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See The Messages Within You Dr. Harvey Bigelsen*
See The Messages Within You by Dr. Harvey Bigelsen* ©Copyright 2013, Dr. Harvey Bigelsen
See The Messages Within You Dr. Harvey Bigelsen*
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The Tipping Point Jonny opened his eyes and the room tipped sideways. He closed them, and tried opening them once more, lifting his head a bit. This time, the room spun like a mad carousel and the nausea came on so swiftly he had no time to hit the “nurse call” button before he vomited. When the nurse arrived she assured him it was from the anesthesia still wearing off and he’d be fine. He wasn’t fine, though. For three years it seemed every time Jonny lifted or moved his head, the dizziness and nausea returned like a wave crashing ashore. It was so bad he could barely get to the bathroom without vomiting. He dropped 65 pounds and spent all but three or four hours a week in bed. An Iraq combat veteran, Jonny returned home with a shoulder that had been dislocated for eight months. In that time, the dislocation damaged the nerves running from his neck to his arm. He’d had several surgeries to repair the nerve damage. The surgery that left him perilously dizzy was supposed to decompress, or release, the nerve from being squeezed constantly.
What went wrong? In the three years after the last surgery, Jonny endured many tests and exams. No one could come up with a better answer than “surgery complication.” There were no treatments that could either alleviate the dizziness or repair the damage – in truth no doctor could find anything explicitly damaged by the surgery.
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Jonny grew depressed and suicidal. Recuperating from the war was hard; at times it seemed impossible. He was only 35 years old. Desperate for some kind of improvement, Jonny and his wife came to see me. They were not ready to build a life around this disability.
A dislocation is itself a pretty major injury that messes with the alignment of the body. Not just the one joint that popped out of place, but the whole body. It’s not just the skeleton whose bones all sit in precise locations. There are ligaments and tendons and muscles that all connect to those bones, so that our bodies can move. The bones themselves do not move; it’s all those soft tissues connected to them. So when a bone dislocates out of its normal position, that puts a strain on the attached tissues. There is both direct stress as the tissues try to pull the bone back into place, and there is isometric stress as the out of place bone resists being moved back. If you’ve ever done isometric exercises as part of your workout regimen, you understand how what appears to be no force is actually making a lot of work for the muscles involved.
Some of the strain on tissues around a dislocation gets translated into pain. The body creates inflammation to isolate the area and to heal the bruised or injured soft tissues. Around a joint such as a shoulder, there is not a lot of room for the tissues to expand, so the inflammation itself can cause some pain. To fully heal the area, the dislocated bone needs to be moved back to where it belongs. But in Jonny’s case, he went for eight months
See The Messages Within You Dr. Harvey Bigelsen* 4 with his shoulder bone out of place. He had eight months
of inflammation, and because the bone didn’t get repositioned, he had eight months of continued small injuries to the tissues around his shoulder. Furthermore, the out-‐-‐-‐of-‐-‐-‐place bone caused additional injuries from stretching and pinning nerves and other tissues in the area.
These direct injuries were just the most visible ones, however. The body works as a whole unit, so the dislocated shoulder disrupted Jonny’s overall body alignment. While the injury started at his shoulder, it affected the arm, the entire shoulder girdle – from shoulder to shoulder –and therefore by relation his opposite arm, neck and spine. All these pieces are connected; not just by the skeletal structure, but by the soft tissues that connect to them, and weave themselves around and over to the next bone. The spine connects at the top to the skull and brain, and at the bottom to the pelvis and legs. The large muscle of the back wraps from the spine around to the ribs, and down the buttocks into the legs and feet.
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If Jonny’s dislocated shoulder had been restored to its proper position right away, its affect would have been far less. With the dislocation pulling everything in the wrong direction, his body tried to pull everything back where it belonged. This effort fatigued his muscles, and it also pulled those other muscles into difficult positions for eight months. In a very real sense, Jonny’s body was tilted, with one area pulling one direction, and everything else fighting that pulling and trying to stay put in another direction. Jonny didn’t realize how out of alignment he was because he was focusing his conscious energy on not being dizzy and fighting pain.
By the time of his first surgery, Jonny was a wreck. And although that first surgery repaired the dislocation, Jonny’s body had a new habit. Eight months of compensating for the dislocation created a habitual posture that wouldn’t just reset itself. The body had come to rely on that posture to keep Jonny reasonably upright and functioning. Unfortunately surgery cannot coax the body back to its normal posture or alignment; surgery is using a brute force hammer rather than a gentle nudge. Surgery also is a one-‐ -‐-‐time action, and changing a habit requires practice, repeated action. Jonny’s second, third and fourth surgeries all attempted to repair injuries that were less about actual broken body parts and more about habitual misalignment in response to the original injury. The result was that the additional surgeries caused additional damage that needed to be repaired.
