Fever, Fear, and Riding a Bicycle: Working with Fever in a Different Way
This article was originally published in Lilipoh Magazine, Issue #97, Fall 2019
We lose part of our sense of control when we get sick, and no one likes that feeling. Loss of control brings fear. Illness is always a little scary because there is implicit risk of loss and incapacity and so we (appropriately) fear lasting injury. Another part of the fear we experience with illness comes not so much from injury, but from simply not quite knowing what is going to happen. Usually illness is mild, but what if it becomes life-threatening, and how are we supposed to know which illness is mild and which is dangerous? Getting professional medical advice aids in that determination, but even the medical encounter itself can bring its own set of worries—we must trust in the advice of medical providers even when we may not fully understand their decision-making process, or worse yet, not even be invited to participate in it. There are reasons to be fearful around illness on multiple levels.
The Unique Anxieties of the Nine-year Change
Do you remember when you were nine? Many people have vivid memories about particularly events or experiences at that age. Some people reflect back and become aware of how their connection with the world changed, how they began to notice new things, ask different questions. If you dig a little, a whole set of people report that this was the age when they actually got a first glimmer of their later life’s work.
What is most consistent, however, is that people remember feeling anxious. This age stands as a developmental eye of the needle, a passage, through which we first become aware of ourselves as true individuals and which naturally brings some anxiety with it.
It is vitally important to know about this threshold time of nine-years because it is now being misinterpreted. Children are too often now being diagnosed with an anxiety disorder at age nine, when we should actually view this period as an essential time of developmental transformation. We can do this if we know the context. There are good ways to help a child move successfully through this transition.
A Mission Statement for the New Year
There are a lot of messages in the world right now about the differences, the problems, the errors and imbalances in other people. The solutions given are too frequently messages of rejection, to simply get rid of what you do not like, or fear, or do not understand, and then the world will be better. That message mirrors, in many ways, a modern medical system that works to accurately diagnose problems but then focuses primarily on suppressing symptoms. In that world view the definition of “health” becomes mainly the absence of symptoms. But that approach risks putting on blinders to the deeper source of illness. Suppression or rejection takes the place of transformation. It creates a kind of false perception, one that wants us to believe that if we just get rid of all the things that are “wrong” then everything will be good. Where is the healing impulse in that? Healing is about finding and participating in your own path of transformation. We believe it is worth working for deeper change and healing.
Thinking About Pain in New Ways
Are there different kinds of pain? How does pain overlap with our normal feeling and sensory life? Do we always have to chemically block pain, or can we also learn to re-educate the feeling life so that it does not stay stuck in a pain pattern? What happens when we use conventional pain medicines that simultaneously work on both physical and emotional levels—why does this contribute to addiction? These are challenging questions, but they form the foundation for a truly whole-person approach to health and illness.
Over the last six weeks I’ve had the chance to lecture about a fourfold approach to pain to medical and nursing students at the CU medical school, to undergraduate students at Metropolitan State University, and as part of the Academy of Integrative Health and Medicine (AIHM) annual conference in San Diego, one of the largest integrative medicine conferences held each year in the U.S. Each time people were excited to learn about a framework for pain which can thoughtfully approach the full spectrum of illness from body to spirit….
How do you Define Healing? Thinking about Symptom Reduction vs. Lasting Resolution
Real change is hard work. Think about a time when you changed a habit, really shifted something, and consider all the effort that was involved. Maybe it was something proactive (like quitting smoking) or something reactive (letting go of someone who broke up with you). It required a lot of repetition to sculpt a new way of thinking or willing. Usually, whether the new habit is exercise, eating healthier food, not picking at mosquito bites, meditating, not getting stuck in anger or turning off all screen in the hour before going to bed, we do well for a while, then it falls apart and we have to start over again. Changing something in a meaningful and sustainable way takes time and it takes repetitive practice. Research by Phillippa Lally has shown that there is actually quite a broad time frame for changing a habit (18 to 254 days), with an average of 66 days, and she and others suggests a 10-week plan for really shifting a habit. That means on average that it takes more than two months to transform some part of ourselves.
One way to help reduce the chances of getting ill is to proactively give the body what it needs. Warmth, whether physical, emotional, or social, helps integrates us into a whole. That’s not just a physiologic process—helping others in our community by sharing useful information is a social and spiritual correlate to that process. Right now is a time in the world when we need to think about how we help each other, not just get stuck in fear. Consider sharing this with others in your community.
Pain is Feeling that has Become too Tightly Connected to the Body
Ever met someone who has a really weak and limp handshake, the kind where the hand flops around in your grip? It is not very satisfying. In fact, it can be a little disconcerting because you don’t feel like you have been properly able to meet or encounter the person. Where is she? What is he afraid of? If a sensation (like touch) is too small or too soft, then it is hard to register or orient to the sensation. On the other hand, if you meet someone who has an iron grip and makes you secretly worry that your fingers are being broken, that is not any better. That hurts! You think “I see you already, I acknowledge you. Let go now, please!” Too much sensation causes pain, whether it is too much grip, or too much heat from a flame, or even too much cold from an ice cube. Take any kind of sensation and exaggerate it beyond normal measure—too much touch, heat, cold, light, noise—and it can become painful. This is a concept anthroposophic medicine has been working with for nearly a century: pain is feeling that has become too tightly connected to an organ, or to a part of the body.
