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What Dandelions Can Teach Us About Treating POTS

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While de-weeding dandelions from our yard this week, it got me thinking. Dandelions seem to be everywhere and they are tricky to get rid of. Why? They have strong, deep roots that stretch way down into the soil. If you simply lop off the tops of these weeds, they quickly grow back. They also have a really great way to disperse their seeds. When the plant reaches maturity, the dandelion flower turns into pappi, the cotton seeds you see that blow away, and these cotton seeds are what create new dandelions once they land. If you don’t get these weeds under control, they spread to other parts of your yard, wreaking havoc on the rest of your lawn, disrupting the grass’s health and growth. To really have success in eradicating these yard nuisances, you need to get at their root.

I think this is a good analogy on how important it is to find the root cause of a disorder like POTS. POTS in itself doesn’t tend to just “go away,” but rather, it is managed. However, if you can find some underlying condition, you stand a better chance at improving your symptoms and potentially getting rid of the syndrome. Simply treating symptoms alone, like clipping off the tops of dandelions without getting at the root, is just a temporary fix — a band-aid masking the real problem.

Dandelions, left untreated or unrooted, are bound to spread to other parts of your lawn, growing more and more dandelions and disrupting the growth and health of your grass. An underlying condition, such as an autoimmune disease, left untreated and undiagnosed, can also spread in a similar way to other parts of the body, affecting other systems and your overall health even more.

Just like it’s important we get down to the root of dandelions, it’s important we do so with POTS as well. If we are able to treat the root cause and help that, we stand a much greater chance of helping the syndromes caused by it.

*Note: It’s still important to treat the symptoms. POTS is a complex disorder and many times, it’s very difficult or not possible with current testing and knowledge to find an underlying cause. You should still treat debilitating symptoms while searching for a cause. 

Getty image by Romolo Tavani.

Originally published: May 1, 2020
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