Holistic Healing: Steps to the Journey of Healing
So, now that you see the big picture, have chosen your preferred approaches to a personalized holistic health care plan, and understand how to evaluate your progress, what are your next specific steps?
Here is a brief To Do list to get you on your journey of healing. These are only suggestions – again, tailoring the program to your needs is also important. Health psychologists also know that doctors and patients can get paralyzed and take no action when faced with multiple choices. To sidestep decision paralysis, focus on the step-by-step process.
First Steps Action Plan:
1. Write out and review your current choices for treatment options. If you are not sure what to pick, educate yourself as a consumer with one of the resource books, audios, and DVDs listed at the back of this book.
2. Set your healing intention. Put it into words that you write down in a journal, as a screensaver or other reminder on your computer screen, and as an affirmation that you repeat silently or aloud to yourself daily just before you go to sleep.
3. Get more information on the constitutional level of care that you chose – both the therapy itself and the local, regional, and/or national practitioners who offer what you want. Possible ways to find a good practitioner include:
o Use word of mouth from family, friends, staff at other health care professionals’ offices
o Look for small area newspapers or newsletters on holistic or alternative medicine with stories and ads about various providers
o Go on-line with web-browsing to search for official organization websites that list certified and/or licensed practitioners of a specific form of CAM. The Resources list at the back of this book gives you a start on some of the website URLs for these organizations.
4. Meet with your primary care provider and discuss your plans. Explain that you appreciate them and their treatment options, but you are thoughtfully exploring additional options. You want to work with them, openly, to find helpful answers to your health problems.
Many practitioners have ways to accommodate people who travel for their care. If you look for a practitioner who does “acupuncture,” as an example, but you accept whoever is easiest to access — or even cheapest — you may not end up receiving the type of acupuncture best suited to your health care needs.
Make sure to check carefully the credentials, training background, treatment philosophy, and current approaches to practice of each provider you consult. For basics such as professional misconduct, licensing boards in each state can provide information as to whether or not previous clients have lodged malpractice or ethical complaints against a given practitioner.
Research suggests that many users of alternative medicine in Western countries are financially able to afford paying out-of-pocket for the products and services they need for their health care. Increasingly, health care insurers are paying for a small number of alternative medicine services, e.g., for a fixed numbers of visits.
Holistic Healing: What’s in Your Dynamics?
In order to put together your personal treatment program in a way that will move you closer to inner readiness to heal and position, you to have an extraordinary healing response to the package of care you assemble. Your healing response depends upon what is in your dynamics and how stuck you are when dealing with a chronic disease.
The Disease Stuckness Quiz – What’s in Your Dynamics?
On a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 = not true for me, and 5 = very true for me, rate yourself for each item below. Add up your scores when you are done.
1. I have had a chronic disease from early in life (before my mid-life years). ____
2. My biological parents and grandparents were sick with serious diseases much of their lives. ____
3. I am the kind of person who stays in an intimate relationship or a close friendship with someone even when it no longer nurtures me. ____
4. I find myself in repetitive patterns in at least one area of my life that seem to end badly for me again and again. ____
5. The kind of chronic disease(s) that I have developed affects my brain or nervous system, or another major organ. ____
6. I rarely catch colds or flu. ____
7. I must take at least one prescription drug regularly. ____
8. I feel that my life is in a rut. ____
9. It is hard for me to bounce back from setbacks or big changes in my life. ____
10. I have to stay in my current job for the money, the benefits, and/or the security.____
11. I need to do certain things as much as I can or I do not feel well (e.g., exercise, control my eating, swallow my anger – or vent my anger, get out – or stay home – more). ____
12. I should work harder – or, its opposite – I should take it easier. ____
TOTAL DISEASE STUCKNESS SCORE ____
The maximum score is 60. A score above 36 suggests significant amounts of stuckness. The higher your score, the more stuck you are likely to be in your chronic disease – and your life, of which the mental, emotional, or physical disease is one major manifestation.
Feeling a need or having to do – or not do – something most of the time limits your freedom. A lower disease stuckness score suggests that the right individualized treatments will move you along more readily and perhaps faster than someone with a higher score.
Do not despair, however – you can usually get unstuck no matter how high your score, unless you are in your final moments of this life. A higher score simply means that it may take more time and persistence from you to get free and stay free of your disease rut. And even when cure is not possible, people can and do heal, especially in their final moments of life.
Use your Disease Stuckness Quiz score as a general guide: (a) to help you set up the extent of your treatment program. The higher your score, the more likely it is that you will need a full program at multiple levels of the system to get yourself unstuck and sustain you in making lasting changes to heal. With a lower score, a simpler program with one modality may be sufficient; (b) to prepare you for how long it might take to see significant change.
The higher your score, the more likely it is that you will want to give each treatment option and yourself a longer period of time to heal, e.g., perhaps on the order of a year or more. With a lower score, the simpler program may produce good results in only a few months.
Holistic Healing: Organizing and Coordinating Your Treatment
When organizing and coordinating your treatment, it is important to address your chronic disease through multiple coordinated levels of intervention that together keep your whole system changing toward better health at multiple levels.
