Strengthening our Social “Muscles”
People have been asking if I am seeing people with COVID symptoms in the medical office and the answer is: “Not regularly.” That may well change as counts are going up in many places, but in general it is not the coronavirus itself that has needed a lot of medical attention, but all of the challenges around it. It is hard to think of a recent medical visit that has not been strongly influenced by living in this time of COVID.
What are we learning from living in this time? Well, if we become sick with COVID, then our immune system will be challenged to decide: what is me and what is not me? Viruses infect our cells. They need our cells to replicate and that process continues until we develop enough “knowledge” to recognize what does not belong to us (the virus) and that it should be removed. We have to burrow deep into ourselves to fight a viral infection. Once that process is completed we will have established new immunity against that process. In that particular area, with that particular virus, we now know where to draw the line of “self” and “not-self.” Antibody resistance means we have worked through a particular pathway of encounter, and it will be easier to mark the line of self/not-self if we need to go that same way in the future.
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.
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.
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 Integrated Care Package
There are currently places in the world where large hospitals, medical clinics and retreat centers are able to offer multi-disciplinary anthroposophic care (Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden), but the current medical model and insurance programs in the U.S. do not make this possible. This is a challenging moral quandary, as participation in insurance plans immediately creates oversight and rigid expectations around the kind of medical care that is being provided. Services must meet the “standard of care,” or practitioners face severe scrutiny, as well as potential punitive limits on medical practice and monetary fines. For these reasons we continue to make the decision that it is better to remain outside of the insurance system, recognizing that it is limiting access but it also allows us to provide a fully individualized, holistic approach to the healing process.
We would like to try to take one step towards healing that conflict.
Inflammation as Transformation: How to Get Unstuck? Part 2
One of the truest definitions of health that continues to prove itself over and over again is that when we get sick, our immune system can work thoroughly and efficiently so that the illness comes to a full resolution. In other words, being healthy does not mean that we never get sick (which would assume that at baseline we have some kind of perfection of physiology, and illness is always a deviation from it). That makes for a clean model, but is a very static view. We are more dynamic beings than that. At important times an illness process can actually open the door for us to transform and rebalance. Small children are particularly good at this. When they get stressed or worn down, they quickly show the world that they don't feel well (adults are not quite so honest, and we can hold out a lot longer with supports like caffeine, deadlines, duty, and yes, the fear of finally letting down…). But sick children do what their bodies need: they slow down, they lose their appetite, get a fever, whine and cling, and discharge what they don't need (with a drippy nose, loose stools, a red rash, etc). That process needs a few days, but usually children swiftly turn the corner and build back to a good appetite and full activity–often better balanced than they were before. So an essential part of health is that our body has the flexibility to loosen and shift and change to a new state as needed.
Healing from the Inside, Out
Why do you go and see the doctor? Usually it is to get something—a prescription, a lab test, a diagnosis, an operation. Occasionally it is just for reassurance, but usually it is because we feel that we need something. And that is true a lot of the time. We can't do it all by ourselves. But receiving external treatments does not solve every situation, and it can even make us assume that our bodies, or our diet, or our genes are inherently broken and lacking something. That takes away a lot of our power to heal. In fact, today's pharmaceutical drug development looks to find conditions that require a medication that you will need to take for the rest of your life. That's good business, but it is not good healing. The truth is that there are many conditions that require us to make a shift and heal from the inside, out.