Acute Care 101: Acute or Chronic?

What’s the difference between an acute or a chronic symptom?

This post is the first in a new series with a focus on acute care. Just in time for allergy and flu season, I will be providing you with practical tips to help you through as well as some important fundamentals to help you better understand your body.

I wasn’t long into my practice before I realized the line between acute and chronic symptoms is quite blurred for most Americans. From my perspective this is because we don’t have a “health care system,” we have a “treatment system.” As a symptom occurs we are programmed to see a physician who then dispenses a medication to treat that individual symptom. In this “treatment system” there is no one to connect the dots between each symptom or present a holistic plan to care for the root of the problem. Given this, all symptoms are just that… symptoms with little thought as to whether that headache is acute or actually chronic.

Let me give you some simple examples to help clarify.

If you happen to get a migraine every month—that is a chronic symptom and with a cause that is likely not in your head.

If you stared at pages of tiny print for 8 nonstop hours and now have a tension headache at your temples and you might experience something similar once a year – that then is actually an acute symptom.

If you wake up tomorrow morning achy and feverish—that is an acute symptom

If, however, you have been running a low grade fever for months on and off that is clearly a chronic symptom that points to a deeper disturbance or imbalance in your body.

You have noticed over the past weeks that every morning after waking your child has a dry, short lived cough—that is a chronic symptom

Your child who has recently shown signs of sinus congestion develops a cough—that is an acute symptom.

I think this topic of acute care is super important because how you choose to care for your acute symptoms can actually prevent chronic symptoms from developing.

The reason it is very important to make this clarification is that acute symptoms can quite often be treated at home using natural remedies. Chronic conditions, on the other hand, need a practitioner watching your elimination, state of vitality and level of inflammation while applying protocols that will address the core imbalance causing the symptoms.

In this series of posts I will be sharing information that applies only to acute conditions, those symptoms that show up on occasion. Next week I will share my tips to lesson your symptoms and support a quick recovery from a flu-like virus. In the meantime if you want to know why Gemmotherapy is better for acute symptoms than over the counter meds or supplements you might like reading this post on Gemmotherapy and Acute Care Support.