About Me
I have had an interest in health and fitness since I was a pre-teen, now in my 40’s. Over the years, I have tried numerous things (both traditional & alternative medicine) in an effort to help the various health issues that have popped up during my life. However, the process has mostly felt like I’m taking “one step forward, and two steps back”. Going back and forth between Western and Alternative medicine, I have been met with incredible frustration on both sides of the spectrum. Either being prescribed pills with numerous side effects, or physicians simply not listening and taking me seriously on the western side, to being promised all I need to do is X, Y and Z (at a hefty price tag) and I’d feel better from the alternative medicine practitioners. I don’t want to take medications with nasty side effects for the rest of my life, but this seems to be the only approach western medicine provides. I also don’t want to be sold “snake oil” or keep guessing which natural solution might help. So I decided to make this website.
About this Site
After contemplating which things have actually worked, which things have been a waste of money, and exactly what I would do differently if I were to go back in time with the knowledge base I have now, I realized I needed to lay it all out in an organized fashion, here, for me (and whoever else may benefit from it). Despite many treatments not showing remarkable benefit, I learned something along the way with each thing I tried, even if the thing I learned was “well, that didn’t work.
First, Do No Harm
Most of the time Western medicine has failed me, big time. Not only has most of it not worked for me, but I ended up worse off after almost every pharmaceutical I have taken in an attempt to help. This is partly due to my body acting like a drama queen, and getting every bad side effect (sometimes rare ones) in existence (turns out there’s likely a reason for this that I’ll write about later). Therefore, I’m no longer interested in medicating symptoms because it just brings more and more symptoms due to side effects. I do believe western medicine has its place. You shouldn’t go treat a broken arm with aloe vera (at least I don’t). But when it comes to chronic health conditions, auto-immunity, or complicated “syndromes” western medicine just hasn’t helped me whatsoever.
Forever a Cynic
I’ll be honest, I can be rather cynical when it comes to trying anything new in either the western or alternative medicine world. There is a lot of “snake oil” being sold to desperate people, along with practitioners selling expensive services that are questionable, at best, just to raise their bottom line. Confirmation bias and placebo effect are very real. If something seems too good to be true, it is. So I take on each new thing I try with some pretty severe skepticism. I plan to break my experiences and knowledge down on this blog piece by piece, treatment by treatment, as simply as I can.