Your Health Comfort Zone: Cause for Alarm
An Interview with Murray Galbraith, DC
You’re doing okay. You have enough energy to make it through the day on most days. You have a fair amount of stress, but then most people do. You have a few extra pounds, but you don’t look so bad from certain angles. You may be dealing with minor physical or emotional symptoms that bother you and know you could be eating better and exercising more. There certainly isn’t any immediate reason to be concerned about your health, right?
Wrong. If you are not feeling wonderful, you should be alarmed. People who don't feel amazing levels of vitality are not well, according to Dr. Murray Galbraith of Temecula. He calls it the comfort zone on his Illness-Wellness Continuum. The comfort zone is a place in which we aren’t diagnosed with any major disease, but are not experiencing the extraordinary qualities that accompany true wellness.
Most people consider the comfort zone to be normal. It is not. The comfort zone is a condition in which disease states are actively developing, yet not diagnosable by western medicine. If you are in the comfort zone, now is the time to rebalance your body so you don’t become another statistic, or one of many with a “condition.”
True wellness is the normal state of healthy people; a state in which high energy, vitality, strength, optimism and compassion are the norm. Please enjoy part one of my conversation with Dr. Galbraith and learn more.
HT: I am curious about your Illness-Wellness Continuum. What I’ve understood is that people need to worry if they are in the comfort zone. Why?
Dr. Galbraith: They say that if you put a frog into a pot of boiling water, it will leap out right away to escape the danger. But, if you put a frog in a kettle that is filled with water that is cool and pleasant, and then gradually heat the kettle until it starts boiling, the frog will not become aware of the threat until it is too late. The frog's survival instincts are geared towards detecting sudden changes.
People are similar. We unconsciously and unnecessarily allow our youthful vitality to fade, little by little, until disease states form and it is too late. We think the comfort zone is normal or the best we can do, when in reality, we should think of the comfort zone as similar to falling off a cliff. Imagine falling off a cliff and as you are hurtling toward the ground, you are telling yourself, “No worries, I’m okay for now!” This is what we do when we deny what is really happening in the comfort zone.
Unfortunately, we don’t experience it that way. We tend to think nothing is wrong if we don’t have a major disease. Let me ask you, how does somebody feel the day before they have a heart attack?
HT: They way they’ve always felt.
Dr. Galbraith: Yeah. We need to understand that disease is a process. People think, “Oh, I went to the Padres game and I caught a cold.” Everybody goes, “Oh, well.” No one really questions it. In that vein, you could also say “Oh, I went to the Padres game and I caught cancer.” What? Well, you don’t catch a cold. If you ask someone, “What would you have to do to create a cold in your body?” They would come up with a list of stuff. Well, I’d have to not eat right. I’d have to not get enough rest and I’d have to eat a bunch of junk. I’d have to hurt myself, shock my system or stay up all night. I’d have to deal with a bunch of people I didn’t want to deal with. You know, it’s not a mystery.
Breast cancer has been in the body for seven to ten years before you can feel it or see it on a mammogram. For all the time you are saying, “I’m fine,” you are accumulating more and more sick cells. That’s the difference; that is why we need to be concerned.
You have so many cells in your body that are either creating healthy cells or sick cells, and your body is always replacing those cells. All of us always replace ninety-eight percent of all our cells every year. How do you get a healthier body next year? You replace the outgoing cells with ones that are healthier. How? You supply everything those cells need. You give them the right fuel; they’ve got to have nerve supply. The grossest example of not getting nerve supply is if you cut your head off. You cut off the nerve supply and the rest of the body doesn’t works so well. That’s getting simple.
If you shut off fifty percent of nerve supply, how does your body do? No so well. Look at Christopher Reeve. He went over the horse, broke the top cervical bone and lost his ability to breathe voluntarily or at all. He also lost digestion and bladder/bowel control. He couldn’t regulate his temperature; he didn’t know if it was hot or cold and he couldn’t shiver or perspire.
He also didn’t have any pain. I remember one year he fell over in his wheel chair and they picked him up and his humerus was sticking out of his skin - and he didn’t even know it. He ultimately died of heart failure.
The cool thing is that with proper nerve supply, you and I are self-healing and self-regulating organisms. We are programmed for health. We know how and what we need to do to get back to health. If we do those things, our body naturally responds.
HT: In the comfort zone, what are some of the symptoms I should be alarmed about?
Dr. Galbraith: The biggest one is no symptom.
HT: Huh?
Dr. Galbraith: If you don’t have any symptoms, it could be the day before you drop dead. Symptoms are the worst indicator of whether or not you are healthy. Just start looking at your habits, start looking at your energy level. Not your energy levels on Red Bull or caffeine or something like that. Look at your basic energy level. Do you wake up in the morning feeling grateful for the day, full of energy, can’t wait to get out there and help people and work with people? Or are you just dragging your rear end out of bed saying, “Oh God, it’s another day”?
