Freudian Aroma Therapy
By “Holistic Mentalism” I've referred to an overstated view of the mind-body relationship that sees mental health issues as usually or always a leading cause of physical health problems and of non-recovery from physical health problems. This viewpoint exaggerates the role of mental unwellness in physical illness and minimizes the generally far more powerful physical and biological causes.
My April 12 post gives my major reasons for seeing this perspective as false. Here I’d like to point out two negative effects of Holistic Mentalism in health care practice.
1. Unprofessional mental health opinions: Alternative medicine providers with a mentalistic bias routinely advise patients who are unresponsive to their treatments that, since they didn’t respond to their treatments, they may have mental health issues. This is sometimes stated directly: “Have you considered seeing a psychologist?” More often it’s implied as in “Maybe you need to experience a health crisis...”
A parallel occurs in mainstream medicine when the tests ordered by a specialist turn up no positive findings and as a simple and direct consequence of this the physician, more often than not barely acquainted with the patient, states or implies that the patient is misreporting or exaggerating symptoms.
With the rare exception of a small minority of pain clinics that include psychological intake services, such provider-rendered psycho/spiritual opinions are based, in a word, on nothing. No psychosocial history is taken, no structured interview is given, and no personality testing is administered. There’s rarely even a significant conversation! Passing acquaintances at work have far more personal knowledge of us than providers have of clients that don't respond to their interventions and pass in and out of their offices in as little as one or two visits.
2. “Negative energy” for patients: Any human being who develops a life-limiting illness that is chronic, progressive, or characterized by slow or incomplete recovery, goes through some tough times adjusting. This includes those who enter and adapt to the challenge with average to above average mental resilience. When health care providers make negative and uninformed mental attributions of clients based on no more than the fact that their services didn't help along with conversations about weather, sports, and what’s new on American Idol, then clients are left feeling at least a bit disrespected and disheartened. At worst, the provider becomes a needless source of worry and self doubt for those clients who happen to be at a difficult juncture in mentally adapting to what has happened to them.
Disclaimer! I want to note that in over ten years of continual unsuccessful efforts to diagnose and treat a disease progressively affecting my connective tissue, muscles, skin, bones, and nerves, I did not find that most mainstream and alternative medicine providers played psychologist/spiritual counselor. However, it was a substantial minority.
My April 12 post gives my major reasons for seeing this perspective as false. Here I’d like to point out two negative effects of Holistic Mentalism in health care practice.
1. Unprofessional mental health opinions: Alternative medicine providers with a mentalistic bias routinely advise patients who are unresponsive to their treatments that, since they didn’t respond to their treatments, they may have mental health issues. This is sometimes stated directly: “Have you considered seeing a psychologist?” More often it’s implied as in “Maybe you need to experience a health crisis...”
A parallel occurs in mainstream medicine when the tests ordered by a specialist turn up no positive findings and as a simple and direct consequence of this the physician, more often than not barely acquainted with the patient, states or implies that the patient is misreporting or exaggerating symptoms.
With the rare exception of a small minority of pain clinics that include psychological intake services, such provider-rendered psycho/spiritual opinions are based, in a word, on nothing. No psychosocial history is taken, no structured interview is given, and no personality testing is administered. There’s rarely even a significant conversation! Passing acquaintances at work have far more personal knowledge of us than providers have of clients that don't respond to their interventions and pass in and out of their offices in as little as one or two visits.
2. “Negative energy” for patients: Any human being who develops a life-limiting illness that is chronic, progressive, or characterized by slow or incomplete recovery, goes through some tough times adjusting. This includes those who enter and adapt to the challenge with average to above average mental resilience. When health care providers make negative and uninformed mental attributions of clients based on no more than the fact that their services didn't help along with conversations about weather, sports, and what’s new on American Idol, then clients are left feeling at least a bit disrespected and disheartened. At worst, the provider becomes a needless source of worry and self doubt for those clients who happen to be at a difficult juncture in mentally adapting to what has happened to them.
Disclaimer! I want to note that in over ten years of continual unsuccessful efforts to diagnose and treat a disease progressively affecting my connective tissue, muscles, skin, bones, and nerves, I did not find that most mainstream and alternative medicine providers played psychologist/spiritual counselor. However, it was a substantial minority.
Posted by Paul at 7:48 PM Permalink
17 Comments:
I do not have the time to read, so I merely skimmed the topics and get the gist or drift of the discussion and am adding my perspective here.
