Overnight cures are wonderful miracles. They do happen. Rarely. Gradual cures are far more common, especially with whole systems of CAM (Complimentary and Alternative Medicine). So, expect a possible miracle – or at least a solid improvement, but be prepared for a longer haul and perhaps less than a complete miracle. Many people are healed but not cured. Aim for both cure and healing. Do not settle for just coping better with your chronic disease unless you have given a systemic approach to treatment a good try for a reasonable period of time without success.
In the end, it may be that you do not get all the way to a cure, but you can still improve a great deal and experience much healing as a person.
How long to give your treatment options?
Any therapy could begin helping as quickly as within a few hours or days in a chronic condition. However, on average, you should be able to look back after six months and again after one year from when you set your intention and start your treatment program — especially the constitutional treatment — and realize that you have come a very long way. Nutritional supplements are not drugs and may require 4-6 months to begin hitting their maximum benefit, even if they start working sooner.
Five and ten years from now, you may look back and see that you have transformed or at least that you are in a wholly different place as a human being than you were at the worst of your chronic condition. In most cases, your healing process will have progressed noticeably.
Expect the Improvements to Last
Also, expect that the improvements are lasting, not that you are better one month and then back to where you started the next. If you get better and then relapse, the treatment is not acting at a sufficiently deep level of the system to hold. Discuss the situation with your providers and make adjustments in the overall plan. This may mean changing to another treatment option level or adding another type of care within a given level. It may also mean changing to another provider.
One approach that I like to use is applying major concepts from one field to another. Somehow deeper truths reveal themselves when you find the information pointing in the same direction. Thus, expand your reading beyond books on health and healing.
For instance, a short little book like The Dip (see Resources), one that many business entrepreneurs might read, can help you frame your own progress with your health care choices in terms of when it makes sense for you to stay with a treatment or a provider and when to quit and move on to a different treatment or a different provider of a treatment for which you still hold hope of benefit. Another simple but profound book, The Tipping Point, might help you see how many factors converged to set you off onto a path of illness and how many other factors and changes might converge to re-direct you onto a good healing path.
Pacing
Your disease and your healing will have their own pace. You will find it necessary to honor that pace. Trying to rush it is counterproductive and will be another lesson to learn along the way. The pace of systemic healing usually reflects the intrinsic way you are in life – perhaps fast and intense or slow and methodical. You heal in your own way just as you develop disease in your own way.
