The recent few posts here told a personal story about how I discovered firsthand the importance of not treating an injury and its pain as mere symptoms, but allowing a deeper personal, subjective experience to emerge. This is the key lesson I have been trying to address over the last couple months: moving beyond the war on symptoms approach.
In contrast to the story I’ve told over these last couple posts, consider the standard practice of administering cortisone shots. In fact of the matter, these just confuse the body. Cortisol is a compound the body actually creates and uses as part of its immune system, releasing it when the body is stressed. When we inject cortisone artificially, we are confusing the body’s immune system through an outside “chemical force” which acts to suppress our body’s own immune reactions.
This practice does not allow the immune system to start up and get in gear, but rather replaces its functioning. And we wonder why we have so many autoimmune diseases? Giving a cortisone shot also gives a confusing message to the patient. It creates a false sense of recovery, and therefore a false sense of security.
Since 1992 I cannot even start to count how many patients I’ve seen who received cortisone shots and felt such a decrease of pain they proceeded to take on activities which they would have otherwise been unable to do, and as a result “re-injured” themselves.
Call me crazy, but is it really a re-injury when you haven’t yet dealt with the primary injury? And this is just the beginning of the problem. I’ll have more to say on this in my next post.
