It is always important to do your homework about any provider to whom you entrust your health and well-being and consider the different treatment options that are available with regard to holistic healing.
Mind-Body Treatment Options
You can support these first two components of your care by adding whatever form(s) of mind-body approaches appeal to you (e.g., journaling, affirmations, guided imagery, hypnosis, biofeedback). These approaches are often very helpful to support your healing intention by reprogramming your subconscious mind, especially for people who find it easy to generate imagery and/or who are verbal, depending on the method chosen.
Some research suggests that there are individual differences in personality types in terms of who benefits from specific types of mind-body interventions. For example, absorption is a genetically-determined trait involving openness to new experiences, high intrinsic spirituality, high hypnotizability, and the capacity to lose oneself in an inner or outer experience (e.g., a sunset or a book or movie).
In people with chronic vascular headaches such as migraine, those who scored high on a questionnaire for absorption responded better to guided imagery than to biofeedback. In contrast, their peers who scored low on the same absorption scale responded better to biofeedback than to the imagery.
These observations suggest that we may someday be able to steer people with more certainty to the specific types of a treatment option that have the best chance of helping them as individuals. Genes determine personality traits, which means that personality reflects real biological differences in the brain and body from one person to another. For now, it appears likely that people with high or low trait absorption may need different types of treatments to maximize their recovery from chronic disease.
Structural/Manual Manipulation Treatment Level of Options
Especially if you have any musculoskeletal problems, the manual manipulation methods make great sense as well at this point. Whole systems of care such as osteopathy have a philosophical approach to the person that inherently views the body as comprised of interconnected, interrelated pathways. Getting the physical body into alignment by a manual manipulation method of treatment is permissive for healing throughout the system overall. Subtle energy flows better; physical discomforts resolve.
Constitutional and energetic treatments are particularly complementary with manual manipulation treatments and vice versa – that is, positioning the physical body pathways properly enables constitutional/energy treatments to move past physical blocks and exert their best effects, whereas constitutional/energy treatments can help the physical body hold the healthier positioning of soft tissue and bones from manual manipulation treatments longer.
Preventive and Biochemical Levels of Options
Finally, make sure that you are doing at least the fundamentals of supporting your physical body through the preventive level of options — regular exercise, health-promoting diet, and nutritional supplements as appropriate to your age and condition. A good multivitamin/mineral supplement, for example, is a basic for most people. Evidence suggests that such supplements are especially important for people with various chronic diseases to reduce their susceptibility to acute infections and to later life complications.
