Whenever we got in trouble as kids, one of the things my brother and I would have to do was pick weeds from the landscaping in our front/back yard. Manual labor was my parent’s punishment-of-choice.

Admittedly, I never paid much attention to whether or not I uprooted the full weed. As long as the landscaping looked cleared, my punishment was over. To hasten the process on hot summer days, there were times when I didn’t even bother with the weed itself… I would just shift patches of mulch from one spot to another to cover large groups of weeds.

After “doing my time” I learned the hard way that by not uprooting the weeds, I was simply paving the way for more work to be done in the future. I could have made my job much easier if I just got rid of the weeds properly. Instead, I took shortcuts thinking it would help me “get it over with” faster.

Unfortunately, I think a lot of people approach their health problems in a similar way. You see, symptoms are warning signs that something isn’t right within the body. They’re effects of a problem. Symptoms are like the visible top portion of the weed, and you have three ways of dealing with them:

1. You can throw a bunch of mulch over it so that you can’t see it for a while…
2. You can do nothing, and let the weeds keep growing until they overtake your yard…
3. You can eliminate the cause by uprooting the weed.

How have you been approaching your own health care? Are you addressing the cause or simply manage the effects?