Longread

Illness may be inconvenient and annoying but it's also an unavoidable opportunity to learn, understand and even benefit.

We humans are complex manifestations of life, the universe and everything. Alas many forget this. 'Every form is an aggregate of smaller lives', dynamically juggling to keep the whole together, as live-cell-microscopy videos illustrate captivatingly. Behind this a spark of vitality wants to come through, an invisible (intelligent?) power source. Things work best when in alignment, balance (homeostasis) and moderate (not excessive or stagnant) flow.

Wellbeing enables us to get on with things while illness reveals our complexity, showing that all is not as it appears on the surface. Symptoms are a passing opportunity for a fuller understanding than a mere diagnostic label can provide. 'The map is not the territory', as they say.
Behind detectable signs and symptoms lies causation, although the less glaringly obvious something is the more likely it is to be overlooked or even dismissed. The consequence too often is a firefighting approach that is unready to address, understand or even spot the thing that needs treating.

Acute illness in the natural world tends to either finish you or make you stronger.
The shape of illness has changed a lot over recent decades. Chronic illness (morbidity) is: on the rise big time, often multisystem and usually accompanied by multiple medications (polypharmacy). For all its wonders, medicine hasn’t arrived at clarity on the reasons for this, yet.

My experience is that symptoms need to be heard out and that it's a mistake for the practitioner to be overly confident too early on, because it stalls further thought and insight. This matters because I have found things to be not as they appear (even after good detective-work) but usually coming from something yet unrecognised. The only antidote to this is to keep stalking the truth, knowing that you're always going to be partly short of the mark.

A few weeks ago (from time of writing) I saw a patient who had seen six different doctors for the same condition. Each doctor confidently diagnosed something within their own speciality. Six different diagnoses, each happening to be something the doctor was already familiar with. Have a proper think dear reader about what this says to you, and the implications. If the doctor (Latin for 'teacher') sometimes doesn't know how to spot the truth (which can be difficult), what are we, the ambassadors of medicine teaching you the public about the significance and right management of illness? It happened to be doctors rather than complementary practitioners in this case but the same is equally true for both groups from my experience i.e. this is not a reflection on medicine but on being a disciple to our models rather than to the truth of the matter.
It seems to me that illness itself is the teacher and also that best results come from combining a medical understanding with our own wits and internal wisdom. The Hippocratic Oath (see Articles page) describes the practice of medicine as an art. This commitment points back to medicine in less complex and confusing times.

The task as I see it is for the patient/practitioner team to work to disentangle the different components of the problem and find good ways towards dismantling it when possible. It's like archaeology, where you start by going backwards, seeking clues to find the pattern to make a map. It's very different from 'fighting' or 'standing up to' manifestations that one's own body has made happen.
I have to be a professional understander so being a patient of mine is an active job. If I have high quality information the chances of being able to help are much better. This applies to follow ups too, where noticing peripheral changes (that normally one would ignore, forget or not mention) are small but important clues.

Regarding mind and emotions it's the same approach. Sometimes things can be traced back to/through the parents. It’s as if things can get passed on invisibly, creating our starting position in the world.
I’m happy to find that it is often both possible and productive to meet these layers. One good way is simply to follow the body’s physical sensations.

It’s quite common for new patients to come as a last resort, assuming one takes a different medicine for each symptom and mistaking trigger factors for causes. An example of this last point is the husband and wife team I know who were exposed to asbestos (he massively more than she) where she, not he, developed mesothelioma.

What you can do now if you're not right (physically or emotionally) is start by asking yourself a series of 'why'-type questions:

Why did it start then, were there any small signs before that, has anyone else in the family had something even vaguely similar, what are the things that affect me most, why did I get those symptoms rather than different ones, what is my intuition about the contributing causes, is there a sense of more than one 'layer' at play, what would this be like if it I amplified it, what are the physical sensations that go with this, what are the small other things that aren't quite right and exist in association with it...?
...and write it down, because once you start more insights are likely to come. The results can be a startlingly powerful start. A bit like when we see our lives from a different perspective when on holiday.

Just as the wonderful world of science seeks to understand nature and its principles, good results depend on patient-practitioner teamwork, which maximises the understanding of what’s at play. For this reason I spend a lot of time outside clinic hours reviewing and working on patients notes.

I hope this has given you some helpful insight on how just one experienced practitioner works with the mystery of human function and dysfunction.