What sets naturopathic doctors apart from conventional mainstream medicine is that we are constantly on the lookout for reducing your need for therapies that are too high in force (i.e. higher in the therapeutic order). When you repeatedly use high-force interventions to bandage your symptoms, you are effectively suppressing your body’s innate ability to fight disease and return to normal health. What happens when we allow ourselves to mindlessly take over-the-counter and/or prescription medications is that this cycle continues unchecked; therefore, all of the hard work our bodies are trying to do to bring us back to a state of health and optimal homeostasis is continuously being stopped dead in its tracks. When your body has to fight against these types of repeated insults, the original insult that resulted in disease will be pushed deeper into the body. A common example of this is that when common skin conditions, such as eczema, are treated with topical steroids during our youth, oftentimes you will see asthma appear later in life, which is a much deeper and more chronic condition impacting the lungs, as opposed to the original issue affecting the skin. Naturopathic doctors are your personal medical detectives, and work to identify the root cause of the issue(s) so that they can be eliminated, rather than merely covered up.