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Jonny had scars in his neck from the four surgeries to repair the nerves in his neck and arm. The scars were pulling his arm, shoulder and neck together, in essence creating an injury similar to the one the surgeries were meant to fix. His body was using extra energy to try to keep his head and neck upright, while the scars were pulling him down, literally. Through all this his shoulder and neck were inflamed because his body was still trying to heal the dislocated shoulder. But the surgery scars made it impossible for the healing process to finish normally. Jonny was stuck in the classic scenario of using up all available energy to heal and to deal with the pain and dizziness, leaving nothing left for simple things like eating and sitting upright.
By the time Jonny came to see me, he felt doomed. And yet, despite this unending loop of injury, effect and attempts to heal, Jonny was not doomed. He wasn’t even that far down the road. Time, you see, really does matter. The longer you live with something, the more deeply entrenched its effects, and the more likely those effects will create more effects. Relatively speaking, Jonny had suffered for a short period of time. Not an insignificant time, mind you, but not for decades. This matters because the longer the body deals with the effects of an injury, he longer it takes to recover fully. In virtually all cases, improvement is possible. It just takes longer when the body has lived with the original injury and its effects for a long time.
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To get an idea of the impact of Jonny’s injury, imagine how
hard it would be to remain upright, walk or sit properly with a 100-‐-‐-‐pound weight attached to your back between your shoulder blade and neck. The key to Jonny’s recovery, I felt, lay in two areas. First, the obvious one was to treat the scars. By that I mean soften them up a bit so that the tissues can begin to move and separate. To do this, we inject the scar tissue with isopathic remedies. This was obvious to me because of what I know about scar tissue and its effect on the body. Scars pull on the rest of the body in the same way that an injury like Jonny’s dislocation pulls on the body. And scars are a kind of tissue that has no real ability to stretch naturally. They are tight bands that compress nearby tissue as much as they pull on tissues farther away.
The second key for Jonny was to gently move the softened tissues, and therefore the body, back into proper alignment with osteopathic manipulation. Treating the scar tissue by softening it up makes it easier to stretch the scars and separate them from surrounding tissue a bit so that blood, lymph and nutrients can flow around the scars more easily. The combination of softening with remedies and then
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physically manipulating the tissues helps the body to relearn alignment and positioning in that particular area, which has a ripple effect throughout the body as other, more remote areas no longer have to work so hard to hold their own positions.
These two fairly small actions together created a big opportunity that helped Jonny’s body in two important ways. First, the stagnated healing process now had an outlet for completion, because the treatments reactivated circulation around Jonny’s shoulder. Second, the osteopathic manipulation helped his body remember its original alignment. This helped to start relaxing the constantly tense muscles in his shoulder and neck. If all the blood vessels and nerves in the area previously had been suffering like blades of grass crushed in a tight fist, now the fist relaxed and uncurled. And like the release of those blades of grass, Jonny experienced a relaxation and release of the blood vessels and nerves around his shoulder. Now that blood flowed properly, the muscles, ligaments and tendons received oxygen and other nutrients for healing. Now that the nerves were no longer compressed, Jonny’s pain and dizziness disappeared.
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Jonny’s story is remarkable to Jonny, but not to me. His recovery sounds like a miracle, but it is not. The only difference between my approach and Jonny’s previous doctors’ approach is that I worked from an understanding of how the injury affected Jonny’s entire body. Structure is taught to every student of osteopathy. It is not taught to medical students in general. Furthermore, the important relationship between structure and flow of the body is only taught to osteopathic students interested in learning about cranial manipulation. The knowledge is not offered in general medical school, to future doctors and nurses. After graduating, if a practitioner studies cranial sacral therapy as it is taught to
massage therapists, they will learn the importance of the structure and flow of the body. All injuries change the structure and flow of the body. If those two things are not addressed, the injury itself cannot heal properly and its long-‐-‐-‐term effects will eventually cause chronic conditions to arise. The body never stops trying to heal an injury. Jonny has his life back today despite his injury and its scars. Injuries cause permanent changes to our bodies; Jonny will never be completely as he was before the dislocation. What’s important to me is not that Jonny look like he was never injured, or that he moves as if he were never injured. What’s important to me is that Jonny has taken control of how the injury affects him. It would have been easier for him
to give up and stop moving, to resign himself to spending the
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rest of his life incapacitated. Those scars are permanent and without period adjustments, Jonny would find himself less and less able to move, more and more incapacitated. Scar tissue by definition does not move; an outside force must manipulate it. In a sense, an injury like Jonny’s is a beginning, because it forever changes the way in which we need to take care of ourselves.
The scars are always pulling on Jonny’s body and they are always tending to seize up and hold tight. If he does not occasionally take care of his shoulder, he will experience the effects of clenched muscles and eventually will become dizzy again. If he lets the situation continue without seeing his osteopath, he will eventually face one or more chronic diseases. Yet while Jonny will need to be vigilant about working with the effects of his injury for the rest of his life, this is a different situation altogether than living with a
chronic disease. With regular structural work, Jonny’s situation is manageable.
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With chronic disease, the expectation is gradual decline at worst and little hope for improvement at best. Addressing the effects of injuries over a lifetime actually prevents the likelihood of chronic disease arising. Major injuries like Jonny’s do permanently change the body, but they do not put you on an inevitable downward path. Periodic structural work is important in order to maintain the best possible health. Virtually all of the chronic diseases that we face are the result of past injuries that are not being addressed properly.
