Part 1 of Video 2: Six Things That Worsen Pain and Illness and Prevent Healing
What happens when you’ve had the workup, seen the specialists, treated the obvious problem — and you’re still in pain, exhausted, disabled, or simply not recovering the way you’re supposed to?
Over nearly 30 years in rehabilitation and integrative medicine, I’ve worked with countless people who got stuck in exactly that place. And one of the most important things I’ve learned is that there can be very real biological obstacles to healing that don’t show up as conventional diagnoses.
This is the second installment of my series on the six things that worsen pain and illness and slow recovery. We explore one of the big ones: a miraculously complex nervous system that can help protect you from danger. But sometimes it doesn’t know how to stop.
Your nervous system isn’t just a collection of nerves running through your body. It’s an extraordinarily complex information system. Every part of your brain and spinal cord, muscles and organs, autonomic nervous system, biochemistry, emotions, thoughts and intentions are constantly communicating and adapting together.
And this points toward something much bigger.
I’ve increasingly come to see that body, emotion, mind and spirit cannot really be separated when we’re talking about healing. Biochemistry matters. Structure matters. Neurology matters. Our emotional lives, our thoughts and beliefs, our sense of meaning and connection matter. They are different dimensions of one human system, constantly influencing one another.
That’s why truly integrative medicine isn’t simply about adding “alternative” treatments to conventional medicine. It’s about understanding the whole person and asking what, across all these levels, may be interfering with the body’s extraordinary capacity to regulate, repair and heal.
In this video, I introduce four very different people who had become stuck: a man who couldn’t walk after a knee replacement, a young woman with excruciating hip pain despite normal scans, a woman disabled by widespread pain, fatigue and brain fog, and a young man whose chronic pelvic pain was threatening the life he wanted to live.
Their stories point toward a different question than most doctors ask:
Instead of only asking, “What is diagnosably damaged?” we need to ask, “how have protective responses become dysregulated”.
That’s the shift from simply trying to fix what is broken to mobilizing the whole-system and it’s intrinsic healing capacity.
This is Part 1. In Part 2, we’ll come back to these four patients, look at what had actually become dysregulated, and explore what we did to help them finally begin moving forward again.
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