In today's episode, I'm going to share with you why doctors don't have all the answers to your problem, or indeed the solutions, and where you need to focus on to find those solutions. That's all coming right here on Embrace Your Healing Journey podcast.
Welcome to Embrace Your Healing Journey, a podcast for women with autoimmune and other chronic conditions to help them navigate the illness without fear of isolation and uncertainty and find relief from their symptoms. Your body is your guide and ally in healing. If you're ready to embrace this journey with compassion and awareness, then the show is for you. Tune in weekly as I, a Functional medicine certified health coach, deliver tips and insights that demystify the healing process, guiding you towards the relief you deserve so that you can feel healthy and happy once more.
In each episode, I am going to start by sharing pieces of poems, stories and quotes that I come across in books. And, you know, these are things that have shaped my life. These are, uh, stories and poems that have inspired me. They have motivated me to be on, uh, you know, to live my best life, to be the best version that I can possibly be. And for today, here's an excerpt that I want to share with you. This is from the poem Have the Courage by Donna Ashworth.
Have the courage to live as a whole.
To listen to your heart, to talk to your soul.
To know who you are when others do not.
To look out for vibes, to filter your thoughts.
Have the heart to appreciate. Life, to laugh and cry, to accept both are right.
To go with the flow.
When the winds of change. Rage.
To learn, to let go, to break free from that cage.
Have the vision to share your own story.
The ugly truth heals as much as the glory.
Pass down your lessons. The joy and the pain.
Remind those who follow to dance in the rain.
Have the patience to wait for the signs, but never stop living. Enjoy the ride.
Listening to silence as loud as the screams.
Respect life, sorrows. Follow your dreams.
This is something that I wanted to share today, and I hope it inspires you in some way to keep following your dreams. No matter what you are going through, no matter what you are dealing with. But back to today's episode.
And this is where I was so many years ago. I just could not understand it. I had been doing exactly what the doctors had asked me to do. I had followed all the instructions. I was, uh, you know, giving my daughters all the medications they had asked me to give her. And we had an amazing team of doctors, make no mistake about that. Right. Uh, it was they were trying their best to give us the support, too. They were trying their best to get our daughter's eczema under control. And we had taken multiple opinions across the globe, but her condition was still not. It was just about manageable. It was still not under control. And this was after she had already been on a couple of rounds of oral steroids and then later immunosuppressive medications or immune suppressive medication. Her eczema was so severe that, uh, you know, regular topical medications and all had lost long lost their, uh, ability and efficacy to, uh, help manage her symptoms, you know, so this was a very extreme case of eczema. And, um, what typically, you know, people go through the topical applications, then you might do something like a phototherapy, uh, you might do something like wet traps. You know, the entire thing we had already already completed and done and nothing seemed to be working. And we had reached in this final line of treatment. And I just did not understand why no one seemed to have the answers as to why her body was behaving in this manner, why immune system was behaving in this manner. I simply wasn't getting answers to my questions. Uh, and by that time I had understood that these were all just to manage her symptoms. And actually, that is all that we had, the energy and the bandwidth to focus on just to manage her symptoms because there seem to be no other way. Even when I was trying to figure it out initially, they seem to be no solution. It was, you know, years when later when I did find a solution.
And I've talked about it in episode one, actually, of this podcast, and it was only years later when I speak to my clients or others dealing with autoimmune and other chronic conditions such as, uh, you know, such as eczema, allergies or any other chronic condition for that matter, I see the same confusion in their eyes. They are also exactly where I was, where we were all those years ago. Not understanding what is happening, not being able to get the answers that they are really looking for as to why do they have this disease. Why? Why is the immune system behaving in this manner? Why does it feel like they suddenly woke up one morning and had this diagnosis? Actually, that's not true. And I keep talking about it that you do not develop any chronic condition out of the blue, no matter what it is. It's been the disease process. The disease activation and progression has been going on for many years. And in fact, in the case of autoimmune conditions, it takes years, if not decades before the symptom starts showing. So your symptoms are actually the last straw. So how is it that the medical system is simply not able to help people get better when it comes to these kind of conditions. At best, their life is consumed by medical visits, doctors, and or getting all kinds of treatments, or going from one doctor to another. And at worst people with autoimmune conditions go on to develop yet more autoimmune conditions, and their quality of life continues to deteriorate at an alarming rate despite being on medication or in spite of being on medication.
