Iris Bell MD PhD

Integrative Health For Natural Healing

DrBell

Integrative Medicine: The What and The How – Choosing the Tools of Your Healing Plan

Integrative Medicine

With integrative medicine, it is up to you to try out your treatment program and see if it helps you. If a treatment option helps you, stay with it. If it does not lead to improvements in your health or it actually worsens your health, it is time to move on. This sounds simple and obvious, but many people fall into a rut with this aspect of the process.

Look At Your Plan Objectively

Many times, for example, I have seen people with a history of depression whose doctor had put them on a particular antidepressant drug. Even if they were still depressed a year or two later, no one – not the patient or any provider – had questioned whether or not it was time to move on to a different antidepressant drug or even to a different form of treatment.

Somehow having connected the patient with a treatment that was supposed to help, even though it didn’t, was mistakenly seen as enough by everyone involved. People settled for labels instead of results of treatment. This is the kind of situation where it is not enough to “get some help.” It is up to you first, and your provider(s) second, to look objectively at whether or not the help is helping.

A Word about Conventional Medical Drugs

Most people with chronic disease are on conventional medical drugs when they start a fuller treatment plan. Do not stop your prescription drugs before it is time to try to do so or in a manner that is counterproductive – and only make changes under the supervision of a qualified prescribing doctor. Many people – but not all — find that they can gradually lower their medication doses or eventually stop the drugs altogether as other treatments begin to work.

However, it is not safe to reduce or stop your drugs too soon, at a time when nothing else has actually helped yet, unless the risk of doing so is minimal in your physician’s judgment and you agree (e.g., some increased pain or discomfort but not a flare in disease activity or death).

It is also often especially risky to stop drugs suddenly. Drugs are usually suppressing disease activity. Sudden removal of a drug from the body, which likely has generated a compensatory increase in disease activity behind the scenes to fight the drug effects, will unleash unopposed, increased disease activity. This is often dangerous and usually unnecessary.

Common Sense

Use common sense — I have heard of tragic cases of insulin-dependent diabetics, for instance, who stopped their insulin and died in diabetic coma with high blood sugars at the recommendation of an ignorant CAM provider who told them the new treatment would replace the insulin from the start and who misinterpreted the adverse effects of high blood sugar as a temporary healing crisis. It is easy enough to test your blood sugar and see if the insulin requirements go down – then it makes sense to reduce the drug accordingly in collaboration with the physician who prescribed it. If nothing changes, then you still need your insulin at the dose that your doctor originally prescribed.

Priorities

For most chronic diseases, prioritize your choices. The best way to get unstuck and to heal is to start with and prioritize the two most powerful levels of health care options. These are spiritual and constitutional.
The other key practical decision is to continue your drugs for now, as discussed above. Continue the essential aspects of your biochemical level – i.e., your Western conventional treatment, in consultation with your physician.

Holistic Healing: Steps to the Journey of Healing

Holistic Medicine Updates

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 Medicine: The Who of Health Care Options

Holistic Medicine Updates

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 Programhttps://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.

Alternative Medicine: Take Stock of Your Illness and Your Healing Dynamics

Complementary and Alternative Medicine

Just as you are a unique individual in the universe, what you will need to heal is most likely unique to you. It will be some package of treatments, events, and people at a certain time and over time that will be the answer for you. And for that package to help you undergo the most lasting and complete healing, you will most likely need to make changes in how you live your life. Not superficial changes, not new diets or exercise programs. Real changes in your being.

To do so, you will have to leave your comfort zone of the familiar and the comfortable ways of being in some profound way. Outer changes might occur in your relationships, your job, your lifestyle, your habits, your living and working environment. But the inner changes will underlie the outer ones, and the inner movement will shift you in how you are in your world.

Changing the Context

You are expressing disease because you, as a dynamical system, are dysfunctional within the larger system/environment in which you live. Given your personal social, physical, and/or chemical environmental context, you are not being the best you that you can be.

If you can change the context – move to a new city or change jobs or get a divorce from a bad marriage, you might recover. But, if you can change yourself, you will recover. Sometimes the context will change as a part of the inner changes, sometimes not. What changes is how to relate to the world around you.