The lasting, permanent effects of injuries must be addressed periodically to avoid worse problems. The good news is that it’s possible to not only overcome some of the injuries’ immediate effects, but more important; it’s possible to change the likely long-‐-‐-‐term course of those effects. No matter how dismal or permanent your current situation may look to you, even if you have been in declining health for years, if you take steps to address the original insult, you will see improvements in your health.
The basic lesson of Doctors Are More Harmful Than Germs is that when the effects of injuries are left untreated, problems will arise that lead to all kinds of chronic diseases, up to and including cancer. The basic lesson of this book is what’s most important is that you treat the effects of the original injury. W hen doesn’t matter so much, although obviously it’s better to treat the effects close to the time of the injury. Even if you were to die two weeks after starting to treat that original injury, in those two weeks you would see noticeable change for the
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better. If you start today to treat an injury from 50 years ago, you will improve your health. What matters most is that you address the original injury.
I think it’s fair to say that most of us would like to enjoy improved health, especially if that means improved mobility or improved ability to function unassisted. Because mainstream medicine really is not equipped to do this work, I want to explain in some detail the other paths that are available. There are as many alternate paths as there are unique human beings, but there are some commonalities. It is worth seeking out the right path for you. Even if you have spent significant time and energy on the road of chronic disease, unless you are already dead there is hope. Being on that road does not condemn you to an early, painful death. You can, in a sense, turn the car around and
take a different turning at a number of crossroads. The first part of changing your current health trajectory is that you must know yourself. You must understand what makes you unique in this world. Chronic disease does not own you or identify you. People are complex creatures. No two are 100 percent alike. In my work, I look at a person’s blood to understand who they are, what’s important to their body, and how they have been affected by various insults over the years.
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The Story Of ‘You’ Now come here, I want to show you. Take a look in the microscope. Go ahead, look right there. What do you see? Pretty trippy, eh? That’s your story; you’re unique. No one else has blood that looks like that. We can look at it again tomorrow, and you’ll see it’s different. I ended the last book talking about how I see my role as a medical Sherlock Holmes. Here I’m inviting you to take a closer look, to delve further into the two keys: observation and action. My goal is to discover your story, and for that, observation is paramount. Modern medicine has a tendency to rush screaming into action, before any real observation has taken place. It is one thing to act on a three-‐-‐-‐inch deep knife wound. It is quite another to presume that a high blood pressure reading means a person must be treated for heart disease.
How do you discover the story of you? First let’s put together a framework. What’s going on right now? What caused you to seek out help? What concerns you? These questions give us a general idea of how you have been affected by the source problem. We don’t yet know the source, although we may have a good idea. This first bit of information describes a result that is a kind of a snapshot; it shows us where you are today. For my work, it’s important to keep this in mind, that the current condition is valid for this moment in time. Tomorrow, or after we treat you, you will have changed a bit. I am more successful following the changes than I am staying stuck looking after that initial complaint or diagnosis.
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The body is constantly changing. Remember noticing a temperature change? Clouds moved in when it’s 85 degrees and sunny, and you are reaching for a sweater. Your body is adapting. If the clouds stay, you might start to feel too hot in the sweater when your body stabilizes and you get used to the new temperature. That sort of adaptation goes on constantly, in response to every minute change in our environment.
Another part of the framework we are discovering about you is the events that brought you to where you are now. List out our past injuries, major illnesses, surgeries, accidents, even something around your birth like being born prematurely or being pulled out by forceps. These can all play a role in your current situation. Whether they do play a role, and how much of a role, depends on your unique makeup. One of these experiences may be your key event. However, your key event may be something else, so we add this information to your framework and we keep gathering information.
Now we need to place you in time. When did you notice your health start to go downhill? After your tonsils were taken out? The summer you went to the lake house with your best friend? Time helps us to focus in on an event or a situation. Time is not going to give us the definitive answer, though. Time helps to explain but it is only a clue. We are trying to construct a path of breadcrumbs that together create a picture of your health situation. Sometimes the framework is very simple. For a lot of people, a single major event like a surgery or accident,
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clearly starts a whole cascade of health problems. Unless we discover the framework, however, we are just going to guess wildly in all directions. And my goal is to find that key point to focus in on. That’s where the greatest improvement will come from.
The last thing we do, in constructing the initial framework for you, is to look at your blood under the microscope right after we pricked your finger. We use the blood pictures because it’s an immediate, direct information source about your health. As soon as you take blood out of the body, it changes. Anything removed from the body changes when you remove it, but because we are looking at live blood, blood that is not stained or distorted in any way, we get a unique picture of your health. Blood that is liquid, warm and therefore alive reflects back the true state of your health.
If you look at stained blood, you can see parts such as the number of platelets. But you cannot understand the quality of the platelets. Numbers only get you so far. But in the living blood, you can see whether the platelets are large or small. You can see if they are clustered, you can see if they are hugely enlarged from normal. These things all tell different aspects of the story of a person’s health. The differences are really very important; they can make or break the treatment regimen. The quality of the platelets matters as much, or more than their quantity.
