Complementary and Alternative Medicine: Evaluating Your Progress

What to Look For

In conventional (local, body part) medicine, the changes that you should expect are control of symptoms or problems in whatever local body part the treatment is targeting. Other changes are typically side effects, undesirable changes in other body parts such as indigestion or blurry vision or dizziness or headaches.

In whole systems care, the changes that you should expect are both general or global and local. Globally, your overall energy and sense of well-being should improve. In general, your dynamics as a system, your resilience or ability to bounce back from symptom flares, minor stressors, and major life events, should improve. With more resilience, the duration of symptom flares should become shorter and less severe in intensity. What shifts is the tendency to express the symptoms, rather than the momentary expression itself.

Pattern of Local Systems

The patterning of the local symptoms that concerned you originally should become less frequent and/or less severe and perhaps even stop happening over time. Additional local symptoms that you had then, but had forgotten to mention in your initial evaluation, may also be lessened or gone.

Furthermore, you may have observed temporary re-emergence of old symptoms that you had forgotten for a while, old behaviors or old physical symptoms. Perhaps you came in for asthma, but then in the course of treatment you notice fewer and less severe asthma attacks but a return of diarrhea that you had many years before. Eventually the diarrhea will fade out, perhaps replaced for a while with a skin rash or an increased tendency to catch colds (a less severe form of disease than your chronic illness flares), which will itself gradually end with the passage of more time.

Course of Healing

In short, the course of healing reveals the wisdom of the body as an intact indivisible system in shifting the manifestations of disease back in time, as though rewinding a stored memory in a tape program and in moving the manifestations from upper body to lower body and from more essential organs (heart, lung, kidneys) to less important organs (skin, mucous membranes). You, as a system, change how you live in your world.

In summary, you are an indivisible living network system that is currently manifesting a chronic disease. The most effective treatment for you is a system-oriented package of options that speak to your highest levels of organization as a system.