What is dis ease..the word says it all, it is absence of ease.
What are its origins?
There are infective organisms that have plagued mankind since we existed.
They cause our bodies to dysfunction but our bodies have a great capacity to heal itself so we usually recover fully. Sometimes we do not recover fully
OK it is not only germs, there are other reasons and some of these are
trauma, physical and emotional both equally painful...
Some are dietary ...and toxins ..also trauma in my opinion...
If we do not recover fully from any assault our bodies dysfunction.
They compensate for the pathogen by doing things to escape facing the pathogen, what we call compensatory reactions to the pathogen...
Then you ask , what about chronic disease, they do not have infective organisms..well, who say they don t? It has been found in many cases there are viral particles in the cells of many chronic disease sufferers. It can be passed on genetically...this include the wierd stuff that doctors cannot diagnose because the manifestation is so masked and the pathogen so well hidden they cannot recognise it.
What does this all mean?
That dis ease can be cured if we knew how to reverse the effects of the body's reaction to the pathogen...
How about emotional etc, ...yes they do play a part in making dis ease better or worse
WHat about on a spiritual plane...I think perhaps we kind of chose what illnesses to have because we felt it would be good training for the soul...but we would not be remembering the choices so let us forget I said this..
What to do about it...whatever we can ...which is a lot.....most of it entails seeking help from people who are trained in the art of healing and have a non judgemental wholistic ( not limited wholistic ) approach to it.....and in overcoming or coming to terms with the dis ease, one enrichens one's self and increases in KNOWLEDGE ..of self ..of course in seeking help we also take full responsibility over actions to take or taken ...
I tried to follow my own intuition in selecting a therapist, and they tried to follow theirs.
Finally when I did get cured, mysteriously and instantly, I was left with the paradox that I did it, but I could not have done it without the intervention of my medically-trained practitioner, who in effect made me look in a place I could never have looked myself.
"Maybe you need to experience a health crisis" is typical of the half-formed attempts at healing intuition that I was offered by various well-meaning would-be healers.
I come to the conclusion, after two years of being well, that we have made a big mistake in embracing "civilisation". We have trusted experts and castrated our own deep primitive wisdom.
It happened a long time ago, when the missionaries came to our villages and spoke of their superior gods. We did not know that they were selling us what we already knew, putting us in their debt. This in one way was worse than the slave trade. Though I am a white man, I identify with my aboriginal ancestors and reject the manipulating sophistication of the white man's sorcerors.
White man's medicine (forgive me for calling it that, it's about cultural dominance rather than racism) demonstrates incontrovertibly its inherent flaws by its division into the two camps you have noted: the orthodox and the alternative. This is proof if proof were needed that neither of them have the right theory.
Apologies for the rant, Paul. I tried to keep it on my own blog, but it spills over, such is my fervour in this matter. I hope that nothing I say is the cause of offence.
Smooch,
The Tart
; *
"Then you ask , what about chronic disease, they do not have infective organisms..well, who say they don t? It has been found in many cases there are viral particles in the cells of many chronic disease sufferers. It can be passed on genetically..."
Just to clarify, I didn't state that chronic diseases can't be infections. Lyme disease, for example, is a chronic infection.
But I take your larger point - there's a great deal about the physical causes of disease that we don't yet understand. "Autoimmune" diseases come to mind as a whole disease classification in which whatever's going on physcially is understood pretty nebulously at best.
On Trauma: Notice that although a word like "trauma" carries both emotional and physical connotations, these two sorts of trauma, while sometimes connected, don't have to be. A soldier can return from war physically unharmed but suffer from post traumatic stress. And physical trauma can be experienced without the development of subsequent psychological problems.
YVES: I think you're right - it's telling that we've divided mainstream from alternative medicine so rigidly. Physicians have often been reluctant to study or practice alternative medicine because of professional stigma. Seems to me there should be a willingness to look at alternative approaches as seriously - and critically - as we study mainstream approaches to find out what works and what doesn't.
Guess I'd want to caution against overgeneralzing from your own experience - I don't know that you're doing that, but just in case. That is, the evidence just isn't there to support the notion that everyone who loses their health recovers if they come to substantial enough insight and wisdom. To open a newspaper, consider history, or consider people we've known personally makes it abundantly clear that the unwise are often physically healthy and the wise are by no means exempt from ill health.
IAMVISHESHUR: In brief, I'm near the 13 year mark of a disease progression affecting connective tissue, muscles, nerves, bone, and to a much lesser extent, skin. For about five years it was misdiagnosed as a rare disease I turn out not to have, and in the long run the treatments accelerated disease progression.
