Insights

Illness may be inconvenient and annoying but it's also an (unavoidable) opportunity to learn, understand and even benefit.

Humans are complex manifestations of life, the universe and everything. Alas, many in the healthcare world forget this. 'Every form is an aggregate of smaller lives', dynamically juggling to keep the whole together, as live-cell-microscopy videos illustrate captivatingly. Behind this a spark of vitality wants to come through, an invisible (intelligent?) power source. Things work best when in alignment, balance (homeostasis) and moderate (not excessive or stagnant) flow.

Wellbeing enables us to get on with things while illness reveals our complexity, showing that all is not as it appears on the surface. Symptoms are a passing opportunity for a fuller understanding than a diagnostic label can provide ('The map is not the territory').

Illness can be acute (short and peaky) or chronic, which grumbles on at half-mast. Acute illness in the natural world either finishes you or makes you stronger.
The shape of illness has changed a lot over recent decades. Chronic illness (morbidity) is: on the rise, often multisystem and usually accompanied by multiple medications (polypharmacy). Modern medicine displays confusion about the reasons. Might squashing acute disease predispose to chronicity somehow? Certainly treatments (of all types) can and do have unforeseen consequences ('iatrogenic' i.e. manmade disease). Antibiotic use if followed later by intestinal dysbiosis/'leaky gut'/skin/inflammatory/psychological disruption is one everyday example of that. Antibiotics saved my own life though, more than once and yes, I live now with the unforeseen consequences.

My experience is that symptoms need to be heard out and that it's a mistake for the practitioner to be too confident in their authority and pronouncements. That's because this type of confidence stalls further thought and insight. This matters because I have found things to be not as they appear (even after good detective-work) but usually coming from something yet unrecognised. The only antidote to this is to keep stalking the truth, knowing that you're always going to be partly short of the mark. Simple enquiry is all it takes; using small clues too, taking the time and bothering to have a proper think.

A few weeks ago I saw a patient who had seen six different doctors for the same condition. Each doctor confidently diagnosed something within their own speciality. Six different diagnoses, each happening to be something the doctor was already familiar with. Have a proper think dear reader about what this says to you, and the implications. If the doctor (Latin for 'teacher') sometimes doesn't know how to spot the truth (which can be difficult), what are we, the ambassadors of medicine teaching you the public about symptoms/illness/actuality/power/cure? It happened to be doctors rather than complementary practitioners in this case but the same is equally true for both groups from my experience i.e. this is not a reflection on medicine but on being a disciple to our models rather than to the truth of the matter.
It seems to me that illness itself is the teacher and also that best results come from using both our own wits and received medical 'wisdom' together. The Hippocratic Oath (see Articles page) describes the practice of medicine as an art. Modern doctors are not required to subscribe to or even to have read this commitment.

The task as I see it is for the patient/practitioner team to work to disentangle the different components of the problem and find good ways towards dismantling it when possible. It's like archaeology, where you start by going backwards i.e. seeking clues to find the pattern to make a map. It's very different from 'fighting' or 'standing up to' manifestations that ones own body has made happen.
I have to be a professional understander so being a patient of mine is an active job. If I have high quality information the chances of being able to help are much better. This applies to follow ups too, where noticing peripheral changes (that normally one would ignore, forget or not mention) are those small clues mentioned above.

Regarding mind and emotions it's the same approach. By taking time to tune in it's usually possible to work back towards primary determinants. Quite often it lies with the parents or grandparents. There doesn't have to be difficult past experience because psychological/emotional characteristics tend to get passed on. The oldest child carries it most, in my experience. The offspring add their own stuff on top of what they received.
Here it helps to be honest about our different 'us'-es and that what we show on the surface coexists with different (often opposite) deeper layers. Emotions often can be traced back to some primitive fear that makes no sense but is real and are associated with physical sensations (tight/numb/suffocating/burning etc.) or locations.
This type of problem can be worked with productively through purely physical remedies, going into the unpleasant feeling in order to pop out the other side, family work, dreamwork and other ways.

It's quite common for new patients to come as a last resort and with little awareness of the possibilities outside 'normal' medical treatment. They think you take one medicine for this problem, another for that etc. They mistake trigger factors for causes (which they are not) and have been conditioned not to think for themselves too much. An example of the trigger/cause point is the husband and wife team I know who were exposed to asbestos (he massively more than she) where she, not he, developed mesothelioma.

Results to expect from complementary medicine interventions can include: nothing, benefit symptomatically, benefit widely, partial benefit, benefit then stall, side effects, aggravation then amelioration, temporary aggravation then return to normal and stir ups of old stuff.
It all depends on the dynamics of the problem, what is being aimed at and the ability of the patient/practitioner team.

My patients do usually have more than one thing going on, with the main concern being one or two of the worst. Maybe sinusitis, insomnia, bloating and arthritis as a typical example. Sometimes it's possible to find one pattern behind everything (in the case above I might be wondering primarily about the digestion with added endocrine and/or personality factors). Increasingly it's not though. The complexity/chronicity of things today means practitioners have to be more content take on a bit at a time, modifying treatment along the way according to results and the patient's priorities.

Therapeutically there are usually a few different ways to intervene to improve both the primary issue and the secondary ones (like inflammation in the example above). The main aim of course is to work towards mending the root-cause in a permanent way (that won't depend on ongoing treatment). Meantime other things can be done on the worst symptoms to help sleep, reduce pain and so on. I am often addressing these two (or even more) layers at once these days.

What you can do now if you're not right (physically or emotionally) is start by asking yourself a series of 'why'-type questions:

Why did it start then, were there any small signs before that, has anyone else in the family had something even vaguely similar, what are the things that affect me most, why did I get those symptoms rather than different ones, what is my intuition about the contributing causes, is there a sense of more than one layer going on, what would this be like if it I amplified it, what are the physical sensations that go with this, what are the small other things that aren't quite right...?
...and write it down, because once you start more insights are likely to come. The results can be a startlingly powerful start to improvement.

I hope this has given you a helpful insight on how just one experienced practitioner works with the mystery of human function and dysfunction.