When you don’t feel well you look for something that can make you feel better. It may be coffee to boost your energy, sleep to ease tiredness, or a comedy to bring a smile to your face. Regardless what it is, all of us are in a constant search for correctors, things that make us feel better.
You may be surprised, but feeling better does not always mean getting healthier. A bottle of wine a night can help you sleep, but surely in the long run won’t contribute to your health. An antidepressant will make you feel happy and only as long as you take it, but will certainly not correct the underlying cause of depression, such as nutritional imbalances. You will definitely have a good time eating cookies, but the aftermath is nothing to be proud of.
Correctors come in multitude of forms: food, pills, therapies, or even habits. They also vary in the way they contribute to your well-being. Some of them do a good job, some of them are temporarily acceptable and some are plain harmful.
Finding a good corrector is not easy and we are all guilty of frequently confusing good with bad correctors. The best corrector is one that makes you feel better and, at the same time, removes the cause of your problem. An acceptable corrector is a corrector that makes you feel better and somehow contributes to your health, but does not eliminate the causes of the problem. A bad corrector is a corrector that makes you feel better, but does not contribute to your health. Let’s look at some examples.
When you feel stressed at work you may consider a few ways to deal with it.
a) Drink more coffee to be more productive
b) Work through lunch for increased productivity
c) Establish proper priorities and balance between work and health
Of course, is clear only the third option is a good corrector, yet many people will still choose coffee or skipping lunch, because it is easier or because they do not understand the long-term health implications of the first two. Let’s see another scenario.
You experience chronic tingling and pain in your hands, so you:
a) Take pain killers
b) Take vitamin B12, since deficiency of this vitamin causes hand tingling
c) Improve stomach health, so you can absorb vitamin B12 from food rather than from supplements.
How do these correctors measure up?
a) Pain killers: you feel better, but by sacrificing your health
Sure pain killers make you forget about the pain, but does it equal better health? Unless you remove the underlying cause you will need to keep on taking pills to ease the pain. This approach not only doesn’t fix the problem, but adds another problem: drug toxicity. Every time you use a drug or chemical, your body needs to detoxify, which means more work and less health.
The above is an obvious example of a bad corrector, yet we are all guilty of making wrong decisions. Bad correctors are staples of our lives: coffee to perk up, antacids to ease heartburn, painkillers for pain or headaches and even a black skirt to fake slimmer hips.
If you need to take a prescription or over the counter drugs regularly you need to ask yourself a question: does this drug correct the underlying problem? If you believe so, then shouldn’t your problem be gone by now, and you should be free from pills?
b) Vitamin B12: you feel better, your health is better, but you still did not remove the underlying cause
If taking vitamin B12 removes the tingling you sure were deficient in it. It is good to help the body with the right corrector. However there is a reason behind insufficient amount of vitamin B12 and it is related to poor absorption. And although taking vitamin B12 on a regular basis would not cause harm, you would be better off by helping your body getting top notch absorption rather than continuing taking a supplement.
c) Improving absorption: you feel better, your health is better, your whole body is better
This is how you get truly healthy. Find the cause, remove the cause, and improve health permanently.
Good correctors will make your body healthier, however, only the best will make your body thrive. If you or somebody you care about keeps on taking pills or continues doing something of questionable value to feel better, please consider this: with bad correctors health will surely decline. If you want to be truly healthy, enjoy good energy, strength and vitality for a long time you cannot settle for less. There are many solutions to the same problem. Choose the best.