Additionally, when you look at living blood you can infer a person’s life force. Living blood moves; slowly or quickly, the
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movement tells me if you are exhausted or energetic. I can see when the body is having trouble cleaning out normal cellular debris. I can also see the effects of chronic illness and stress. Both these, along with others, change the proportions of the different blood components such as white cells and fibrin.
Often when I look at a person’s blood after they’ve told me the basic framework, I see confirmation of everything that’s been said. Sometimes I see new information like a scar from a forgotten injury. Most important to me is what their blood says about their current state of being. If a person is overly tired, and worn down, I need to proceed more slowly than if they are reasonably energetic. Tired, worn down people have used up most of their energy reserves. Every treatment is a change, and adapting to change requires energy. A person who is already nearly out of gas, so to speak, will do better with small changes that gradually help them to recharge their energy.
The number one rule is that you need to be treated as an individual, not as a disease protocol. Protocols, whether for diseases or personality types, are ridiculous. You’re a hot liver person and you fell off your bike? That tells me something important. But it does not mean you should have the exact same treatment as the hot liver person I saw earlier who also fell off their bike. The way you manifest those concepts, the injury that brought you here, and the result that showed up and is affecting your life, that’s a whole package. Those pieces come together differently for every person. When I look at your blood, my goal is to decipher and work with your unique story. That’s the only
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way to get through to what’s really going on for you. How you got here and what’s bugging your body right now, that’s all yours, no one else can claim it. I work with your unique story to come up with a plan that is all about you. It might look a lot like plans for people with similar stories, but in the details it’s all just for you and no one else.
For example, I see two people who have head injuries. Both fell: The woman fell off a bunk bed and hit her head on a wood stove, breaking her jaw. The man tripped and fell, hitting his head on a fireplace hearth. The woman has no apparent long-‐-‐-‐ term effects while the man is having short-‐-‐-‐term memory problems and some other physical effects. The woman has reacted to her accident by changing the alignment of her body, starting with her jaw. The man absorbed the major force of the blow from his accident in his head. It would be silly to treat them
exactly the same way, with some kind of a head injury protocol. The plain truth is that no one else in this world has your exact set of experiences. No one else has precisely the same gene combination – not even your parents.
No one else uses their emotions in quite the same way as you. When you put together the entire package that is you, the result is undeniably unique. There can never be a double-‐-‐-‐blind study of you. It’s impossible. All of those drugs out there designed to treat complaint X or nagging problem Y, they are there in part because what works for one person does not work for someone else.
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Diagnosis is not the key Establishing a person’s framework of health is so different from a diagnosis. I can’t tell you how many times someone has come into my office with a clear diagnosis from a medical doctor, and we have shown that diagnosis is nothing more than a symptom – the result of a deeper problem. The person often comes to see me because they don’t want to take drugs or do a recommended surgery, or they want a second or third opinion before undergoing a diagnostic procedure.
There it is: modern medicine rushing to act before all the information is there. To be sure, there is a very limited set of tools that a regular doctor has at their disposal. Those tools tend to be geared toward removing, blocking, diverting and destroying. You can argue that many tests and procedures-‐-‐-‐ disguised-‐-‐-‐as-‐-‐-‐tests have as their goal identifying, but that is actually a side effect of the test. To do the test, something is done to you, your body is acted upon, and most often, invaded. That is the entire subject of Doctors Are More Harmful Than Germs, however, so I point you there now if you want the fullness of my thoughts on that matter.
Here I want to talk about the idea that a diagnosis is The Law, in the sense that it proves what is wrong with you and gives you something to treat. One of the reasons Jonny and his wife came to see me is that they were looking for a definitive diagnosis; they needed something to latch onto. That’s human nature, to want an answer. But the answer is not necessarily the label of a diagnosis. By definition, a diagnosis is a name for a collection of identified symptoms, nothing more. And by “nothing more,”
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what I mean is that a diagnosis does not, and cannot, identify a single entity that can be seen, attacked and defeated. Diabetes, for example, is a collection of actions and reactions in the body that have been grouped into the heading of “diabetes.” Those actions and reactions are symptoms that could have any name, such as “apples.” When you are given a diagnosis, that means, to modern medicine, that there are drugs, treatments and presumed outcomes that all fit into that particular box. Every diagnosis has a protocol: Every single person assigned to the diagnosis gets exactly the same treatment, from beginning to end. There is zero thought to a person’s unique makeup. Even when a drug fails to cause the desired effect, the doctor simply pulls the next one off the shelf that is what they give to everyone for whom the first drug fails. The standard of treatment says that anyone who does not get the protocol is receiving poor care.
