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...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health
I began to wonder whether I had asked too much of life, whether I should just accept my situation: learn to live without love. Of course, in the beginning, I was happily convinced that my marriage met all that was required in a proper match, but now nothing alleviated...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health
We started our first steps toward me telling you about my healing journey with MS. As preliminary to that, it was necessary to remind you of a couple important things. Including that each person’s journey will be individual. There are no cookie cutter solutions....
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health
Numerous studies show that stressors can have profound emotional and physical health consequences. Stressful events trigger cognitive and affective responses, which in turn induce sympathetic nervous system and endocrine changes that ultimately impair immune function....
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health
We concluded the last post with a discussion of the contribution of Samuel Hahnemann to symptom diagnosis and homeopathic treatment. The key idea was that diagnosis and treatment required a full assessment of the individual patient’s larger life situation. The point...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health
Over the last year and a bit that I have been writing this blog, we’ve covered a lot of material. I began way back at the outset with the project of dissecting the conventional SOAP approach to patient evaluation. Though we’ve taken many detours and required some deep...
