There’s No Lab Test for Feeling Safe

Do you feel like sometimes your body's just stuck and you're not healing? You've been to all the specialists, all the doctors, got the right diagnoses, the right medications, but something's not right. Your body's stuck. Or maybe you've seen all the integrative functional people, they've done their fancy testing and you're like 50% there. You know, there's something you're missing, but it hasn't been gotten to. I wanna talk next in the series about, you know, why are you, why are you stuck? Why is your body not healing? You know, why aren't you getting better? And talk about ideas that'll help you educate you about what you might be missing and overlooking, or your providers to help you down this journey. And one thing I want to talk about is the idea of the hierarchy of healing. It's something that naturopaths have been talking about, you know, for over 100 years now. It's in their textbooks, and it's just now kind of creeping into the functional medicine world. When I did my training, we didn't really talk about hierarchy of healing. It's only recently I've heard it being talked about by naturopaths. And naturopathic doctors, and then all of a sudden you're like, oh, it's in their textbook. The textbook I've got actually sitting over there. Maybe it's—I got my textbook of naturopathic medicine somewhere around here, and it's in there. And it's like, okay, well, what is this triangle of healing? The triangle of healing kind of sort of is the naturopathic world's version of kind of like I call my triangle of health. It revolves around setting the table for your body to self-heal and self-repair. So what do I mean? First, good environment, healing environment. You need to feel safe. You need to have, you know, being outside in the grass, sun, things that help calm your nervous system, having a sense of purpose and meaning. All these like mind-body things that conventional medicine overlooks because it's not, you know, traditional medicine, but ultimately set up your nervous system, your spiritual system, your soul, whatever terminology you want to use, that thing that the true self, your true you, not just— you're more than your body. You know, I tell people all the time, you know, my father-in-law had his liver transplanted. You know, he he's still who he is. You know, people get organ transplants; they still are who they are. You might have an injury; you can't lose your legs. You are still you, and there's that part of you that's separate from your body, which is where you interact with the world. If that part of you is not functioning appropriately, is dysregulated, all of a sudden the body will get sick and stay sick. And the books have been written about this. You know, the body keeps a score. The idea that you need to be in a healing environment, a healing place. This is where you get some of the stuff about you know staying away from people with trauma, staying with you know avoiding. The chaos. You know, troubles will find you in life. Don't— you don't need to go looking for them. You don't need to— you know, they will find you. But having a healing environment, first thing. The second thing is, you know, looking to nature. What does nature do? Nature has an order. You know, certain foods grow up in the spring, certain foods grow in the summer, some foods in the fall. It's interesting how, like, in the fall, for example, mushrooms start popping up, which are higher in these sugars that actually help activate your Innate immune system, natural killer cells. They actually prepare your immune system for the winter when people get sick, right? And so, it's interesting how you go through the winter, you eat more protein, more fat because you need those things to keep you warm traditionally. And then, what happens in the spring? Microgreens, fresh greens pop up. Those actually help your body detoxify from what you ate over all the winter. And then, obviously, historically toward the end of the winter and spiritual practices, there are times of fasting. Yeah. Voluntarily or of necessity, but there's actually certain types of detoxification your body does at that seasonal time that actually preps you for the next season. So respecting your body, respecting the environment sounds kind of weird, sounds kind of woo woo. But you know, in the in the integrative functional medicine world, with you know the microbiome and polyphenols and all these new things with cell danger response and mitochondrial efficiency, we're realizing there is a cycle, there is a synchronicity, there is a connectivity. With the powerhouse of your cells, mitochondria, and literally in your environment. And so respecting that is a huge part of this healing triangle. And then putting good things in your body, real food, real water, clean water. It's not so much the detoxification stuff we'll talk about in functional medicine, but it's the idea that you need real healthy stuff in your body if you really want to heal. And those are like the foundational things in the healing hierarchy. You know, giving your body what it needs. Clean, giving your body what it wants. And then like the final part of that, and this is kind of saying the same thing but in a different fashion, like the things that give your life value. And so that's family, that's a job, that's a vocation, that's art, that's whatever you do that gives you, you know, what is your source of purpose and meaning in this life? It's really interesting. There's a saying, and I'll probably get this a little wrong, but the saying is, you know, if you have the appropriate or correct why, you can withstand almost any what. And the idea is that, you know, Man's Search for Meaning, Dr. Frankl, he was a psychiatrist in World War II that survived a concentration camp. And one of the things he documented is people surviving the most horrific situations, not based on race, creed, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, even if the guards liked them or didn't like them, didn't determine if you survived a concentration camp. Yeah. Did you have a reason to live? And so, when you talk about the healing hierarchy or the tri— whatever you want to call it from whatever path you're coming from, it's something that's not really talked about. They're starting to talk about the sense of meaning, purpose, and value and this biopsychosocial method of model of healing in medicine. We got to give it fancy terms. But about the idea that there needs to be more to your healing, more to your journey than just, I want to get better so I can make more money or You can do, you know, travel the world, which is cool. But do you have a source of meaning purpose? All these things fall into this idea of a healing environment, a healing hierarchy, a triangle of healing, whatever you want to call it. I call it triangle health and I try to keep it simplified when I talk about it. But it's the idea of like respecting that in your healing journey. And so I've taken 2 episodes to talk about this concept just because it's really super important to understand, because if you're stuck, you're stuck for a reason. You know, I've seen 80-year-old up actually 70, 80-year-olds have their chronic fatigue and fiber go away when we treat their Lyme disease. I've had young patients with inflammatory bowel disease have their testing normalized when we treat their gut infections and mold and other other things. And so I've seen I've seen people I've seen patients after chemotherapy for their cancer have their neuropathy go away, have their chronic fatigue go away, have some of their early heart stuff from the Adriamycin and cytotoxins normalize, and so these concepts we talk about that sound very basic that most people are probably rolling their eyes at right now. I use these concepts with very sick, very significant patients, and so I want us to realize that as we move forward and talk about you know why why are you still why are you still sick? Why are you stuck? Why are you not getting better? Start the basics and then go off from there. So hopefully this information was helpful, and we'll keep on going forward talking about these things. Why are you stuck? Why is your body not getting better? And what you can do about it. Because ultimately, information without an action or follow-through is just education. And we want to make things that are available, digestible, and usable to all of you out there. Take care. We'll talk to you soon.