Cancer and Chemotherapy Support
An exciting development is that more and more people are learning about mistletoe therapy as a supportive treatment for cancer care. This is probably related to news of an ongoing study at Johns Hopkins related to tumor therapy with mistletoe preparations and the education and advocacy of Believe Big. Immuno-therapies for cancer are also becoming an important part of standard oncology practice, especially for some types of lung cancers and melanoma—you have likely seen advertisements for those very new and expensive immune treatments in television commercials or magazine ads. Mistletoe, meanwhile, as an immune supporter and stimulator, has been part of anthroposophic medicine for almost 100 years.
Spring Cleaning, for the Body, Heart, and Mind
If you listen very carefully you can hear that the earth is beginning to wake up, with bulbs pushing out of the soil and new buds on the trees. What had become brown, dry, frozen and mineralized over the winter is now enlivened and reinvigorated. Sometimes we are right there with this process and have already started clearing out the garage, or our sock drawer, and maybe even made a trip to the goodwill to give away what we don’t need. Sometimes, however, we feel more like molasses, and getting started is very, very hard. What to do? In Anthroposophic Medicine there is clear recognition that a part of our own physiology works to continually lift physical substance into a living state; and, reciprocally, that living substance eventually falls back into a gravity, mineral state. We are therefore beings of constant lifting and releasing. We feel sluggish if we aren’t lifting enough substance into living activity, and/or when what has been released back to a mineral state can’t be adequately shed or gotten rid of. So here are some suggestions for helping this process find renewed strength on the levels of body, heart and mind. Consider it a small springtime primer.
What’s the Healthiest Way to Work with Fever?
There are times when you find that the way you have been approaching things, even if it is by doing exactly what you were instructed to do, is backwards. I remember vividly a professor saying in the first week of medical school that “fifty-percent of what we are going to teach you is wrong and will be corrected over time–the problem is that now we don’t know which half.” That was a remarkable admission from a very experienced and seasoned clinician.
I believe that not so many years from now we will recognize that the way we have been working with fever is all wrong. Too often fever is treated as a bad symptom (and yes, you might temporarily feel better if your temperature is lowered), but routine fever treatment blinds us to fever’s essential role as a tool of the immune system. The importance of fever has long been appreciated within anthroposophic medicine, and now it is increasingly confirmed by good, modern, scientific data.
Below are some facts and recommendations that might help shift your thinking a bit.
A Fourfold Approach to Healing
There are a lot of different terms for describing therapeutic approaches that think differently from a conventional, Western-medicine approach. For a long time, they were considered to be “alternative” therapies—meaning something completely different and separate from usual medical practice. Then the term “complementary” therapies became popular—suggesting something still different from usual practice, but which could perhaps be used alongside standard treatment and enrich it. In the last few years a newer term, “integrative medicine” has come to the fore with the understanding that we need, more and more, to weave different therapeutic perspectives and healing streams together. This change in language reflects our evolving understanding, and broadening recognition that wisdom comes in many different forms.
Skin: What a Marvelous Sense Organ
You can read in many different places that our skin is the largest organ of our body. Some parts of our skin we know quite well, such as the skin of our face. We identify with that skin a lot. Other parts of our skin we may hardly notice, like the skin on our elbows, lower back, or maybe the tops of our feet. Our skin has social roles; it defines certain aspects of our social identity. We usually want it to look good and so as a society we spend a lot of time and money on things that smooth and nourish the skin with things like facials, chemical peels, sliced cucumbers and botox injections. Our skin simultaneously leaves us open to superficial judgements and prejudices, related to the color and pigment of the skin as well as the number of wrinkles it holds. Our skin protects us from the outside world with its barrier function. And yet it allows us to feel all barriers melt away, like the comfort of skin to skin contact.
Pain, Sleep, Seizures: Windows to Healthy, and Imbalanced, Wakefulness
The beginning of August offered a powerful experience for me when a wide-ranging group of anthroposophic doctors, nurses and therapists gathered for a conference about “Transforming Chronic Pain–a Spiritual Task for Our Time.” The meeting included very inspiring presentations from several doctors in Europe, especially one with deep experience in palliative care and another with very poor and challenged patients in central London. After coming back to practice in Denver, I’ve been struck by the many different variations of pain and how it represents an imbalance, or a kind of distortion, of normal wakeful consciousness and of waking and sleeping processes. This has happened to me before: I go to a meeting and learn about special topic, then I come back and find a whole group of people who are struggling with just that kind of illness or injury and need this knowledge.
