by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health, Addressing Your Pain
Chronic pain is a complex and often debilitating condition that affects millions of people worldwide. Unlike acute pain, which is usually a direct response to an injury or illness, chronic pain persists long after the initial cause has healed. This persistent pain can...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health
The new paradigm in healthcare that I’ve been discussing in this series of blog posts is sometimes mistaken for simply alternative modalities of practice. The choice of modality is not unimportant, but neither is it a panacea for sound practice. Valuable as was my...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health
In my last post I began a discussion of the paths that lead us to the new healthcare paradigm. There I discussed the personal experience of a disenchanted law student who discovered that justice through the law wasn’t all I’d initially thought it cracked up to be....
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health
In my last blog post, I discussed the emergence of a new paradigm in healthcare and some of the opportunities it was beginning to open up. Such important changes in how people think, feel and act are not expected to come out of nowhere. So, from where has all this...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health
Embrace The New ParadigmIn my book, What Patients Don’t Say, If Doctors Don’t Listen, I discussed how the day-to-day challenges of our practices can wear down the initial inspiration to heal for many healthcare professionals. It doesn’t need to be that way, though....
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health
Everyone wants to live a healthy, happy life – but how do we break out of our old cyclical habits and get there? With fear and uncertainty in our way, building walls of shame and anxiety… gaining back our health can sometimes seem and feel like an impossible...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health
It all started one morning, when I was battling with a little voice that kept saying, “It’s ok, you don’t need to be at work at 9am, just call in and tell them that you will be delayed.” But the better part of me scrambled for change to take the bus and packed my bag...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health
Many have a personal story, often of a family member or relative who suffered. Whether or not they died or were “saved,” a light was turned on because of their experience. The practitioner enters the field of medicine driven by a desire to help others or find a...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health, Advancing Your Practice
As we have seen, therapeutic effect is increased if the patient is aligned with the treatment and has positive reinforcement for the outcomes. Research confirms the beneficial effects of patients’ increased control over their health and body. Approaches to treatment...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health
“The science of medicine must be deployed to elucidate the art of medicine; otherwise, medicine falls short, both as science and art.” (Miller & Colloca, 2011) I set a mission for myself when I began this blog. It has been a long journey, lasting several years....
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health
In my last post I discussed the findings of a set of vertebroplasty studies that revealed the power of the positive “placebo” effect of informed patients. Let me quote at length one research group’s evaluation: “The power of information disclosure to influence patient...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health
Over the next couple posts I’m going to discuss a case study that casts a helpful light upon our recent discussion of the so-called placebo type positive effect resulting from a treatment approach that privileges informing and empowering patients. In this study on...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health
Is there something that has yet to be better understood that takes place when a patient engages in a course of treatment? According to Milton Cohen, when considering pain there is, “The self-referentiality of living systems (through their qualities of autopoiesis,...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health
As we’ve seen over the last couple posts, the placebo effect discussion is a little more complicated than seems at first flush. We could redefine the “placebo effect” as the “aligned and committed effect” or the “positive effect.” Unwarranted, preconceived negatives...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health, Addressing Your Pain
In the last post we discussed how research on the placebo effect complicated a lot of assumptions about pharmacological research. But if the manifestations of improved health are not a result of physiological effects, it’s fair to ask: if we’re not the disease, are we...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health, Addressing Your Pain
We left off the last post pointing out the ethical quandary around using the placebo effect for therapeutic purposes. Consider the fact that as NDs, “Do no Harm” is a fundamental tenet of our practice. Everything else aside, if the results are similar whether or not...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health, Addressing Your Pain
In the last post, we saw widespread findings showing a pervasive placebo effect with the use of pharmacological treatments. What do these findings tell us? Why all these variable results? If drugs are supposed to have a predictable result on certain pathways or for...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health, Addressing Your Pain
In Sheather-Reid’s 1990s study on efficacy of pain relief agents, the agents used were opioids and non-opioid analgesics (such as nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs and acetaminophen (paracetamol)) to examine the analgesic efficacy of the opioid agonist codeine...
