Jasmin Lee Cori, M.S. - Author, Mind, Body & Spirit

Change is ongoing in a system as complex as the human body, and if we’re not paying attention, small changes pile up, adding weight, until the structure breaks down and it creates something akin to a rockslide. When there is a rockslide, it isn’t just one rock that rolls downhill; a whole mass slides down slope, sometimes with disastrous consequences. 

When we have more of the picture, we see that everything we do and everything about us is part of the stability of the landscape. And if we are good tenders, we do our best to shore up the instability as quickly as we notice it. Yet what seems to be the default for most of us is that when symptoms first pop up, we ignore them. We may notice them but hope they will go away on their own. 

What happens when you ignore health symptoms? Yeah, they get worse. A few may work themselves out on their own, especially if you follow your intuition or unintentionally change some habits that are major contributors, but many conditions are progressive. If the colon is not healthy and eliminating wastes, these wastes accumulate on the walls of the colon and it becomes less able to do its job. Or a dysfunction in one system affects another, like a weak heart contributing to worsening dementia. Or a knee surgery that could be avoided if you deal with signs of trouble early, perhaps by strengthening the right muscles and working out whatever is causing that foot flare. Usually, any of these problems are more easily contained if treated early. 

I point out these three factors--ignoring early signals, the fact that most conditions build on themselves, and the fact that it’s easier to correct something that is smaller and more contained—to show that the rockslide is not inevitable from the beginning, but becomes inevitable when we do nothing. 

You might use this opportunity to take a moment to get honest with yourself. 

• What are the conditions you have ignored? Go ahead and make a list of them. Get a little uncomfortable. 

• How did each of these turn out? 

• What would you do differently next time? Or what might you do now?

• What are the factors the fuel any ignoring of symptoms (fear of what you may find, lack of time, not having the bandwidth, not knowing where to start…)?

Things happen in life, and our health ebbs and flows. It not that you get a free pass until you reach a certain age, as health issues come up at all ages and maintaining your health foundation is a lifelong process. 

Fortunately, we have a lot of help. The body wants to keep working well, and can do amazing things when we partner with it. Yet as with other parts of our life (relationships, finances, our home, our body politic) we need to stay engaged, stay awake to signs that things aren’t where they should be, and respond to them. 

What we learned from studies of radical remissions from serious diseases is that you can be told you have only weeks or months to live and be thriving decades later. It’s not without work, but it comes with taking responsibility and finding your own way. 

So regardless of your diagnosis or prognosis, it's not hopeless. We have more power than we ever imagined. During the hard times, like life-threatening illness, we need to devote ourselves to healing, and during the good times, we don’t want to slide by and get neglectful. We don’t want to wait until that rockslide when things are desperate. 

You might think you care about your body but if you look closely, you’ll see the many times you put its wellbeing second to something else. Your body is signaling you that it needs something or is hurting in some way, but you just keep doing what you’re doing. 

What takes priority over self-care will be different for everyone. It might be wanting to not be in conflict with another, so even though you are tired, hungry, cold, sore, or whatever, if your friends or family wants you to continue with something, you do. Often times it will be justified by priority given to work or making money. Maybe you are doing what you think you should be good for you, like exercise or something some health guru tells you to do, but it’s actually harming your health and you are not tracking that fact. Or you are having so much fun in an activity that you don’t want to stop even though you’ve used up the energy readily available and are more likely to have an accident (the last ski run).

I notice that I most often ignore my body’s needs when I am overfocused on something and especially when I am wanting to finish a task, frequently inserting a time pressure that doesn’t need to be there. This happens a lot when I am working at my computer. My body wants to move, to get a drink, to change it up, but I’m not letting it. 

