Patience is More than a Virtue – it’s a Medical Strategy
I am generally impatient by nature. I’m not sure if I’ve always been this way. But 30 years as a busy consultant, getting paid by the hour and keeping a timesheet, has developed an insatiable need for time efficiency. Every minute wasted sets an invisible clock ticking in my head.
It’s not healthy in the short-term with immediate adverse effects on our cells, but impatience affects our long-term health through the search for quick-fixes and the normalization of symptom relief at the expense of good health.
Developing patience and a new attitude towards waiting can impact your health in a myriad of helpful ways.
Symptom Relief vs. Cure
Big pharma has capitalized on our lack of patience by offering a smorgasbord of chemicals that address individual pathways in your body to block a particular symptom, giving rapid relief.
When you have a headache you’ll typically reach for your pharmaceutical of choice such as Advil or Tylenol, find some respite, and go on with your day without another thought. But ingesting those chemicals has set in motion additional processes in your body such as a die-off of some healthy bacteria in your gut that couldn’t handle the chemicals; maybe a detoxification procedure to prevent further damage from the additives and unnatural ingredients that your body can’t use for fuel or nutrition.
You might think that pharmaceutical “cured” your headache but did it really make you any healthier? What was the underlying cause of the headache? Were you dehydrated? Skipped lunch and had a dip in blood sugar? Had eye-strain from staring at a computer screen too long? Was it stress from that family situation or upcoming deadline?
The problem with pharmaceuticals is that your amazingly designed, infinitely complex body is going to adjust around the pathway block (like registering pain) to find another way to keep you in balance. Your body is hardwired to constantly shift around that latest roadblock to keep you functioning optimally resulting in unintended consequences which are usually detrimental to long term health.
In medical school doctors are taught that there is no cure for most of the labels assigned to people as chronic disease in the 21st century. They learn that all we can do is address the symptoms resulting in a large proportion of their curriculum spent studying which drugs affect what.
From the 100+ autoimmune conditions such as multiple sclerosis, lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, or ulcerative colitis, to cardiovascular disease and diabetes. All of these conditions are entirely reversable when the body is supported with everything it needs plus a healthy dose of patience.
The Psychology of Waiting
Our need for speed has accelerated this century with modern technology giving us instant gratification for our desires. Making a purchase in seconds, allowing artificial intelligence to summarize a book or a paper for us without having to read the whole text ourselves, losing interest if a video doesn’t grab our attention in the first few moments.
One study quantified this impatience by showing if an Amazon page loads one second slower it could cost the company $1.6 billion dollars a year!
Chronic impatience can raise our cortisol levels, generate oxidative damage in our cells and promote ongoing inflammation. A JAMA study showed that higher levels of time urgency and impatience (TUI) resulted in an increased risk for hypertension.
A former professor at Harvard Business School, David Maister, wrote an essay entitled The Psychology of Waiting Lines in which he made several key observations about why some features of waiting are more bearable than others. Mainly applicable to keeping customers happy in a business situation, there are elements we can apply to our health such as: occupied time passes faster than unoccupied time or “a watched pot never boils”; an uncertain wait-time feels far longer than a known amount; and an unexplained wait-time feels far worse than knowing why the delay.
Reframing our health conditions and approach to them will result in far better long-term outcomes.
Managing expectations and setting more realistic monitoring targets will help increase our measure of patience, and enable us to choose natural health modalities that will drive health and not just manage symptoms.
A Combination of Factors
The specific factor that tipped the scales into illness or a diagnosis may never be known. It is rarely one aspect of our lives that caused the breakdown in our health. It’s also not just bad luck or bad genes. It is the infinite combination of our interaction with this world over many years that influences our level of health today.
God gave us five senses with which to interact with the world: touch, sight, hearing, smell and taste. Positive interactions like eating nutritious food, hearing the birds sing, smelling fresh flowers or citrus, seeing a baby smile and receiving a hug from a loved one, all bolster our reserves and improve our health. Negative interactions such as ingesting chemicals in processed food, hearing police sirens, smelling dry-cleaning gases, seeing violence or feeling an injury when we slip in the shower, all detract from our reserves and put us in repair mode.
Our daily habits are therefore key to our health. If we’ve tipped the scales into illness we need to get more intentional about righting the balance.
There is no one-for-one cure. Doctors may be taught that antibiotics “cure” an infection or quinine “cures” malaria. But health needs to be considered holistically and any illness should be an impetus to increase the positive influences on the body and remove more of the negative.
