Hey! You're so right and we are working on making a demo available on the website - but in the meantime, let me just share one we have in our system -- here ya go:
Meditation sounds like a post-religion religion, but at least there was the promise of silence. Now we have loud meditation?
To me this video is quite terrifying; it reminds me of some kind of megachurch experience, a place where a guy like Kenneth Copeland wouldn't look out of place (see the intensity firing up around 21:22 and then dropping off at 23:24).
Quite good when the symptom is harmful in itself, which both fevers that are sufficiently high and stress can very much be.
As a long time meditator I agree with you, this is a very insightful comment. Unfortunately many of the things sold as "meditation" in the west are totally divorced from their original intent and are repackaged as stress reduction or performance enhancing instead. I find that trend quite dangerous.
Meditation (dhyana) is multifaceted and has many different traditions, but the major forms all tend to be about mind training in order to help the practitioner have some sort of realization about the nature of self. What that self is is where traditions diverge.
So yes you'd be correct in saying that stress is a symptom and focusing solely on these sorts of things is treating a symptom. You can certainly become addicted to these stress-reducing activities and end up not fundamentally altering the root cause. You see it in these western health spaces a lot, the people that come in and take intense daily yoga classes and keep crashing into depression once the endorphin highs go away since they're not focusing on treating the fundamental issues.
The path of meditation is hugely beneficial though and is not just about symptom treating in traditional lineages.
This is a common misconception when the concept of biological stress is applied to humans. It stems from the correct observation that an increase in external stressors usually increases stress.
If you are interested in the science, two helpful models to conceptualise stress are Lazarus' stress model [1] and the jobs-demands-resources model [2].
Stress is the result of a lack of resources to deal with demands (stressors), not stressors themselves! As an example, most of us will never be air traffic controllers, simply because we would not be able to deal with the demands.
This is not to say the most effective way to treat stress isn't to remove the stressor. It's simply another avenue that can be pursued in parallel, and sometimes the only one available, in particular when stressors are internal (think negative thoughts, phobias, mental health).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appraisal_theory
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job_demands-resources_model