Getting Whole, Getting Well: Healing Holistically from Chronic Illness
176
Getting Whole, Getting Well: Healing Holistically from Chronic Illness
176Paperback
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781600373879 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Morgan James Publishing |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2008 |
| Pages: | 176 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.60(d) |
About the Author
Dr. Kenneth R. Pelletier is clinical professor of medicine, Department of Medicine, and a senior research scholar at the Stanford Center for Research in Disease Prevention, Stanford UniversitySchool of Medicine. He is also a vice president with Healthtrac, one of the largest providers of disease-management programs to corporations. Dr. Pelletier is director of the NIH-funded Complementary and Alternative Medicine Program at Stanford (CAMPS), and director of the Stanford Corporate Health Program, a collaborative effort between Stanford and twenty major corporations including AT&T, American Airlines, Merck, Blue Shield, Bank of America, IBM, Medstat, Levi-Strauss, Motorola, Rite Aid/PCS, United Behavioral Health, and Xerox.
Dr. Pelletier has served as president of the American Health Association since 1990; is a member of the Board of Directors with Health Net of Foundation Health Systems, which is the fourth-largest integrated health provider system in the United States; and, in 1997, was appointed a founding board member of the Foundation for Integrative Medicine. He is the author of more than 225 professional journal articles and seven books, which have been translated into fifteen languages, including the classic bestseller "Mind as Healer, Mind as Slayer, " first published in 1977 and revised in an updated edition in 1992. At sea, Dr. Pelletier is an avid open-ocean sailor. On land, he is an equestrian and lives on a farm in Alamo, California, with his wife, Elizabeth, and their two thoroughbred horses, Qolcha and Tir Nan Og.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Start on the Healing Road – Again and Always, Ready or Not
"Toto — I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore."
~Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz
One of my favorite movies is the Wizard of Oz. In telling its timeless and entertaining story, the movie teaches many essential life lessons. It is the story of a young girl from a Kansas farm, Dorothy Gale, whose world gets turned upside down and transported over the rainbow by what she experiences as a tornado. Everything she believed, thought, and did in her usual world is different. Scarecrows talk, trees come alive and throw apples, monkeys fly, witches pop in and out — nothing is the same as it was in her Kansas world.
People with chronic illnesses find themselves shocked and bewildered when they are displaced from "normal" everyday life into their own new world of difficulties. Your usual life has been swept away by your own personal tornado and dumped into an unknown land with unknown people and new rules about how things work. Not only do you have to deal with figuring out how to get the best health care, but you also have to adjust your goals, dreams, relationships, and everyday life around your illness. How you deal with the difficulties determines how your story ends.
This book gives you a way to look at the process of having one or more chronic diseases and of healing yourself as the individual who experiences them. This is not a one-minute solution to chronic illness or an ordinary list of how-to's and where to get help. It is a practical health philosophy book for people who need to make sense of what has happened to them. The book helps you see your illness pattern in a larger context and to discern how to select from and orchestrate the overwhelming options for treatment that bombard you with promises of cure.
"Pay no ... attention to that man behind the curtain."
~The Wizard of Oz
Some people quit and let the disease take over. They go to sleep in the poppy field and don't wake up. Some find ways to cope and accept their limitations. They may find their way to Oz, but they never leave — they just proceed to live in their bearable, but stuck place. And some seek ways to "fix" the problem. Those people try to find the Wizard of Oz, who, they expect, has "The Answer" for making the problem miraculously go away. The thing is, the Wizard is often, at best, a well-intentioned caring mortal who really can't change their problem very much, or at worst, a fraud who makes promises he cannot keep.
You are a unique individual who needs a unique package of care and tailored advice. You must develop a self-directed plan for choosing the healing mentors and using the package of healing methods best for you. You will go through a great deal to learn that you have gathered the answers all along the way — so that, in the end, you are ready to click your heels and say, "There's no place like home, there's no place like home, there's no place like home." And you get home. To health.