I was able to continue working full time until four years ago by making lots of adaptations to my office at work. By now I'm housebound and semi bedridden.
THE TART: Thanks... "Tart" is one of those words you don't hear a lot of these days. Would you also be a "wench" and "vixen" then?
Not too many years ago, it was thought that things like asthma, allergies, and migraines were due to psychological problems. Not too many years ago if you went to the doctor with certain physical symptoms you were told it was your nerves and you were given a prescription for tranquilizers.
Dr. Andrew Weil, M.D. encourages Integrative Medicine which is taking from both worlds, conventional and alternative, in order to bring about healing.
Keshi.
Do we cause our illnesses by our thoughts and emotions? Sometimes ...it is yes, sometimes it is no.
Disease has many reasons some we have control over, some we do not have control over.
An autoimmune disease, psoriasis have been found to have HPV virus particles in the diseased cells...it is very likely that the genes pass on the virus particles and cause the descendants to be predisposed to certain diseases....
it would be nice if you can contribute to the story book if it won't be a problem for you i will send you a invite...
hope you will accept it.
vishesh
KESHI, thanks. After this many years, I’ve had a lot of practice. I’m pretty sure that most people are stronger than they realize.
DR SU: But my answers were only rhetorical too, lol. Sorry about that.
Wow, that’s interesting, never heard of that – genes passing on viruses. My mom happens to have psoriasis.
VISHESHUR: It’s hard to explain – about what’s kept me going. When I really rounded a corner in coming to terms with it, it didn’t feel like the key was any sort of personal strength. It felt broader and deeper than that, so to speak.
Thank you for the invitation. It happens to be one of three things I’ve never done before that I’ve been asked to look at over the last several days, which I’m happy to do: a carnival, a kind of blog award meme, and your story book. If I end up not doing some of them it’s only because I didn’t have time. The health situation can make me prioritize in ways I wish I didn’t have to.
GAUTAMI: I’m sure some do. My impression is they haven’t been studied as well as they should be – also dietary supplements.
Acupuncture, for example, I think is one of the better studied ones and that it’s been demonstrated to help sometimes with some conditions. My mom did this for a torn rotator cuff – she’d been advised to have surgery – and ever since the acupuncture, must be seven or eight years ago now, it’s been like 95% better. And she was very skeptical going in, couldn't see how something her doctor said needed surgery could be helped by that. She's lucky her friend kept saying she should give it a try.
I saw your blog on "The Rare Disease Community".
First of all, I didn´t have any idea of how far your work has gone.Congratulations!
I too have a rare disease and it´s very good to see that people like me(I don´t know what your medical condition is,but the feelings are very similar in all those disease)can achieve great things!
And I agree with lots of things you said(on the community, I haven´t had the time to read this blog yet).And now that I see there is a book comming, I really would like to get it, and if you have any other book names(yours or from other authors) about rare disease or its emotional and spiritual consequences (and vice-versa)to an individual, please share with me.
Oh!I live in Brazil, so if your book doesn´t get to the brazilian libraries I would like you to send it throug the post office(or if there is one of those sites where I can buy it and they send me, let me know)
Tahnk you
thank you
The book will be on Amazon and I plan to link from this site to the book's Amazon page as soon as it's available. I'm pretty sure you'll be able to get it that way, I know they do international orders.
It's true that the book may have some added interest for people with disabilities/chronic illness; however, I also don't want to mislead you about the contents.
Original Faith is about spiritual development and some things that I believe hold true for pretty much any human being. Physical health/illness isn't discussed as a topic and my personal health situation is way way in the background - a "subtext" as they say, at best.
But in a way, to me, that in itself makes a statement relating to the disabled and the sick: I don't think it's necessary or desirable for us to be defined by what disables us. And I'll add that the things I write about are, truly, the things that have kept me sane in my circumstances even though Original Faith only alludes to them.
For some reason I can't get the rare disease site to load. This would be another easy way to provide your email address:
Under "About the Book" on the left side on the page where you read my post, just click "Request to be contacted" and fill out the brief form.
I´ve filled out the form and sent it.
Thank you!
Managing to hang on and then go on in that same direction after losing my health is what's kept me sane in a pretty extreme situation. So as far as I can tell, spiritual development is spiritual development, and it's a good thing both for ourselves and those around us whatever our physical health status may be.
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