Why Trying Harder Doesn’t Make Anxiety Better
In many areas of life if you try harder, focus more, consciously push further, then performance and success improve. It is tempting to extend that logic to all areas of life, but medically that principle does not always work. In truth, only specific portions of our body’s activities are open to conscious guidance, while many other realms function below the level of daily awareness. They are “sleeping” functions. What are these? One, quite literally, is sleep; but other related “sleeping” processes include recuperation, regeneration, digestion, and metabolism. These don’t necessarily get better by trying harder. Just ask yourself: “When I am having trouble sleeping, does trying harder to fall asleep make it better?” or “If I have a stomach ache, does concentrating on the pain make it go away faster?” The answer is usually no.
Stomach Flu, Probiotics and Digesting the World
Here are three paragraphs about supporting and strengthening your digestion:
When you have an acute gastroenteritis (more commonly know as the stomach “flu”), a simple, but very helpful trick:
If you get a stomach virus—the kind that quickly goes around schools and workplaces and causes multiple episodes of vomiting—it is very easy to get dehydrated. This makes you incredibly thirsty, so then once you have a break in the vomiting it feels good to gulp down a bunch of liquid. The trouble is that usually the stomach is swollen and irritated because of the virus, and when you gulp a bunch of water it stretches the swollen stomach, which makes you vomit again. This can become a vicious cycle–vomit, gulp, vomit, repeat. So here’s a recommendation:
Building Strength for the Future, from present adversity
Health and illness follows certain foundational laws of cause and effect. Falling from some height (like a tree) risks breaking a bone; smoking increases rates of cancer. Those are fairly straight forward links that are easy to understand. We could say, the horse is clearly pulling the cart.
But there are other situations where two results seem to come parallel to each other, like the “horse” is walking just in front of, or just behind the “cart.” But there are other situations where two results seem to come parallel to each other, like the “horse” is walking just in front of, or just behind the “cart.” For example, it has been demonstrated that having heart disease puts you at higher risk of depression, and that having depression puts you at higher risk of heart disease. Also, that depression puts you at higher risk of developing diabetes, and diabetes puts you at higher risk of depression. Hmmm—which is now the proverbial horse and which is now the cart?
What is the Best Diet (for cancer)?
This comes up as an important question when people are trying to heal a tumor. Cancer is an illness that seems to magnify the importance of many of the questions and concerns that people have all of the time. It occasions extra consciousness, for we want to really be aware of what we are doing and the possible consequences. We are forced to reconsider many of the things we have previously done out of habit or convenience, and whether we should continue them or make a change. In terms of diet and cancer it is very clear that we need to choose things that support good vitality and that nourish us, and that we need to avoid things that are burdensome and depleting. Here is a brief list of several of the common themes that emerge in discussions about diet and cancer, with some introductory insights:
The Therapeutic Value of “Maintenance” as a Life Process
We all need to devote energy to “maintenance.” No, this does not refer to some kind of human 30,000-mile check, like what you might do for your car (although healthcare would be much simpler if it only required a new water pump or brake pads at certain intervals). No, we are referring to a different kind of maintenance. What is being recommended is more along the lines of taking the time to really work through what has been taken in, so that it can fully become one’s own.
The Waterfall of Stress and High Blood Pressure
The holidays are behind us and now it is back to work, back to regular life. And for a lot of people that means diving back into stress (of course the holidays are not necessarily free from busy schedules or lots of unusual demands, either!). Stress is, however, a natural part of life, and there are aspects of our stress response that are very healthy, even life-saving in an emergency. At the same time continued chronic stress can make us really sick. There is a kind of “waterfall” effect that relates acute stress and physical illness. Here is one perspective that has proven to be helpful in talking to many different people about stress.
External Treatments using Kitchen Ingredients
Here are three simple ways to try to keep an illness process moving! And they only involve ingredients that you probably have in your kitchen cabinets or pantry. Sometimes our body just needs a little extra help so that a process doesn’t get stuck.
Chamomile steam for a badly congested nose and sinuses, or for an ear that won’t “pop” after air travel:
Boil several cups of water, and then pour them into a broad bowl. Add several teaspoons of chamomile tea (loose tea works a little better, or break open the tea bags if all you have is packaged tea). Stir in well and then with a towel or sheet make a little tent over your head and breathe in the chamomile steam. It can get hot and humid, so be sure to take breathes of cool air so that you don’t become light-headed and fall over! You can often even find chamomile teabags in a hotel, which is handy if your ear won’t pop after you have traveled far away from home.
Don’t Wash your Dishes so Well
What can you do when something bothers your digestion? This is an important question, as there are sure a lot of people with food allergies and sensitivities right now. One logical, initial step is to work to identify what it is that is bothering you (food diaries and allergy elimination diets work well for this). Then, when you have confirmed that something is a problem you should make sure that we are not eating it in excess. Sometimes it is even necessary to eliminate it from your diet completely. This gets to be a little bit of a complicated issue because, more and more, as we eliminate certain foods from the diet (like gluten) other foods tend to take a larger part of what we take in (like corn). Blood testing for antibodies, skin testing for reactions, and muscle testing are all important tools too. But then what do you do with the information? When we take something out of our diet, does that mean we can never eat it again?