The Slow Creep
A few years ago, I thought about writing a wellness book from a patient’s perspective. We love reading books written by doctors, the ones who can write are often also the ones who are great healers. But patients have their own unique perspective, especially in a world where we have no agency and no real say in our health outcomes. I asked myself why such a book was necessary and these are the answers that came to me:
Because what we have is sick care which enslaves people to a lifelong dependency on pills.
Because people believe chronic diseases are irreversible.
Because we take sleeping and breathing for granted.
Because we regularly and willingly ingest carcinogens.
Because of the slow creep.
Beware of the slow creep. We live in a world of conveniences. As kids we learn that all good things come at a price and that if something looks too good to be true then it probably is. But as adults we forget these lessons as we embrace conveniences. If you have seen the movie - The Graduate - set in the late sixties - you will remember a very young Dustin Hoffman explaining to some elders at a party that plastics were the future. He was right. Plastics made our lives very convenient for several decades and now broken down microplastics and other forms of plastic waste are choking marine life.
Food became very convenient over the years as well. Now we wonder how much of what we consume can even be called food. The side effects of conveniences accrete. It’s a slow creep that’s largely unnoticed and each time we bite into a S.A.D (Standard American Diet) morsel of food we creep a little bit more toward malaise..
I spent many years being oblivious to the nature of what was on my plate, my refrigerator, or my freezer. If it was sold as food I was convinced it was food. Then one day the lab reports, following an annual check up, showed that I was on the verge of being diabetic, that my cholesterol was beyond the high normal end of the range and that I was now someone who was at a high risk for a future cardiac event. I was mostly in a state of disbelief because I felt fine.
So many of us feel fine.
I had no standard vices, I was not abusing any substances; I was just being slow-boiled like a frog, always feeling fine.
Around this time I noticed a blood pressure monitor lying around the house, someone had left it behind. I took a reading. It was off the charts at around 200/150 or worse. I took several readings and it was still high. My husband and I went to the local pharmacy that had a blood pressure cuff and took a reading there, the results were the same or worse. I had no symptoms, I felt physically fine but was getting increasingly stressed by these readings. I visited my family physician and he gave me the standard ten minutes of his time where he did not ask me anything about my lifestyle or dietary choices but wrote up a prescription for blood pressure medicine. He told me that I would need to take this medicine for life and proffered the opinion that after a certain age there really was no difference between the physiology of a man and a woman, that women became as prone to cardiac events as men upon estrogen depletion. It was a shrugged response that held an assumption that this was what one could expect from life; an eternal enslavement to pills, that there were no alternatives.
When his prescription didn’t work he prescribed a diuretic on top of the blood pressure medicine. Then one morning I took these pills and went to a Pilates class. It was a sweaty class but at the end of it, when I crouched down to clean and disinfect my mat, I felt as though my limbs were made of lead and I couldn’t move or get up from all fours, it felt like paralysis and I didn’t know what to do with myself. The others around me noticed something was wrong and led me to a chair. I sat there for several minutes drinking lots of water before I felt normal again. The blood pressure pills in combination with the diuretics had lowered my blood pressure below normal and the feeling was the scariest I had ever experienced.
This is when I started wishing for an alternative to sick care, an alternative to a lifelong dependence on pills which only treated symptoms while keeping me sick.
These wishes came true when I learned how all the medicine one needs in the pursuit of wellness and restoration of health was in plants.
“And behold, I have given you every herb-bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in which is the fruit of a tree-yielding seed-to you it shall be for food.” (Genesis, 1:29)
I found a health care practitioner who got me there.
Three years into this journey I have realized that positive health outcomes require positive lifestyle changes. The approach that works is a holistic one, all others are doomed to fail.
Does this sound familiar? If so, let’s chat!