There is a pattern called “whipping the dying horse.” I’ve been told this image is too triggering to use, but with my apologies, I stick with it precisely because it is so strong. The phrase is used mostly in the stress field to talk about a phase of pushing ourselves when we are on our last legs. It brings our attention to the seriousness of the situation. We need to bring attention to it, because we often don’t realize what we are doing. People have collapsed and died after running a marathon and young people have died at their desks from non-stop work. Our pushing may seem less drastic than these examples, but isn’t it fundamentally the same pattern of rolling over what your body needs and doing what you either think you must do or want to do? What if we stopped long enough to recognize what we are doing and, in metaphoric terms, lay the whip down, lie next to the horse, and let ourself have some genuine feelings? Do you think maybe you’d have a tear or two? 

After decades of working in the medical field, physician and professor Victoria Sweet, MD re-envisioned medicine in her book, Slow Medicine. Modern medicine “is based on the idea that the body is best understood as a machine or a collection of machines,” she writes. It sees disease as a breakdown, and the doctor as a mechanic.  Like other kinds of mechanics, the doctor’s job is to find what’s broken and fix or replace it. 

Dr. Sweet found inspiration in an interesting place--the Slow Food Movement which is transforming the way people eat. In the Slow Food Movement, the focus is on slowing down the process of choosing, preparing, and sharing food, bringing pleasure and community back into the experience. Rather in amazement and as confirmation, Dr. Sweet noted that all over the world, people had independently arrived at the notion of slow medicine. 

Slow medicine leaves the mechanic behind. The provider becomes more of a partner in the healing process. A partner engages in real relationship and makes time for it. A healthcare partner brings not just their training but their curiosity, looks at the larger context, and looks for what is getting in the way of the natural healing the body is designed for. Clearly there is a yearning and need to get beyond the assembly-line, productivity- and profit-oriented approaches to healthcare to something more humane and more healing for all involved, Sweet notes--an opinion shared outside mainstream medicine. 

Dr. Andrew Weil, who has trained many physicians in Integrative Medicine, sees restoring the doctor-patient relationship as one of the goals, as well as a return to the core values that drove people to become doctors in the first place. He hopes it will improve doctor satisfaction if they can slow down and spend more time with patients, as well as have more in their toolkit.  

It's not just a matter of practitioners making the time. They also need to not be too stuck in their model. When things aren’t working according to the model, what is needed is to expand beyond the model. The path to healing comes from listening for what is needed (and is being signaled in some way) by the person coming for help. I’ve even heard this referred to as “personalized medicine.” Shouldn’t all healing practice be personalized? 

Keeping in mind that any practitioner can be limited by not ‘thinking outside the box,’ this problem happens most in the ‘factory medicine’ that Dr. Sweet was talking about. It’s not that allopathic medicine cannot be adjusted to more of a Slow Medicine model (Dr. Sweet offers steps for even large hospital systems to move in this direction). To the extent that conventional medicine cannot adapt, it will be replaced by alternative models of medicine that are rising up to fill the gaps, models better suited to addressing the whole-system nature of health. 

To make use of these alternative models, we as consumers need to change our thinking too. We need to get beyond, I’ll go to my MD, get a pill, and it will be taken care of. It may involve a whole lot more steps than that. Working with a functional medicine doctor, for example, will in most cases be focused on rebalancing and restoring a number of compromised systems and various interrelated problems. It is longer than a quick “fix-or-replace” model where if the gallbladder isn’t working, the answer is to take it out (although if you consider recovery time and future problems, maybe the conventional approach isn’t a quick fix in the long run). To restore systems that have broken down over years or decades doesn’t happen with one intervention, and so it may seem like it takes more patience--although trying thirty-eight different meds (in an example previously given) certainly takes patience! And some things improve quite quickly with just dietary changes.

Many outside of allopathic medicine say that allopathic care is great for acute conditions, but not so successful for chronic and complex conditions, like cancer, heart disease, and autoimmune diseases. However, our current healthcare system applies allopathic care to basically all disease. Disease is clearly it’s focus. How to promote wellness, not so much.

When your health (and perhaps your life) is on the line, it makes for a complex relationship with any provider that you are working with. Relying on another for essential services can bring up earlier feelings you had with a parent or person you were dependent upon. We could say this is the “understory” level, and it can come up in both a long-term relationship with a provider and even a one-time encounter. Journaling about this or talking with a trusted other may help you understand what is contributing to feelings that are troublesome. 

