Causes of Disease

The cause of any health problem usually depends on perspective.

Your Medical Doctor will see it as one thing, your alternative practitioner as another.  It is important for you to see the whole picture.

Let me clarify with an example:  Take high blood pressure for example.  This is a symptom of an imbalance in your cardiovascular system due to some cause or combination of causes as shown above.

So there are three levels:

1. Cause - The causes of most disease are lifestyle choices.  These are things you often have control over. Working on causes has the most impact on your disease.  One problem - working at the cause level is often slow and the changes are not obvious in the short run.
2. Imbalance - This is what the cause leads to.  For example, in Chinese Medicine, high blood pressure is often diagnoses as a liver or kidney problem.
3. Symptom - This is often what you, the patient, thinks is the problem. An advantage of working at this level is that the patient sees results quickly.  The disadvantage is that the causes and imbalances are not addressed.  This means the symptom control needs to be taken for ever, and, since the imbalances and causes are not addressed, these causes and imbalances may cause other, perhaps more dangerous, symptoms later.