A week ago, I was at my worst. In the ten months of agony I’ve endured fighting a slew of health issues, I was finally so beaten, so broken down, so utterly without hope that I decide enough was enough, I was done letting doctors string me along, promising answers, promising relief, fighting my symptoms but not fighting the cause of my problems. I decided to seek a more nontraditional route. At this point, I was so desperate to cure my issues, to get back to a life worth living, to feel like a human being again, I would have tried just about anything.
Western medicine is great. For certain things. When I broke my elbow at 13 years old, it took many trips back and forth from my Poconos home to my Philadelphia doctor to get things put back together. I’m eternally grateful to that doctor, whose name now eludes me, for having the experience and education that no local doctors could muster to mend my one-of-a-kind injury. If it wasn’t for him, my arm would have forever been frozen in a half-usable state, stuck somewhere between fully extended and fully retracted, with my elbow and wrist locked up for good, never to be fully utilized again. When I got in my one (and hopefully only) car accident eight years ago, even though I wasn’t severely injured, it was a good thing to have the ambulance come and take me away, to be whisked off to the hospital for a thorough screening and to be checked for any internal damage. If I, heaven forbid, ever have a heart attack or some other life-threatening issue that comes on instantly and spontaneously, I want a western doctor nearby to bring me back from the brink of death. So yes, western medicine is a vital part of our existence as humans, and we’ve come a long way with many scientific advancements regarding medicines and I’m grateful to have access to these technologies if and when the need arises.
But when it comes to my insides, I’m done letting the western doctors have their way with me. I’m done trusting they will figure out what’s really going on inside me, what’s causing the problems deep down instead of just asking what my symptoms are and throwing a bunch of medications and vitamins at it. At my lowest point, when I was so desperate for relief that I would take anything the doctors threw my way, I was taking about 8-10 different over-the-counter and prescription medications on any given day. For an almost 30-year-old who doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke, doesn’t do drugs, eats fairly healthy (at least what I believed was healthy), has a regular sleep cycle, and exercises fairly regularly (at least when my fatigued body would allow), this seemed insane to me. There’s no way someone as “healthy” as I seem to be on the outside should need all this garbage.
But I think that’s exactly where the real problem lies. I might look healthy on the outside to anyone observing my physique and my habits, but I’ve been allowing myself to stay sick, in fact I’ve been keeping myself sick all these years by trusting these western doctors to “fix” whatever ails me. Instead of healing my body from the inside out, they’ve just been throwing more drugs and more synthetic garbage at me, telling me to take this or that to solve my problems, only to wind up creating more problems for me, thus requiring more drugs and more fake sh*t to suppress those symptoms and to keep me coming back for more and more. Depression and anxiety? Here’s a drug for that. Just watch out for the ringing in the ears it will inevitably cause you, stealing away what little peace and quiet you had left in your life, forever plagued by tinnitus when all you want to do is read a book or go to sleep without the sound of buzzing keeping you up. It will also make it hard to focus and make you dizzy and give you migraines, but don’t worry, we make more pills to tackle those issues. Frequent migraines? Here’s some prescription strength ibuprofen. Take as often as needed, up to three times a day. Don’t mind the ulcers and the holes it will tear in your stomach, who needs a stomach anyway? Painful cystic acne? Here are some antibiotics to cure that inflammation right up, just don’t mind the havoc it will wreak on your intestines, shredding your insides to the point where your body can longer get the nutrients it needs to survive. The list goes on. By trying to “fix” one problem with medications, three new problems pop up. It’s no wonder my body has gotten to the point where I can’t eat anything without chasing my food with Tums. And it’s all I can do to drag myself through the work day, only to come home and go straight to bed. And I shouldn’t be surprised the probiotics and vitamins I keep inhaling aren’t doing any good when I’ve destroyed my insides so bad they can longer absorb them. Not that I need the vitamins anyway; if my body was working properly and if I was giving it the right nutrition, it would have all the vitamins it needs in the first place without me jamming artificial versions down my throat.
After I went to see what I like to refer to as my colleague’s “witch doctor,” a holistic doctor with 15 years experience healing people, I came out with that sort of light bulb moment. In the hour she spent with me, testing every inch of my insides to find the source of my agony, she told me how she was going to help me fix the root of my problems, not just fix the symptoms. It makes sense to me now. All this time, I’ve just been slapping Band-Aids on things, hoping the problem would go away, but the Band-Aids are piling up and there’s blood oozing out from underneath, and I can’t keep hoping these wounds will close unless I do something to heal them, not just cover them up.
I feel like I’ve finally woken up, that my eyes are finally open to what’s been happening to me all these years with doctors and medications and ailments and symptoms and never feeling like I could be my best self because I was so sick and dying on the inside. I understand the hand I’ve played by allowing these doctors to dictate my health, but no more. I’m ready to regain control and, even if it’s messy, even if it takes some trial and error, even if it takes time and effort and frustration, which I’m sure it will, it has to be way better than these last few years, even these last ten months, where I’ve felt like a slave to doctors and medicine, only to continue feeling my body slowly dying, crying out for help. Well, I’m finally listening and I’m finally ready to make a change that hopefully changes the fate of my health for the better. For good.
mind over madness 