Another year is upon us, and once again most of us celebrate the New Year with the age-old custom of making resolutions. Most resolutions revolve around health: “This year, I am going to ________.” This blank is often completed with “lose weight,” “start exercising,” “quit smoking,” “eat better,” or some other improvement.

   These are wonderful promises to make to yourself, especially if you follow through with them. It is always important to adopt a healthy lifestyle and do things that will enhance well being. You only have one body, so you might as well do what is best for it. Good exercise and a nutritious diet are great habits to develop, but how do you take care of yourself when you are sick, have a minor injury or are otherwise in pain? The decisions you make during these times are just as important to your health.

   It has been erroneously taught that all discomforts for your body are bad. Fevers, runny noses or a sore lower back send most people to the medicine cabinet to find something to stop it and return to a state of comfort. You may not realize that by doing this, in the long run you are hurting your body and can actually be making yourself more ill.

   When you come down with the flu and suffer through the symptoms, what is really happening? When you burn up with fever, your nose runs like a faucet and you sneeze and cough, what is really going on inside your body? As uncomfortable as these symptoms may be, this is how your body heals! A fever raises your temperature for a reason. Viruses can only reproduce at normal body temperatures. Your body knows this, so by raising your internal temperature, you are stopping the virus from making more viruses. At higher temperatures, your body also produces specific proteins to fight infection and mobilizes white blood cells to attack the virus. Additionally, the fever helps your body to detoxify. Your nose pro-duces mucous to wash away the virus-infected cells, leading you to sneeze and cough. The action of the sneezing and cough-ing further dispels this mucus. If you take drugs to stop these symptoms, you will weaken your body's defenses and keep it from doing its job.

   Your body is also pro-grammed to alert you to dangerous situations that may be harming it. This built-in alarm system is called pain. If your body suddenly develops pain, listen and explore why it is happening. Examine what is going on in your life to determine why your body is not comfortable. Your discomfort can be the result of an emotional situation as well as a physical one. Most people do not take the time to explore the possibilities. If you view pain as an inconvenience that is interfering with your sleep and daily activities, and if you just take painkillers, you are turning off the body's natural alarm system. This masking of symptoms will numb you to important messages that your body is trying to give you. When you take painkillers, the pain may go away for a while but the situation that created it remains. You may be the greatest harm to yourself simply because you are not listening to your body.

   Your body is truly an amazing miracle of life, and it serves one purpose and one purpose only – to keep you alive. Everything your body does, everything it goes through, whether it is comfortable or not, is to meet that purpose. Your body is not out to get you. It is not a self-destructing system. It does not plot to make your life miserable at inconvenient times. It only wants to serve and protect.

   When you judge what your body does as wrong and interrupt its rhythms with drugs and therapies to cover up the symptoms and alarms, you are stifling your body's healing and creative processes. In the end, this will make you sicker because you never gave yourself a chance to heal when it was appropriate. The toxins your body tried to eliminate are still inside. The danger your body tried to warn you about went unnoticed and you kept on doing the things that your body tried to warn were harming you. Today, there are more degenerative conditions occurring in people as they age than ever before due to interference with the body's healing processes.

   If you want to make a New Year's resolution that will really make a difference, resolve to stop interfering with yourself. Let your body do what it is programmed to do. It is okay to have pain. It is okay to have a fever. It is okay to cough, sneeze and have a runny nose. And it is okay to be uncomfortable. Listen to your body because it knows what it needs to do. It knows how to heal you…if you just give it a chance.

Disclaimer: This article is for information only. It is not intended to diagnose or treat a condition. Always seek the advice of your health care professional, particularly if symptoms are extreme or persistent.

Dennis Ehren, DC is the director of the Ehren Chiropractic & Wellness Center, located at 13314 Detroit Ave in Lakewood. He specializes in Network Spinal Analysis and Holographic Health. Dr. Ehren can be contacted at (216) 221-9990, and you can look up the center on the web at www.ehrenchiropractic.com.