But how do you figure out this special plan? It's a secret that only a few people stumble upon in their lives. The secret is that you have to go home to yourself, your true self, by way of your own personal life journey down a yellow brick road of obstacles, mystery, and change. There are both spiritual and practical steps you can and must take to heal.
Health problems are part of your life's journey; they are not detours that take you off your path. You can't force your body to stop having a disease or symptoms. If you do, more problems will pop up somewhere else. Get help staying on the road, assembling tools, supporters and fellow travelers, until the healing happens in its own time, in your own time, with your own answer.
Five personal qualities necessary to carry you through your challenges with chronic illness are:
[??] Courage (The Cowardly Lion)
[??] Heart (The Tin Woodman)
[??] Clarity in thinking (The Scarecrow)
[??] Persistence (Dorothy) [??] Openness to change (Dorothy)
Glinda, the Good Witch — - "You don't need to be helped any longer. You've always had the power to go back to Kansas."
Dorothy — "I have?" Scarecrow — "Then why didn't you tell her before?"
Glinda, the Good Witch — "Because she wouldn't have believed me. She had to learn it for herself."
In addition, you also need the right information, social support (a scarecrow, a lion, a tin woodsman, and a Toto, not to mention Auntie Em and Uncle Henry), and the ability to sort through the information with advice from a mentor who can see the big picture of your particular situation and help you at the right time. You need a Glinda, the Good Witch of the North, a mentor to point you in the right direction and keep you safe when danger lurks.
In the movie, everybody tells Dorothy that the answer lies in following the yellow brick road to the Wizard. That road is far from safe or straight in getting her where she needs to arrive, but it guides her into the experiences she must live through so that she can ultimately get home.
Getting Whole, Getting Well is your first Glinda to start you off along your own personal yellow brick road with a big picture overview of what happens in disease, health, health care, and, ultimately, self-healing. Many books talk about wellness measures such as diet, exercise, and meditation that are basic and valuable for everyone, but usually not enough to move the person with chronic disease into true healing.
I intend Getting Whole, Getting Well to help serve as part of your decision-making process in making informed choices about your health care, but it does not replace the advice of — or treatment from — qualified health care professionals. You will need more mentors and more information, so — seek them out. At appropriate places, I will also point out some additional movie metaphors that illustrate other key ideas.
The point of view is my own, based on my personal and professional experiences with, knowledge of, and opinions about disease, health care, and healing. You might agree or disagree. But it will force you to think about your health and health care in a new way. Just looking at these issues can be a start for you in getting whole, getting well now. And if you build your own personal holistic health care plan with a practical map, you will be on your way.
"Most people have come to prefer certain of life's experiences and deny and reject others, unaware of the value of the hidden things that may come wrapped in plain and even ugly paper. In avoiding all pain and seeking comfort at all costs, we may be left without intimacy or compassion; in rejecting change and risk we often cheat ourselves of the quest; in denying our suffering we may never know our strength or our greatness."
Rachel Naomi Remen, MD
"Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity."
World Health Organization
CHAPTER 2You Are Not a Car: Change Your Mindset, Not Your Oil
The New ABC Perspective of Whole Person Healing: You are More than the Sum of Your Body Parts
"In the book of life, the answers aren't in the back."
~Charlie Brown, "Peanuts" comic strip character created by Charles Schulz
A. Is Your Life a Car or a Hologram?
The trouble is that people with chronic disease have usually accepted the world view of conventional medicine that the body is made of parts that are assembled into some sort of mechanical being. Parts can be removed with surgery or forced to work better with a drug if they malfunction. To conventional or mainstream medicine, the body is a car whose parts are either unnecessary (appendix, tonsils, gallbladders) or replaceable (hearts, livers, kidneys). In many emergencies and acute illnesses, the mainstream perspective and treatments can be life-saving. In chronic disease, however, it can lead to problems.
The trouble with the automobile or static mechanical view of the body is that it is incomplete and often wrong. Conventional medicine works best in the short term on local body parts. In the long term, however, a person is a living whole being (in technical terms, an indivisible complex living system), a dynamic (ever-changing) network of interrelated and inseparable parts. The health of any particular part is a reflection of the health of the whole person.
