Is it ever good to get sick?
This is a very challenging question, because even daring to ask the question can seem immoral, crass, or uncaring, especially when it arises out of medical work. But at some point it becomes essential to ask this question when we strive to understand illness in the context of broader patterns of human growth and development.
The usual, reflexive answer to asking “is it ever good to get sick?” is “No.” We perceive illness as painful, dysfunctional, and representing a failure, a breaking down of the machine of the body. Sometimes this failure comes through an invader (like a viral or bacterial infection), sometimes it comes from mistreatment (poor diet, alcohol, drugs), overuse of our body, or overexposure to toxic agents….
Avoiding Surgery for Big Tonsils, Gallstones or Fibroids
We get sick in stages: there is a waterfall relationship between the immediate impressions of a situation; to what with time becomes a more chronic, physiologic imbalance; to what eventually becomes a true pathological (illness causing) change. An example: if I have an sudden shock or scare, then heart rate, blood pressure and muscle tone will naturally all go up, but they should all gradually relax and return to normal over the course of a few hours. That would likely change if a shock or scare began to happen every day, then soon the body's steady state changes, it gets reset—perhaps to a place where there are persistent challenges with falling asleep, or painful tight muscles that become the norm. And if my “reset” physiology stays imbalanced long enough we meet irreversibly illness, like a heart attack, a tumor, or high blood pressure that cannot be brought down. Most medical interventions happen in this third stage,though obviously working to change the process earlier (upstream) is a more ideal, and potent place to work.