Every year, the Holiday season seems to get more hectic. All the stores are having the best Christmas sale ever. There are magazine proclaiming how to make the holidays perfect. It’s a lot of pressure. Many of my patients ask me how they can manage stress during this time. They complain of fatigue, depression, insomnia, and feeling run down. The stress leaves them susceptible to colds and flu.  Is there anything you can do to avoid this? The answer is yes. Let’s look at some tips to help you avoid the stress of the holidays and take better care of yourself.

The first tip has to do with diet. Right after Halloween, I walked into my local “health food” store and noticed something. There were holiday treats everywhere. Chocolate, cookies, and cakes were on every aisle. Patients tell me that from November until the end of the year everyone brings treats into work. There is temptation all around.

You can’t always avoid the treats at work. (Although you don’t have to eat them. ) But you don’t have to bring the sugar home. Instead of baking high-carbohydrate and sugary treats, try something new. These treats can give you the sweetness of this time of year in a healthy form.  There are tons of blogs that have paleo and refined sugar free options for treats. (Big Man’s World and the Detoxinista are two of my favorites.) I suggest trying at least one new recipe this holiday.

Holidays have become a frantic rush to out do the year before. Magazines claim that we can make this years meal “the Best Holiday Dinner Ever!”  But a simple refocus on the holiday from “best ever” to “let’s enjoy what we have” will help us reduce stress.

Here are a few tips to make the holiday meal less stressful:

•   Think basics. If you want to do a holiday dinner, stick with the basics: meat and vegetables. If your guests have special requests, invite them to prepare that and bring it to share. You don’t have to do it all. The point is to express joy and love, not to spend your time and energy catering to a huge crowd.

•   Draft help. Split up your task list and share it with the expected guests. Getting others involved will help them feel a part and allow you to enjoy the holiday more. Drafting help includes clean up and dishes. Set a rule that the TV doesn’t go on until the dishes are finished.

•   Let go. If you’re the type that obsesses over details and needs things done just right, this is a good time to let it go. (Frozen song aside ). Remember that the dinner takes a fraction of the time to consume as it does to prepare. Let others help in their way so you can enjoy your guests.

Meals and sugar aren’t the only things stressful about the holidays. All the running around, buying the perfect gift, and parties can be stressful. Here are a few more tips to keep your mental health.

•   Don’t be in a rush. Take time to enjoy each holiday celebration as it comes.  If you don’t get everything done that’s OK. Be sure to enjoy the holiday yourself. If you like to give gifts, do so. But don’t at the expense of your own sanity and pocketbook.

•   Drink Water. Drink enough water to stay hydrated. This will help your body detoxify. We tend to eat a lot of rich food this time of year. Water can help. It also helps decrease your chance of getting sick.

•   Make sleep a priority. Try for 8 to 9 hours of deep refreshing sleep per night. This will recharge your batteries and helps prevent illness.

•   Take Time for You. This is a social time of year. There are many parties and activities that people do in December. It’s easy to lose sight of your need to have some down time. Along with extra sleep, it’s a good idea to have some alone time. If you have people coming to stay with you, take a time-out before they arrive.

•   Be Thankful. Many studies show that gratitude is a key component of health. The more thankful we are for things, the better our mental health. It can ward off depression and anxiety that could otherwise be a challenge this time of year.

I’m sure there are other ways to de-stress the holidays. These are just some simple ideas to get you started. Remember it is the season for sharing, joy, and love. If you can focus on those, you will be that much closer to staying healthy during the season.

Happy Holidays!
Dr. Gil

How to stay healthy and fit in mind & body? That’s been a question for the ages. Why do some people get sick and others don’t? While I want to discuss mind & body, (and spiritual healing too) in this blog, I want to start with a simple example that is more relevant to most people as we head into fall and winter. How do we avoid colds and flus? If we get one, how does the body recover? Answering this question may be important to better understand the balance between mind, body, and spirit and why some people end up with depression, anxiety or other mental health conditions.

How to Stay Healthy in Mind & Body? Or Why Do Some People Get Sick?

There are many theories proposed to answer why some people get sick. My focus has been more about mental/emotional health and most of the time that’s what I write about too. But as we’ll see in future posts, there are layers and layers of complexity to answering this question. So let’s start with why people get a cold or flu. Modern medicine believes that we get sick because of a virus or bacteria that invades and overwhelms our immune system.

Colds and flu represents the number one reason for office visits to the doctor and the cause of the most days of work missed. Buzz Aldrin is quoted as saying, “we can put a person on the moon but still can’t cure the common cold.” Science thinks they know how and why people get sick but there is still no cure, interestingly enough. The theory, as it is understood in the mainstream, is that a pathogen (either a virus or bacteria) invades the body (an outside force) to cause an infection in the body and create the disease. (For a moment, turn the clock back 500 years and replace “pathogen” with “evil spirit” and you have a disempowering model once again. As an interesting side note, many of the texts showing pictures of evil spirits look a lot like the electron microscope images of viruses. I’ll save this discussion for another article though.)