Our entire modern health care system revolves around the sanctity of the diagnosis. Almost universally, health care providers despise the diagnosis coding system. Yet everything they do, and everything that we as patients rely upon, is connected to the diagnosis coding system. That system ensures that every diagnosis of whooping cough is treated with exactly the same drugs and procedures. That system forms the basis for deciding which procedures are allowed for heartburn and which are not. It is that coding system that gives the CDC data about how far the flu has spread in any given year, and which drugs are effective or not effective in treating it. The diagnosis coding system provides various experts with data for measuring the prevalence of heart attacks in middle-‐-‐-‐aged black women
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and the numbers of kids diagnosed with ADHD. The diagnosis coding system is an important component of insurance underwriting, providing both overall population statistics and information about individuals. Coding determines whether a procedure or treatment is covered or whether you will be stuck paying for it.
No treatment can be paid unless there is diagnosis, and that diagnosis must be an approved match for the treatment. Some rules about how diagnoses and treatments can match are made up by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and other rules are made up by the insurers themselves. Diagnosis code data is parsed with populations, locations, economics and other factors within beneficiary rosters.
Finding the right diagnosis is key, because for a provider to be paid, the diagnosis must back up all treatments and procedures given. Even if the problem is not yet known, the tests ordered must have a presumed diagnosis attached. If the eventual diagnosis does not support one or more tests, the provider must document a rationale or payment is denied. This is done in part to prevent unnecessary testing but it is also done to ensure that all providers treat people with similar symptoms in
exactly the same way. The effect of all this on health care is that the emphasis is on the diagnosis, not people. The people, the patients, have become irrelevant; they are trumped by the importance of the diagnosis. We define ourselves by our diagnoses. I think that what is most egregious about this trend – who we are and how our bodies adapt is irrelevant.
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The only thing that matters is the label assigned to us. A diagnosis tells us nothing about a person, nothing about how they ended up at this place. But, a diagnosis does tell us which procedures to do and which drugs to take. Will these solve our health problem? Maybe, but probably not. In fact they usually mask one set of problems and create others.
A diagnosis is meant to be that “one true thing.” But it is not – any health professional can tell you that. This notion that a diagnosis has to be static leads to some pretty interesting situations. If you exhibit symptoms that do not fall neatly into your original diagnosis box, you can be diagnosed with something additional – in its charming fashion modern medicine calls this “comorbidity.” Alternatively, you might be told that because your symptoms do not fit the diagnosis you can ignore them.
But symptoms are the way the body communicates with us. They are like a little kid saying, “mom, mom, mom.” If we ignore what the symptom is trying to tell us, we may lose important and useful information. Similarly, if we ignore the kid trying to get our attention, they may wet their pants. We all have situations where we cannot be fitted into a neat diagnosis box. A diagnosis only gives you a shorthand description.
Symptoms are not the end or even the beginning. They simply are the way your body is reacting to a particular event or situation at this point in time. They are attempts by the body to tell us what is going on. A collection of symptoms, while called a diagnosis, in reality is itself a symptom pointing to the real problem.
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It can be challenging to identify the real problem, because each of us is unique. The way our bodies respond to something can seem totally unrelated to our logical, linear brain. This is especially true because we’ve been taught for years to look at
each ailment as a singular, unattached event. For example, one man hit by a car while riding his bike may later develop heart disease. The heart disease is treated without any thought of the accident. Another man who experiences the same accident has a concussion that immediately affects his health. The concussion is presumed to be caused by the accident but the head is treated on its own, in isolation from the rest of the body. Knowing the diagnosis name for a group of symptoms doesn’t really tell you anything. It’s a label designed to make communication easier.
However, by observing those symptoms you learn how the body is reacting to and dealing with something. You need to observe closely – pay attention – to truly know what the body is explaining. That’s one reason I like to think of myself as a medical Sherlock Holmes. With experience, you get better at figuring out how a particular body has chosen to communicate, but you still have to test your theory to find out if it is accurate. For me, observing the blood before, during and after a treatment is my preferred tool. It’s such a clear, real-‐-‐-‐time reflection of what the body cares about.
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Staying focused on a diagnosis has other drawbacks. In particular, the name that is a diagnosis usually carries a stigma fraught with fear and uncertainty. Being told you have X condition usually means you are now condemned to a lifetime of drugs and probable invasive procedures, along with a gradually poorer and poorer quality of life. And really, who wants that? Nobody I know.
It can be worse to be given a diagnosis that supposedly can be cured with an invasive procedure or surgery. Your expectation is that getting the procedure will make everything bad go away forever. The reality is that another problem will crop up later on, and maybe it will be worse because you had the procedure. You may make the connection to the procedure or you may not. The two will be linked regardless. The procedure adds alayer of complexity on top of the original problem, which is still around. The original problem is still around because all the procedure did was attack a symptom and attempt to change the action of the symptom. For example, you have high blood pressure and severe chest pain, so you are given a stent to keep your artery open. A stent is a tiny, flexible mesh of plastic or metal that is inserted into the blood vessel. Your chest pain may go away, or it may not. You will still have high blood pressure. The stent and the action of inserting it damage your blood vessel, which forces your body to produce inflammation to try to heal the damage. The stent is a constant irritant inside of your blood vessel. Attacking your pain and blood pressure by inserting a stent does nothing for the underlying condition that caused your pain.
