My interest in medicine has eluded me towards a fatal flaw that concerns all of us, manifesting itself in multiple areas of life — one of them being teenage acne.
Since having recently fallen prey to acne, the first thing I did was try to get rid of it through any means possible. I exhausted through a long list of creams and cleansers not seeing much difference in the long term, it returning after a day or two to much dismay. I was only able to get rid of my acne for a few months when I understood the cause behind it — I was consuming way too much damn sugar and wasn’t sleeping enough. What I went through last year was an exemplary pattern of treating the symptoms and not the cause.
Think about it, this pattern is everywhere:
Doctors prescribing antihypertensives to patients with a bad diet
Politicians and bureaucrats with ineffective diversions for simple societal and civic issues
Current-day parents handing over a phone or tablet to calm their child down
Addicts using drugs to feel better in the moment about an underlying stressor
An overfat person wearing looser clothes to be comfortable for the time being
Programmers coding several workarounds for a problem they don’t want to fix
The examples are innumerable, and I am certain you have had similar experiences. I believe that this instinctual way of thinking is due to a virtue of modern society — shortsightedness. We never think of symptoms in the way they truly are, visible manifestations of an underlying cause — a problem. Instead, we choose to believe that the symptom is the problem itself, thus falling into this loop of fixing a ‘problem’ that is bound to come back because the cause hasn’t been addressed due to myopic limitations — leading to inexistent problems such as Untreatable Acne.
I’ll leave you with my two cents — don’t focus on the zit, focus on the how and why behind the zit instead. Think of problems in the way they truly are, issues with a fixable underlying cause and an unfixable persistent symptom.
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