Dog Tales

If you happen to inadvertently step on the tail of one of your furry friends - how do they usually respond? Likely the dog will whine or yip or bark, and you would have a response to this behaviour. You’d obviously put a muzzle on it to stop it from making that sound right? No? Check it’s teeth? Would you remove it’s voice box perhaps? That surely would achieve the desired outcome of stopping the barking. Hopefully you’re silently screaming at me that we should just take our foot off the poor dog’s squished tail because that is the problem the dog is trying to tell us about! And I think you’d be right - I think universally, we could all agree that’s right. How crazy does it sound to only look at solutions for the barking by just considering the dog’s mouth as the problem? Ludicrous you say?!

Well how crazy does it sound to only look at your head if you have headaches? How crazy does it sound to only look at your skin if you have a rash? How crazy does it sound to only look at your knee if you have knee pain? How crazy is it? Unfortunately, it’s not that crazy to a lot of us! We often have very narrow views when it comes to navigating our own symptoms. We rarely acknowledge that perhaps what we are seeing or experiencing is simply our body yelling out “something is wrong in here!” The something that’s yelling is not always going to be the root or source of the problem, it’s just the alarm bell that happens to be visible to us. We often zero in on the area that is bothering us and feel the need to address it directly, without considering if we’re actually getting to the underlying cause of the issue or just targeting (or worse - covering up) the symptom.

Certainly, there are times when the area that is yelling at us is in fact the main source of the issue at hand. However, in the absence of trauma or acute injury, I have found more often than not, what’s “barking” at us, isn’t actually the original source of the problem, it’s simply an expression from the body that there is an issue. Let’s take a rash for example: rash = something wrong with the skin right?… Not necessarily. I think we could all come up with (and have experienced) something that had nothing to do with our skin that caused us to develop a rash. Ever eaten something that you had a sensitivity to and gotten hives? Ever had a viral infection that also caused a rash (i.e.. chicken pox or shingles). In both of those cases there isn’t actually anything “wrong” with your skin, it is just the component that’s visible to you -  it’s messaging that not all is right inside our little bodies. This is true of sooo many of the ailments that we experience. Some are obvious and others are much harder to see - especially when we zero in and restrict our views. I have worked with enough people to know that we don’t have inflammation because we have a lack of ibuprofen in our systems. We don’t have headaches because of a lack of Tylenol or because there is certainly something wrong with our brain. Can there be something structurally wrong inside our noodle? Sure, sometimes, but the majority of the time, we have to consider more than just our brain as a source of headaches.  Maybe it’s emotional stress, maybe it’s physical stress, maybe it’s a reaction to food, maybe it’s that we are aren’t being totally honest with ourselves about the path we’re on - you get the idea. It is fairly acceptable to consider headaches as stemming from something else, but this concept can apply to a lot more than just headaches. There are a lot of chronic injuries, aches and pains, musculoskeletal disorders (like arthritis or chronically tight muscles), migraines, organ dysfunction, mental disorders, you name it that don’t fully resolve until we track down what our body is asking us to acknowledge. 

Unfortunately, the very nature of our current medical system is designed to encourage us to operate a bit segmented, with specialists in various body systems. This has its pros especially in emergency situations, but we should acknowledge it also has its drawbacks and that we need to take some of the responsibility to be curious and honest with ourselves about what messages our body might be giving us. I want to encourage you that it’s important to step back and consider what else might be contributing to whatever it is that is ailing you. Certainly, it’s important to follow the advice of your healthcare providers who will help to damage-control the symptoms and/or disease process, but it’s up to you to be curious about what else might be deep at the root of it all and what you can do to help address it. All of our body systems are so interconnected and constantly communicating with each other and with our environment.  What’s happening in one area can certainly result in symptoms in another. Take heart though, this doesn’t mean you’re hopelessly looking for a needle in a haystack when it comes to resolving your symptoms. It means that you have an amazing opportunity to discover changes and solutions that are available to you and that will provide a lasting benefit to your overall health. When you are wiling to dig deep and listen to that little voice inside you might uncover a change you need to make that you’ve been avoiding. And when you make a positive change in one area of your health, it will inevitably improve your overall health. You never know, it might just end up being that missing link to stopping the barking and resolving some of those stubborn symptoms you’ve been damage-controlling.