Maybe, though not many people can. More likely, some personalized package of care will help you make the changes and support you through them until they become an integral part of you.

To be sure, spontaneous healing does occur, as does healing from treatment with an isolated intervention, be it conventional or alternative. Miracles do occur, and some people get to stay the same and nonetheless give up their disease.

At the same time, in my practice I used to watch in amazement and sadness when dozens of patients with a chronic disease would flock to a particular treatment after word spread through their support network that one of their own had experienced a remarkable recovery from the “same” health problem during the treatment.

I never saw the others respond as miraculously or as well to the same treatment as did the one person for whom it appeared to make such a difference. It was as though that one person was poised and ready to respond, that the treatment somehow spoke to his or her condition in some unique, well-matched way.

The other patients were apparently not poised to respond to that treatment, and its language was unfortunately foreign to their conditions. I believe that the person with the miracle recovery did need the treatment they received at the time to experience their excellent outcome. It wasn’t a meaningless coincidence, but it may have been a meaningful synchronicity. The inner and outer circumstances were all set just right when the treatment arrived into his or her life. And the treatment arrived, because of the readiness of the person and the environmental context.

The point is that health care providers, healers, and treatments are external to you. Most of us need them to heal. However, they are a necessary but not sufficient element of the healing process. True healing must come from within, assisted and/or nurtured by the external help. At just the right moment.

Holistic Healing: What’s in Your Dynamics?

Holistic Medicine Updates

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.

Complementary and Alternative Medicine: Setting Your Healing Intention

Complementary and Alternative Medicine

The dictionary defines intention in general as “a course of action that one intends to follow,” “an aim or objective.” Ironically, in conventional medicine, the word intention means “the process by which a wound heals.” In a much broader sense, for healing from chronic disease, setting the intention to heal is the overarching first step in creating your program and putting the healing process into motion.

In setting this type of intention, you are asking the universe, cosmic consciousness, or God – however you are most comfortable addressing the “highest” level of infinite reality – to help you achieve the goal of healing.

Setting Your Intention to Heal is the Core Step

A recent survey of CAM use in the U.S. found that prayer for health was the most widely-used form of “CAM” in the previous year (43% prayed for their own health; 24% received prayers by others for their own health). You can consider this step to be praying or you can consider it setting your intention. This is a matter of labels with which you feel most comfortable. Whatever the label, setting your intention to heal is the core step of the overall plan.

It is up to the universe to figure out the details. You identify the goal, that is, healing. You may have some ideas about how you will start to go about operationalizing the steps along the way, and you will need to take those steps. When the intention is clear, the process will take over and lead you into whatever experiences, treatments, and people will ultimately be involved in your healing.

Make no assumptions that what or whoever is right for you now will remain right for you throughout the process. Remember, you are a dynamical being, ever-changing, expressing your free will in the context of a larger, a much larger environment.

No One Right Way to Set an Intention

There is no one right way to set an intention. It may be more common to do so in a quiet contemplative moment when you are fully present, without distractions of daily life. You may be alone or with someone you care about and who cares for you. For you, it may require a silent resolution, a statement out loud to yourself, a written diary entry, or a statement to a loved one.

What is important is to aim as globally as you can in setting the intention, i.e., that you are healing as a whole (not that just your body part is healing). As Larry Dossey, MD has said of prayer – Be Careful What You Pray For, You Just Might Get It. In this case, your goal is systemic healing, not just conventional medical local healing.

Play Big, Not Small

In other words, play big, not small. If you ask for small changes in body parts, you just might get those. If you ask for whole person healing as part of the Universe’s big picture, you just might get a transformation.

Setting an intention reflects clarity, simplicity, focus, largeness, love, determination, and positiveness. Bring together your feelings and your resolve in the moment of commitment to the intention.

Your intention is speaking to your deepest subconscious and unconscious mind and the larger non-local universal consciousness. Phrase the intention in a positive manner – that is, ”I am healing, I am whole at the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual levels of my being, for the highest and best good of all” (rather than saying, “I don’t have disease XYZ any more”). Aim for the most transcendent level with your intention.

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