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.
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?
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.