It is unfortunate that right now, many people reading this article are suffering from one or more chronic health issues. You may be one of them. Many times the symptoms are not so bad that you can’t learn to live with them. Of course, they do get worse, but helpfully, ever so slowly. We are, after all, prime adapters. And should living with it fail, there are always the great medications.

Sometimes when I meet people having this experience I’ll ask, eagerly, “Would you like to find the underlying cause?”

Now you’d think that the response would be a resounding YES.

Yeah, well. You’d think.

Nope. Often the response is a shrug of the shoulder. A polite cock of the head. Indifferent eyes. Absolute stillness. And all within striking distance of the answer, right before them, just waiting to help. Sometimes my head will swim with astonishment. Until I begin to recall at least some of the reasons why.

Illness as a matter of luck. Illness as genes. Illness as something that time will take care of. Illness as something I may have to change (and I’m so tired now…). Illness as a belief in these things. Maybe a shrug, in so many syllables, is what their doctor, limited within his own expertise, gave them, when there was no other answer. Except for those great medications.

Look, I love modern medicine. We all should. God bless ‘em for what they do best: Corrective surgery. Research. Survivor-ship & Emergency Medicine. Even those great medications again.

For creating a pill is, if you think about it, every step of the way, is an act of astounding brilliance. But camouflaging symptoms with it?….maybe not so much. Covering up symptoms is an act of emergency medicine, and no one should live in a state of emergency. Tamping down symptoms is fine if that’s all you have, but I’m here to tell you emphatically it’s not all you have. Not anymore. Some us out here in Help-You-Land are, if I say so myself, pretty darn good at nailing the whole health problem to the source — and quickly. Symptoms don’t have much of a chance around here. Causes either.

And then, one day, one day soon, like all those who once defended themselves against change (or luck or genes), you can look back on your old self from the height of the spanking new improvement shaking your head at why in the hell you ever waited.

Or believed otherwise.