How to REVERSE Chronic Illness - Dr. Anderson

We need to remember that we are what generates our own empowerment, and we need to be doing things proactively to find help. And we also need to be reminding ourselves and reminding our brain that we are working towards becoming better and more healthy. Hey, it's Dr. A. Welcome to my YouTube channel. And on here we talk about all things integrative and naturopathic medicine and chronic illness. Today we want to get into a discussion around strategies I've seen over time that are at their base helpful with people dealing with chronic illness. Chronic illness is more common than is often talked about in medicine. Chronic illness is much more broadly affecting of you and your quality of life and your loved ones than is often admitted in medicine the way it's practiced nowadays. And so this is a beginning discussion. This is sort of at the very base of everything. I want to talk about things that I've seen over the last 3 decades that make a difference in chronically ill patients. So one of the things that I see that is a problem sometimes for both the practitioner and the patient is actually being patient. It is very hard when you don't feel well to have patience with a process that may take time. It's also often frustrating on the practitioner end because they would like you to get better faster than you maybe have the physical capability to improve. So patience is important on both sides of the equation, but something that's really important that I want to make sure you get is patience doesn't doesn't mean that you sit around and wait and don't do anything, or you put up with, say, a therapeutic intervention that's not going anywhere. Patience is more for the big picture. It takes longer for even very perfectly timed, appropriate treatments to work when you're chronically ill. And sometimes it's more like an up and down of a roller coaster, especially in the beginning, where you'll make some gains and then you may lose some ground and make some more gains and lose some ground. That is the normal process of chronic illness. So you having patience with it over time. But like I say, patience doesn't mean putting up with not going anywhere in your treatment. This is where feedback between you, the patient, and whoever your practitioner or practitioners are becomes very important. Because as an example, if a patient comes in and we've assessed that these are the places we want to start, and I tell them, look, we're going to be a little gentle in the beginning, but if your body has an opening and your body tells us that it would like more effort, we'll go that way. If this very gentle approach is too much, we'll back off. And we have to wait for your body to So the next step is being at least patient enough to see what your body says about this treatment or treatments we started. But if you come back for your follow-up in 1, 2, 3, 4 weeks, and then you are not reacting much at all, it's helping a little bit, then our job is to say, well, we're going the right direction, but at a low amplitude. Let's increase the effort towards that end. On the other hand, if you come in and you say, look, it's doing something, but it's too much, it's too much for me, here's my symptoms, then we're going to take a step back and say we need to adjust that treatment down. Downward or balance it out with some other treatment. So patience is not not doing something, but it's understanding these things take time when you're chronically ill. The next thing is building as much of a good team as you can. So that might be things that you are doing on your own to research therapies and other things. You, you have a hand in everything because it's your body, so you certainly want to be informed, etc. And depending on the type of chronic illness you have and how good or bad that is progressing, you are probably going to need more than one practitioner involved. In many cases, you may have a standard primary care healthcare practitioner who's taking care of more of your, you know, general middle-of-the-road type of medical needs. And then you may have one or two integrative practitioners who do chronic illness care, and they may have different specialty areas. So for example, you might get a physician or other practitioner who's like myself, where we deal with the spectrum of chronic illness, and we may start you on various amounts of therapies with whatever underlying issues you have. But then we might want to involve another type of specialty such as acupuncture and oriental medicine, or maybe a physical medicine practitioner, or any number of other types of practitioners that we don't have specialty in and we don't offer because we know that sometimes you need more approaches to approach a chronically ill person's case than just the ones that you have. So building a team's important and the team is different for each person. So some people only need one person kind of helping as maybe the captain of the ship Other people need a lot of different angles of approach, and that's something that you work out with your providers as you move forward. So building the team. The next thing is looking at what I call the things that stick up above the horizon in the beginning. So these would be things that are triggering your system, maybe keeping you chronically ill, or they're, you could call it holes in the bucket where the energy is running out and you don't have a way to plug them up and get your energy back into the system. Now, one of the things is that the triggers are often not static, meaning they're not the same all the time throughout your course of treatment. Sometimes that happens, but rarely. So what we have to look at, as I say, is things sticking up above the horizon. So if, for example, you have primary problems with fatigue and brain fog and, you know, other things in that neighborhood, we might look at underlying areas that may feed into fatiguing states and