Growing up as the son of a doctor, I was definitely taught to look down on natural remedies. You see, unlike prescription drugs, herbal remedies were not subject to the same level of rigorous testing. My father believed that many of them were actually harmful, and that most of the rest of them would do very little good for you. He believed that it was all right to take a natural remedy if you had nothing else available, but that with the miracles of modern medicine it didn't make any sense. There are just too many good treatment options available for most serious health conditions.
Since then, my perception of natural health remedies has changed a lot. You see, modern medicine didn't always cure me. One time, in fact, it made me very sick. I used to have serious chronic sinus problems, and I was prescribed antibiotics over and over again. Nowadays, more and more doctors understand that natural remedies for sinus infections make sense because not all sinus infections are bacterial, but back then the usual response was to put you on a powerful course of antibiotic and see if it cleared up. If it didn't clear up, an even more powerful course of antibiotics was used, and so on. As a matter of fact, many doctors still use this course today.
Natural remedies are much more gentle, and as a result they don't have a lot of the side effects that antibiotics have. Antibiotics can kill off a lot of bacteria that your body needs, causing serious digestive problems that can last for years and years. If my doctor had opted to try a natural remedy for sinus infections, I might not have had the serious and debilitating health problems that I have had since then. I know that he was just doing what he thought was right, but to me the continued ignorance of the medical field about alternative therapies seems willful at times. It is almost as if they don't want to know how much they have been missing for all of these years.
My interest in herbal remedies has really steered me onto a positive path in many ways. I have decided to make natural remedies my life, in fact, becoming a professional herbalist. It is my hope that I can educate more people about the perils of antibiotics, and help them to establish a more balanced holistic approach to their own health care.
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