Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom (142 page)

—Abraham, via Esther Hicks

The nature of most people who go into health care is they are wonderful
human beings who want to help other human beings.

—Susan Frampton, Ph.D.

WHY YOU MUST TAKE RESPONSIBILITY
FOR YOUR HEALTH CARE

O
ne of the most powerful tools for flourishing and healing is knowing how to get the right kind of support at the right time. To do that, you must stand up for yourself and for what you know and feel— and you must absolutely believe that you have the ability to attract what you need as well as be willing to receive it. You must also assume responsibility for your end of the health care partnership. Your health care provider has a body of knowledge. What you have is knowledge of your body. Both are necessary. But right now, your knowledge of your body and your willingness to do what it takes to truly flourish no matter what your current state of health is more crucial than ever. We can no longer afford to assume a childlike role and simply turn our health over to the current mainstream medical system without our own very active participation.

David Riley, M.D., the editor-in-chief of
Alternative Therapies in Health
and Medicine,
summarizes this nicely in his recent editorial on health care reform:

To comprehend the insanity of our current situation, consider this: if we were able to demonstrate that a lifestyle change could prevent most cardiovascular disease in this country, we would bankrupt most if not all the hospitals in the United States and cause a massive gridlock in the healthcare industry. Providing health is not the goal of our current system; managing disease is the name of the game. Hospitals are built around very expensive (and reimbursable) treatments, often of cardiovascular disease with stents and bypass surgery, often without evidence that they are indicated in most of the patients who receive these services.”
¹

Bottom line: You won’t find health in the conventional medical system. A ten-year survey of government statistics concluded that iatrogenic illness (e.g., adverse drug reactions, poor surgical outcomes, etc., that are caused uninten tionally by the actions of health care providers) is the leading cause of death in the United States and that adverse reactions to prescription drugs account for more than 300,000 deaths per year.
²
And according to a November 1999 report published by the Institute of Medicine, anywhere between 44,000 and 98,000 people die per year from mistakes made in hospitals.
³
Most doctors already know this. This is why so many of us don’t use mainstream medicine much. I also don’t expect my health insurance to cover much of anything related to my health—and I have good insurance. I figure that my health insurance is designed to take care of a major medical emergency such as a car accident. That’s it. My actual health care consists, first and foremost, of knowing that my health comes from deep within and that my thoughts and emotions are hands down the most powerful forces for flourishing that are available to me. I pay out of pocket for massage, vitamins and minerals, and Pilates and yoga classes. My “primary care provider” is my acupuncturist! I also keep a journal, have a solid social support network, read a lot of books, and keep learning new things. I know that I can attract the resources I need when I need them (some of which have indeed been in mainstream hospitals, such as when I had my fibroid removed and when I had my breast abscess). When you are truly ready to assume responsibility for your health, you, too, will find the resources you need.

Choosing the Right Healers for You

To flourish, you must own your power to seek out doctors, other health care practitioners, and environments that actually increase health. You should begin by finding a health care provider whom you trust and believe in. And the health care you select must be based on your needs and values. This is as much a part of your health and healing as any mode of treatment you might choose. (I hope that in the not-too-distant future this kind of health care will be covered by insurance, or at least we’ll have a plan in which individuals like me could use our health insurance money to pay for health-enhancing modalities.)

One of the most common questions I’m asked is “Is there a doctor like you in New York?” or California, or elsewhere. Many patients value an approach that honors their inner wisdom, acknowledges the message an illness holds, and combines Western medicine with other modalities. A new “third line” of health care providers who are open to this approach is rapidly emerging. Everywhere I go, I meet doctors and medical students who are interested in and actively practicing what is now known as complementary or integrative medicine: the coming together of the best of both—conventional (allopathic) medicine and so-called alternative medicine, which acknowledges the body as an energy system. Many other health care practitioners trained in different disci plines also share this approach. There are scores of deeply committed, caring physicians practicing in the United States and around the world who don’t necessarily call themselves holistic. In fact, the doctor you’re working with now may well be open to your ideas about your illness and may be willing to follow along with your new path—once you discuss what you want.

