Effects of the Pandemic on Digestion and Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS)
It is now possible to look back at some of the effects of the pandemic, beyond the obvious outer social changes, limits on activities, and number of people who became ill. A central aspect of this time has been the repeated call to heighten our awareness of everything around us! What are you doing, who are you around, how close, what’s allowed, what’s not allowed, how do others feel about this? It’s been a lot of sensing.
Looking towards the Recovery Stage of a Healing Crisis
An important part of anthroposophic medicine is thinking about why we get sick, even with the COVID19 illness. That consideration does include aspects like routes of exposure (respiratory droplets, coming into contact with contaminated surfaces) as well as knowing when someone can most easily spread an infection (once your fever has been gone for three days you are no longer considered contagious). Those aspects are real and lend quantifiably information we can study through testing and epidemiologic models. Those are the outer parts of the illness and they deal with the quantifiable parts of the illness. But there are other levels of illness which have more to do with patterns of symptoms and patterns of consciousness and try to understand the qualities of the illness. Why are we getting this illness? Those pieces can tell us something about the “being” of an illness. Pandemics are unusual because everyone around the whole world experiences the same illness process at the same time. Pandemics have more of a relationship to the experiences of a particular time than to the conditions of a certain place. They are different than working to understand the health history, illness inclinations, or biography of an individual person.
A Global Biographical Change (in which we are all shifting at the same time)
Where does change come from? Change is constant, with different people continuously making important life shifts all around us. The timing for them is usually independent and varied, so that there are always losses, moves, divorces, and births, but unless we are immediately connected to them we may not think much about them. Right now, life is different. We are all sharing a common experience of change, all around the world. It is a time of strong outer changes, which will undoubtedly fuel inner shifts that last beyond these immediate weeks and months.
Breathing in the Time of a Pandemic
I’ve been thinking a lot about the novel coronavirus and its illness, COVID-19, and the fact that it generally does not seem to be such a severe illness for children. That fact is unusual. We generally worry about children becoming more ill with a new virus because they have not encountered it before. The seemingly continuous “six-month-cold” that virtually every child gets when she begins school or daycare is really the repeated process of working through one infection after another. There is a whole repertoire of respiratory viruses they have never met before. With each illness process immunity builds, and in time, the inflammatory reaction becomes brisker and the child more resilient. As adults, we are surely exposed to those same viruses and bacteria all the time, but have gained protection, gained “experience” around working with them. We therefore do not have the same repeated symptoms. But meeting the coronavirus seems to be different, almost opposite. No one has existing protection from this virus–that is why it is labelled as “novel”—and yet, young age seems to be of physiologic benefit. There is something about the way younger children get sick that we should pay attention to.