And this is where we were all those years ago. We were going from one doctor to another. We were doing doctor visits every single week because there was some infection coming up. Something else used to come up. So you're putting out these little fires. You put out one fire, a little fire, and then some other little fire comes out. And a lot of people I find, whether and I see it in my family, I see it in our society, in my community, of course, with my clients, when they come to me that they are putting out these little fires all the time. And, and they're going from one doctor to another trying to figure out how to, uh, you know, stop getting these fires in the first place like this. You know, they keep springing out of nowhere and you put out one and the other one comes up, right? It's so I call it being stuck in a disease Merry-Go-Round, because that's where you know what it looks like. You're stuck going round and round in circles, and you're not still not getting a solution or an answer that, you know, sort of will solve all your problems.
And maybe you are in this position too? So you may be tired of going from one doctor to another and doing doctor visits every single week and not getting any answers. Uh, maybe you feel like your symptoms are being dismissed or not taken to seriously by your doctor. And that again, happens typically with women a lot, and especially in cases of complex diseases like autoimmune conditions. Why? Initially the symptoms are so scattered and sometimes random that, you know, they are often dismissed by their doctors even when they take it. And, you know, because nobody has a clue as to what's going on. Or you may be struggling with multiple chronic symptoms that seem unrelated. They seem unusually related, but they actually are not. Or you may have already received a diagnosis, but find that your treatment plans plans are unsuccessful. So we had we had a diagnosis for many years, uh, for our daughter. But the treatment plan was simply not working. Uh, and I only later found out that that is because it was not the root cause solution that we were looking for. And in fact, all these are very common problems that people with chronic conditions such as autoimmune disease deal with all the time. So know that you are not the only person dealing with this. I know that that doesn't make you know things any better, but maybe you feel a bit less isolated. You know that this is not just you, it's the system that sort of does not have those answers because the system was not designed to tackle chronic conditions you know, in this way. And maybe I'll do an entire episode on that. So all you know, the real problem, the real problem causing chronic symptoms, is that, you know, they don't really improve, uh, with the help of, you know, medical treatments. That's the that's the problem. And, uh, these symptoms do not go away. And it's not a, you know, lack of effort on your doctor's part. And that's something that was certainly, uh, with us. It was not that the doctors were not giving us the support that we needed. Uh, you know, in some cases, yes. People don't get the support that they need. But even if they do, uh, with the medical treatments, you may find that, you know, you're simply not getting the results.
But it's a fundamental limitation of the conventional medicine approach. That's where the problem lies. So doctors are trained to look at health from a very narrow point of view, very narrow lens, that of disease management. And it's about identifying disease and prescribing medications to treat the major symptoms. And that is where the real issue is. So unless we change that lens of seeing the problem from a root cause, uh, you know, approach a solution, the disease simply does not go away. And that's that's really sad because, uh, people remain stuck in this. They lose, you know, big chunks of their life, maybe even the rest of their lives trying to get those answers and being on medications, and still their life becomes, uh, you know, from bad to worse.