Here are some steps to help you find the right health care practitioner for you.

1.
Get referrals.
When seeking a specialist or other type of health care provider, there are two kinds of referrals to consider: those from satisfied patients (or clients) and those from doctors and other medical personnel. However, if a health care provider works with alternative medicine modalities, he or she might or might not work within the mainstream medical com munity. For this reason, your family physician may not know of a good acupuncturist or massage therapist. But that does not mean that there aren’t any. Often the best health care providers are found through word of mouth—women talking to other women. So ask your friends whom they see and why. And when it comes to doctors in your area, see if you can find a nurse who has worked with the local doctors at your favorite hospital to give you a recommendation.

If you’re looking for an alternative health care practitioner, a good place to start other than friends is your local health food store. Many times the staff at these places knows who is available in your area. They may also have a bulletin of listings available. And more and more, alternative practitioners are teaching classes at Y’s, high schools, colleges, and adult education programs around the country. Taking a yoga, mas sage, tai chi, or other class is a very good way to find out who is doing what in your area, because those interested in complementary medicine tend to know one another. Of course, the Web has revolutionized networking to the point where you need only type in the word “acupuncturist” to find someone in your area. Still, the best referrals are from someone who knows the practitioner personally.

2.
Look at credentials.
Board certification is evidence that a doctor has passed a number of qualifying exams that measure competence to prac tice in his or her chosen field. Having been through the process, I can at test to the rigor involved. Of course you’ll want to know a specialist’s training—and most good ones have this information readily available in their practice brochures. Credentialing varies widely in the alternative health care field and in some cases is not yet in place, though this is changing rapidly.

The American Holistic Medical Association (AHMA) has a specialty board to certify holistically trained physicians using the same rigorous criteria that other specialties have employed. (For more information, visit the AHMA’s website at
www.holisticmedicine.org
.) The Institute for Functional Medicine also has a tab on its website (
www.functionalmedicine.org
) to help you find a functional medicine practitioner in your area. Functional medicine is not a specialty or a separate discipline but rather an approach to medicine that focuses on treating the whole person instead of a set of symptoms and on prevention instead of diseases. In addition, Planetree, a nonprofit organization that works with medical practices that want to improve their patients’ experiences by focusing on patient-centered care, lists more than 125 health care organizations that are members on its website (
www.planetree.org
).

3.
Ask yourself whether the person feels like a good fit for you.
A health care provider can have all the credentials in the world and still be the wrong person for you. So, having checked out someone’s credentials with your intellect, you’ll ultimately have to trust your heart and your gut before you let that person care for you or oper ate on you, no matter how highly he or she has been recommended. The best health care providers are those who are aware of how powerful their words are. The cloak of the shaman rests on their shoulders—whether they realize it or not. Their words have the power to heal or to destroy, because of the powerful impact of beliefs on the body, especially in a person who is vulnerable and afraid. Professionals’ words must be truthful and at the same time chosen to support healing.

When my daughter needed oral surgery, I knew before I met him that the oral surgeon had impeccable credentials. But I was not willing to allow him to do anything to my daughter until I had had a chance to experience his interpersonal skills and what I’ve come to call his “healer quotient.” (See next point.) If either of those elements hadn’t been there, I would have left the office—and so should you.

4.
Assess the person’s “healer quotient.”
Does your health care provider feel like a healer? Do you leave the office feeling reassured and uplifted? Do you feel like you’re in good hands? A healer knows how to assist you in eliciting your own inner guidance and will not try to talk you out of your gut feeling about a drug or a procedure that doesn’t feel right to you.

