Healing is not a disjointed, compartmentalized event. For those people who have emerged well from a serious health issue, there are, in my experience, often crossover effects. The treatment prescribed for one ailment left a perhaps undesirable impact or effect on another part of the body. Or the treatment for one health problem opened a doorway for other effects to come stream in.
Health choices can lead to a cascade of effects in the body that impact everything from sleep, to digestion, and even your mood or attitude. Because of how medicine works, when you enter the doctor’s office with a problem that falls in a red area in terms of “urgency” doctors are often left to treat issues without always knowing the deeper impact that treatment can have on other areas of your life.
Yes, there are many documented connections that doctors and pharmacists are aware of, but as a patient, it really does fall on you to wave the flag of concern if a treatment for one challenge is having adverse affects on another area of your life.
Doctors “assumptions”
They universally describe a fundamental shift in some aspect of their routines, habits, meals, or biases. Usually there is a sacred cow that they first must find and dig out as they identify unconscious assumptions, and then they replace them with mindfulness. It is somewhat like the “red pill” of the Matrix movies where they choose to see what they have not seen before and question things they never knew to question. These make up some predictable categories.
Usual examples include:
- Maybe patented medicines are not addressing the cause of my illness or even making me worse
- Maybe controlling symptoms is not the only goal
- Maybe I have to feel worse to get better
- Maybe I have to do more than take a pill to change my symptoms and the underlying problem
- Maybe no one has really helped me find the root cause of my problem
- Maybe my food choices and supplements affect my illness
- Maybe my illness is recoverable despite dogma that it is incurable
- Maybe environmental, construction, furniture, textile and personal care and cleaning product toxins are involved in my disease
- Maybe chronic infections are part of my illness
- Maybe I was unaware of or not addressing a certain source of stress in my life
- Maybe I was living for others and not following my fulfillment
- Maybe i do not need surgery
- Maybe my surgical failure is treatable
- A few outliers have cured themselves of my illness without or despite orthodox medical treatment
- Maybe polypharmacy (the use of more than 2 medications at a time) is part of my illness
- How did I get into this bloody big mess in the first place? Maybe my illness is not purely random or genetic. I think I can look back and maybe trace the steps that led to my illness developing over time now.
- Who am I really?
Those who truly and actually recover from mind or body issues are authorities on at least their own experience, despite the risk of chance remission. They can tell us what changes they made, and which ones made a real difference. Most of them realize the root cause of their illness at some point. Most report a feeling of personal power increasing once they realize which health and lifestyle levers that they can pull to cause change in their symptoms. This experience of real healing is increasingly called disease reversal versus cure, due to the FDA and FTC regulations on use of language.
As a doctor, the key turning point seems to me to be when they cease obsessing over their symptoms, and begin to pay more attention to mechanisms, and then to signs of deep change that they can measure or feel easily. There is a certain level of self-awareness that must be reached, and that includes calming down, reducing the mental noise, listening to the body’s messages, and observing their bodies and minds quietly and with intention.
Some people did not pay enough attention to themselves because they had poor self-esteem or held others above themselves, and still others paid too much attention to themselves, but to the wrong things.
Deep healing is always a change.
Sometimes choices become simpler, such as cutting out all dairy foods, and sometimes more complex, like reading food labels when one never did before. Whatever change occurs is initially stressful before it becomes ingrained. Doubt is a part of the process, and progress is hard to see because living systems have plateaus.
We make progress with a symptom or a measurement of health, and then we hit a plateau for a while where we feel stuck because our progress appears to be stuck. This is usually because the body is healing tissues we cannot see, or emotionally we are not ready for the next step or there is something we need to attend to before we can make the next advancement.
Sometimes there is another toxin that needs to be cleared or another deficiency that must be filled before we can grow to the next stage of improvement. It seems to help to measure progress somehow, and to know how long it should take for certain organs or tissues to heal.
An experienced doctor or patient can help guide you in making these prognosis judgments. Drawing a lifetime timeline of symptom development, illness, and recovery can really help to gain perspective and examine long plateaus or even setbacks.
Sometimes the blockage preventing progress in healing is a sharp left turn for the person. For example, a menstrual problem may have a thyroid root cause-a leg pain may have a dietary component-or a back pain may be related to feeling unsupported at work or in the family or both.
The root cause of a problem can affect many systems in the mind and body. More importantly, a root cause can have no direct or obvious link to the mechanism behind the symptom. That is, until the sufferer can find the link and feel it deep down. These feelings can be very subtle at first, and we are culturally conditioned not to accept these disparate links because we see them as weak, petty, or immature. Conditioning of children before the age of 8 or so can leave them more or less adapted to certain stresses and conditions. Undoing these can be the hardest of all.
Still other people need to explore biochemistry and abandon old assumptions about food and diet that have been tacitly accepted.
These often include ideas that need examination, like:
- Polyunsaturated fats are healthier than saturated fats
- Red meat causes cancer
- Fluoride protects teeth and has no side effects
- Dietary fat causes cholesterol and arterial plaque and heart disease
- Blood pressure and blood sugar cannot be lowered safely without medication
- Fiber is necessary and vital to health
- Dietary fat makes you fat
- Clean carbs are safe in any amount
- Seed oils are healthy
- Bottle formula is superior to breastmilk for infants
- Headaches, back pain and menstrual symptoms are normal and expected
- Medication is safe long-term
- The FDA, CDC, EPA and even the FED serve the people
- Only my doctor can figure out and manage my problem safely
- Other countries are backward and behind US science
- Other countries are sicker than US people
- We have the cleanest safest food systems and water treatment on Earth
- Food additives and commercial chemicals are vetted for safety
- Vaccines and drugs are safe and effective if the manufacturer and FDA approve
- State medical boards protect the public
- Medical care is fundamentally expensive to provide and getting more so because innovation costs money
- Prevention is impossible
Healing, real healing, looks similar in most human and animal cases. There is real reversal, there is a fundamental change in lifestyle, the mechanism is roughly identifiable, the tissues and chemistries or electrical properties of the organs involved are measurable, and the cost of treatment is marginal. Diagnosis may require more cost and effort at first, but even the concept of diagnosis must be unpacked.
Diagnosis used to be described as the root cause of symptoms based on a common mechanism. Today, however, diagnosis is often co-opted into a classification code scheme to see who qualifies for proprietary and dangerous treatment codes and reimbursement. The qualification is based on symptoms, and not mechanisms.
Always seek root causes of symptoms and diseases and look for the shining lights of those who reversed your disease and live free now, or have adapted to a huge degree.
For more on finding the root of your illness, visit my YouTube channel here.
Or you can book a coaching session with me.
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