Recently, our two littlest ones, ages 2 and almost 4 became sick - fever, lethargy, vomiting, etc... Now that we are over the illness, I told Steve that I thought I should post my thoughts on dealing with illness, both in ourselves and our children.
As a parent, its extremely hard to watch your child be sick, in pain or uncomfortable. In our allopathic society, at the first hint of discomfort, we tend to start popping medicine. However, God designed our bodies with the amazing ability to fight off illness, if we are generally healthy in body, soul and spirit.
When a virus or bacteria attacks us, our bodies will usually:
1. Heat up (fever). Our bodies heat up to kill the offending virus or bacteria.
2. We tend to stop eating/become lethargic/tired. This is because our bodies are concentrating their efforts on destroying the enemy, not on digestion and our normal work routine.
3. We have diarrhea, vomiting, runny noses, etc... - this is because our bodies are trying to purge the offenders.
Once our bodies have gone through this process, an amazing thing happens - immunity against that particular virus or bacteria.
If we take medicines to halt the healing efforts of the body, all of this is negated. Now, obviously there are circumstances that allopathic medicines are justified and necessary (such as when my first born son became septic at 11 months and ran a fever of 105 degrees) but I am referring here to the everyday cold, flu, allergy attack, etc...
As an aside, when a child becomes ill, I do use immune boosting herbs to help their bodies be extra strong in fighting the illness. I have to become better at not wanting to give them comfort foods that are sweet (since sugar weakens the immune system) but rather nourishing foods (broths, honeyed tea, etc...) - that is a post for another time.
Anyway, those are just my thoughts on illness...
Nice post! We do exactly the same.. :) Plus some homeopathy :)
ReplyDeleteBlessings and may God grant us healthy bodies today to serve him better!
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So glad to hear this from others as I've always felt like people look at me like I'm from Mars when I said try not to lower a fever because it's necessary for fighting the infection, etc. I used to be a pediatric nurse in a clinic and one of our docs was of the opinion of "letting the fever fight the infection"(of course he was the only one!),and I was skeptical too, til I read it other places and well, it just seems to make sense and go along with the way our bodies were designed...And I realize we're not talking about 105 degrees and sepsis situations, but just every day stuff...Excellent post, Amy! Thanks!
ReplyDeleteLove it, Amy! Thank you for explaining things so clearly!
ReplyDeletePraying for sunny spring days for you and yours to be outside, breathing deeply God's glorious fresh air!