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 | Advancing Your Practice
Over the course of these blog posts, I hope we’ve learned the importance of congruence, context, and expectation in treatment. These are all factors established in relationship and cannot be “objectively” measured. Further, it is not what we do that matters; it is the...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | Advancing Your Practice
This blog’s discussions of the limits of SOAP remind us that the “plan” is a journey. The destination is a doctor-patient relationship built on congruence of perception, aim and method: key to aligning for success. When discussing placebo, M.J. Simmonds (2000) states:...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | Advancing Your Practice
Over this series of blog post, I hope I’ve convinced you the SOAP form is fraught with the assumptions that lie at the base of conventional medicine. In fact, it has spawned a “relationship” between the doctor and the patient that is neither conducive to the...
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 my last post I raised the issue of fear as a meaning invested in the body and its symptoms. The correlation of the body part with the fearful memory deeply connects and acknowledges the fear. Making explicit the mind-body connection helps release the traumatic...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health, Addressing Your Pain
In recent posts we’ve been discussing the value of a paradigm shift to thinking of the body as a carrier of meaning and the health care opportunities it affords. As one commentator observed: finding ways for patients to shift their perspectives, to achieve “…a shift...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health, Addressing Your Pain
In the last post we looked at the research on the human body as a carrier of meaning, with a discernible history with lessons to teach us. Let’s look at this idea more closely. The work of Steen et al., “Generalized chronic musculoskeletal pain as a rational reaction...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | Addressing Your Pain, Advancing Your Practice
Our discussions in this blog have continually circled us back to the same set of questions. As a doctor, what is our responsibility for assessing the situation and exploring possible “prescriptions”? To how much of the patient’s story will you relate, and through...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | Uncategorized
In the last post we saw the findings on stress from mouse research. These findings were seen as providing optimism for the development of compounds to improve resilience to pain. A couple of thoughts come to mind in response to these ideas. On the one hand, yes, we...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health, Addressing Your Pain
In previous posts we’ve considered the benefits of stress relief in treatment. Humor can effectively relax patients, allowing them to better handle fear and anxiety. “Nurses find humor to be very beneficial for increasing their patients’ pain threshold, which helps...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health, Addressing Your Pain
In the last post we began to look the changing role of the Doctor in a health care approach that treated the patient as a whole and meaningful entity. As a person with a life experience that had a bearing upon their existing state of health. We saw that taking a full...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health, Addressing Your Pain
In the last post we raised the issue of defining chronic pain. One suggestion was to define it in terms of duration. Van Korff & Dunn, in Chronic Pain Reconsidered (2008), argue that “while conceptually appealing, this approach has not produced reliable or valid...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health, Addressing Your Pain
Patients seeking care for pain want to know whether it is likely to improve or run a chronic course, not just its cause and how it might be relieved and managed. But it is difficult for the doctor to give a clear and reassuring answer. Korff and Dunn, in their book,...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health, Addressing Your Pain
As covered previously, the autonomic nervous system is comprised of both the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system. In chronic stress, the sympathetic system, through several hormonal and neural pathways, maintains a state of chronic stress. While...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health, Addressing Your Pain
We’ve seen over the last several posts that the standard explanations for pain related to whip last, tending to identify it with lesions and their effects, is increasingly challenged in the research literature. Few insightful studies demonstrate successful...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | Addressing Your Pain
The pathways for pain transmission are complex. Generally, nociceptive information (pain-info) reports external and internal representation of the body’s physiological condition through two different components: The sensory-discriminative component, transmitted...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health
In my last post I shared some of the emotional background to my onset of MS. The history, the symptoms and the neurological exam results (ie. Hyper-excitable reflexes, inability to walk foot to heel in a straight-line, hyper-sensitivity to heat) all led to my...
