If you suffer from any of the most common health issues bothering the Western world, the last thing you want to do is fight it.

I know this is against everything your doctor as well as your common sense has told you, but after helping thousands of people with everything from high blood pressure, diabetes, arthritis, obesity to full blown cancer and everything in-between, I’ve become aware of a fundamental mistake we all tend to make when tackling these health issues.

What’s more, this mistake not only applies to health but pretty much every aspect of our lives. If you take my advice today, I guarantee both your health and happiness level will rise 200%.

This article is a little philosophical, so I think the discussions at the end will be interesting and lively.

You see, in the early nineteenth century Alexander Fleming made a breakthrough discovery called penicillin. It changed everything when it came to health. Suddenly 90% of all deadly diseases of the time could be treated.

Just think about it. It would be like today one drug with very limited side effects that could eliminate cancer, heart attacks, strokes and diabetes- all at once. That’s how powerful the discovery of penicillin was, only in that day and age infectious diseases were the bane of everyday existence.

However, did this stop people from dying or getting sick? Only to some degree, and only temporarily. People who didn’t die of bacteria-caused diseases lived to develop other, more sophisticated diseases like cancer for example.

But it did change the way we thought about illness and injury. With the discovery of bacteria and viruses, we were suddenly aware that we were fighting tiny, unseen forces that were attacking us. Kind of like being at war.

We fight diseases! Makes sense, right? Maybe…

You see, diseases caused by viruses and bacteria are very rare in wild nature. They only began to drastically develop among people in the last 2000 – 3000 years when they began to build bigger cities and pack hundreds, thousands or even millions of people in a small space. Especially when there was little room for processing waste.

Increase in traveling also spread bacteria from one area where people had become immune to them to another where people were vulnerable. One of the most devastating examples was the wipe out of big populations around the Amazon River when Europeans “discovered” the area.

So in some ways, we could say that it isn’t really the bacteria and viruses that most often cause those diseases cured by Penicillin but our lack of respect for the environment, overdoing with technology and overloading our immune system.

However, the human mind is amazing in its adaptability. Using penicillin and by dealing with our waste a little better, keeping our water supplies clean (although that sometimes means loading it with cleaning chemicals), bacteria and viruses don’t seem to be as big of a health threat any more.

So what are today’s diseases? At the top of the list is type 2 diabetes, heart attack, stroke, cancer, arthritis, obesity, fatigue … just to name a few.

And what do all these diseases have in common? It’s not that we’re fighting external invasion like bacteria or viruses. What happens is that your body is turning against itself.

Cancer cells are your normal cells that have changed to attack your organs. Heart attack and stroke happen when plaque (created by your own body) builds up in your arteries and blocks blood flow (often caused by your body raising your blood pressure to a dangerous level on a daily basis). Type 2 diabetes comes to existence when your body’s normal insulin response fails and arthritis is created by an over-reactive immune system that attacks healthy cells (so are hundreds of other auto-immune diseases).

And the source for most of those diseases can be found in one way or another in the lifestyle we’ve lived. Scientists have yet to link more than 3% of any of modern day diseases to genetic causes. Which only leaves the environment we live in, the diet we consume and the lifestyle we practice.

This brings us to the cruel point of today’s article. This is something that Eastern philosophers have been preaching for centuries. The fact is, we most often don’t have to fight external threats. We are so often our own worst enemy.

We ourselves are the ones who consume all the food that makes us overweight; the sugar, fat and processed food that clogs our arteries and unbalance our immune system. We’re the ones that skip the salad and go straight for the steak.

I’m a big believer that stress is a major contributor to almost all diseases. Stress causes our body to store fat, not deliver energy to vital organs, raise blood pressure and weaken our immune system.

But nobody really puts stress on us. It’s only the amount we accept and take. It’s our reactions and attitude towards the events in our lives. So the politicians are unethical and stupid, it doesn’t do us much good to sit and rage about it does it? So our family members often act imperfectly. How we react is not going to make them any better – it only makes us worse.

It’s not the snake who bit you…

90% of those dying from snake bite do so from reacting to the snake either from fear or anger, increasing the heart rate and therefore the rate at which the poison travels through the body. If people just relax, sit quietly and try to stop the blood flow from the bite, most often help will arrive in time.

In the same way we often make the events in our lives much worse by over-reacting to them. It’s not just our health that suffers.

I often receive feedback from people who used my blood pressure exercises for a while. They tell me that not only did their blood pressure quickly drop down to normal, they also experienced extreme calmness in stressful situations, even days after using the exercises. You can learn more about the blood pressure exercises here…

The fact is, we shouldn’t try to fight diseases. We should try to find the root cause of why the disease began to develop and then change what WE did to cause it to happen. Most often it isn’t an attack from outside but a process from within.

It doesn’t mean that all the fault lies with us. Genetics can cause problems, too, and part is the environment we live in. But even if we only take 50% of the responsibility, that leaves us lots of leeway for improvements.

There is so much info on the Internet you can find. You can begin by reading over hundreds of articles on this site and often very helpful comments from our readers at the end.

You can also check out some of our natural health guides on the sidebar of this page. Some of the more popular are the Type 2 Diabetes Guide, The Arthritis Guide and The Cholesterol Guide. They are all based on taking responsibility to change our lifestyles to improve our health.

But first, please leave your feedback below.