And in this in the book, uh, The Disease Delusion by Doctor Jeffrey Bland. And I highly recommend that book if you're trying to wrap your head around what I'm saying here and also to try, you know, if you are trying to look for a solution, uh, that is more fundamental, that looks at, you know, at creating health instead of only managing major symptoms like conventional medicine, which is the functional medicine approach. Uh, and he says
where chronic illness is concerned, that's the problem. So for today's rising burden of chronic illnesses cannot be contributed to alteration in a single step, in a particular step. Rather, the diseases and conditions we call chronic derive from a variety of causes, each expressed in their own symptoms or set of symptoms. And because the drugs for the illnesses treat only the dominant symptoms, that is the effects. Not the ultimate cause. And this is the important part, right? You don't really get over a chronic illness, no matter how often you pelt it with drugs on, or how many kinds of drugs you pelt it with. I think this is what you need to wrap your head around. And this is where people remain stuck. They keep pelting drugs at it, medications at it, hoping against hope that one of these drugs will be the miracle cure to fix them. It's going to fix all their problems. It's going to fix their health and reverse their symptoms. But that that doesn't happen. Instead, it either persists or records. In fact, it actually gets worse over time. The outcome of the treatment isn't isn't a return to good health, but rather increasing disability and a diminished quality of life.
Now, I'm not sharing this to scare you, but just to open your eyes to the reality, because I think this is not something that is talked about often enough. We don't really talk about what a root cause a resolution can really look like and why it is so important in the case of any chronic condition, including something like autoimmune disease, right, where there's a multitude of factors, you know, and it comes out as a symptoms or set of symptoms which can keep changing and fluctuating. And that is why they are so unpredictable and unreliable in that way. And this is what you will see happening all in all around us. Those who are dealing with any kind of chronic illness, uh, are having these set of symptoms because in reality, symptoms like fatigue, pain, digestive issues, skin problems, hormonal imbalances, they can have complex origins. And often they are the beginning stages of a diagnosis that is yet to come. Again, it is not to be, you know, to get scared by this, but it is more to actually acknowledge that these are signals by our own body telling us that something needs to be done, because there are there are some issues that are going on. So these are these messages that you get from your body all the time. And because these messages are often frequently rooted in underlying dysfunction, but they cannot be discovered through regular testing. So your regular testing may not even uncovered this. In fact, in functional medicine, we have a whole host of tests that we do. And I can share a few links here, but this is not something that you will actually get a solution from your basic test. Yes. Basic testing can give you certainly some amount of data. And I do a lot of basic testing. You can get some data, but, uh, there can be other things that may not get discovered and may need, uh, further testing, not always necessary. Plus some major factors that contribute to this body. White dysfunction includes poor diet and lifestyle choices, chronic stress, toxins, infections. Also how your microbiome, which is your, um. Pool of microbes, your bacteria, viruses, etc., which is in your primarily in your large intestine. They can cause havoc within your immune system. They all connected. And if this continues, then they can create, you know, chaos. And this inflammation is at the root of most chronic conditions. Right. So this is your immune system in action. And if it goes unchecked that is what creates chronic inflammation. And that is at the root of so many conditions. So the medications and surgeries that target individual symptoms are just Band-Aid solutions like putting Band-Aid on a wound and you know, uh, thinking that the bandage is the one which actually heal the wound. It's your body which is actually doing the healing, right? You put it back, you get a small cut, and you put a Band-Aid on it. And the body, you know, that wound heals. It's not because of the bandage. The bandage is just to keep infections at bay. It's your body that did the work, right. And because it's a small wound, body can take care of it itself. But if it's major issues, any kind of complex chronic disease, your body needs your support. And the answer lies in identifying and addressing the root causes right of this body by dysfunction and using a holistic approach.
