WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE?
ACUTE DISEASES are temporary disturbances of one’s health. They are SELF-LIMITING, which means they have a period of incubation, then progress slowly or quickly into a peak, which is followed by recovery or in some unfortunate cases, when the immune system is low, it can end with death.
Examples of acute diseases are the common cold, the flu, fever and so on. It is usually a healthy reaction of the body to have a cold now and then. This means that your immune system is strong enough to give your body a good cleanse.
Immune system
The stronger one’s immune system is, the faster the acute will come up, usually with a short term, high fever, and then disappear as fast as it came. If someone’s immune system is weaker, the cold will come on slowly and linger on for longer. A cold now and then is a healthy reaction of the body, but what if it happens every month or every forthnight? Or it doesn’t go away at all. Then it has become a chronic state.
CHRONIC DISEASE means that there are ongoing or recurring problems, such as hay fever, colds, coughs, skin rashes. When you get a cold often, the body might not be able to overcome it anymore and the cold does not really get resolved.
Root cause
Chronic disease will stay in the body, unless the root cause has been removed. Many chronic disease start as minor discomforts, therefore most people adapt without realising this reduces their quality of life. It is often not obvious for someone that they are suffering from a chronic disease until it has escalated, sometimes many years after the initial symptoms appeared.
Hidden chronic state
A contrasting situation would be, someone who appears healthy and then suddenly, they are diagnosed with cancer, heart disease, rheumatoid arthritis ets. We are shocked as this person rarely ever had colds or minor acutes. In reality, the ability to throw out a minor cold was suppressed and we just thought they were healthy.
Misha explains it really well in this 2 minute video:
This was just a short overview of acute and chronic disease, there is much more to it. The homeopathic approach to acute and chronic disease is therefore very different, I will write about this in more detai later.
