Iris Bell MD PhD

Health care options include a what (name or class of therapy), a how (particular school or style of the therapy), and a who (particular provider). All health care occurs in a context — the larger context of your life. Although you may see your health as separate from your life context, it is not. Health and disease are very much interwoven into the fabric of your life.

That is why you hear about people who undergo miraculous cures of their diseases talking about changes in themselves that go far beyond the resolution of a health problem. Your health care is simply a local focus for you to get the help to get out on your road to healing.

The Who of Your Healing Programhttp://irisbell.com/wp-admin/post-new.php

Your program will most likely involve you and professional providers in selecting and implementing various tools for healing. The Who is variable. You will always be the person making the decisions as to whom to involve in your care. Some of the way, however, you may also learn about a valuable self-care tool from a provider or a book or website or a friend or family member.

Some of the tools will involve self-care, not a professional provider. You may identify a form of a tool that is helpful for you to incorporate into your program. You do not necessarily need a provider for every aspect of your health care.

In chronic disease, research shows that one of the most important aspects of improving your sense of self-efficacy and your outcome is learning how to manage day to day aspects of living well and coping with disease-related challenges for yourself. Expecting a professional to be there all the time is not only unrealistic; it misses the point of growing through facing challenges on your own.

To the extent that a health care option depends on a particular provider’s judgment of what is wrong and what treatment is needed, things may go better or worse. In the ideal, each provider is equally qualified in terms of technical training and preparation to help you to the maximum possible and in personal qualities with which you resonate. In the real world, providers are people with their own technical and personal strengths and weaknesses.

In the real world, you may or may not develop a good relationship and communication channel with a particular provider. A provider may have what appear to be good tools technically, but difficult to work with in the therapeutic relationship. Another provider may be very caring and compassionate but still not have the perspective, knowledge, or tools that will help you the most.

If you happen to find both the relationship and the tools in the same provider, rejoice and partner with them in your healing process. However, some providers, even the most talented, may also be so bound up in ego issues about needing to help you and taking credit for your recovery that they have their own unresolved issues that are not yours to take on.

For your healing, seek selfless compassionate healers who have only your highest and best good as their intention, not another notch on their therapeutic gun. Flee from providers who tell you that you must forsake all other care for them and their approach, as they have the only right and true answer for you. In some way, they are more of a cult leader than a true healer.

For an optimal healing environment, you will want your healers to relate to you in a way that makes you feel heard and understood. Although you may find that the turning point for your healing occurs under care with a particular person, you may also find that you need several different providers with different tools at the same time or over time.

Mainstream conventional or Western medicine is the politically dominant form of health care in developed nations. The central world view assumption about nature in Western medicine is that the person is a physical entity in which some external cause produces an effect (disease manifestations).

Conventional Treatment vs. Alternative Medicine

Conventional treatment consists of doing something at the local physical level to block the cause from acting on the body. Disease is considered a foreign enemy attacking the body in a particular place. Conventional physicians rely on pharmaceutical drugs as their main tool. The focus of conventional medicine is looking for a single cause to produce a single effect.

However, it also is possible to use nutritional supplements and herbs or botanical supplements as though they were drugs. Many health care providers and patients can hang onto their world view that nature is just a physical place in which disease is an external enemy – and they simply substitute natural products for drugs.

The natural products may — or may not — be safer than the drugs, as supplements are also much less regulated and standardized. It is less certain what you are actually taking. With thoughtful research, however, you can find safe and effective supplements. How you use them is another matter.

CAM Healing Systems

Many CAM (Complimentary and Alternative Medicine) healing systems see chronic disease as a deeper problem with multiple causes that all possible “right living” may not prevent. A host of interactive factors may still enable the expression of disease. Inherited disease vulnerabilities (e.g., through genetics), unintentional dietary errors, environmental toxins, negative social settings with perceived daily hassles and stressful major life events (negative traumas or even major positive changes) can foster development of disease.

The spiritual challenges that you face in life and any impaired resilience in throwing off their effects to bounce back may play out in the specifics of these factors and lead to development of disease.

The CAM Whole-System-Oriented View

Many CAM therapies, even ones that are not derived from the Eastern cultures, have a different way of conceptualizing the world of nature and of healing. These therapies intervene to allow the network system to heal itself from within and thereby work better overall. Whole systems-oriented care is focused on healing the person from the inside out. The complexity of living systems makes it hard or impossible to find a simple single cause for events in the system.

There are levels into which health care options fall. Each has its own implicit assumptions, world view philosophies, and science behind it. Unfortunately, it is possible to use many of the CAM health care options in a conventional local way, that is, to force the body parts to stop manifesting disease.
For example, one Western way to use guided imagery tells one cell to attack and kill another cell within the person. A more systems-based way to use guided imagery or various forms of art expression asks the body part to dialogue with the whole person, tell the person what the larger message of the symptom or the disease is, and advise the best way to resolve the imbalance or problem for highest good of the person as a whole.

People who have used biofeedback can tell you that trying to make a body part behave in a certain way does not work. Trying to make something happen rather than let something happen causes stress in your mind and your body, and you cannot achieve the goal.

You have to allow the biofeedback from the body part teach you when you are passing through the desired state of being – then the equipment lets you know whenever you have achieved it. You can allow, but not force, the desired state to occur more often and more reliably.