The Time I Said I Couldn’t Help
The other day a friend asked me whether I could give him something to boost his immune system and I said no. I wish I did have a one-size-fits-all remedy that would help but it’s never that simple.
This friend was recovering from a virus and was still feeling a bit run down weeks later. For some reason his body was taking longer than normal to recover. It was just a passing conversation, so we didn’t go deeper but it got me thinking.
Digging deeper
From a holistic health perspective, the most important question to ask is why. Why was it taking longer to recover this time around? If you think about all the times in your life when you’ve gotten sick, you realize that your immune system typically works so well that you just get better and never think about it the illness again (apologies to long Covid sufferers or those with chronic fatigue for whom this is not the case!)
What’s the body telling us?
If you find yourself with a lingering illness, it’s usually telling us that you were already run down before you got sick. Maybe you were dealing with prolonged high stress, or poor-quality sleep, a diet that wasn’t nutrient rich, or an overreliance on coffee or alcohol to cope with the life’s demands. One of the hardest cases of long Covid I’ve worked with was a client who was already at a point of ‘burn out’ when she first got Covid. From a holistic perspective she just didn’t have the vitality that her body needed to have a smooth recovery. She’s doing better now but because she was at such a low ebb to start with it’s been a long hard climb.
Vitality
Vitality is the ‘horsepower’ that enables your body to move through the stages of an illness. We all get sick, even the most robust and healthy get viral infections. The one’s with the most vitality may even get more intense symptoms, but they tend to recover quickly and completely. What builds vitality is multifaceted and a topic for another day but chronic illness is a sure sign of compromised vitality.
Quick Fix
When you’re run down, it’s tempting to think there is a something that might boost your immune system and get you back on the road to wellbeing. Don’t get me wrong, there are remedies that can help, certain herbs or supplements that can make a massive difference, but they tend to be person specific because each person’s reason for being sick is different. It’s the generic, off-the-shelf formulas that tend to fall short of expectations because, unless they have been prescribed by someone with knowledge of what’s going on for you, they are more likely than not to miss the mark.