You’ll need to make room to work out mistrust or negative feelings, especially anything that endangers the relationship. Sometimes you can process this on your own or talking with someone you trust, and sometimes you really need to do it in the relationship. In psychology we refer to this as “repairing a rupture.”

I want to share a couple of experiences with this. In one of these, I had undergone a four-hour procedure to replace a crown in my mouth and had found the situation very triggering. I’d never had such an upsetting experience in a doctor’s office, and it put me into a trauma state. When I got home and got my wits about me, I emailed the dentist telling her a little about my experience. She wrote back right away apologizing and asked what she could have done better. When I returned in a couple of weeks to have a different crown replaced, it was an entirely different experience. She incorporated my feedback and took time to check in with me, making sure I was all right. She also gave me updates about where we were in the process and made a connection with me as a human being. If the practitioner isn’t treating you as a person, but just focused on their technical job, that can take us to places we’d rather not go. I had another surprise when I went to pay and was told it was ‘on the house.’ Talk about good results!

It doesn’t always happen this way. I had an MD not inclined to repair the rupture; and to make matters worse, when I took it another step and complained, he lied. That made it very clear that he was not the doctor for me.

I share one more story of a positive outcome to give you a little more encouragement. This is not about a rupture but about proactively speaking up for your needs, which can feel vulnerable and scary. A friend who had a traumatic history with anesthesia had an upcoming surgery for which anesthesia was going to be important. Yet the thought of being put under put her into a stress response, which is where you don’t want to be before or after a surgery. So she called and got ahold of the head of anesthesiology for the clinic and shared with him what she was feeling. He was absolutely wonderful—empathetic, totally willing to work with her to make it as comfortable as possible, and provided information from which she could make decisions. He put her in charge and became a member of her team. He even arranged to be the anesthesiologist to go through the procedure with her. This had all the elements of a healing experience.

You don’t know how it will work out when you speak up for yourself. It could be the end of the relationship or make it closer. Dr. Bernie Siegel in his book, Love, Medicine, and Miracles, views a caring relationship between patient and doctor as part of the healing power.

It is easy to confuse fitness with health. Having at least a modest amount of fitness supports health, and good health supports the activities that people do to maintain fitness, but they are not one and the same. Here are some things to keep in mind:

One is that you can be very into fitness and be hurting your health if you are pushing too hard. Long time-fitness instructor and triathlete, Debra Atkinson, spent hours exercising daily for decades. Then she went through a period when she could barely fit in twenty minutes on some days. According to her belief system (prominent in fitness culture), less exercise should have weakened her. She discovered just the opposite: she was stronger and leaner doing far less. Digging into the research, she discovered that most exercise research has been done on men and very little relates to women in the second half of life. She began experimenting and found that in her health coaching business, her clients all reported feeling better and sleeping better with less exercise. Trying to maintain a previous habit of very vigorous exercise, especially after menopause, can steal from hormones and increase your cortisol if you are exercising too much for you. You need to find your sweet spot, not worrying that it is too little. 

Others have also learned this lesson, some of them only after falling ill with cancer. More is not always better, although that idea seems to pervade the fitness culture. You know, “no pain, no gain.” That has some truth when it comes to things like building muscle mass, but health is more nuanced than that.  Also true, at least part of the time, is the view that less-is-more. As I learned from Traditional Chinese Medicine, you don’t want to use up all that you’ve got. Always leave some in your energy bank. So we may push ourselves, believing that doing so is the road to health, when actually we may be draining systems (like the adrenals) by following that philosophy. 

Just as one food can’t meet all your nutritional needs, this one slice of the ‘health pie’ can’t make up for all the others. It can’t substitute for missed sleep, for loving touch, feeling good about yourself, or doing your deep inner work rather than running away from it. It can’t make up for poor nutrition, but may even worsen the situation. That sports drink may actually be hurting you. 

So, fitness is great but no guarantee of health. It is something we have to approach wisely, to avoid both small injuries and more system-wide breakdown if we push too much.