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Follow The Connections To Find The Cause Diagnosis by modern medicine is so misguided in so many ways. It creates an idea and then seeks to treat the idea as if it were a real object. You see a doctor because you have symptoms that are causing you discomfort and concern. The doctor runs tests to try to match your symptoms to a treatable object, the diagnosis. The tests often look for numbers like blood pressure, cholesterol, glucose, or more esoteric ones like A1C, protein alpha or D-‐-‐-‐dimer. Any test result that comes out positive is taken as proof for a diagnosis. Then treatment focuses on changing the test result, usually with a drug. The idea is that by changing the test result you can be cured of the diagnosis. But the weird thing is that you have to keep getting retested, and the numbers keep changing. When you stop taking the drug, your test results go right back where you started.
Why do you suppose that is? Because your problem isn’t the test result. Nor is it the diagnosis, the treatable idea that matches the test result. By treating the test result there is no actual effect to you, except whatever reaction you have to the drug. This is also true when you have a procedure designed to change a test result. Nothing has actually been altered that relates to the problem itself, only the result. For instance, if you have a deep splinter that eventually gets infected, medicine treats the infection, not the splinter. But the infection is a result of the splinter; it would not have appeared all by itself if the splinter weren’t there. Removing the splinter will cause the body to clear the infection.
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That’s really easy to see, right? So ideally, rather than treat a diagnosis like diabetes, what you want to do is understand why the diabetes showed up, and deal with the original insult. A diagnosis is always the end result of something else. It’s a signpost, pointing toward the problem. You can’t have heart disease; the symptoms that are called heart disease have developed as a result of something else that the body is working on. Disease does not magically appear from nowhere. Disease is not an attack by an evil lurking entity. The body doesn’t decide to create disease. The body has no consciousness. Disease has no consciousness. When symptoms appear that we call disease, the body is trying to accomplish something.
For instance, we have been taught to believe that measuring cholesterol guarantees the presence or absence of heart disease. But the only guarantee is that you will know how much cholesterol is in your blood at the time the blood is drawn. Any test you have is useful only as a single point in time – once that point passes the test result is no longer valid. The body changes all the time. Thus increased amounts of cholesterol mean only that the body is doing something that is resulting in more cholesterol than is typical. Our job is to figure out why the body is taking that action. That increase in cholesterol may drop on its own, or, it may continue to increase and be associated with other symptoms. But, and this is crucial, by taking a pill to reduce cholesterol levels you are interfering with what the
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body is trying to do, and it will seek out other pathways to
achieve its goal. The body has no consciousness. It simply acts. If the body could have goals, they would be to keep the entire organism alive. That organism is us in our entirety. Our existence, our life, is critical to the sustenance of an entire ecosystem. The goal of life is life, not destruction. If you try to stop what the body is trying to do, it will find a way around the barrier. If all you do is take drugs or supplements or have procedures designed to do away with one symptom or another, whether named as a diagnosis or not, you will never do more than place barriers in the way of what the body is trying to accomplish. Seeking out the reason for what you are experiencing is the only way to change it permanently.
Treating symptoms and their results in isolation is especially harmful when it comes to chronic disease. By definition, chronic disease unfolds over a long period of time. It doesn’t mysteriously appear overnight. Chronic disease cannot be attributed to “bad” test numbers, because again, those numbers are doing little more than chronicling actions that the body is taking. A test might be interesting and it might provide some useful information, but it is not going to help determine the root cause of that chronic disease.
Knowing the root of a problem is the key to solving it. Every current health concern is the result of a connected series of events. You really have to pay attention to those events. If it weren’t for them, you wouldn’t have your current concern.
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Treat a symptom, and you will resolve a symptom during the time you treat. You will have no effect on the underlying issue that caused the symptom to show up, except by accident. And that effect may not be the pleasant outcome you imagine. In virtually all cases, you will force the body to seek other means of resolution, which means you will experience other symptoms.
Symptoms are not a punishment. They are the body’s attempts to tell our brain what is going on.
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Pay Your Body Some Respect When you take a drug or have a procedure, your body changes instantly. Because of this immediate effect, you think that you are improved. A drug is a chemical that forcibly alters some process in your body. If you stop taking the drug, the process returns to its previous state if it hasn’t been damaged too much. You can see this really clearly with all the drugs given to alter test numbers like cholesterol and blood pressure. When you stop taking the drugs, your numbers go haywire again. The goal when taking these drugs is not to improve your overall health but to achieve the right numbers on a test. Think about it. People talk about the importance of keeping their numbers low. They don’t talk about how their quality of life has improved. Procedures are worse than drugs because they permanently alter and almost always destroy something in your body. And neither of these does anything more than address symptoms. By treating your symptoms and diagnoses, in effect modern medicine turns a blind eye to what is really happening:
What is the body trying to resolve with the action that creates these symptoms, in you, right now. Everything that happens in the body is connected. It’s an interdependent system. Those connections are far more important than any diagnosis. Only by identifying and addressing such a basic question – the root of the problem – can you improve conditions and provide nutrients that the body can use to heal.