In one sense, a person is more like a hologram than a car. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts, and what each part does at the seemingly local level reflects the condition of the whole person at the global level. A hologram is a three-dimensional image produced by a coherent laser light.
The key feature of a hologram is that any part of a holographic film contains the whole image. Many systems of CAM, including acupuncture and homeopathy, explicitly recognize this holographic reality of the person and use it in their approach to diagnosis and treatment. CAM systems use the local symptoms as a clue to the overall (global) disturbance in the person.
The symptom is a complete, self-contained small picture (microcosm) of the complete big picture (macrocosm) that is the person's disease. CAM treatment ultimately targets the big picture (global) as it reveals itself in the small picture (local) disturbance. Conventional medicine looks at molecules, which are the local level, and stays at the local level to treat the molecular behaviors. The best drugs in conventional medicine target specific cells and molecules, even subtypes of cells and molecules and their receptors in the body at the local level of scale. In contrast, CAM systems use the behaviors of the molecules in order to see the big picture behaviors of the whole system of which the molecules are a part.
Thus, mainstream medicine and systems of CAM approach diagnosis and treatment very differently. As a consumer of health care, you may not realize that you usually apply the much more familiar automobile, local world view of your body when you seek treatment.
In fact, you often use the automobile world view even when you try CAM. You want something to fix the problem you experience in a body part. You usually don't consider that the body part is simply doing its best to tell you that You are sick. Sickness in a body part is a biofeedback message back to you that You are out of balance, out of alignment with your Self and your environment.
The misalignment is not necessarily some conscious decision you made that you can feel guilty over or revisit and do over in a simple way. Rather, the misalignment is a result of the convergence of multiple causes that may range from genetics to lifestyle to environmental stressors and circumstances. Some of the causes are conscious choices you made, but some are very much outside your immediate control.
Your body has a wisdom – it knows that it isn't a car. It knows that it is a hologram. Do you? If you have a symptom – a rash on your skin or a headache or a pain in a joint or diarrhea, you are sick, not your skin or head or joint or gut. It just happens that the only way your skin can manifest your sickness at its own local level is by way of a rash or a pimple.
In short, symptoms are a wake-up call from yourself to Your Self. This is true holistic healing in action. If you can look at your symptoms and diseases in a holographic way, you can come up with remarkable insights and plan your treatment better. Otherwise, every option seems just as good – or bad – as every other option – and there is a bewildering number of options out there from which to choose.
This book's specific point of view comes from a convergence and an integration of modern thinking in science, i.e., complex systems and network theory, and the ancient wisdom from complementary medicine systems of healing – i.e., classical homeopathy, traditional Chinese medicine, Ayurvedic healing. There is a way to decide which of the 2,653 options make most sense – and how the options you do choose might be best utilized. The rest of this book explains the general principles of how to do so.
B. Zooming your lens up and down the levels of scale in healing.
A person is an intact, indivisible network system. At the same time, a person is part of larger and larger network systems (social groups, the biological, chemical, and physical environment, up to the universe at the highest level) and is comprised of smaller and smaller network systems (organs, cells, molecules). Depending on your perspective, you probably also consider yourself part of an even larger spiritual or transcendent reality. How you view a person or yourself depends on your perspective – that is, if you had a camera that could zoom out to panoramic view or in, down to a microscopic view, you would be able to look at health and disease from different perspectives. The perspectives would be where you stand as the observer.
Regardless of the position of the observer, however, upsetting or perturbing a network system at any level of organization will lead to changes at levels above and below the immediately affected level. That is, a loss or gain of social support from a spouse has an impact, as does exposure to or avoidance of a toxic environmental chemical or a nutritional deficiency or supplement that changes biochemical pathway network function at the molecular level of organization.