That’s not a symptom of being in wellness. Wellness is how your body works. How your life works. Look at how consistently you are exercising. Do you exercise because you love it, because of the way it makes you feel? Or do you have to exercise to feel good? If you have to exercise to feel good, that’s a warning sign.
Then look at your at your attitude. Is your health a high priority? If your attitude is “I’ll put it off until tomorrow,” that’s a warning sign. If you don’t pay attention to your health, it inevitably declines. Chaos starts to develop. Any system you don’t pay attention to starts moving towards more chaos and disorder until you finally get recycled.
So, that comfort zone is like a tipping point. If you took stock of everything you are doing today and you just did one more little thing, like five percent more positive, you’d be moving in the right direction. You don’t need to do one hundred percent. You don’t need to get there by Friday. You just need to do a little bit every single day. Imagine if you just did five percent better than you did yesterday. By the end of the year, you’d look back and be across the country. It just takes consistent and persistent effort. Not a lot of effort, just consistent and persistent.
HT: If you are in Wellness, on the far right side of the spectrum, what’s life like? You said you wake up and you are ready for the day and ready to help people. You have the energy you need. Does anything else stand out about that? How should we naturally feel?
Dr. Galbraith: We are naturally positive, naturally loving, naturally kind and naturally helpful. We are naturally generous. When you see those things start to slip away, those are red flags going up. Then, when you are out in the world, it’s the job of your body to carry you through the day and not give you any lip. You should get to the end of the day and say, “Thank you, body!”
HT: You shouldn’t have to fight your body throughout the day.
Dr. Galbraith: You can put a backpack on and fill it with one hundred pounds of rocks and get through your day. Unless you are training for some hellacious race it’s probably not the thing you want to do. The point is, you are naturally programmed to feel great, have a lot of extra energy, be strong and love life. If this isn’t true, then you may have adapted to life in the comfort zone. You’re falling off a cliff and pretending that all is well.
Part 2
A young mother visits her doctor. Her life is busy; she feels constantly on the run. Her fatigue level is really high, lacking the energy she needs to keep up with an ever-renewing list of demands. She’s got chronic low back pain that nags her. She’s had reoccurring urinary tract infections. After visiting several doctors, she is on the verge of giving up because she has been told that, basically, nothing is wrong with her.
One of her small children suffers from continual ear infections and fevers. The little one has been on eight rounds of antibiotics with little or no results. The infection keeps recurring. Mom is worried sick and this adds to her burden. Her doctors haven’t had anything new to say in quite a while about the ear infections and more antibiotics doesn’t seem like the solution.
Is this just how life is? Where is she to turn for answers that will make a difference? The above is a summary of one of Dr. Murray Galbraith’s actual patients. I asked him what he did to help her and the conversation took off from there.
Dr. Galbraith: The baby was obviously subluxated. A lot of nerve pressure in the upper neck. Checked that out, adjusted. That frees up, she starts detoxing a bit, and she starts coughing some more. She gets a fever higher than mom ever thought she’d be comfortable with. Just let it go up. The fever broke. Now the baby is much happier. She sleeps better. She’s still getting a bunch of green stuff out. But, for a year, year and a half, she has just been having this stuff suppressed and hadn’t been able to get it out.
Babies - not just babies, but kids or adults - when they have fevers, it’s the body’s way of mobilizing calcium. Temperature goes up; it’s the body’s way of moving calcium out to where it’s needed. The white blood cells need calcium to function. It’s sort of like the gas in their tank.
Dr. Lee, who developed Standard Process, said that people don’t die from infections, they die from starvation. The white blood cells run out of fuel and then they just get overrun. It’s like your army just ran out of bullets. So, one thing you can do is feed them calcium lactate. A lot of time the body will get on calcium and the fever can go down. Not that you are trying to lower the fever, but it can go down because it doesn’t need to be up anymore - it got the calcium that it needed. The white blood cells do what they do and the white blood cells clean up.
HT: And the mother?
Dr. Galbraith: When you look at her thermal scans showing the organ part of her nervous system and you look at the EMG scans that look at the muscle part of her nervous system, they are completely distorted. When you see that, you know that there is a nervous system under stress.
Then you look at the heart rate variability scan where she’s not as bad as she could go, but for somebody her age, she’s got the scan of a sixty-some year old because she’s been battling everything with what’s been going on with being a mom.
HT: What do you do for treatment?
