Effects of Stress
No Laughing Matter, No Joke At All.

If you don't believe me, just ask Dr. Ray Strand, a medical doctor with 35 years of clinical experience, who has spent the last 10 years becoming an expert in the subject of nutritional medicine. His site is subscription-based for about $60.00 per year, but it is well worth the investment

Anyway you slice it, the medical evidence is real. The effects of stress are wreaking havoc in our lives, medically-speaking and we must get stress under control or get sick and stay sick.

What is the point of living longer if we are sick all the time? And panic attacks are the least of your problems. There are serious illnesses out there that are the direct effects of stress, and they are made 10 times worse by ongoing stress. The effects of stress can kill you.

I am an asthmatic, for example. In 2002, I had to call an ambulance for myself in the middle of the night because I couldn't get air. It was so scary. Now, I'd had problems with bronchitis my whole life, but that was nothing like this. I had no idea what had caused this new, much more dramatic and life-threatening version of my problem.

I survived, of course, and then I began to do research about asthma and the effects of stress. I learned that so many things had come together in my life to make me really sick. Part of it was diet, for sure, I was eating all the wrong foods, but the biggest problem was my stress level. It was off the map, out of control.

The doctors told me that I would have to use steroid puffers every day for the rest of my life. Lots of people can afford to buy the drugs that doctors recommend, but I couldn't because I was self-employed and I did not have a drug benefit plan. Just one of those puffers cost $150 and it seemed, according to the recommended dosages, that I would need to replenish my supply once every month. I don't know many people that can afford $1800 a year for medication.

This was especially true since the problem was not going to be going away, it was just going to be managed. In addition, the side effects from these medications were huge. No, I needed to find a better solution than this. Even if I could have afforded the drugs, it really didn't seem like a good solution.

It has taken me six years to get my life back under control and guess what? I haven't had a serious asthma attack in over a year now. In fact, I haven't even had a serious cold or flu. And no drugs either. No more puffers of any kind. I still keep the emergency-response puffer filled all the time - the one called Ventolin, but I never need it and even if I did, it's nowhere near as damaging nor as expensive as the steroids. If I can do it so can you.

Now, don't get me wrong, this problem did not miraculously go away. I was very sick every winter for five years. I have viral-induced asthma, which means that me and the cold and flu season don't get along very well. Whenever we go in the ring together, I usually lose the fight. For me, the effects of stress used to last 12-15 weeks every year. One winter, I coughed so hard that I broke a rib.

Now, everyone's situation is different, and I, certainly, don't recommend that you throw your puffers out tomorrow. I just mean that reducing stress and taking back control of your life allows you to make better decisions. When you're making better decisions about your health, then you may be able to reduce or eliminate your dependency on drugs and increase your quality of life. It has taken an immense amount of work for me, but it has also been more than worth it.

So, what disease either controls you now or threatens to control you and what will you do to fix the mess?





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