I couldn’t say that I was surprised when I learned the diagnosis:
Crohn’s Disease. I had been living with symptoms that just weren’t
right for 20 years. Of course I had been relaying my symptoms to my
family doctor, and physician’s assistant, and then another family
doctor, and another nurse, and my gynecologist, and her referred
specialist. Throughout my medical history, I had regular check-ups and
blood work and was considered healthy by these standards.
But my body did not feel right. And my mood did not feel right.
Aside from symptoms associated with irritable bowel syndrome, I was consistently wracked with emotional fraught. My husband referred to me as ‘like a teenager’. I felt passionate about things, for better or worse, and exuded all of this energy whenever I walked into a room. This roller-coaster of drama in my close relationships was beginning to take their toll. I felt shattered, fragile, un-centered and definitely not the person I wanted to be, and knew I really was.
A Physicians Assistant ordered some prescriptions for me to take: an anti-depressant and an anti-anxiety medicine. That slowed me down; but the pattern had already been established within me after years of reacting the same way. I had the conscious realization that there was still work to be done on myself, made all the more poignant with my husband’s frankness that something had to change.
More than unhappy with this predicament, the dark tendrils of stress twined throughout my daily thoughts, gave credence to my sense of self doubt and self worthlessness, and fed my hate of what is unjust, unfair and untoward in humanity. I reveled in the sense of justice, and gleefully pointed out mistakes in numbers, mistakes in protocol, and mistakes in whatever concrete thing I could fix to prove how valuable I was.
Things were not any better emotionally or physically for me when my blood work results came back, this time with low iron and B12.
I went in for a scope of my digestive tract and they found the ulcers that had been leaking my precious blood and robbing me of my body’s usable resources.
My appetite was gone; more than that: my relationship with food had changed completely. I felt nausea every morning and throughout the day- all waking hours. I lost a considerable amount of weight in a short period of time. I could not digest the food that I did eat very well and knew I was not getting the nutrients that I needed to sustain myself. I began to drink Ensure and other easy-to-digest supplements to get my daily allotment of calories. I made myself eat more vegetables. I forced myself to try and eat bites of meat, chicken or fish at least 2 times a week.
More medicine was prescribed to me for these symptoms: an anti-acid to aid in nausea and an immune suppressant to help my body stop fighting itself. That’s what it is, you know, any auto-immune disease. It is your body attacking itself for no known medical reason. And it’s on the rise.
“Don’t read too much about Crohn’s disease on the internet,” my gastroenterologist suggested. “You’ll scare yourself silly.”
Great. That’s not stressful at all to me, doc.
My husband now researches the internet, a natural talent of his, and finds out all kinds of alternative methods to helping me overcome these symptoms. I’m taking different types of herbs, vitamin supplements, pureed glasses of cabbage 3x/day, and aloe juice. I see an alternative healer, a belly specialist. I give up dairy, wheat and sugar for 2 months and my stomach still hurts.
I’m less productive, less focused, tired, hurting and grumpy more than I should be with others.
Lightening my work-load, I ease up on my responsibilities and focus on one: Marketing. I meet another alternative healer, this time an acupuncturist. I was encouraged by my spouse to schedule an appointment. Why not? Nothing else was working. Why not needles in my body? I shrug and make an appointment.
Alison smiles at me when I step into the office. She is tall and gracefully energetic, and her smile is open and genuine. We talk about acupuncture and she starts to give me some insight into this ancient healing art. Using illustrations and beautiful Chinese metaphors, Alison explains to me about how my body and mind and spirit are connected. When some part of us is imbalanced, the other parts become affected as well.
I unload on her some of the things that are concerning me. We discuss my physical symptoms as well as my emotional ones. Now, I’ve had the pleasure of speaking with professional therapists different times in my life to try and get some perspective on things, but this was completely different.
Alison prayed as she worked. I could hear her, humming softly as I lay down on the table comfortably. Her focus was completely centered about me. The breaths she took were full and deep, reminders for me to mimic. She explained to me about what she was doing and why, and helped me to understand the connections my body innately has. She taught me how to meditate. She walked with me to dark places I’d kept well-hidden in the haunting shadows of memories, and together, we brought them to the light.