And the mistake that many people make is that they have probably relied entirely on their doctors to solve their health problems without being an active participant. They're they're just passive recipients of a prescription or a drug or a medication or a treatment. and this does not work in the case of chronic conditions. In acute conditions, yes. If it's a life saving surgery or any other surgery for that matter, if it's an infection. So acute conditions, this approach is absolutely warranted and necessary. But this does not work in the case of chronic conditions. And another mistake is that people they may have also followed standard medication or surgery protocols without questioning it. If there could be alternative options or root causes that also need addressing at the same time. And I keep repeating myself that it's not a, you know, either or approach where either you need medications and treatments or surgery or you need a root cause. Often it's both. So even if you have to go in for surgery, even if you have to go in and take medications to prevent further damage, it is equally necessary to actually address the root causes of your disease. Plus, sometimes people don't even realize the importance of advocating for themselves, or they don't even know how to do it when they feel dismissed, unsatisfied with the treatment, or confused about symptoms that linger. So they know something is wrong, but they are not able to stand up for themselves. So these are some of the things that are, again, I find quite common. And what you can do instead. That's what I want to share with you. Right? I want to empower you with some tools here. Here's what you can do. You can explore alternative modalities like lifestyle changes, uh, supplements, acupuncture, acupuncture, relaxation techniques. You can, of course, take the help of someone, but you can at least start your own research. You can, you know, start forging your own path, and you don't need anyone's permission for that. You can work collaboratively with your doctors instead of relying them fully for all the answers. And you can start taking an active role in your healing journey. You know, uh, basically trying to find out how you can support your body's healing process and you can seek second or even third opinions from those who are further down the path or those who are actually maybe dealing with the same kind of disease that you have. And they are seeing doctors that they are happy with, practitioners that they have been to and has been able to help them, uh, you know, so you can actually take references from them. And again, it's not just looking at the symptom management part of it. At the same time, you also need to figure out a way to address the root causes. And, uh, research. When I talk about research, you can actually read books on, you know, the topic. It's because of the internet. Um, you know, the whole of the internet is at your fingertips. So, uh, which is a problem. I know, and that is why I have a resource that I'm going to share with you. Uh, so the link to that, the resource is a guide.
It's called Autoimmune Disease 101, where I have curated a list of books, podcasts and other resources that you can use, uh, apart from this podcast, of course, but it's a curated, uh, resource that you can use to go through the books and understand more about your disease condition and what you can do about it and why. Right. Okay. Um, I have also, uh, shared some pointers if you want to get deeper on gut health in episode five, where I talk about a step by step approach to addressing gut health issues, which is where most of these diseases arise. And episode eight, where I talk about four steps you can take apart from just eliminating gluten and dairy from your diet, which is where most people actually focus on, they just focus on eliminating rather than also adding in the foods that their body needs to heal the nutrients that their body needs. The immune system needs to function optimally because what happens when you don't? What happens if you don't take, you know, take this kind of an approach, right. So you may continue to deal with unpredictable and debilitating symptoms that significantly affect the quality of your life as you continue to struggle to find effective treatments and substantial improvement so you can continue on this path. And this is again, being stuck in what I call is a disease. Merry-Go-Round. And because of this, you may also deal with constant anxiety, stress, and worry caused by an uncertain future, right? If your symptoms are so unpredictable as it is in the case of autoimmune conditions, you don't know what's coming next. You don't know how you're going to feel in an hour, literally in a day. That causes a lot of worry, right?
And many people here are here are what I call WEARY WARRIORS. They are trying their best. They are trying to find out what's going on. They are trying to deal with it the best that we can, uh, that they can. Which is why I call them warriors. But they are very they are tired and they're exhausted and they continue to battle feelings of hopelessness, frustration and isolation and maybe even feeling betrayed by their own bodies. And this is really unfortunate, because they so desperately want to lead a life where they can actively participate in social and physical activities without having to constantly worry about their symptoms or how they will feel the next day, maybe the next hour. And they want to experience empowerment, resilience and confidence in their own bodies once again. They want to feel alive. They want to feel vibrant and healthy. And in fact, that's a question I ask when I do a free 45 minutes discovery call for anybody who's looking to see, you know, what their next steps should be, whether they should sign up for the, uh, one is to one coaching program that I call. It's a six month coaching program called Healing from within. And in that one of the questions is, when was the last time that you felt you felt vibrant and well, and it breaks my heart to see so many, you know, answer. The last time I felt was 20 years ago, maybe in childhood or but it's usually several years into the past. It's So unfortunate that, you know, there's so many years have gone by and they still feel this way and things are just becoming progressively worse. So what I want you to know is this. I don't want to live with, you know, a living living from here, you know, with this kind of thinking or feeling that nothing can be done. I want to leave you with feeling. With knowing that your body is not broken and neither are you.