Trying combinations of treatments that mostly fall into the same level of options is less likely to produce optimal results. For example, adding more and more nutritional or botanical supplements (Biochemical level of options) but no other type of treatment from the other levels of options is only likely to become expensive without getting you unstuck and moving along toward systemic health.
An exception might be if your disease is due to nutritional deficiencies, and supplements are all you need to correct the deficiencies.
However, for the typically complex chronic diseases of modern life such as inflammatory conditions, autoimmunity, heart and blood vessel problems, cancer, arthritis, and multi-system conditions such as chronic fatigue syndrome or fibromyalgia, a multi-system treatment program package is usually preferable to an overly narrow one that speaks to only one level of your overall system.
Coordinating Your Systems-Oriented Treatment Planning
Start with the spiritual level of prayer and/or intention, which is singular and focused. Your intention to heal sets in motion the new pattern of change that you will undertake. It provides the umbrella for the package of care. Then you select from the different levels of options below the spiritual to fill in the ways in which you will work to get yourself unstuck and moving in a healing direction as a whole system.
Constitutional Systemic and Subtle Energy Treatment Options
Select whichever one form of constitutional treatment (Chinese medicine/acupuncture or classical homeopathy or Ayurveda) appeals most to you, is accessible to you in terms of provider availability and costs, and has the best evidence of helping in your specific condition (see the Resources section at the end for brief definitions and links to additional books and information for disease-specific guidance).
Constitutional systems of care tend to have long historical roots for hundreds to thousands of years. Chinese medicine, which includes acupuncture, is from China, classical homeopathy from Germany (Europe), and Ayurveda from India.
All of these systems describe the person as an intact whole, an interconnected network, in which the goal of treatment is to restore balance of function between the body parts throughout the whole system and harmony with the larger environment around the person (the natural, social, and transcendent worlds). Using a constitutional treatment that addresses the core illness process within you as a whole is the most powerful way to stimulate deep healing throughout your being.
It is best not to start more than one constitutional option of treatment at a time, as these are the most powerful forms of systemic treatment for chronic disease. Each constitutional program has its own transitional processes in stimulating healing that proceed best without disruption by another such process, especially in the beginning.
Can you combine two or more types of constitutional care? The answer is a cautious yes, though the combination requires collaboration between your providers and added skills and awareness of how you respond to each treatment. As time passes, the beneficial changes from systemic treatment become ingrained in your dynamics and patterns, making it easier to put you back on course if something happens to set you back or off track again.
Complementary and Alternative Medicine: Examining the Levels of Scale in Holistic Healing
Patient-Centered Care vs. Disease-Centered Care
In health care, our usual focus is the person level of organization. In conventional medicine, there is a perspective called “patient-centered care.” Patient-centered care, which concerns itself with the issues of who-has-the-disease, is distinguished from disease-centered care, which concerns itself with the issues of what-is-the-disease. In other words, the person is more important than his/her disease label.
Disease-centered thinking in conventional medicine revolves around the cellular and molecular level of scale. However, research has shown that many of us prefer to have a relationship with a provider who gives us patient-centered care in the sense that we are informed about our disease(s) and all of our treatment options and participate in decisions about how to proceed (rather than being told what to do).
Organizational Levels of Scale
You are a system unto yourself, but you are made up of other systems at lower levels of organizational scale (e.g., circulatory system, immune system); and you are a part of still other systems at higher levels of organizational scale (e.g., families, communities, living creatures on earth).
§ Higher Level of Organization: For a complex living system, each next higher level of organization has emergent properties, that is, behaviors that the higher level can generate, but that its component parts at a lower level cannot (a person has” behaviors” that a liver or heart by itself does not).
At the same time, there is a bidirectional feedback loop of information, from the global to the local level and back the other way. It is the feedback that allows the global (person level) and local (body parts level) to influence each other’s function, that is, to define your unique “you-ness.”
Levels of Scale from a Systems Perspective
Another way of understanding the holographic qualities of health and healing is to look at levels of scale from a systems perspective – true holism. Many systems, especially living systems, have a self-similarity or theme (also called “fractality”), at every level of scale. The self-similarity is a geometric concept, in which an object is irregular but similarly irregular at every degree of magnification, i.e., close up and far away.
In conventional anatomy, the self-similarity occurs in body parts such as different levels of organization of the bronchial tree. In complementary therapies, the self-similarity is not in physical structure so much as it is in patterns of function or dynamics (change). People can be in self-similar ruts of disease, just as they can be in ruts with relationships or jobs. The same idea is true for processes and functions – such as you, your body, and your health in your life.
Thus, under environmental stress (psychological or physical in nature), a person prone to asthma may experience an asthma attack. Their “rut” is responding with anxiety and asthma under certain environmental challenges. A different person might respond to the same environmental factors with irritability and a migraine attack.
You are literally “doing your own [unique] thing” in your world. And, in chronic illness, you are doing your own unhealthy thing over and over. The names and faces (specific content or details) may change from event to event, but the storyline repeats the same process through time.
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