Exploring the Road to Optimal Health

Karen Brooks

  • BSc(Hons)
  • PGDip
  • mBANT
  • mCNHC

Learning about diet and nutrition became an all-consuming passion of mine and I decided to give up working in primary education in order to pursue a career as a nutritional therapist. I studied at the renowned NCA college in York on an intensive Masters level course with a focus on using a functional medicine approach and gaining experience in the college Nutrition Clinic.

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Like most people I’ve always enjoyed food although didn’t really appreciate its therapeutic value until I had a family and started thinking about the quality of what my children were eating and how this affected them.

What really impacted on me was seeing family members battle with chronic illness and not really having any resolution.

I saw them lose control of their health, take an ever-growing list of medications and their health gradually declining.

This inspired me to seek out a different approach to health – I knew there had to be something better than this. My interest in food and nutrition grew and it was a revelation to me that changes in diet and lifestyle could have such a huge impact on how we look, think and feel.

Learning about diet and nutrition became an all-consuming passion of mine and I decided to give up working in primary education in order to pursue a career as a nutritional therapist. I studied at the renowned NCA college in York on an intensive Masters level course with a focus on using a functional medicine approach and gaining experience in the college Nutrition Clinic.

Whack-a-Mole Health

For those unfamiliar with “whack-a-mole”, it was originally an arcade game featuring large, circular holes each containing a mole that pops up and down randomly. Players use a mallet to hit the moles back down, earning points for their efforts; higher difficulty levels involve multiple moles appearing simultaneously.

In our medical system, once a doctor addresses one symptom, more often emerge—either due to medication side effects or because addressing the patient’s symptoms isn’t actually dealing with the underlying cause of their condition.

Each new symptom is met with a prescription, test, or scan, with little consideration given to identifying the root cause. As new symptoms arise, they are similarly treated with more medication or interventions. Despite this, the patient may not feel truly healthy due to ongoing side effects and unresolved issues.  As time goes on, people may have a growing list of medications  to take and they may find that their list of diagnoses also grows….

When the root cause of symptoms remains untreated, the problem persists regardless of how many times the doctor treats the symptoms. Treating symptoms should not be a substitute for addressing the underlying cause (or causes) and repeated visits to the doctor can become an endless cycle of symptom management, potentially harming overall health.

Does this sound familiar to you? Are you or people you know in this situation?