Healing takes responsibility. Healing takes guidance. Most of all, healing takes patience.
You didn’t get sick overnight, and you’ll likely not get healthy overnight. I know that’s not what you want to hear and I’m sorry. Being sick and in pain is frustrating. Getting better is something you want now, right now! You can get better, but you have to take some important steps.
The first step to getting better is taking personal responsibility for healing. Your doctor can help, but s/he can’t do it for you. She might be willing to give you a pain reliever for some immediate relief of your symptoms, but that isn’t healing. That’s symptom management. Healing is restoring balance in your body and something you have to do one step at a time. It often means learning new things. It may mean learning to cook real food. It may mean learning to say, “no” to others so that you can say “yes” to meeting your body’s needs for rest and care. It may mean reading books about recovery. Only you are responsible for your health. Granted there are things that happen to us that we can’t control, but what we can control often has greater impact.
The second step to healing is getting guidance from health practitioners. I’m so grateful to live in the United States where we have state of the art medical technology. However, when it comes to chronic illness, the medical community offers little in the way of healing. Fortunately, allied health professionals such as nutritionist, physical therapist, acupuncturist and more offer a lot. You’ll likely need more than one practitioner along the way just like you have more than one medical doctor. We know that healing from fibromyalgia requires looking at the SHINE protocol as developed by Dr. Jacob Teitelbaum. SHINE stands for sleep, hormones, infections, nutrition, and exercise.
I like to think “E” also stands for emotions. I’ve seen a direct connection between fibro pain and emotional trauma in my clients. In the SHINE protocol, nutrition isn’t just covered under the “N.” Nutrition also plays a role in sleep, hormones, infections, and needs to be addressed before exercise. However, nutrition can’t take care of all sleep issues, all hormone issues, or all infections. You may need a sleep specialist, counseling, EFT, or a mattress sales person! You may need a good endocrinologist or Lyme disease expert. You may benefit from acupuncture and massage. One health care practitioner can’t do it all.
The third step to healing is patience. It takes time to fully understand everything involved in your health crisis. You can save time by knowing your genetics, micro-nutrient status, level of toxicity, hormone levels, and other lab values. However, as Roger Williams, MD explained in Biochemical Individuality, we are more different than we are alike. That means recovering from an chronic illness will often be as much skillful art as it is science. A good practitioner understands this and enjoys working with the nuances of the client.
Sadly, I have clients come to me who have seen a half dozen other practitioners. They’ve seen fabulous functional doctors who’ve ordered wonderful tests. But, in a desire to get better NOW, they’ve not stayed with the practitioner. They took their test and went to another professional. It’s hard to be patient, but it’s good to be persistent when working through a chronic illness with a professional. Each test or each protocol that’s failed gives a vital clue to getting better.
Do yourself a favor. When you start working with a health practitioner, whether an MD, functional nutritionist, PA, DC, acupuncturist, herbalist, or some other professional, stay the course for a year. Follow through with your “home work.” Give your healing a shot. If after a year, you aren’t seeing improvement, make the change to someone and something else. It pains me to see a person going in for chiropractic adjustments three times a week for months or years. If it’s not working, change gears. There’s a reason it’s not working. You’re better off spending your time, energy, and money finding what does work. You can heal. Give it time and focused energy. If you can, find a practice that offers multiple therapies. We offer several therapies in my office, nutrition counseling, chiropractic, acupuncture, EFT, massage, cupping, bio mat, and more. We also offer free consultations if you want to more about what we can do to help.
I hope you decide today to take your healing to the next level.
To your health!
