Today I attended a health meeting on chronic illness with a number of medical professionals. The one overriding phrase I noticed being repeated again and again was the approach of “managing illness” or “managing health conditions”. And what I realized as I was listening to the presenters is that there seems to be a general expectation that people are either going to have a long-term condition for the rest of their life or for a long time to come.
In other words, there is an UNSPOKEN ASSUMPTION that this is it – one is sentenced for life and we just have to make the best of it.
NO, NO, NO. It doesn’t have to be like this.
As I have see from clients I work with and my colleagues work with, it doesn’t have to be like this. This is an outmoded and limited view.
If we look at the situation from a different perspective and understand that:
- Symptoms are highly intelligent communication from a very intelligent body
- Symptoms contain clues to the solution
- The body is a self-healing mechanism
- Symptoms can be de-coded and the underlying cause revealed
Then, rather than seeing symptoms as a problem, we can see them as part of the solution.
Symptoms need to be understood and interpreted for what they are: messages of some underlying mental or emotional dis-ease which is manifesting as pain.
I know I keep on harping on about this, but really, if you take a different approach you’re going to get a different result.
So what is the solution?
We have to stop focusing on the condition, on the symptoms. These are just the end-result. It’s not just about “managing symptoms”. We need to look in the other direction, literally turn around 180° and look at the causal factors. Once we deal with them, the symptoms will disappear.
For more info see www.artofhealth.co.nz
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