we have this question or comment asked to us a lot, “Doc, I had no idea this particular condition was going on in my body because I feel fine.” Yeah, that can absolutely happen.

Many degenerative diseases that start in the body are going on for years before they show outward signs or symptoms. It isn’t until you notice the signs and symptoms that you usually go to the doctor. On our disease timeline these signs and symptoms don’t appear until you have already lost about 75% of your function. On one hand it is pretty interesting to see how our body has the ability to adapt so that we can keep going when we have a disease.On the other hand, it’s very bad, because we’re not getting any of the warning signs as we go through our life that this disease is developing.

So what we often see is that when people start to notice the symptoms they go to their medical doctor. Oftentimes, the course of treatment from your medical doctor involves prescription drugs or surgery. Both of these options can also be degenerative within the body. Now, I want to make it clear that there is a time and there is a place when you need a surgery. But when it comes to taking care of chronic degenerative disease, we are not very good at that.

Once we get to the stage that the disease has already been developed we’re fighting an uphill battle at that point. Where healthcare has failed today is we failed to look at the biomechanical functional losses within the body and all of the stresses that are affecting it today. I believe that healthcare is going to change when we start being proactive versus reactive.

Hopefully, this explains the importance of staying on top of your health. Making sure you are living a healthy lifestyle and getting checkups with your chiropractor to make sure your body is moving correctly is a much better choice than waiting until the symptoms appear and you lose most of your function. Contact LifeWorks Integrative Health today to start working towards a healthier life!