After working with her weekly for 6 months, I was able to stabilize my health. I did not need to take my anti-acids, anti-anxiety or immune-suppressants any more.
This was my first experience with a true Healer.
I continue to see my regular doctors and specialists, but not nearly as often as I used to. It’s down to appointments every 6 months, instead of every 6 weeks. I tell my family doctor about my acupuncturist, and I give her about 5 business cards each time I see her, to remind her to tell her other patients about my experience. I tried to give some business cards to my gastroenterologist, but I think he just puts them in the trash.
It is my humble and personal goal to educate everyone why being proactive is so much more efficient than being reactive. Alternative medicine has been providing proactive support to us for all of humanity’s existence through a combination of spiritual, mental and physical awareness. One of Alison’s favorite sayings is that the mundane practitioner heals the body, the moderate practitioner heals the mental and emotional, and the supreme practitioner heals the spirit.
Western medical practice is truly awesome in reacting to physical emergencies. I’m so glad we have the ability to safely birth breech babies with Cesarean sections, as a personal example.
Western medical practice and opinion is not so good at opening itself up to alternative methods of healing. Science-based research is coming along as more funding can be acquired; however, most American funding sources go to researching pharmaceutical therapies, rather than the use of herbal medicines and alternative healing practices. Though there are “quite a number of federal agencies in the United States (which) provide funding opportunities for companies in the herbal trade and for individuals and organizations that conduct herbal research,” other countries have adopted much more open approaches to teaching and learning about the medicinal uses of herbs.
“Countries all over the world, and especially the developing world, are taking a different approach to their herbal traditions than the American approach, which seems focused primarily on protecting the medical monopoly of doctors, drug companies and insurance companies.
In another example of the more enlightened approach being taken elsewhere, renowned herbal medicine specialist Dr Gunnaram Khonikar appealed to the Government of Assam “to include and introduce herbal medicines in the school syllabus so that students would be able to identify medicinal plants with their medicinal properties and cultivation as well as preservation.”
The healing properties of plants are not new, nor are eastern approaches to health; they are just forgotten and mostly untested by our current scientific measures.
What can be done about this?
But my body did not feel right. And my mood did not feel right.
Aside from symptoms associated with irritable bowel syndrome, I was consistently wracked with emotional fraught. My husband referred to me as ‘like a teenager’. I felt passionate about things, for better or worse, and exuded all of this energy whenever I walked into a room. This roller-coaster of drama in my close relationships was beginning to take their toll. I felt shattered, fragile, un-centered and definitely not the person I wanted to be, and knew I really was.
A Physicians Assistant ordered some prescriptions for me to take: an anti-depressant and an anti-anxiety medicine. That slowed me down; but the pattern had already been established within me after years of reacting the same way. I had the conscious realization that there was still work to be done on myself, made all the more poignant with my husband’s frankness that something had to change.
More than unhappy with this predicament, the dark tendrils of stress twined throughout my daily thoughts, gave credence to my sense of self doubt and self worthlessness, and fed my hate of what is unjust, unfair and untoward in humanity. I reveled in the sense of justice, and gleefully pointed out mistakes in numbers, mistakes in protocol, and mistakes in whatever concrete thing I could fix to prove how valuable I was.
Things were not any better emotionally or physically for me when my blood work results came back, this time with low iron and B12.
I went in for a scope of my digestive tract and they found the ulcers that had been leaking my precious blood and robbing me of my body’s usable resources.
My appetite was gone; more than that: my relationship with food had changed completely. I felt nausea every morning and throughout the day- all waking hours. I lost a considerable amount of weight in a short period of time. I could not digest the food that I did eat very well and knew I was not getting the nutrients that I needed to sustain myself. I began to drink Ensure and other easy-to-digest supplements to get my daily allotment of calories. I made myself eat more vegetables. I forced myself to try and eat bites of meat, chicken or fish at least 2 times a week.
More medicine was prescribed to me for these symptoms: an anti-acid to aid in nausea and an immune suppressant to help my body stop fighting itself. That’s what it is, you know, any auto-immune disease. It is your body attacking itself for no known medical reason. And it’s on the rise.
“Don’t read too much about Crohn’s disease on the internet,” my gastroenterologist suggested. “You’ll scare yourself silly.”
Great. That’s not stressful at all to me, doc.
