Recovering from chronic (long-term) illness, pain or low energy

Recovering from chronic (long-term) illness, pain or low energy

The challenge in overcoming chronic illness, pain or low energy that has lasted years, if not decades, is working out what your body has specifically been fighting all that time. Working this out is not straight forward as your chronic illness does not exist in isolation. There is much going on in the body that complicates matters.

Therefore, before working out what you are fighting, the first step in overcoming chronic illness is to simplify your health, such that you are handling fewer health problems simultaneously. You will be in a better place to find what is causing your chronic illness if, for example, you reduce the number of toxins that you are exposed to or eat food that suits your genetics or reduce the stress in your life.

Moreover, your chronic illness might have multiple causes. One illness or deficiency makes you susceptible to other illnesses and deficiencies. Therefore, overcoming one illness or deficiency allows your body to use its resources to better overcome your chronic illness.

For example, you might be eating vegetarian yet have the genetics of a carnivore, you might have a job or boss that causes you stress, and you might be living in a house containing black mould. In this case, it will be difficult for you to work out what is causing your chronic illness without simplifying your health by eating properly for you, by removing sources of continual stress, and by removing toxins from your environment. And you are not allowing your body to conquer your chronic illness if you require your body to also fight stress and toxins without the nutrients that it performs best on.

Finally, if you suffer chronic illness, it is likely that you have already tried multiple medications, been to different doctors, and read a lot about your illness. If there was a simple answer to curing your chronic illness, you likely would have found it by now.

This page does not offer you yet another treatment to try but rather a framework for helping you find your answer to a complex long-lasting illness.

A framework for recovering from chronic illness

Part 1: Simplifying your health

(1) Remove life stress
The hormones that we produce when under stress put us in a state that helps us handle a threat in the short term. For example, the hormones adrenaline and cortisol put us in a fight-or-flight state by preparing the body to either confront the threat (fight) or flee from it (flight), allowing us to respond quickly and effectively to the perceived threat. However, remaining in this state in the long term exhausts our resources, weakens our immune system, disregulates our emotions, affects our mental processing, strains our cardiovascular system and thus causes a variety of diseases.

Therefore, you might want to pay attention to what is making you miserable, put yourself around different people, change your job, and exercise.

(2) Replace processed food with naturally occurring food and homemade food
The core issue with processed food is that we, the consumer, do not know how the food has been processed. We do not know which processes have stripped the food of its nutrition. We do not know what additives have been added to make us addicted to the food. We do not know the full range of effects of sweeteners, flavourings, pesticides, and preservatives. We do not know how the ingredients themselves are processed before they are combined. Moreover, few foods that have a shelf life long enough for retail sale can be considered natural. Simply reading the ingredient list does not tell us most of what goes on in the production of our food.

Therefore, you might want to ensure your food contains the nutrients that it is supposed to contain, by considering how it is being grown and where it is coming from. You might want to ensure your food is not covered in toxins that your body will need to process. You might want to make and cook your own food at home from the simplest ingredients so that you know what is in your food. You might want to investigate what vitamins you struggle to absorb and use, and consider taking their activated forms as dietary supplements.

(3) Find the diet that works for your genetics
Not everyone is designed to be a vegetarian. Not everyone is designed to be a carnivore. Some people work better on a fat-based diet whereas others can handle some carbohydrates. Some people thrive on tomatoes whereas tomatoes cripple others with a severe episode of arthritis. Find the diet that works for you. One man's medicine is another man's poison.

(4) Reduce your exposure to toxins
Why would you not be in a constant state of inflammation, and the pain associated with it, given that we have poisoned the earth, poisoned the air, and poisoned the water?

You might want to reduce the toxic load that you are placing on your body so that it can devote its resources to fighting your chronic illness. You might want to purify your water; avoid pesticides and herbicides. You might want to eliminate your use of fragrances on your body, on your clothes and in your home. Trust your sense of smell when it is telling you to avoid certain environments or chemicals. Put on your skin only what you would be willing to eat or drink.

(5) Give your gut biome a chance to balance itself
You require a proper balance of microbes in your gut to digest food, absorb nutrients, create vitamins and neurotransmitters, regulate the immune system, protect against pathogens and prevent harmful substances from entering the bloodstream. However, it is near impossible to guess what microbes your gut needs, and even if you could guess, it would be equally difficult to then supply those microbes to your gut.

What you can do is not kill the microbes in your gut in the first place, and hopefully allow different microbes to return to levels that suit you.

Therefore, you might want to drink purified water, rather than directly drink tap water that has been treated with chlorine to kill microbes. You might want to reduce the amount of microbe-killing preservative that you eat (by making your food at home from natural ingredients).

(6) Move
Pump your lymphatic system through exercise and by massaging your lymph nodes. Your lymphatic system is the main battleground where your immune system is fighting foreign invaders, and your lymph fluid must be kept moving through bodily movement, exercise and massage as there is no other pumping mechanism.

(7) Get in the sun, often
Most of the global population has a severe deficiency of vitamin D, which is crucial to the proper functioning of many physiological processes in the body. Besides creating vitamin D in the skin, sunlight regulates levels of melatonin, serotonin and cortisol that make us active and regulate mood, appetite, and sleep.

(8) Sleep
Sleep aids recovery in that it releases hormones that stimulate tissue repair; produces and releases proteins that target the immune system's response to infection and inflammation; regulates inflammation; replenishes energy stores; and ensures balanced levels of cortisol and insulin, thus preventing weight gain, reducing stress, and maintaining metabolic health. You might want to get off that device and go to bed early.

Part 2: Finding and addressing the route cause to your chronic illness

Now that we have improved and simplified our general health, we are in a better place to observe and overcome our chronic illness.

(9) Consider obvious nutritional deficiencies
Many cases of chronic illness are due to a lack of a specific nutrient or group of nutrients for a period of years or decades. You likely think that you eat well, but you might have been born with deficiencies that you have never made up for; the plants and animals that you eat might lack certain minerals because of how they are farmed; your genetics might prevent you from activating certain vitamins; or your pharmaceutical drugs might deplete you of vitamins and minerals. Many experts consider that, even in the modern world (and sometimes especially in the modern world), the population is severely deficient in certain vitamins and minerals. Moreover, large proportions of the population have genetics that struggle to use vitamin B2 or convert vitamins B9 and B12 into their activated forms.

If your chronic illness is due to a nutrient deficiency, the solution will likely require high-dose supplementation rather than a mere change in diet. Yet there are complications to consider with high-dose supplementation. The high-dose supplementation of one nutrient can make you deficient in another nutrient. Or, the high-dose supplementation of one nutrient requires high doses of supporting nutrients to work. As you can see on our website, we are advocates for taking nutrients in high doses as medicine, and we discuss the contraindications, precautions and co-factors of taking nutrients as medicine on many pages of this website.

Furthermore, chronic infections can be fed by supplementation. It can be that a nutrient fuels both your immune system and the infection that it is fighting, requiring you to experiment with the size and timing of your dose.

(10) Find other people suffering the same illness
You are most likely to find the answer to your chronic illness by learning from the experiences of others.

We find that we best learn about health by reading the experiences of hundreds of patients who have tried different approaches or by listening to the experiences of clinicians who have treated hundreds of patients having the same illness. We learn from each of these people. There are online groups whose members are getting results and who can recommend a protocol or a doctor who specialises in overcoming your illness.

(11) Your chronic illness may unexplainably disappear
Once you have improved and simplified your general health, your body might now have the resources it needs to overcome your chronic illness, pain or low energy, such that it disappears as mysteriously as it arrived.