The theory is a little more complex than that although it still isn’t completely understood. It is believed that a pathogen disrupts the balance in the body somehow. See, it’s not so much about catching a cold or flu, as most of the viruses are likely living on our body much of the time. It is only when they overwhelm our system for whatever reason that there is a problem.

Without getting overly political, I describe to patients that our body is kind of like the United States. There are citizens, documented aliens, and harmful undocumented aliens. (At the time of writing this, immigration is a hot political topic so patients can relate to this analogy. I don’t generally like to discuss politics with patients). There are 30 trillion human cells in the typical human body. Each cell has a particular function and specialty. We also have countless other documented aliens – mostly bacteria – that help protect our skin, help with digestion and so forth. The last group is the pathogens that we don’t want in the body. The reality is that there is no way to really keep them out 100%. Somehow though, our immune cells circulate through the body and keep the undocumented aliens (pathogens) in check most of the time. Every once in awhile they fail to do that and an outbreak occurs in the body. When this happens, our immune system sends out a larger alarm in the form of inflammatory cytokines (hormones that communicate to other parts of the body) to mobilize other parts of the immune system to fight the infection. This process is what causes us to have symptoms of sneezing, aches, chills, and/or fever. We’ll see in another post why this is key to understand some mental illness and chronic disease.

There is likely something to this theory as well. Washing hands, not picking your nose, and staying away from people who are sick definitely helps decrease the spread of disease. Other theories abound that are equally and maybe more plausible including a disturbance in Qi (from a Chinese medicine perspective), disruption of mental/emotional balance (Louise Hay and others), spikes in inflammation or detox reaction (many researchers), and a host of other possibilities. (Maybe washing hands is a form of psychic purification for example).

But let’s turn the current disease model on its head for just a moment. What if one of these other theories is correct? What if the Qi is disturbed, or there is a mental/emotional imbalance that causes illness? A different way to look at this is that a cold or flu represents a disruption of the balance or homeostasis in the body. On his deathbed, Louis Pasteur is said to have recanted his theory to say that Antoine Béchamp (his main rival) was correct. Béchamp proposed that illness is about the terrain and not about the pathogen. His theory is that the pathogens are typical inhabitants of the body and for the most part he has been proven correct. In other words, we don’t get ill because of the pathogen necessarily but rather that there is an imbalance in the body allowing the pathogen to take advantage of the body. The pathogens are already there. So could washing hands be a placebo?

Another possibility is that the body has too much toxicity (think heavy metals, too much sugar or alcohol, or breathing in soot when there’s a nearby forest fire) and it wants to purge that to bring the body back into balance. It isn’t uncommon for one to feel like one is getting sick after this and have all of the same symptoms (including fever) as if one has a cold or flu, but a pathogen isn’t the culprit. Rather, there is another imbalance in the system.
From this viewpoint, the treatments that we think of to prevent a cold or flu, Echinacea, zinc, vitamin C, and so forth may not be the best approach. Immune boosting vitamins may not have the intended effects that we want. Rather we may want something that helps the body better recognize toxicity so as to facilitate removal of those toxins. Or we may want to help the organ systems that remove waste be more open and efficient. This slight shift in paradigm changes the approach to disease and illness.

If the problem is mental, emotional, or spiritual then treatment and prevention must focus on those factors to heal. Maybe this is why the placebo effect may be helpful. Or why there are so many anecdotal stories of faith healers, spiritual healers, spontaneous healings, and so forth. Of course, there is still something happening at the biological level, but maybe we can see a connection between the realm of the seen and the unseen.

My first year of medical school had a required course called Naturopathic Philosophy. Multiple professors giving their perspectives on being a Naturopathic Doctor (ND) taught the class. An important question in ND practice is one’s philosophy about how healing occurs. In one of the classes, the discussion of how to heal came up. Early in the course, there was one professor I was immediately drawn to. He was a Naturopathic Doctor and not an acupuncturist, but he spoke in terms of how organ systems interacted much like in Chinese Medicine.

As a quick side note, I am mildly trained in Chinese Medicine. I don’t use acupuncture in my practice but understand some of the principles. Classical Chinese Medicine (CCM) works within the context of five-element theory that believes that different organ systems interact in the body in ways that can create imbalances. A symptom might show up in the heart but that may not be where the problem originates. Western medicine has some of this concept in it as well. For example, high blood pressure may have less to do with the heart and more to do with water retention because of kidney troubles. Generally though, Western Medicine attempts to gain symptom relief within the context of the biochemistry and pathology.

