Brain First / Body Follows
In my continuing series (Part 1, Part 2) about the ideas I needed to give up in order to live better, I am asking myself, if the body self heals for the little things, how come we don't trust that for the big things?
I realize this is a different walk for each of us and some people are at a very rudimentary level. That's why people reserve chiropractic for their back pain and don't apply the same principles of healing to other issues in their lives. That's why my most important job is to expand their comfort level about self healing. This includes helping people trust the process.
The things we were taught as children and young adults, the information handed down to us from past generations, and this includes our formal education, will contain errors that we just accepted as common sense. Everyone meant well, but I see the negativity in it.
If we are self healing, and when I say that it means we have the ability to rebuild our resilience, then why do we have so much disease?
First thought, we only have disease because we name everything that seems like a break down or a mistake. We believe the body goes rouge. I no longer follow that mind-set.
Everything the body does is appropriate for the situation. It's time we took a closer look at our situations. When the body goes into a protective situation raising blood pressure, diverting blood from the digestive tract, and switching the brain into primal memories of survival, it's not wrong.
When the survival event is over, the body shifts into a state of rebuilding. That, too, is not wrong. But we call these states diseases and feel compelled to rely on interventions that delay the rebuilding. Quite frankly, we turn to poisoning the body with drugs. These drugs switch us back to survival mode again and the body burns through so much energy. This is a repetitive cycle where many people find themselves unable to "catch up." They rarely get back into the rebuilding stage.
And the next thought is to evaluate how we repay our bodies. How do we assist the rebuilding? Do we rest or put in more overtime at our jobs? Do we seek out organic nutrients or do we interrupt the rebuilding process with a Tylenol? (Pain meds rob us of nutrients and especially glutathione which is very essential to life.) Do we recharge our brains with chiropractic care or do we ignore the nervous system keep exhausting it?
Most of our health education is a half thought with no completion. That's why I say I've stopped in the middle. The disease model doesn't recognize the genius of the nervous system and often hinders it. We don't go to the actual finish line of appropriate rebuilding. We do an about face and return to the stresses that wear us out.
Even my chiropractic college studies never ventured into how to care for the nervous system. Funny, huh? It's tragic. Occasionally we were taught about the feedback loops within the body via hormonal output, nerve signalling, etc., but not in a way that made it useful in our care of the patient. We never made it to the finish line. It's as if we stepped off the path and walked back to the starting line. Are we afraid of something?
The brain has no reference point for a new experience, so we block it out, ignore it. Some of us give up on the idea of vibrant health.
This is especially concerning when we focus on body responses as symptoms of a possible disease plunging us in the dark hole of desperation. And we tend to "manage" our brain's half attempt to heal and rebuild because stress is going to put us right back in the fight or flight response.
I'm also scratching my head at the incongruencies of my education. We know a fever is good, but we still freak out and want to turn down the response, which delays healing. We are told our bodies snuff out cancer all the time, but then sometimes it blows up into a malignant tumor? We call it anaplastic cell replication, but do we really understand it or must make assumptions that it must be bad? Why do some people forgo conventional treatment and go into spontaneous remission? Hint: understand the genius of the nervous system. And why do we ignore the phenomenon of remission? Why do we give it lip service? Why do we then call it a misdiagnosis? (I think we are not as knowledgeable as we believe.)
Older doctors will admit they saw tons of tumors on cadavers in medical school, and know these tumors were not the cause of death. How do we explain these examples? I think we stop our thinking process and just rely on old opinions.
I'm not saying we don't have emergencies and close calls with death. But our modern system of technology and drugs accelerate the ultimate exhaustion of the body.
If you recall an older blog post about the BBC documentary of an autopsy, the volunteer who donated her body had very thin walls of her heart muscle. Her lungs were also filled with fluid that the pathologist remarked was long standing and probably made her out of breath just to take a flight of stairs. It didn't matter what disease label the doctor gave her. She ran out of time replenishing her tissues.
(I can't quickly find this older post. I wonder if I wrote a blog post or mentioned it on Facebook. It's called Obesity: the Post Mortem by the BBC)
The nervous system is key to all body function. I've had to continue learning this in depth on my own. Chiropractic is an important tool for nervous system care, but your understanding of it must come first. Your brain chooses your pain. You need to properly translate your brain's actions. This requires us to go further in our understanding. Keep up your journey. Don't just stop in the middle of the road.
