We live in an over-medicated society where people are getting more ill, instead of better. Each day when I open my Facebook newsfeed, and I read posts by mothers moaning about their children's coughs, colds, fever, congested chests. Again. And often, accompanying these posts are photos of sorry-looking children (passive, cowed and victimised) and the medication that they have been prescribed with. Being ill has become a state of play, for both the unthinking parents' monkey brains and the pharmaceutical industry. A whole generation of children is accepting that illness is normal, and the solution is taking sick leave and swallowing drugs. Hello, this is all part of growing up.
Do you know that doctors and hospitals make money from selling medicines, dear parents?
Analgesics are popped into the mouth like sweets these days. There is medication for fever, coughs, colds, congested chest, you name it, and you can be sure that a pharmaceutical company somewhere has thought about it (and exploited modern society's desire for instant effortless cure). The majority of medicines found in the home are useless. Harmful even, in the long run, because apart from breeding resistant bugs, we rob our bodies of the vital opportunities to learn how to overcome infections. Indeed, we are de-skilling our body's defence system by mollycoddling it with false friends.
The fact that your body is sick means that there is something not quite right about it at the moment. And it is for a reason. It is out of balance with its environment, resulting in the outbreak. For example, if your child is often ill with fever or other little ailments, it means that he/she is not able to fight common infections. So instead of medicating your child, may I suggest that you do an audit, which is to say find out if your child nutritional intake is sufficient to balance the needs of his growing body? Is he having enough rest? Is he drinking enough fluids? Is there an underlying serious issue that's causing the recurrent outbreak? It could be emotional, as more and more children in our pressurised society is suffering from stress early, and illness is one of the ways the child manifest the stress or unhappiness that he is feeling. Medication for fever is not going to solve the real problem for the long term.
If your child's daycare centre has frequent outbreaks of the highly infectious hand-foot-and-mouth disease, arming yourself and your child with crazy quantities of anti-microbial hand sanitisers is not going to help. Some hand sanitisers are carcinogenic. Far better to insist that the daycare centre establish a clear protocols to prevent future outbreaks, because you are then dealing with the problem, rather than loading your child's body with more toxins. The general practitioner, Dr. Rosemary Leonard wrote that we are breeding a 'dangerously clean generation', and she sees a rise in immune-related disorders, such as eczema, asthma, hayfever and food allergies.
Of course, I am not advocating that you just leave a sick child be. We, the parents, have to manage the illness with wisdom and with these four facts:
(1) Keep a fevered child's temperature down by regular sponging him and wearing loose cotton clothes. Let him rest in a room with cool ventilation.
(2) Ensure that your child is hydrated.
(3) If the illness persists for more than three-four days, take your child to a reputable emergency unit/trusted doctor, and seek explanations. You may have to insist on tests.
(4) Look out for other symptoms, such as blotches (which could be indicative of meningitis) and rash.
(5) If your child's condition worsened, then it is straight to the emergency unit as soon as possible.
For our children's sake, we must begin taking responsibility and stop subcontracting their health to outside parties, who often do not have your children's best interest at heart. Wake up to the reality that popping pill does not help. It may even kill. We may seek to cure or prevent all illnesses with disinfectants, antibiotics and cleanliness, but Nature has found a way to get her own back. There are more sick children today than there ever was. Don't let your child join the ranks of the ills.
Stay tuned on my piece on Energy Medicine.
This article was first published in www.raisinghappystrongkids.com