The speaker that day, Dr. Dickson Thom, discussed a six-element theory based on Anthroposophical Medicine and the work of Rudolf Steiner. The five-pointed star of CCM became a six-pointed star of two interlaced triangles in Dr. Thom’s model. The bottom triangle consisted of kidney/adrenal, digestion, and lung. (See diagram 1). These organ systems are about assimilation and elimination. If there is an imbalance in one, symptoms may appear in another. For example, people with liver congestion may present with allergies. A Western Medical approach would be to give anti-histamines, resolving the symptom but not necessarily the underlying problem.

Understanding the interactions of organ systems gives a better indication of how to treat disease. It also creates great complexity even for practitioners. Seeing the interconnections between body parts is requisite to effective medicine. The goal in Chinese Medicine and Naturopathy is balance of physiology.

What isn’t on the diagram is the interaction between the physical body and the mental/emotional and spiritual components of human existence. Much has been written about these topics, and Anthroposophical medicine discusses the interaction of the mental and spiritual with the body. That day we touched on the subject when Dr. Thom stated that it takes years for people to regain health. I questioned that assumption and spoke to him at a break. I said to him, “people can heal spontaneously.” He said, “that’s true, but they don’t.”

Dr. Thom and I have continued this discussion many times over the last 15 years, honing our arguments and discussing cases that illustrate our perspective views. We shared cases where people improved in ways that neither of us expected. I had a case several years ago of a patient who, in the process of doing neurofeedback, had an opening of his heart that couldn’t be explained by the treatment. His other physical symptoms disappeared at the same time. The headaches, anxiety, insomnia, and muscle aches were gone. The neurofeedback treatment could explain some of this, including the relief of headaches, anxiety and insomnia, but not necessarily the good feeling and the muscle aches. His grief and broken heart over his divorce also lifted. What happened?

Dr. Thom and I discussed several patients with cancer that, medically speaking, should be dead but somehow healed and went into remission. There are no answers only questions. The purpose of this blog is to explore these questions. “How do people heal?” is one question, but other questions abound such as, “What is the connection between heart and brain?” “Where does mind reside?” and “How does one mend a broken heart?” It is my purpose to explore these questions, not so much to provide an answer as to ask the question.

I have had some serious writer’s block for some time with this blog. My issues started when I decided to change the brain book into a heart/brain book. The Power of the Heart appealed to me. It’s not like I was planning to write a book on the brain. My first book, Feel Well, Play Well: Amazing Golf through Whole Health was a bit of an accident. What I mean by that is that I hadn’t intended to write a book. I wanted to provide a handout of exercises to my many patients who golfed and injured themselves every summer doing so. I figured it would be a small 20-page booklet with pictures of how to do stretches before and after playing a round to prevent the most common injuries. Two hundred pages later I had 6 chapters, around 50 exercises, and other healthcare tips that helps improve not just one’s golf game, but also one’s health.

I haven’t marketed that book very well. It’s not that I’m not proud of it. It was quite the accomplishment. I wrote it in six weeks. The book poured out of me. The editing took longer, a lot longer. But it has received good reviews and my patients have loved it. My passion though is bigger than golf. Bigger than sports medicine. Bigger than not getting injured.

The brain book started in much the same way. I wasn’t planning on writing a book about the brain. I was writing a 2,000-word article about the brain and reasons that mental emotional issues arise from physiologic and social perspectives. It was to be an educational piece for the clinic’s website. The ten-page article became one hundred pages. I realized I had another book.

The trouble is that my work is bigger than just the brain. I have done neurofeedback for almost 10 years now and combine it with other natural modalities including helping the body be better at eliminating toxins, reducing inflammation, balancing nutrients in the body, and helping digestive problems. I work with a variety of ailments including neurological conditions such as MS and Parkinson’s but also mental/emotional problems including anxiety, depression, Reactive Attachment Disorder, OCD, ADD/ADHD, and autism. What has struck me in all these years is how some people have a change of heart more than a change in brain function.

I am starting to learn more about how the heart influences the brain, how imbalances in the body affect both, how trauma can be stored affecting one’s ability to enjoy life. My passion is about helping people heal. Heal in mind, heal in brain, heal in body, heal in heart, heal in spirit. Every deserves perfect health and what has occurred to me is that when we reach a tipping point of balanced people in our society, our society will become a more just, balanced, and healthy place to live. Thus far, I have helped heal one person at a time. Now I want to bring this knowledge to more people. I want to empower you, the reader to take charge of your health. I want to show you the connections I’ve learned about so that you can balance your body, achieve optimal health, and have more joy in your life.

How do we achieve this? What allows one person to become anxious or depressed in the face of underwhelming circumstances while another person walks through life with grace and happiness when their entire world is seemingly falling apart? Why does a particular biochemical imbalance lead to one diagnosis such as schizophrenia in one person and depression in another? Why do two people facing the same disaster have completely different responses to that event?  These are the questions that interest me. The answers though, don’t lie exclusively in modern science but in the depths of spirit and philosophy.