Over my many years in medicine, I’ve found that true healers work everywhere, regardless of the tools they use. (This can include the custodial staff at the hospital, by the way!) Though I already knew this, the lesson was brought home to me in a big way when my then-husband and I went to a gifted intuitive in Vermont for a reading. This woman told my husband that he had a great deal of healing energy in his hands and asked him whether or not he did any healing work with them. He said that he didn’t, and she suggested to him that he might consider looking into massage or chiropractic. Later, as we were driving home and he was thinking about the reading, he said to me, “Do you suppose that orthopedic surgery counts as doing healing work with my hands?” Then we both laughed, because my husband—as well as much of our culture—has assumed that “healing” is not part of mainstream med icine. He assumed that because he’s a pretty mainstream orthopedic surgeon and quite skeptical of much of alternative medicine that he must not be a healer—that healers are those people who use herbs and massage. How wrong he was. My heart is continually warmed by the caring, compassion, and true healing that I see happening every day, regardless of the setting.

On the other hand, when your health care provider is aloof, trying to be objective—giving only facts—only the intellect of the patient gets taken care of, and that is not enough. I once had a patient with breast cancer who told her doctor, “Coping with the cancer is no problem, but recovering from my visits with you takes me about two weeks.” She was referring to his detached manner and her perception that he didn’t care. She didn’t expect a miracle, but she longed for some reassurance and an occasional touch. After she conveyed this to him, their relation ship improved. Such improvement often happens when you let your doctor or other health care provider know what you need.

Another of my patients who came in for a checkup complained about one of her other doctors: “She doesn’t think she can take care of me without filling the pages with all these little numbers,” she said. “I know she’s a good technician, but I don’t feel heard.”

One of my friends told me that while her doctor was looking at her ovaries via a sonogram during a failed cycle of IVF, he remarked, “What do you have growing in there? Grass?” She complained about this to the head of the hospital’s ob-gyn department. His response? “Oh, Brenda, quit being so sensitive. Your doctor felt bad and was trying to make light of it.” There’s not much “light” about a failed IVF cycle that just cost you $10,000!

I continue to hear too many stories like these because our health care system is itself sick. Unfortunately, fixing a patient through the manipulation of blood chemistry or the repair of broken bones is the main focus of allopathic health education. This has been what medical students get graded on—not how well they communicate with the patient or how well their very presence elicits the placebo effect. Though this is changing in medical schools today, most doctors now in practice were taught the skills of curing, not caring. But we each need to realize that compassion is the key, now more than ever. We, as a society, need to open our hearts to one another. The heart and the intellect need to work in partnership in all of us.

T
HE
P
OWER OF
P
LACEBO

As the late Norman Cousins wrote, “The doctor knows that it is the prescription slip itself, even more than what is written on it, that is often the vital ingredient for enabling a patient to get rid of whatever is ailing him. Drugs are not always necessary. Belief in recovery always is. And so the doctor may prescribe a placebo in cases where reassurance for the patient is far more useful than a famous-name pill three times per day.”
⁴
The placebo effect is
physical
.
⁵
A very striking example of this (and there are many) was in a study reported in the
New England Journal of Medicine
in 2002 of people with severe knee pain. Bruce Moseley, M.D., an orthopedic surgeon from Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, wanted to know just what part of his surgery was the most effective. He divided the study patients into three groups. One group had arthroscopic surgery in which the cartilage was shaved. Another group had the knee flushed out to remove material thought to cause inflammation. The third group was put to sleep and the standard incisions were made in their knees, but no surgery was done. The results were amazing. The first two groups, who actually received surgery, improved. But the truly shocking finding was that the third group—who had no surgery— improved just as much. (I’ve seen this same thing hap pen with intractable pelvic pain and laparoscopy. The very act of doing something—along with the patients’ belief in the procedure—often ef fected a cure even though I didn’t do much to the pelvis!)
⁶
The placebo effect in these situations is not “nothing.” It is a powerful anti-inflammatory and hormone-balancing effect most likely resulting from the high levels of nitric oxide produced by the lining of the blood vessels in situations in which there is hope and positive expectation. Going to a health care provider who inspires hope is therefore a crucial part of your health care.