Modern medicine is absolutely brilliant at saving your life when you’ve got a gross anatomical problem, like injury, poisoning, or malnutrition.
Or in the healing phase and especially the healing crisis after you resolve a major biological conflict.
But conventional and even most alternative treatment regimens do not resolve symptoms for organically-generating diseases that aren't a result of injury, poisoning, or malnutrition.
Diseases like cancer, heart disease, diabetes, AIDS, stroke …or even the common cold.
As a result, organically-generating symptoms are almost always incurable. At least with conventional treatment.
But we’re very attached to our treatments. We’re so attached to the idea of “fighting” the symptom that we actually try even harder …but doing the wrong thing.
The reason why this philosophy of treating symptoms does not cure our illnesses is that organically-generating symptoms are a result of a traumatic stress experience.
The symptom is your body’s attempt to resolve that traumatic stress experience. To make you whole again.
The word “heal” means “to make whole.” Your body is constantly striving to do this.
The symptoms are your body’s emergency response mechanism, your body’s way of helping you to heal the trauma. Your symptoms are your body's attempt to heal.
But treatment seeks to defend against, resist, or outright battle those symptoms.
Sometimes this "fight" helps people to focus on and resolve the original stress that the symptoms are trying to heal.
If it doesn’t, though, the result of treatment can be more stress, more trauma, and more symptoms.
Listen to Episode 10 of the Mind Over Symptom Podcast to find out how to heal your symptoms at the source and use treatment to help that process.
Permalink to episode and shownotes: http://mindoversymptom.com/10-the-life-savi…ment-and-healing/
Get your (free) Mind Over Symptom Training or book a session to uncover the source of your symptom: http://mindtreehealth.net/services/
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What Are You Fighting With or Fleeing From?
It's been almost a century since Charles Banting's discovery that high blood sugar (diabetes mellitus) has to do with the production of insulin by islet cells located in your pancreas.
Low blood sugar (hypoglycemia) is to this day rarely even diagnosed as a medical condition, and when it is, it's usually thought to be a consequence of incorrect use of diabetes medication.
Diabetes makes you feel heavy, slow. Hypoglycemia makes you feel shaky, restless, hungry.
If blood sugar goes high for too long (diabetes), ketoacidosis, which is slow poisoning from metabolic waste products, will make you increasingly ill. If blood sugar goes too low (hypoglycemia), death occurs within hours. Your brain simply cannot keep functioning without adequate energy supply.
Medically, diabetes is controlled either by controlling sugar intake (dietary restrictions) or by taking medically-prescribed insulin (or both).
Hypoglycemia, much more dangerous than diabetes but rarely diagnosed except as a complication of diabetes, is treated by eating constantly. A snack every 20 minutes during an episode. (And by avoiding carbs the rest of the time)
Normal blood sugar fluctuates around a setpoint so that the range of "normal" blood sugar is 70-110 mg/dL or 700-1100ppm. Normal blood sugar level will go up or down within this range according to whether we’ve just eaten, whether we’ve exercised recently, and other daily activities.
What Causes Low or High Blood Sugar?
Conventional understanding of the blood sugar mechanism is that, when we eat food, the sugars in the food would flood our bloodstream, if not for insulin, a hormone released by islet cells in the pancreas.
It’s believed that insulin causes the cells of the body to “open” and store the sugar, which takes the sugar out of circulation. So the conventional story is that diabetes is a condition in which the islet cells of the pancreas don’t “work” properly, that something goes wrong with the pancreas, and thus, when we eat sugar, it just floods into our system without any controls.
The conventional story about low blood sugar is that, if the blood sugar goes below the normal range, it must be because we have too much insulin. Most health practitioners believe this to be a medical complication from taking the wrong amount of insulin for treating diabetes.
The official story is wrong.
Both the amount of sugar going into our blood and the amount of sugar being taken out of our blood are tightly controlled by hormones. One hormone - glucagon - to put sugar into the blood. Another hormone - insulin - to take sugar out of the blood.
Each of the hormones involved in making your blood sugar go up or down is produced by its own type of islet cell in the pancreas. Alpha islet cells release glucagon, beta islet cells release insulin.
When your blood sugar goes higher and lower than the normal range of 700-1100 parts per million, it’s because these islet cells are producing less or more of the hormone than normal.
However, it’s not because the pancreas or the islet cells are broken or damaged or dysfunctional.
Your blood-sugar regulating hormone levels change for a good reason.
That reason is that your brain is telling your islet cells to change their level of hormone output.
And why would your brain want to make your blood sugar go up or down?
Your brain raises your blood sugar levels to fuel your muscles to fight or defend yourself. Your brain lowers your blood sugar levels to help you escape.
Blood sugar changes are the first biological changes you make in the fight-flight response.
Listen to Episode 9 of the Mind Over Symptom Podcast, "The Ups and Downs of Blood Sugar," to the discover the true source of your symptom ...and how to get off the roller coaster of the fight-flight blood sugar response.
