Treating Symptoms Doesn't Make the Problem Go Away

If you hear your smoke alarm sounding, you don't treat it as an annoying nuisance and hope it will go away. If your bathtub faucet is dripping and the noise of the drip, drip, drip is sound more like a water torture, placing something under the drip to deaden the noise, will stop the water torture, but it won't do anything for solving the cause of the drip. If you have a cut or scrape on your hand that is causing a tremendous amount of pain, taking a pain pill may dull the pain sensation, but it won't fix your scrape.

When we have "symptoms," they are trying to tell us that something is wrong in the body. The symptom is just a "messenger" letting us now a problem exists. Symptoms are not usually the problem or the cause of whatever is happening. So treating symptoms without searching for and treating the cause is like shooting the messenger because you don't like the message.

Most of our chronic illnesses are considered chronic because they won't go away. Diabetes, arthritis, fibromyalgia, irritable bowel syndrome, and a host of other chronic conditions are deemed not curable. Maybe they are not curable because we continue to treat the symptoms without finding what the cause is a finding a treatment for that.

Finding the underlying cause is not always easy. And finding an accurate diagnosis for any condition is key to finding the right treatment. Treating the symptoms may be all we can do for some things, but we can't stop looking for the "right" underlying cause. If you discuss ALL of your symptoms with your health care provider and create a team effort in finding the accurate diagnosis, you will become closer to finding a cure or at least an effective treatment for your condition. Ask questions, give feedback, become a part of your health care team.