My husband now researches the internet, a natural talent of his, and finds out all kinds of alternative methods to helping me overcome these symptoms. I’m taking different types of herbs, vitamin supplements, pureed glasses of cabbage 3x/day, and aloe juice. I see an alternative healer, a belly specialist. I give up dairy, wheat and sugar for 2 months and my stomach still hurts.
I’m less productive, less focused, tired, hurting and grumpy more than I should be with others.
Lightening my work-load, I ease up on my responsibilities and focus on one: Marketing. I meet another alternative healer, this time an acupuncturist. I was encouraged by my spouse to schedule an appointment. Why not? Nothing else was working. Why not needles in my body? I shrug and make an appointment.
Alison smiles at me when I step into the office. She is tall and gracefully energetic, and her smile is open and genuine. We talk about acupuncture and she starts to give me some insight into this ancient healing art. Using illustrations and beautiful Chinese metaphors, Alison explains to me about how my body and mind and spirit are connected. When some part of us is imbalanced, the other parts become affected as well.
I unload on her some of the things that are concerning me. We discuss my physical symptoms as well as my emotional ones. Now, I’ve had the pleasure of speaking with professional therapists different times in my life to try and get some perspective on things, but this was completely different.
Alison prayed as she worked. I could hear her, humming softly as I lay down on the table comfortably. Her focus was completely centered about me. The breaths she took were full and deep, reminders for me to mimic. She explained to me about what she was doing and why, and helped me to understand the connections my body innately has. She taught me how to meditate. She walked with me to dark places I’d kept well-hidden in the haunting shadows of memories, and together, we brought them to the light.
After working with her weekly for 6 months, I was able to stabilize my health. I did not need to take my anti-acids, anti-anxiety or immune-suppressants any more.
This was my first experience with a true Healer.
I continue to see my regular doctors and specialists, but not nearly as often as I used to. It’s down to appointments every 6 months, instead of every 6 weeks. I tell my family doctor about my acupuncturist, and I give her about 5 business cards each time I see her, to remind her to tell her other patients about my experience. I tried to give some business cards to my gastroenterologist, but I think he just puts them in the trash.
It is my humble and personal goal to educate everyone why being proactive is so much more efficient than being reactive. Alternative medicine has been providing proactive support to us for all of humanity’s existence through a combination of spiritual, mental and physical awareness. One of Alison’s favorite sayings is that the mundane practitioner heals the body, the moderate practitioner heals the mental and emotional, and the supreme practitioner heals the spirit.
Western medical practice is truly awesome in reacting to physical emergencies. I’m so glad we have the ability to safely birth breech babies with Cesarean sections, as a personal example.
Western medical practice and opinion is not so good at opening itself up to alternative methods of healing. Science-based research is coming along as more funding can be acquired; however, most American funding sources go to researching pharmaceutical therapies, rather than the use of herbal medicines and alternative healing practices. Though there are “quite a number of federal agencies in the United States (which) provide funding opportunities for companies in the herbal trade and for individuals and organizations that conduct herbal research,” other countries have adopted much more open approaches to teaching and learning about the medicinal uses of herbs.
“Countries all over the world, and especially the developing world, are taking a different approach to their herbal traditions than the American approach, which seems focused primarily on protecting the medical monopoly of doctors, drug companies and insurance companies.
In another example of the more enlightened approach being taken elsewhere, renowned herbal medicine specialist Dr Gunnaram Khonikar appealed to the Government of Assam “to include and introduce herbal medicines in the school syllabus so that students would be able to identify medicinal plants with their medicinal properties and cultivation as well as preservation.”
The healing properties of plants are not new, nor are eastern approaches to health; they are just forgotten and mostly untested by our current scientific measures.
What can be done about this?
- Educate yourself- read information on the internet, research at the library for older pieces of information, and seek advice from your local health food store.
- Talking with health-care practitioners of all types is an excellent exercise. See if you can discover patterns in various types of regimes and advice.
- Consider supplementing or replacing some of the over-the-counter medication that you normally would choose, for something natural and organic. Vitamins are a great place to start.
- Contact your local and state representatives to relay how important funding for research and development of alternative medical practices is to you, so that the efficacy of alternatives is proven and a variety of health options are recognized.
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