In this day of medical specialties for just about every organ, system, part, and disease, it’s easy to see how we’ve fallen for the belief that we’re a collection of parts that need to be treated separately.
The mechanistic model is the basis for the medical system we have today. You use drugs or surgery to suppress or remove symptoms from an affected part. This may work great for cars, but injuries aside, it’s not always so great for the human body.
Your body works as a whole unit. That’s why it’s easy to get misdiagnosed or get poor results when trying to only address symptoms. This is also one reason why unpleasant side effects are so common with drugs.
I love the TV series Mystery Diagnosis. Each episode reinforces how important looking at the whole picture is before coming up with a correct diagnosis. Unfortunately, people featured on the show often go through years of illness, seemingly unrelated symptoms, wrong diagnoses, treatments, and heartache before a doctor finally pieces the puzzle together.
Even looking at your body as an entire system, as the good doctors of Mystery Diagnosis did, may not be enough. For optimal health, you have to look even deeper than the correct diagnosis. You can name and treat the disease, but why and how did you get it? There’s a reason your wonderfully created body is malfunctioning.Why did your cells mutate so you grew that tumor? What caused your joints to degenerate? Why do you have high blood pressure? These answers often go way beyond the affected part.
To restore health and promote healing, you have to get to the cause. Otherwise, what’s to stop you from growing another tumor or having it spread? What’s to stop other joints from wearing out? Is high blood pressure really a drug deficiency? We can rightly blame lifestyle and environmental concerns for some of our health concerns, but not all. As a matter of fact, as more knowledge of the mind body connection becomes known, it’s easy to see how looking beyond the body for answers may be the most important place to look.
Many mental and physical problems can be traced to stress of some kind. This could be mental stress such as an old trauma you haven’t released or chronic current problems. It could be a physical stress such as consistent poor nutrition, too much exercise (you go past feeling good to feeling wiped out and stressed), and toxins. Perhaps your stress is spiritual. You withhold love and cling to unforgiveness.
Some medical models, like Traditional Chinese Medicine, link specific mental and emotional states to specific organs and systems. Dr. Hamer, creator of German New Medicine noted after researching hundreds of patients that their cancers started within three years of a traumatic experience. The Meta-medicine model goes so far as to show, using scans, where in the brain trauma lodges and how those areas relate to specific body parts. These are the parts that manifest the symptoms. Heal the trauma, heal the disease.
Regardless of whether your troubles are mental or physical, the main idea to remember is, “It all goes together.”
So don’t buy into the parts model. Have an open mind and be a detective. Look deeper for what may be driving your issues. Examine your lifestyle and eating habits, toxic exposure, your trauma history, your mental and emotional state, and inherent family and personal ‘susceptabilities’.
Then work on healing yourself as a whole person on all levels. Here’s where the paradox comes in. Look at, and work with, the parts of yourself that need healing. This may include mental, emotional, and spiritual work, as well as herbs, supplement, drugs, or medical interventions geared to that specific body part and problem. In this way, you are likely to get better results and enjoy greater levels of holistic wellness.