Getting healthy

I find it ironic that practicing simple healthy habits is called “alternative” health and/or medicine.

I’m not using “alternative” health modalities. I’m getting healthy without medication after conventional medical treatment with drugs profoundly wrecked my wellbeing. Our language obfuscates. It’s quite Orwellian, in fact.

Getting healthy in my mind means returning to or rediscovering what being in tune with our body/mind and spirit entails.  Nothing alternative about that. It’s about returning to our animal inheritance. It’s foundational to simply being human.

Conventional medicine, in general,  as practiced, is what should be called alternative. I’m not talking about catastrophic care. That is when our medicine can truly work miracles. No, I’m talking about all the chronic conditions that are caused by the harm we’ve incurred to the atmosphere, the planet and our bodies. We dump toxins into the environment and eat polluted and processed foods that don’t nourish us and then when we get sick as a result, we take neurotoxic substances called medicine to make up for the neglect which actually just adds insult to the injury. The list of harm can go on and on.

For healing from those multiple injuries, and the neurotoxic psychiatric drugs I took for so many years, the “cure” is a densely nutritious diet and movement (yoga and other forms of natural exercise like ecstatic dance) and meditation that includes self-enquiry. Supplements are kept to a minimum because in a body that has been ravaged by drugs too many are actually often contraindicated. They’re not all that different from pharmaceuticals if they’re not used carefully. That is a fact that medical practitioners of all stripes, “alternative” and conventional, don’t understand. Supplements can be potent and need to be used with great respect. It pays to be very careful and do research with the help of those of us who’ve learned from each other in the trenches. There is a time and place for just about everything under the sun. Healing has helped me gain that discernment. I don’t say no to any of these things, I simply use all with care. See: Support in withdrawal 

It  is the great irony of “medicine,” in general that people need more and more drugs once they start taking them.  That happened to me too. Healing isn’t really ever in the cards once one gets on that merry-go-round. The tricky thing about so many medications is they require, at best, continued use for maintenance, but then at worst they cause additional issues that cause one to need more and more drugs. Getting off all of them is rather like juggling and it’s often not a linear proposition. Sometimes it’s not even a good idea. There can sometimes simply be too many risks to come off all drugs safely. I am pragmatic. We do what we need to do and ultimately our individual experience is always going to trump ideology or whatever we would like to believe. That means there is never an absolute cookie-cutter solution to anything and sometimes, yes, drugs make sense given whatever idiosyncratic situation someone is confronted with.

Still, the whole framework of what it means to be healthy in this culture is terribly askew…medicine as practiced today (in general) has very little to do with health and much more to do with maintaining illness via pharmaceuticals.

I’m deeply grateful to have, for the time being, completely emancipated myself from conventional medicine as practiced by the status quo. That does not mean I don’t utilize labs and other forms of competent and non-harming application of science to monitor and understand my health. These things have undeniable wonderful purposes that should be utilized. Medicine could be a wonderful vocation with all the technology and science we have access too. But for now medicine is controlled by pharmaceutical companies  (even enlightened MDs are saying so) so it’s not safe to take anything the mainstream practitioners say for granted.  For me this means I’m on a learning journey to discover all the myriad ways I can learn to live in harmony on this planet as naturally as possible.

• October is: Iatrogenic illness month — Medically induced illness: iatrogenic injury

• Everyone’s path to wellness differs: Many paths (as many as there are beings)

• See also: Informed choice: knowing potential of harm vs the potential for help in order to make a reasoned choice

• My healing protocol detailed…

also

• Healing with whole foods

*it is potentially dangerous to come off medications without careful planning. Please be sure to be well educated before undertaking any sort of discontinuation of medications. If your MD agrees to help you do so, do not assume they know how to do it well even if they claim to have experience. They are generally not trained in discontinuation and may not know how to recognize withdrawal issues. A lot of withdrawal issues are misdiagnosed to be psychiatric problems. This is why it’s good to educate oneself and find a doctor who is willing to learn with you as your partner in care.  Really all doctors should always be willing to do this as we are all individuals and need to be treated as such. See: Psychiatric drug withdrawal and protracted withdrawal syndrome round-up

For a multitude of ideas about how to create a life filled with safe alternatives to psychiatric drugs visit the drop-down menus at the top of this page.  

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