Dr. Peter Dingle joins me to discuss his new book The Illness Paradox. Understanding the early signs that people can be faced with before illness, asking why certain health recommendations have been promoted and three things common to all diseases. Dr. Peter Dingle also leaves us with the first practical and simple steps that you can take, to take control of your health. A recurring theme!

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Dr. Ron Ehrlich:                   Hello and welcome to Unstress, my name is Dr. Ron Ehrlich, my guest today is Dr. Peter Dingle. Now Peter has spent the last 30 years as a researcher, an educator, a communicator and an author, and he has written 15 books on living well, that's quite an author. Peter helps cut through some very common health and medical myths as you will hear in a very accessible and a down to earth way, this is no-nonsense. It's a subject I feel very passionate about, and it's a subject we go into a lot in this podcast.

Now Peter has also coined the phrase, "The Illness Paradox" and we'll find out what that means and also "The Illness Triad" referring to three things that are common to every, yes every, disease. I hope you enjoy this conversation with Doctor Peter Dingle. Welcome to the show Peter.

Dr. Peter Dingle:                 Thank you Ron it's Fantastic to be here.

Dr. Ron Ehrlich:                   Peter I always love chatting to you, you always have so much to say, and you are a prolific author and researcher, but this latest book of yours, The Illness Paradox, can you tell us what The Illness Paradox is.

Dr. Peter Dingle:                 Well look it's really simple. The first part of it is it's the way we look at illness, and whenever you get diagnosed with an illness, we've given it a name, we've called it cancer or breast cancer or liver cancer or have called it heart disease or stroke or blocked arteries. We tend to name everything as an illness, and we've really been trying to name aging as an illness and obesity as an illness, and all these conditions that we have.

And what it is is that when we name it there's a good part to it that people recognize that they've got something, but the bad part is we all see these illnesses as something that's going to kill us, something that's going to cause us pain and suffering, and we there have to look forward to a life of suffering for the rest of our life, or it's going to kill us in the next couple of years if it's diagnosed with cancer or something.

So by giving it that label, by giving it a name, we're being told we have to suffer from it, and the problem with that is with modern medicine, which is a part of the illness paradox, they don't fix the illness, they don't treat the illness in any way, they treat the symptoms. So instead of let's say when you've got diabetes type 1 you go to your doctor, you're high blood sugar, the doctor will say you've got diabetes type 2. And the doctor will say you're going to stay on these medications for the rest of your life and what's likely going to happen is this. And then we'll give you some medications which will regulate the blood sugar level and they'll regulate a few other bits and pieces, but what they don't do is look at the cause of the illness. They don't look at the contributing factors to the illness and how to actually resolve them.

And the reality is we can reverse these illnesses. It is something that we now know that we can do, but by giving it this label and by going on the medication we get into this vicious cycle, a negative cycle all about getting worse and sicker and taking more meds and a part of the illness paradox is the acceptance of it. The acceptance of oh no this Is genetic. When people tell me it's genetic I go, "Rubbish. Stop talking rubbish." We now know that about 6%, 5%, 3%, in some cases 10%, in rare cases more than that, of these diseases are genetic. Sure your dad died of it, your brother died of it, your wife probably is dying of it,