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No doctor or health professional can heal you. Your body does all the healing. The best a doctor or health professional can do is to make a good observation – interpret your symptoms – and provide a combination of therapies and nutrients that your body can use to heal. A health professional can assist the body. But nothing more than that. Most of the time, that’s all that is needed. Think about it. The body is capable of finding a cut, stopping the bleeding and closing it up – all without any medical intervention whatsoever. Isn’t that truly remarkable?
There’s something else really important to understand about diagnosis and modern medicine. By treating a diagnosis, a doctor splits the problem off of you, so that you become secondary to both the diagnosis and the treatment. This is one reason that people who are well on their way to dying are so often over-‐-‐-‐treated, receiving supposed lifesaving surgeries and then dying soon afterward. The body does the healing, not the doctor. The body created the symptoms, so when you do something that acts upon the symptoms, you are affecting the body and its healing processes. The body has no conscience; it has no idea why you or the doctor is trying to stop the symptom.
The body will keep trying to accomplish its goal, regardless of the treatment. The only way for a treatment to be “effective” is for it to wipe out, extinguish or demolish the body’s ability to create the action. You are never isolated from anything the body is doing. Something happening in the body is happening to you. A treatment designed to only touch a symptom, like
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killing cancer cells, will always affect your entire body. Isolation
is a myth. Over the years I’ve noticed that there is a truism about how the body reacts to procedures, in particular. If you have never been seriously ill, if you have had none, very few or maybe one minor procedure, then a single major surgery can cause you major problems. It’s like the body is so amazingly outraged that you would dare to attack it, it reacts very strongly. Whereas if you have had many procedures, or many illnesses, the body is tired and worn out, and it has no energy left to react to another insult. In some ways a person whose body is reacting strongly can appear to be far more seriously affected than the person whose body is totally worn out. The strongly reacting body is vigorously trying to heal the affront, and that takes a lot of energy. The worn out body is no longer capable of raising a finger in protest, i.e. healing; it is instead actively declining.
This is why a very sick person has to be treated delicately. You will only cause harm by aggressively subjecting them to interventions and drugs. People who are very sick just do not have the energy within them to work with aggressive treatments. If you want treatment to help, you have to be patient and give them time to regain a reserve, no matter how minute. And, age really matters. An eighty-‐-‐-‐year-‐-‐-‐old man has lived a very full life and has that many more experiences to take into account. He may be very healthy and fit, but that does not mean he can be treated as if he were twenty.
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Have a little respect for what the body has been through. It may not seem like much to someone else, but they are not you, how could they possibly know what is important to you? It’s not a weakness to show respect for years of using your body. Being dead is not so macho.
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Tuning Out The Sirens I decided to write this book because a lot of people who read the last one (Doctors Are More Harmful Than Germs) want to know how to actually find the root and work with it rather than treat symptoms. The theory sounds great, but the reality for most people is that they are trying to keep cholesterol numbers down. Insurance companies reward for that. Doctors praise for it. You feel like you are successfully dealing with your health problem. And in our day and age, we have been trained to believe that invasive procedures like biopsies are the only way to know what is truly going on. Seeing believes.
There are two conundrums here. Number one, how to get past the siren call of the tried-‐-‐-‐and-‐-‐-‐true mainstream approach to chronic health conditions. And number two, what to actually do if you’re not going the route of mainstream medicine: tests, chronic drug use, and procedures. The view of the blood that I showed you in the microscope you will never see in your doctor’s office. Mainstream medicine never looks at the blood like that. They don’t teach that it’s possible to look at it that way. What’s crazier to me is that most doctors aren’t even curious about it. Do you know, I once had a chief of hematology refuse, point blank, to put his eye to my microscope? Can you believe that? A medical doctor whose specialty is the blood, and he has no interest in seeing blood while it’s alive. Where is the scientific curiosity?
You might be more curious than that doctor was, but those two conundrums invariably will dog you. Medicine’s history in the U.S. has linked them inextricably. The first, how to avoid the
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siren call of mainstream medicine, is philosophical, but it’s huge. Everyone has a lifetime of conditioning and propaganda, to the extent we are not consciously aware of it. Very tricky. There always seems to be a point where, from stress or habit or fear, or all three, people turn to mainstream medicine as the most likely source of answers. It doesn’t matter that the answers aren’t there, we want to know.
To that conundrum I can only suggest practice. Practice looking from a different vantage point. Practice observing rather than rushing to act. Unless you are having a life and death emergency, practice watching how a health concern unfolds. Instead of rushing to the doctor with sore muscles after a workout, pay attention to those muscles. What movement makes them hurt? Does movement like walking make the muscles feel better? When you choose to act, do so deliberately, knowing that your eyes are open wide, and keep observing. Notice how your body is reacting. If movement helps your sore muscles, can you do some gentle stretches to ease the soreness?
Make adjustments, even if that means stopping something that you previously agreed to. If stretching in one direction doesn’t help, try the opposite direction. Whatever you do, don’t become so passive that you are just a faceless body being acted upon. Don’t just lie in bed wishing for a doctor’s appointment so they can fix your problem for you. Be very deliberate in what you allow, when you allow it, and how you follow through. Practice trusting that what you observe is the truth. If gentle stretching and movement helps your soreness, try doing that for a few days and notice whether the soreness resolves on its own.
