Simple steps for avoiding a detox

In today’s culture, detox seems to be the go-to for almost any health concern.  And why not?  We are often overwhelmed and so overloaded, that the idea of “letting go” of it all seems incredibly appealing.

However, sometimes a detox isn’t the answer.  Oftentimes, there are simple solutions that require a more gentle letting go–such as releasing old paradigms and emotional patterns.

Lack of sleep

For those who are tired and have trouble falling asleep, I recommend leaving computers, cellphones and televisions out of the bedroom. When you get into bed at night and you are ready for sleep, do nothing except relax and settle your body down;  the stimulation to the pituitary and pineal gland from the screen lights is not one that is conducive to a state of relaxation. For those who fall asleep with the television on, while that may help you to fall asleep, you won’t get the deepest level of sleep that you could get. Try changing to light music without words or nature sounds . Burning two sticks of Nag Champa incense by the bedside about ten minutes prior to getting into bed helps bring deep sleep on for many, even where pharmaceuticals fail.

Stress, weight loss, and more

Dehydration, simply put, means that no toxicity is leaving your body no matter how hard you try because there is no exit pathway, or way for the toxins to leave the body. When one pulls toxins out of any internal organ and those toxins have no way to effectively exit the body, they don’t: they swim around the system and dump back into whatever weakness they can find, or these toxins can cross the blood brain barrier and give a person quite a headache. This is eliminated easily by hydrating a person very well when dehydration is an issue, as it is in varying degrees for most of us. 

Being undernourished is a problem for many of us as well. Even when the diet is very careful, the soil today still isn’t rich with the nutrients that it was packed with 100 years ago. Sometimes people think they need to detoxify, when really what their body needs is to be fed better.  I am not a vitamin doctor so much as an organ doctor. By that I mean that the thrust of my practice for over a decade has been finding weaknesses in organ and gland function, and feeding those weaknesses through specific bodywork and supplementation tailored to each individual’s particular deficits. Read about a patient who found significant relief from fortifying his liver rather than struggling to detoxify it.