If it’s a chronic disease or condition, the situation should be reframed to take steps to improve overall lifestyle bit by bit and not seek a quick fix.
Maybe you’ve already tried one or two natural or lifestyle strategies and they didn’t seem to help so you gave up.
What you think you tried years ago that didn’t seem to improve matters doesn’t mean it won’t be a step in the right direction today. If our stomach is unable to absorb nutrients well then taking a particular supplement is probably not going to heal us right now. We need to fix the stomach first. If we attack a chronic infection, the resulting die-off may make us feel worse for a while. If we pull heavy metals out of our tissues but don’t support them being carried out of the body they could be reabsorbed elsewhere causing new problems.
What you need to avoid is giving up on a healthy habit and returning to something obviously unhealthy just because you didn’t see immediate results.
Ten Years to Find Relief
I apparently suffered from eczema as a young child. I don’t remember the details; I grew out of it. But in my 40s I suddenly developed chronic pustular eczema up and down both arms. Terribly itchy and painful at the same time, it involved blisters that oozed with blood and pus, so bad that I was unable to wear sleeves. I had an entire wardrobe of sleeveless shirts and vests for warmth, and had to get creative when travelling in winter.
The dermatologist wanted to put me on steroids or newer eczema ointments, but I refused, both for the side-effects and the long-term damage they would cause to my skin. I searched high and low for the root cause, changed laundry detergent, avoided gluten, dairy and anything processed, drank extra water and herbal teas, exercised more, added supplements like evening primrose oil. I found some relief with acupuncture but when life got busy and I couldn’t spare the time to go it flared up.
I had more success with Array Skin Therapy which applies a few minutes of whole-body ultraviolet light with the exposure gradually being increased over time. After some months my skin was mostly clear and I enjoyed a permanent suntan. But it was expensive and finding time to go twice a week was onerous, even though I could be in and out in 15 minutes. Then in March/April 2020 they implemented requirements for mask-wearing which were ridiculous and problematic (the chemical-laden masks caused eczema on my face while we had no interaction with anyone as we were alone in the treatment rooms) so I stopped going. A few weeks later the eczema returned.
I was starting to despair but instead reframed my predicament as just one of the thorns I’m dealing with as part of life. Knowing that our skin heals from the inside out I just focused on living the healthiest life I could and not seeking out “the cure”.
I can’t even tell you the moment my skin began to improve or what healthy habit or food or supplement might have made the most difference. All I know is I have completely normal skin on my arms today. Even the scars from the chronic blistering have mostly faded. I recall last winter I was surprised to be able to pull out my old full-length sweaters and sweatshirts – clothes I hadn’t worn in years. I have no fear of the upcoming Texas winter having moved here this summer.
I’m now in my mid-50s, take no pharmaceuticals whatsoever, not even for a headache! (peppermint essential oil is my go to when a glass of water isn’t enough). I continually strive to improve what I’m eating (I’m rather obsessed with raw goat’s milk and regenerative bone broth right now!) and how I’m living. The focus is to maximize my positive interactions with the world and minimize the negative.
Avoid Fear-Based Decisions
Patience is the key.
Avoid fear-based decisions you may be pushed into by alarmist doctors or family members. Gather information on whether your condition is life-threatening in say the next month or two. If not, take radical action to support your body in healing itself and monitor the results over the next 3-months and beyond. It can take years to get fully well as I can attest to. But you will be improving your health incrementally with each passing year and extending your longevity and resilience to any future disease.
As noted above, you may feel worse before you feel better but trust the process. If your medical team is not on board with this (active) wait-and-see approach, you may need to find another team.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that scariest of diagnoses – cancer. With all the billions of dollars that have been poured into research over the decades we still claim the “cure” is elusive. Cancer is characterized by mutant cells that can pop up anywhere in the body at any time. Part of the immune system’s job is to clean out these mutant cells in a process called apoptosis. Malignancies occur when your apoptosis systems are not working properly. Again, your body can heal itself if provided with the right support and the benefit of time.
Chris Wark’s Square One program to heal cancer naturally is reaching the 20-year mark with thousands of survivors telling their stories. Here’s a short video talk Chris gave over a decade ago.
Chronic disease manifests itself differently in different people, but similar underlying factors or combinations of factors are usually involved. Consequently, similar approaches, albeit with different combinations of natural modalities as the focus, are often the answer. The details will depend on your own individual situation and lifestyle.
All chronic disease takes years in the making. You simply need a large dose of patience to heal it.