brain fog, et cetera. And we may need to start and say, is there anything that is triggering your system so it can't get out of the fatigue cycle or It can't get out of the chronic inflammatory cycle, etc. So having a good whole body approach, looking at it holistically, and then going after the things that we think are primary is really helpful in the beginning because we want to clear that junk out of the way so that then your case and your healing becomes more obvious as we move forward. The next thing, and this is just more of an observation over three decades of looking backwards at treating people with chronic illness, three areas of your health that you need to. Approach and interact with over time are so critical as foundational pillars that we have come to look at these as the basis upon which all the other treatments are done. Now, this doesn't mean that they have to be perfect in the beginning, but it means that over time, these things need to be strengthened so that other treatments you do are more effective. And indeed, these 3 areas I've seen over and over be very, very important. And those 3 areas are 3 memorable words. So food, muscle, and brain. And briefly, what we mean by that is food is of course the food you eat. So there's the fuel aspect that might be, you know, macros and micronutrients, but there's also the timing of your eating. You might start to do some time-restricted eating, which can be very easy to work your way into with appropriate practitioner, maybe other things about the timing of eating, but also food is a major way for toxins and toxicants to come into our body. And we want to minimize those when we have any, you know, any illness or just staying out of illness, less toxins are better. So we want to look at the cleanliness of the food. Also the amount of food. We don't want too little and we don't want too much. We want to feed the body appropriately. So food becomes important. And again, this is a long game. This is over time. We want to build that up and make it better. Muscle has to do with the fact that even when you are very deconditioned and tired and out of shape, if you can get your core muscles in your body, especially your leg muscles, the bigger muscles in your body to working, They start to send signals out that are actually going to be beneficial to your immune function and other organ functions to start you towards healing. The counterbalance of muscle activity is fat activity, and if we have a lot of fat activity, that's usually driven by insulin excess, and that's going to lead to a lot of inflammatory chemistry that opposes the healing. So the important part with this, again, it's the long game, and you don't have to become a marathon runner or something. You just have to do a little bit more every week or every month with your physical whole body so that the muscles are engaged and working, and you do it to the level that is appropriate for you. We don't want you to overtrain or do other things and hurt yourself. So again, you work with your practitioner on that, but muscle becomes medicine in that sense. And then brain is really a two-way street with your brain, and that is we have the obvious things that go into the brain. We have to be careful about negative inputs and things that might make us, you know, depressed or run down, etc. You can think of You know, just news. News in the modern world is not the happiest thing. You have to be very careful about those inputs, but that could also be our friends. Some friends are very uplifting. Some friends are not so uplifting, and we may have to balance out how we interact with people. So that's one direction. The other direction though is the internal direction to your brain. That's what we tell ourselves. And when we don't feel good and when we're chronically ill, it's very easy for us to step back and say, you know what, I'm in pain chronically, I'm tired chronically, et cetera. I choose not to be happy about that. And that's totally your choice. choice and fine. But then that can lead to levels of depression or anxiety or sleep disturbance. And so we have to be really careful about what we're telling ourselves. And it's not that we have to be Pollyanna about the fact that we're chronically ill because we're chronically ill, we don't feel good. But it's that we need to remember that we are what generates our own empowerment and we need to be doing things proactively to find help. And we also need to be reminding ourselves and reminding our brain that we are working towards becoming better and more healthy. And then once you have these basic things working, what I've seen over time is that the other efforts, which often are what cost you money, other therapies and things that you put in on top, actually work better when you have these basic things being attended to. Like I say, it's not the short game you're worried about. It's the long game with these things. So having some patience with the process, but also being forward and being assertive with your practitioners so they know what's happening and what's not happening. Building the kind of team you need. You might need to build a team individually, or you might have a great practitioner who does that with you. But somehow getting a team of whatever practitioners you need, having them assess and work on the things that are suppressing your system the most, working on the foundational things of food, muscle, and brain, and then continually adding things in to help clear the junk out and feed your body in a way, whether it's biochemically or mentally and emotionally or in any other way to help you improve and become less suppressed and less chronically ill. It's a very long process sometimes, but it can be done. I'm Dr. A. Thank you for listening to the channel. We're going to put up a couple of other videos here you can take a look at. Love it if you like, share, subscribe, and join our YouTube group. Thank you very much.