Imagine your smoke alarm won’t stop beeping. Has that happen to you? Every day, every hour, maybe every half hour.

It starts to get annoying, to the point where you BEEP can’t function. It’s like Chinese water torture. BEEP. So you call up a the BEEP guy who says he knows how to fix BEEP smoke alarms that beep. (You do know there is a BEEP guy, right?)

The guy arrives with a short ladder, a bunch of foam padding and ten rolls of duct tape. He then proceeds to tape foam over your smoke detector until it’s completely covered, charges you $1000 buck, and go on his day.

 The sound, as a result, is more or less muffled. Finally, peace and quiet. Granted, there’s a huge lump of foam padding on your ceiling, but you’ll do what you have to do to stay sane. That’s the price of peace and quiet.

So you go about your life. Sometimes you’ll have guests over for dinner and they’ll ask about the strange growth on your ceiling, and you’ll explain that your smoke alarm had chronic beep syndrome (CBS) and you had to get it treated. They nod and smile.

Occasionally you’ll hear a faint “BRRP” as you walk under the smoke detector, so you call up the guy who fixed it and have him put a few extra layers of foam on. You know, just to be safe. You pay another $1000 bucks, and he goes on with his day.

One day you come home from work to find that your house has completely burned to the ground, and there’s a group of firefighters gathered around a smoldering mass of melted foam and duct tape—your old smoke detector. Surprisingly, the smoke detector is fine. In fact, it’s the only thing that didn’t get incinerated.

Suddenly a van pulls up. It’s the guy who fixed your smoke detector.

“Hey, just wanted to check to see how the smoke detector’s doing.”

You want to punch the guy. “Can’t you see that my house is gone?”

“Oh,” he says, looking at the debris. “I know a guy who can build you a new one, no problem.”

Why am I telling you this long, winded story?

I’m telling you this story because it summarizes a big problem I see in our healthcare system. Conventional medicine aims to treat symptoms and diseases through drugs, radiation and surgery. You go to a doctor and say you have chronic pain, you get painkillers. You have erectile dysfunction, you get an ED drug. You have insomnia, you get sleep meds. Acid reflux? more drugs. 

The house in the story is your body.

The basic philosophy of conventional medicine is to do whatever makes the symptoms go away. Get rid of the beeping.  A “band-aid” approach, if you will. If the beeping comes back, just apply more duct tape until you can’t hear it anymore. This is what happens with pain medication, for example. Forget the cause, just get rid of the pain. If the duct tape is a little unsightly, you deal with it. It’s a “side-effect.”

Now, to be clear; I have great respect and admiration for my conventional colleagues. If you are looking for a website that disparages conventional doctors, this is not one of them. I have worked closely with mainstream docs for over twelve years and what they do is often magical. If you get hit by a car, God forbid, don’t come see me. Go to the Emergency room. If you have a urethral stricture where you can’t pee, my supplements and natural program will not work, you need a urologist to bring you relief.  Same with prostate cancer. At times surgery or radiation is what is needed. But someone needs to take care of the person – take care of the terrain. That’s what well trained holistic doctors do.  Get it?

I don’t practice conventional medicine. I practice functional medicine and naturopathic medicine, which aims to treat the cause of disease, in a holistic fashion, not the symptoms. Let’s look at the story I just told, but in this new version, you call the right person.

Functional Smoke Detector Repair

Imagine your smoke alarm won’t stop beeping. Every day, every hour, maybe every half hour. It starts to get annoying, to the point where you BEEP can’t function. It’s like Chinese water torture. BEEP. So you call up a guy BEEP who says he knows how to fix BEEP smoke alarms that beep.

“Hello?”

“Hey, my smoke detector won’t stop beeping. Do you know what might be causing that?”

“Low battery.”

“Thanks.”

Cause identified. Problem solved. No negative side effects. House not burned down. Happy homeowner.

What You Should Do

If you’re suffering from chronic health problems, my guess is that they’re caused by something unhealthy that you do every day, whether that’s in your diet, stress management, physical activity levels, or other lifestyle choices. My advice for treating  chronic diseases:

• Get a Functional medicine or Naturopathic medicine doctor
• Get 30 minutes of vigorous exercise every day.
• Cut out processed foods and refined carbs to at least 50%. If not more.
• Load up on nutrient-rich vegetables, quality fish, nuts and legumes
• Practice relaxation techniques and keep calm, despite of your political views. 🙂

To find a well trained holistic physician , any of these organization can help :

American Association for Naturopathic Physicians

Institute for Functional Medicine

American College for the Advancement in Medicine

Be well.

[About Dr. Geo]