Our nation is finally starting to bridge the gap between healthcare and sickcare. And to go one step further we are starting to bridge the gap between mental/emotional/spiritual and physical.

 

Psychoneuroimmunology is the study of the effect of the mind on health and resistance to disease. Often when someone tells me about any form of symptoms and an impending trip to a doctor I start to ask a lot of questions. After a person has visited a doctor they might tell me what a “mess” they are, their diagnosis, and then they leave all of their healing up to the doctor they just saw. That’s a lot of pressure on a doctor.

 

I fear that we are depending too much on one person to not only find out exactly what our problem is but to also go ahead and fix it for us. At some point we are going to have to use the medical field as it should be, a part of our care and healing. At some point we are going to have to take some responsibility, we are going to have to advocate for ourselves. 

 

At 19 I started suffering from chronic low back pain. I was diagnosed with degenerative disc disease, SI joint dysfunction, and three bulging discs caused by a syrinx (fluid-filled cyst) inside my spine. I went to handfuls of specialists, physical therapists, and chiropractors. I would find some relief but never really move forward. The problem was, I wasn’t playing my part. I wasn’t doing the work on my end to support any kind of healing.

 

I didn’t eat well, I didn’t workout, and I didn’t take care of my emotional/mental wellbeing. 

 

I started doing more research not just on what my diagnosis was but what affects those parts of my spine had on different parts of my body. I wanted to know how it was connected to the rest of my life. It turns out that stress, emotions, and how I felt about myself as well as what I was eating (or wasn’t eating) and how I treated my body had a huge impact on my pain and quality of life. 

 

Focusing on strengthening my body to support my diagnoses turned out to be a catalyst to healing it. I learned about strength training and nutrition and the stronger I got physically and the more food I ate to support my body the less anxiety I started to experience. Slowly I started regaining range of motion in my spine. I started gaining confidence. And slowly the pain started to decrease. 

 

What I’ve learned through my experiences is that it is all connected. The pain you may be experiencing in your jaw may show up on a scan as something that is “out of place”, but it could also stem from some kind of stress or emotion. It is not one or the other. It all works together. In that example the pain in the jaw could be treated by a chiropractor and be alleviated but if the root cause of the pain (the stress or emotions) is not treated you will end up back in treatment for the same thing. 

 

We don’t have to choose one or the other. We don’t have to be anti-treatment and we don’t have to trust our healing to one person.

 

What we should be doing is working together with treatment plans. We should be advocating for ourselves, asking lots of questions, doing lots of research, and giving healthcare providers more information about you than you may think necessary. We should diligently work to make sure we are looking at our bodies and our minds as a whole. We should advocate for ourselves to make sure that we are not treating symptoms but treating the root causes of our pain.

 

When it comes to your health or the health of your children it is your job to become your own advocate. It is your job to be an active participant in your healing.