In health care, our usual focus is the person level of organization. In conventional medicine, there is a perspective called "patient-centered care." Patient-centered care, which concerns itself with the issues of who-has-the-disease, is distinguished from disease-centered care, which concerns itself with the issues of what-is-the-disease. In other words, the person is more important than his/her disease label.
Disease-centered thinking in conventional medicine revolves around the cellular and molecular level of scale. However, research has shown that many of us prefer to have a relationship with a provider who gives us patient-centered care in the sense that we are informed about our disease(s) and all of our treatment options and participate in decisions about how to proceed (rather than being told what to do).
Organizational Levels of Scale. You are a system unto yourself, but you are made up of other systems at lower levels of organizational scale (e.g., circulatory system, immune system); and you are a part of still other systems at higher levels of organizational scale (e.g., families, communities, living creatures on earth).
For a complex living system, each next higher level of organization has emergent properties, that is, behaviors that the higher level can generate, but that its component parts at a lower level cannot (a person has "behaviors" that a liver or heart by itself does not). At the same time, there is a bidirectional feedback loop of information, from the global to the local level and back the other way. It is the feedback that allows the global (person level) and local (body parts level) to influence each other's function, that is, to define your unique "you-ness."
Another way of understanding the holographic qualities of health and healing is to look at levels of scale from a systems perspective – true holism. Many systems, especially living systems, have a self-similarity or theme (also called "fractality"), at every level of scale. The self-similarity is a geometric concept in which an object is irregular but similarly irregular at every degree of magnification, i.e., close up and far away.
One example from nature is a pine tree (see photo series in Figure 23A to 2-3C). From forest level of scale to a single tree to a branch with pine cone to close-up detail of a pine cone, the irregular appearances are similar. Look at the pictures – zoom in left to right. Zoom out right to left. You see some similar visual themes in the way the pine forest, individual pine tree, and single pine cone look, whether you zoom in or zoom out as you look at the scene across the set of pictures. One obvious theme, for example, is the irregular pointed tips of each level of organization, with a recurring theme of triangular shapes.
Without question, a forest, a single tree, and a pine cone each has some properties that the other levels of scale in this example do not possess. Nevertheless, some patterns manifest across the different levels of scale.
In conventional anatomy, the self-similarity occurs in body parts such as different levels of organization of the bronchial tree. In complementary therapies, the self-similarity is not in physical structure so much as it is in patterns of function or dynamics (change). People can be in self-similar ruts of disease, just as they can be in ruts with relationships or jobs. The same idea is true for processes and functions – such as you, your body, and your health in your life.
Thus, under environmental stress (psychological or physical in nature), a person prone to asthma may experience an asthma attack. Their "rut" is responding with anxiety and asthma under certain environmental challenges. A different person might respond to the same environmental factors with irritability and a migraine attack. You are literally "doing your own [unique] thing" in your world. And, in chronic illness, you are doing your own unhealthy thing over and over. The names and faces (specific content or details) may change from event to event, but the storyline repeats the same process through time.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Getting Whole, Getting Well"
by .
Copyright © 2008 Iris R. Bell Associates LLC.
Excerpted by permission of Morgan James Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments,
Foreword,
Introduction — Learn the Big Picture of Chronic Illness and Current Health Care: the ABC Principle for your Personalized Holistic Healing,
Chapter 1 — Start on the Healing Road: Again and Always, Ready or Not,
Chapter 2 — You are Not a Car: Change your Mindset, Not your Oil,
Chapter 3 — Stuck in the Forest? Take Stock of Your Illness and Your Healing Dynamics,
Chapter 4 — Assess: You CAN Get There From Here: Discover All of your Options,
Chapter 5 — Balance: There's No Place Like Home: Set your Healing Intention,
Chapter 6 — Coordinate: Design your Own Yellow Brick Road and Get Moving,
Chapter 7 — Pull Back the Curtain: Are you Better or Worse?,
Epilogue — Now What?,
Definitions — Know your Friends: Health Care Options Defined,
Resources — Track Down Whom and What you Need,
Background Research Readings,
Illustration Credits,
About the Author,
Reader Bonus Gifts,