By Catherine Guthrie, Experience LifeThe body is a magnificent machine. When things go awry, it generally doesnt just shut down without warning, like an incandescent light bulb popping its filament. Instead it sends us little signals (think of them as gentle biological taps on the shoulder) letting us know that something is amiss.Physical signs and symptoms are ways your body tries to alert you to deeper imbalances, says Elson M. Haas, MD, a San Rafael, Calif., physician with a natural-medicine approach and author of
Staying Healthy with Nutrition (Celestial Arts, 2006). Taking the time to decipher the bodys codes is always better than simply popping a pill and hoping the symptoms just go away. Ideally, we want to get to the causes of problems, not just suppress the end result of ill health. But interpreting the bodys quirky Morse code requires a deep level of body awareness that, like any skill, takes time and practice to perfect. To that end, we recruited a handful of the countrys leading integrative health practitioners to help identify nine of the most common conditions underlying frequent, and sometimes mysterious, symptoms. Read on to clue into your bodys messages.