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Suppose you’ve observed and now you’re ready to act, but you’ve decided that you don’t want to go the route of tests and drugs and procedures. Start where you’re most comfortable. Taking different route to resolving your health concern doesn’t require you to turn your back on mainstream medicine. I’m asking you to pay attention to the very real limitations. All of the answers are never in one place. There is nothing wrong with talking to your doctor if you have a good rapport with them and you trust them. You might discover that your doctor is very interested in how you might address a health concern without tests, drugs or procedures. Lifestyle changes, for instance, can do a lot of good, and your doctor may be just the cheerleader or moral support that you need to go after old habits. Maybe it’s your doctor who recommends seeing a massage therapist before racing off to get an MRI. More and more doctors today are learning how to affect health in other ways, and deep down most are interested in causing you as little harm as possible. They’ve been hampered for years by a culture and industry that not only denies everything but drugs and procedures, but that also mocks and derides other approaches from day one of medical school.
Regardless of how you begin, start looking for a good structural practitioner as soon as possible. This is a person who really understands how alignment of the body and all its components affects health. People with this expertise may be osteopaths, acupuncturists, and chiropractors or massage therapists. But don’t accept just anyone with these titles. Look for osteopaths trained in cranial manipulation. Chiropractors who specialize in network spinal analysis understand the role of the soft tissues, as well as bones, in structure. Similarly, seek out massage
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therapists trained in therapeutic techniques such as cranial sacral therapy, visceral manipulation, neuromuscular therapy and myofascial release. Although acupuncturists focus on changing energy flow, their goal is the same as those who work with the physical body directly. The best practitioners can have long waiting lists for initial appointments; so don’t wait until you are in a crisis to find someone. Structural alignment is so critical to good health, this is one particular area where you really need to work with someone regularly, especially if you have a chronic condition of any kind. These are the people who can help your body return to optimal functioning after an injury or surgery. They can also help to prepare your body if you are facing surgery so that the damage and repercussions are minimized.
One of the most famous of all structural therapists, the father of osteopathy Andrew T. Still, said that “order and health are inseparable…when order in all parts is found, disease cannot prevail…” He was referring to the structural alignment of the body as well as the relationships between all organs, systems, nerves, blood vessels, fluids, bones and so on. Other practitioners have expanded upon this in referring to flow, or movement, that is inherent throughout the body. Everything moves. And when something does not move, that sets the stage for health problems. Flow stops wherever there is a scar, and where the body has twisted or contorted itself in trying to work through a health problem. The goal is simply to open up the point where there is a blockage, rather than to inflict an action at that point. For example, air does not flow through a closed window. You can open the window by unlocking
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it and using the existing window hardware to gently open it. Or, you can take a hammer and smash the glass. Both methods achieve the result of opening the window, but breaking the glass causes permanent damage. This is the difference between working with a structural practitioner and working with mainstream medicine. Most so-‐-‐-‐called alternative medicine schools teach the least possible intervention for this very reason.
Lastly, a naturopath can help you find and resolve the root cause of your health concerns. Rather than focusing on symptoms, naturopaths are trained to find the underlying concern that the symptoms express. They support and work with structural practitioners while supplying the body’s healing efforts with needed nutrients.
A talented cranial osteopath will be able to set you up for a positive change for virtually any health problem, simply by tuning in to your body. Acupuncturists work with the flow of energy through the body, particularly looking for places where the energy flow has stopped, the stagnations. I honestly cannot recall anyone among my clients who has not seen benefits from structural work. You owe it to yourself to find someone.
There are numerous online directories where you can find structural practitioners near you. These are listed in the resources section of this book. It is more important to find someone who is really good rather than someone with a
long list of techniques to their
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name. Your doctor may surprise you with a really good
recommendation. While you are searching out other health practitioners, keep in mind that most practice by treating diagnoses and symptoms. These other practitioners I’ve mentioned usually have a long intake interview for your first visit. Use that time to ask your own questions and get to know the practitioner’s approach. Do they focus on what tests you’ve had, the results and your deviation from normal results? They’re focused on symptoms. Does the practitioner want to know the events and timing when you began to feel your health declining? They are looking for a root cause. Does the practitioner ask you about popular health issues like vitamin D deficiency and wheat sensitivity rather than your specifics? They’re going to offer you a protocol and probably treat something different than your problem. Does the practitioner get excited about discovering cause and effect (links between earlier
events and later problems) in your story? They’re going to focus on your particular situation and needs. Practice observing a health practitioner just as you is practicing observing your own health. While you might have to talk to a few people to find the right fit for your situation and needs, a little extra time spent searching will ultimately land you the best possible
long-‐-‐-‐ term partnership.
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Editor’s note: For more information, visit: Bigelsenacademy.com *Harvey Bigelsen holds a degree as a Doctor of Medicine, he is not currently licensed to practice medicine in any jurisdiction, and he does not hold himself out as a licensed physician or other healing arts practitioner.
The End (Until We Meet Again…)