We are often led to believe that our body is weak and prone to developing disease at any moment, or in the case of autoimmune conditions. We are led to believe that our immune system is confused and attacks our own tissues because, you know, just without any reason whatsoever. Right? And our immune system hence need to be suppressed with immune suppressing medications because it has gone haywire and has become too strong. You know, there's all kinds of myths floating around, and it's so far from the truth. You know, it sort of just angers me in a way. And we also are led to believe that there is only one path to getting better, and that is by fighting with our own bodies and suppressing our immune function. Right. And that is not the way that is not a way to, um, deal and address the root causes of the disease that you might be dealing with. That is simply not the best use of your resources. You cannot fight your own body and you cannot win that fight. What you need to do is work with your body. So rather than fighting, it's working with your body as your friend. And that is to start, you know, believing that our bodies are our friend to begin with and not there to, uh, blame for what is happening to us. And our bodies are certainly not broken.
There is a reason why you have developed these symptoms, the reason why you have developed this disease and that this disease has, you know, activation happen and has progressed. And once you know the reasons, you can actually start, uh, halting the progression, uh, preventing future diagnosis, preventing future, uh, issues happening, and of course, managing the unpredictable symptoms and reversing many of them. Right. Because if we believe in this, if you believe in this, you give away your power to others. And you wait for others to tell you what to do, what steps to take, what foods to eat, what foods not to eat, what treatments to go in for. And you believe that this is the only way to get better? As I've said earlier, it's not about the fact that you have to avoid all medications or treatments because sometimes they are necessary, especially in the case of, uh, you know, uh, severe conditions like autoimmune disease, they are necessary in order to stop further damage, prevent further damage, uh, and make symptoms more manageable so that you get the energy and a chance to put certain systems in. Is work on your, you know, on your diet, lifestyle, etc. so they give you time and space for that. At the same time, they are not the answers that you are looking for. They are not the solution that you're looking for. It's more of a stopgap arrangement while you figure out what's going on. Right?
So but many of us sadly don't get around to exploring other options, alternatives and solutions that are far more effective. Options that are gentle and necessary for healing. Solutions that work not only at the physical level, but at the spiritual and mental and emotional level as well. And this is where I found a way to do that, by doing a whole lot of research for my daughter, because I was completely sure that, I mean, I was quite sure that there had to be a better way, and I did. And you can do that too. And you don't have to go through a whole year of research like I did, trying to figure this out and sort this out for myself, because what I'm sharing here on this podcast episode and my blogs and other resources that I share, is to help you see through all the information that is out there and see and understand what is, you know, relevant for you, what is actually true. It is based on evidence. It is based on science. You know, all the resources that you can possibly have to make an informed decision as to what your next steps should be.
So I hope this has opened your eyes to the fact that where your answers truly lie and if you start, uh, you know, paying attention and looking for answers within yourself, your body will certainly give you many of the answers that you are looking for. And when you start paying attention to your body's signals, which are in typically in the form of symptoms, you will be able to address them. You will be able to figure out how to manage them, how to reverse them, and certainly prevent many such symptoms in the future. If you have any questions, you can connect with me on Instagram at and 1s and thank you so much for joining me today for this episode of Embrace Your Healing Journey podcast. If you are ready to create a loving, healing environment by connecting with your body and empowering yourself with tools such as self-care, self-compassion, gratitude, journaling, mindfulness, then the free e-book Autoimmune Healing Toolkit is just for you. Head to 1s com forward slash toolkit and.com/toolkit, or just click on the link shared below. And in the next episode, I will be talking about how taking even small baby steps can lead to major healing, right? A lot of people actually don't understand this. They actually underestimate the power of these small steps. But you don't need to do that because you will be listening to the next episode. Don't miss it. Your body knows how to heal. Are you going to support it?
