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 recent posts we’ve been considering the therapeutic benefits to dealing with stress as a strategy for addressing pain and cancer. But what is the story behind these concerns with stress? Researchers have long questioned why some people are resilient to stress while...
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
Bowen “moves” initiate and stimulate energy flow. That energy flow translates into a safe, rapid self-healing process which typically provides long term relief from pain and discomfort, for a wide range of conditions. BowenFirst™, allows the body...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health
In the last post, I introduced the notion that stress didn’t act upon our immune and nervous systems in an entirely unmediated way. The flip side of the mind-body connection is that effective use of the mind can benefit the well-being of the body. Skills to cope with...
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
The last several posts have explored the biomechanics of stress memory. Reactions to all stressors are stored in memory. As stressors are activated or reactivated, the previously conditioned responses are retrieved from memory, primarily by the hippocampus, which is...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health
The “stress memory” also needs to be addressed, not just the original cause of the stress. Although removing the cause, exiting an abusive relationship for example, will alleviate triggering the stress feedback loop, susceptibility persists until the body releases the...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health
In the last post we saw how stress triggered cortisol and some of the deleterious effects of excessive, prolonged cortisol in the system. A less known effect of cortisol is its ability to divert blood glucose from the brain, in particular the hippocampus, to muscles....
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health
In last post we looked at the connections between the brain and immune system. This led to reflection on the role of the vagus nerve and its role in this process. This led us to question whether it was possible to communicate with the vagus nerve so as to decrease...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health, Addressing Your Pain
If you are in a continual state of stress, like in PTSD, this greatly affects your interoceptive ability. To foster interoceptive accuracy, it is important to move the client from a sympathetic state into a parasympathetic or vagal state, which is what happens with...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health, Addressing Your Pain
Often I find people feel like the physical or emotional pain that they harbour is deserved, or at least they accept it. Maybe you had terrible posture your whole life, or wore bad shoes, or lifted too much or played too many body contact sports, so you accept that...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health
Imagine how much deeper you would heal if you also liberated your body from the humiliating memory and the fears that lurked in your subconscious waiting to attach themselves to new pains. Notice the way you are standing. Are you really standing from a place of...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | Addressing Your Pain
The therapeutic goal is to have our ANS experience that the trauma is over by experiencing a state of safety and calm for repair, restoration and rest. There are a myriad of symptoms that the body adopts in chronic pain syndromes such as anxiety, learned...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health
More and more discoveries are being made about the kinds of neural links made in the brain and how they affect our perceptions, our minds and our bodies. The brain appears to be responsible for our entire system or is that the case? On one level, any attempt to effect...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health
What is the doctor’s role in the disillusion of patients suffering in pain? Does our failure to fully disclose the subtleties of dealing with pain, opting for the easy short term “solution,” play a destructive role? Research in psychoneuroimmunology shows the...
