The recovery process

I've been recovering from a cold and have consequently wanted to rest and relax a lot lately. I find that the internet sites that interest me when I'm healthy seem irrelevant when I'm healing. Is there a message there?

The stages of home treatment for a cold seems to follow a natural progression:
1. Denial: the cold doesn't seem bad, and I try to fight it off through aspirin, zinc lozenges, and affirmations, continuing my regular daily activities.
2. Engagement: the cold starts to settle in. In engage in a more pitched battle, combining cold remedies, fighting off the inevitable need to slow down and rest.
3. Acceptance: I'm sick. I spend an entire day in bed, sleeping and reading, following all the rules, taking cold remedies as advised.
4. Entrenchment: this happens when I try to resume my normal activity level. The cold finds a place to get entrenched. In my case, it produces a persistent chest cough.
5. Reassessment: Because the cold is persisting, I begin to get suspicious of all the pill-based remedies I've been using thus far. I begin to explore healing on a deeper level. Out come the stashed home remedy books. I stop taking everything, and go back to the basics: rest, copious amounts of water, raw garlic 3 times a day, and reading.

This last step begins to have some salutary effects. One of the books that has had enduring value to me in my health-restoring efforts over the years is Home Remedies: Hydrotherapy, Massage, Charcoal and other Simple Treatments, by Agatha Thrash, MD. It's out of print but you may be able to find used copies out there.

The simple remedies Thrash offers come from simpler times, when the patient didn't have quite so many options to consider, and there was less expectation of a quick fix. Thrash says:
"...it becomes obvious that almost anything that is done merely to alleviate symptoms cannot effect a cure, but actually interferes with the genuine healing processes of the body itself."

The human body is a thing of remarkable beauty and complexity. This fact was driven home by my recent visit to the Body Worlds exhibit, the amazing result of a German anatomist's efforts to display what goes on underneath the skin of real human beings--corpses whose bodies and body parts were injected with a plasticizing substance to become permanent. The Body Worlds exhibits have been seen by 20 million people around the world. It has been interesting to visualize my congested lungs, for example, now that I can see their shape and location in the body so clearly.

There is no denying the power of complex interventions to cure our medical ailments. But the healing process must begin on a simple foundation: rest, patience, and the establishment of a relationship with the dis-ease. Without this foundation, the search for a cure can lead us to counter-productively suppress the symptoms, or to overdose on the myriad choices offered by conventional and alternative medicine.