Dr. Galbraith: We go back to the basics and look at what runs the body. Well, it’s the brain. How does the brain get the messages into the body? Through the spinal cord and the nerves. If there is interference on that system, that’s not good. Things start to go down. Our job is to get the interference out of the way; primarily through the nervous system.
Then, we coach the people on the other aspects of health. You’ve got proper nerve supply, proper rest, proper mental attitude and proper diet and proper exercise. When you have all five of those going it’s like a recipe for bread. Put all the ingredients together you’ve got a loaf of bread. If you leave one of them out, like the yeast, you get crackers or pita, but you don’t get a loaf of bread.
Health is not any different. Some people get on a nutrition kick and they do nutrition and then they stop it. Then they get on a chiropractic kick and then they stop that. Then they get on an exercise kick. Your body requires all that together at the same time. You’ve got to do it for a period of time and then your body has what it needs to start getting back to normal. Normal health, being healthy, is the way we are supposed to be. It is the way God intended us to be. He didn’t design us to be sick. It says that God created everything and it was all good.
Oh, except that bad cholesterol over there. There’s no such thing as bad cholesterol. That’s all just marketing. Cholesterol is cholesterol. You can look at so many studies out there that show that if you try to artificially lower LDL cholesterol, deaths and heart attacks go up. That’s not what they say on TV, but that’s what happens.
You’ve got to have cholesterol to make your hormones. You’ve got to have cholesterol to make your cell walls and for nerve transmitters and wound healing. It’s pretty important stuff. They know that elderly people that have higher cholesterol have a half the rate of infections and fewer heart attacks. But that goes against what conventional wisdom says. If you look at what drives conventional wisdom, you’ve got sixty billion dollars worth of cholesterol lowering drugs. That’s a no-brainer.
We see all kinds of people, but the bulk of the people we see are here for wellness. I’ve got some people who come to see me that have been here since the time I came to Temecula, over twenty years. We’ve seen Mom come in and have a baby. Baby goes through elementary, middle school, high school and then graduates. That’s pretty rewarding when you can see a kid develop normally, avoiding all the stuff other kids go through. The thing I’ve noticed with my family and my brothers’ kids (both my brothers are chiropractors) is that our kids excel. The kids that start out getting chiropractic care from the get go, from birth; they just do so much better. They live a healthier life. Way less drugs if any drugs.
I haven’t had a headache since 1974. I got a physical, a life insurance physical about four years ago. I got a super preferred policy at fifty. There are people who do that, but not many people. That saved me around six hundred dollars a month in life insurance costs. It pays to be healthy. People say it’s expensive to do that. Well, you think that’s expensive? Try being sick. Go look up on the internet and see what it cost to get chemotherapy or to manage an infection. The costs are just nuts. I think fifty-one percent of the bankruptcies in this country are because people just can’t pay for their medical bills. That’s crazy.
Even if you aren’t that extreme case, consider the low productivity, low energy, time off work or time you can’t operate your business. Not to mention the emotional anxiety that comes from these types of things.
HT: So, if I’m a reader and I’m reading all of this, what’s the plan? What can I expect by signing on with your wellness program?
Dr. Galbraith: Well, when you first come in we want to learn your history; what kind of stresses you’ve had such as mental stresses, chemical stresses, or emotional stresses. We want to know what kind of traumas you’ve had. Did you fall off your bike eighteen times or just once? And what is your activity level? Do you ride mountain bikes or roller blades? Do you sit in a chair all day? Sitting is probably the most stressful thing that we do. I think we do if for thirty-two or thirty-seven years of our life. It’s one of the most stressful things you can do the brain, nervous system and the spine.
So, we look at that and we also look at your health future. You can look at someone’s health history, but I think it was Tony Robbins that said, “The past does not equal the future.” If you don’t have a go forward position; if you don’t know where you want to go, it’s pretty hard to get there. So people have to get an idea like, “I want to be here in a month, I want to be there in six months and this is how I want to be in the year 2050.”
That kind of clarity allows people to make a commitment. People have to look at where they want to go and then say, here’s what I’m willing to do to get there. I’m willing to take a year to get there, five years to get there. Everyone has their own schedule and pace, but restoring health requires the intention and goal-oriented mindset that most worthwhile achievements require. We will coach you on the things you’re going to do. But you can’t say, “Here’s my body, I’ll be back at five, have it ready please.” It’s not like dry cleaning. You have to put some energy into it. It’s not hard. It just has to be done.
So, based on that, we come up with a plan for them. Part of the plan is here’s what we are going to do. Part of the plan is what you are going to do. I have to say, we don’t have the answer for everybody. Nobody has that, but we can do so much to help people who are struggling terribly with a variety of health issues, who haven’t been able to find solutions elsewhere.
Contact Dr. Galbraith at Galbraith Chiropractic Associates in Temecula, 951-695-5433.