Permalink to episode and shownotes: http://mindoversymptom.com/9-the-ups-and-downs-of-blood-sugar/
Insulin pharmaceutical value: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/global-insulin-market-expected-to-reach-usd-3224-billion-globally-in-2019-transparency-market-research-2014-07-25
Permalink to episode and shownotes: http://mindoversymptom.com/9-the-ups-and-downs-of-blood-sugar/
Get your (free) Mind Over Symptom Training or book a session to uncover the source of your symptom: http://mindtreehealth.net/services/
Rate/Review this podcast in iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/mind-over-symptom/id1135291574
AIDS was a terrifying new disease that first appeared in 1981, and then exploded into a global epidemic that killed its victims very rapidly. A cure and vaccine have not yet been found.
Health care professionals quickly pinpointed a retrovirus called "Human Immunodeficiency Virus" and the American Food and Drug Administration approved a blood test to identify the presence of the virus. Then AZT, a chemotherapy drug designed in the 1960's, was approved as a treatment to try to prevent HIV from developing into AIDS.
Unfortunately, the drug was very expensive. And it produced harsh health effects of its own.
Fortunately, the illness began to decline in most areas of the world by the mid-90's ...however, sub-Saharan Africa still lists AIDS as its number one killer. This makes AIDS the 4th leading cause of death worldwide and it's still an enormous health emergency.
The solution is elusive, because HIV is elusive.
The virus has never been isolated. The HIV test only measures antibodies against proteins which are believed to be part of HIV.
The progression of AIDS remains poorly understood. Nobody knows how the virus makes one person get one symptom and another person get another symptom ...or why some people never get any symptoms at all.
Or why people can have AIDS symptoms and but test negative for HIV.
Or why people can have HIV and even AIDS ...and then test negative or overcome their symptoms.
Why all the questions? Because HIV-AIDS was always handled as a medical emergency, and so the response was technological.
The SCIENTIFIC response has only just begun.
Listen to Episode 8 of the Mind Over Symptom Podcast, "HIV Positive? Your Biggest Threat (and What You Can Do About It) to take a refreshing look at what AIDS is really about, why it happens, and how it's possible to resolve this collection of symptoms right at the source.
Get your (free) Mind Over Symptom Training or book a session: http://mindtreehealth.net/services/
Non-Ischaemic Heart Disease
Non-ischaemic heart disease, unlike ischaemic heart disease, actually affects the heart.
This group of symptoms is called
- cardiomyopathy (literally, "illness of heart muscle"),
- heart failure (meaning, "failure of the heart to do what it should, or do it very well"), and
- valve problems/valvular disease (which includes the diagnosis of rheumatic fever)
Cardiomyopathy usually also includes
- pericarditis or pericardial effusion. These symptoms affect the pericardium, which is actually the protective sac that surrounds the heart, and isn't part of the heart itself.
Prevention of Cardiomyopathy
Both our prevailing understanding of how the heart works and our belief about what causes cardiomyopathy are based on the underlying assumption that the heart is a pump. Its job is to push oxygenated blood around your body at a rate of about 5 litres per minute.
This essentially mechanical device is like an engine, but instead of about 300,000 kilometres in it, the heart's got about 2.5 billion beats in it.
The idea is, to prolong your "engine" life by keeping that engine well "tuned" which you do by getting your heart rate up a few times a week through concentrated aerobic exercise. This will make your resting heart rate slower, which will spread those 2.5 billion beats over a longer period of time!
Unfortunately, this won't help you if you've already got heart disease.
Or if your heart had a defect to start with.
Treatment
Other than hidden defects that "accumulate" over time, the only other conventionally-recognized causes of cardiomyopathy are extreme stress ("broken heart syndrome"), damage due to stimulants or poor nutrition (e.g. severe anemia), and rheumatic fever (a streptococcal infection which is thought to produce sore throat, joint inflammation, and, later, scarring in the heart valves).
The only treatments are medications or pacemakers to control heart rhythm, or surgery to correct tissue malformations.
How the Heart Really Works
The heart isn't actually a pump.
It's more like a grand central station of blood flow. It's an area where blood flow is coordinated, but it's not a forcing mechanism to push the blood throughout the body.
To pump 5L per minute through your 90,000 kilometres of blood vessels, your heart would have to be much bigger than your body! (Just think of how much effort it takes to inflate one of those long skinny balloons you use to make balloon animals. Now multiply that by a few hundred thousand...)
Blood flow is directed by fluid dynamics, just like cloud flow, river flow, the flow of the jet stream, even the flow of glaciers and the flow of the planets around the sun, spiralling through space.
This flow does not have a "pump" somewhere that initiates the flow (let alone initiating it 60-70 times per minute, the typical human heart rate).
So where does this energy come from to propel the blood through the body?
The energy for propulsion of the blood is embodied in the blood itself.
We know this because this pulsing, spiralling movement of the blood begins in embryos well before there is a heart to participate in the process.
So if the heart isn't a pump, and if heart problems aren't a result of mechanical damage or defect in the pump ...then where does non-ischaemic heart disease come from?
It comes from the same place that all symptoms come from: it is a biological response to an acute traumatic stress experience.
In the case of the heart muscle and its protective sac (the pericardium), the symptom is a biological response to a stress of feeling overwhelmed, or that your heart can't take what life has given you.
Get your (free) Mind Over Symptom Training or book a session: http://mindtreehealth.net/services/
Rate/Review this podcast in iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/mind-over-symptom/id1135291574?mt=2