Pain, Fatigue and Mental health- making sense of it.

Symptoms or root cause

The rise of all kinds of long term health conditions is undeniable and hard to ignore. The prevalence of syndromes like CFS/ME, fibromyalgia, post viral fatigue and autoimmune dysfunctions are among those conditions that the healthcare system is struggling to address.

The way that these conditions present in each individual is unique and the causes, likewise, are specific to each person. This is one of the reasons why our current system of healthcare falters, because it’s not set up for, or resourced enough to support people on a case by case basis.

Standard healthcare is predominately oriented to, and very good at, addressing acute illness by reducing symptoms through pharmacology or surgery, but when dealing with chronic, complex, system wide health problems it struggles, because there is no single treatment protocol that works for everyone. And of course the objective of merely reducing symptoms without considering the root cause, is deeply problematic.

A different perspective

I’m particularly interested in this type of presentation in my clinic. I work with each person differently and support the basic needs of the system as a whole. I offer a different approach to mainstream healthcare, one that does seek to address the underlying causes. Here is a very brief rationale describing how I might approach working with these conditions.

We constantly seek balance

From the perspective of functional or integrative health we take the view that the individual functions as an intelligent responsive system that is constantly seeking health or balance, in the best way it knows how. This system will organise itself to meet the world via the information it receives from inside and out. It’s important to understand this as a basis for moving forward, because we need to know that health will definitely improve, all by itself PROVIDING the information it used to organise itself is interpreted by the system in a way that fosters a conditional theme of SAFETY.

So to present this idea simply, for the sake of a blog post – all of the conditions mentioned can be seen to share many of the same symptoms and all have at the root, a fundamental imbalance in the way that safety and threat are perceived. In other words they are underpinned by a dominant theme of threat or stress which drastically changes the way our psychology, physiology and metabolism works, causing downstream effects over the months and years which start to produce the familiar signs of pain, fatigue, anxiety, depression, digestion problems etc.

Change to a theme of safety

One of the most important things I help clients with in the clinic is to ‘refocus’ the way that the system interprets itself in relation to the world. We gently allow the old patterns that keep us contracted around fear to surface, be seen and understood, and then integrated into the system as a functional whole. This process of relearning to hold a theme of safety is different for everybody, we all have our own way of finding our way back.

As we begin to be able to stay in safety more and more, our internal world changes and metabolism and physiology come back into a more balanced way of functioning, paving the way for a more optimum expression of health.

If you would like to talk about making some changes that support your path back to health, please get in touch.