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Health & Fitness

Put The Fire Out

When it comes to your health, don't just treat the symptoms, fix the problem instead!

 

September 5, 2012

Yesterday was an interesting day.  Yesterday I saw three patients suffering from unrelated disorders yet sharing a common thread.  In all three cases, my patients were on medications to treat symptoms that had persisted for a long time, yet were no better off than when they started their treatments.  Compounding the issue was that each of the three patients thought their treatments were successful and came in for refills.

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Confused?  You ought to be.  Puzzles are often confusing until you line up all the pieces, appropriately allowing you to see the complete picture.  The first thing you need to understand is that there is a big difference between treating the symptoms of a disorder and treating the cause.  If you are being burned by a fire, you can build a firewall to shelter you and hope the fire will burn out; or you can put out the fire.  All three patients today had constructed excellent firewalls and were content to let the fire burn.  I was neither content nor willing to let the status quo stand.  If you let a fire burn, it may burnout; but it may flare up and burn down your firewall, and leaving irreparable damage.  It’s best to put fires out as soon as you discover them

Patient number one wanted a refill on her sleeping meds.  She has not been able to sleep in years and has relied on sleeping pills to “turn herself off.”  She is a very responsible individual, bringing home her work stresses every night.  She stores them in her brain, treating her brain as if it was an IPad that never needed recharging and had unlimited capacity to store data and run computations.

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Yes, the human brain is much like a computer and trying to go to bed with programs (worries) running is not easy.  Her problems started with poor sleep hygiene and are now compounded by a reliance on sleeping pills.  “Worry time” exercises and guided imagery/progressive relaxation are solutions that strike at the heart of the matter.  “Worry time” exercises allow patients to actively go through a shutdown process much like you would shut down your computer.  By taking 15 minutes to write down everything you are going to worry about before you go to sleep and then writing down what you are going to do with each of your worries in the morning, you can appropriately handle a lot of what was going to keep you awake, making restful sleep possible.

Progressive relaxation/guided imagery are valuable tools to help control your brain, relieve your stress, and allow you to relax.  I like Bellruth Naperstak’s work and refer many of my patients to her website, www.healthjourneys.com.   Do not listen to her work in your car.  She will put you to sleep.

Rather than building firewalls, learn to put out fires.  Treating the cause is always better than treating the symptoms.  Yes, there are times when you have to treat the symptoms while you work on resolving the underlying cause, but it is imperative that you not become complacent with symptomatic control.  If you do, you may spend years taking medications and dealing with the consequences of letting your fire burn you up.  www.livewellthy.org

 

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