Being well in four dimensions

In popular consciousness, the fourth dimension is time. I’m not a physicist (alas! there isn’t time for everything) and I’m sure this definition is greatly over-simplified. But for our purposes in this short article, it will do very well.

Our cultural conditioning tends to make us to see life in a mostly unconscious way, as a featureless stasis to take for granted, until something goes so wrong we can’t function. The norm, then, is to use force to suppress the problem, from the outside in. What I want to convey today is that it’s vitally important to think of health in terms of an evolving process. A world of sensitive, adaptive complexity is going on beneath the surface, every moment of every day, and it is altered by all kinds of events and exposures. Like an intricate web, good health is about carefully balanced tensions, strong connections. We need to consider the cost of that automatic symptom-elimination reaction.

When we’re sick, our modern medical paradigm has taught us to think in terms of sensations of pain or relief, identification of chemical changes, or organs and organ systems, maybe even cellular processes. These are not wrong—they can be a useful, even critical part of an intelligent response. But they are not enough. And seeing each “new” symptom in isolation (isolation in a particular part of the body, and isolation in time) is not only inadequate, it’s blatantly unrealistic. I find it very strange that even with all the brilliant science which has shown us so much about genetics/epigenetics, and evolution in general, a person’s health history is seen as an essentially random series of discrete events.

The present rapidly deteriorating state of public health confirms that this methodology is not successful. Many medical treatments address symptoms, even major disease conditions, with little or no awareness of the continuum of health. What we do, or what happens to us, at any point, influences the rest of our lifetime. Yet I have never had a medical doctor (and I’ve visited a whole lot of ‘em over the years) investigate why a particular problem appeared in me, nor have I ever had one speak about what actions I might take to sustain and protect my health in the future. In fact the continuum is far more expansive even than our own personal histories, including networks of lifetimes before ours, and if we have children, branching lifetimes after ours.

When we get used to seeing our health and healthcare from this much wider perspective, the real implications of our medical choices begin to be visible. New questions present themselves: How do we know which therapies or medicines are actually good for us, as a whole evolving human? How can we assess the real risks, not just immediate or obvious hazards (severe adverse reactions, predictable organ damage such as gut or liver injury from drugs) but the change of trajectory at a deeper level? This isn’t new-agey or speculative; it’s practical,  it’s in full agreement with the best science and research on genetics, epigenetics, and the relatively new interdisciplinary medical specialties. These have names like neuroendocrinology and psychoneuroimmunology… and they are presented as cutting-edge and innovative, even though traditional and holistic medical systems at all times, everywhere on Earth, have understood that our health is a complex, integrated whole, not a list of checkboxes and body parts that function in isolation from each other and the world.

Now this may seem like a flagrant digression, but bear with me. When my children were very small, I gave them materials. Paper, fabric, paint, pencils, wool, leaves, water, feathers, pots and pans, wood, soil… basically anything safe I could get my hands on, rather than coloring books and crayons, or television for that matter—entertainments which would present them with predetermined possibilities and values. I’m guided by the same principle when I first meet with a new client. Some practitioners have lengthy and detailed intake forms. Mine are very simple: contact information, and lists of any medical diagnoses and medications they are using. Instead of giving them a long list of leading questions, I usually ask them to prepare for our work by making a personal health timeline. I ask them to include anything and everything they remember (or have been reliably informed of) which they feel had an influence on their physical, emotional/social, or cognitive health, for worse or better. This could include events like moving to a new town, a change or loss or addition to the family, and more obvious physical events such as infections, antibiotics, vaccinations, herbal treatments, accidents, winning the lottery… and so on.

It might sound at first like a simple task, but one quickly finds it, too, is multi-dimensional. I’ve understood its value ever since a beloved teacher/mentor suggested I try it, many years ago. Naturally, there is always more which emerges when the client and I meet and discuss, and I do ask many specific questions at that point. But the preparatory, opening step of the timeline helps both me and the client by explicitly illuminating the fact that health and sickness are processes, progressions. Neither appears out of nowhere, and each influence on our vital energy creates a cascade—overt or latent—of changes in function and structure.

I’ll illustrate with an example. This is an invented typical case, a progression of the sort seen again and again and again by practitioners who are alert to the whole spectrum of health, in space and time.

This is the story of a child (let’s call him Nathan) born into a middle-class North American family. His parents are caring and responsible. Nathan is breast-fed for two months, after which they switch to formula as his mother needs to return to work and already has another child, a toddler, to keep up with. They try to keep an eye on the official nutrition recommendations, and stay up to date with their state’s vaccine schedule.

Nathan is by all appearances a healthy and happy infant, though he has a persistent rash from his third month. Their pediatrician suggests treating it with a topical steroid cream. Eventually the rash fades and disappears. Several months later, Nathan gets a painful ear infection. Antibiotics make it go away, but it comes back; by age three, he has recurrent otitis with increasingly high fevers, for which he receives multiple rounds of antibiotics. When he is four, the infections suddenly stop. The parents and pediatrician are pleased that they have finally defeated the stubborn problem.

Over the next year Nathan rarely gets sick, and when he does it’s mild, with no fever; however, he increasingly shows intolerance to several common foods which never bothered him before. By the time he is seven, the family has adjusted by removing all the “problem foods” from his diet. That year, Nathan begins to have trouble at school. He becomes more and more restless, and can’t concentrate on lessons. Always a good-tempered child, he now gets angry very easily, with classmates, teachers, and his family. His parents try taking him to several therapists, and struggle to help him at home, but feel something is slipping out of control.

Nathan starts taking medication for his ADHD symptoms when he is nine, following an outburst of anger which injures a younger child. The medication generally controls his restlessness, though the side effects are quite unpleasant and his parents note with dismay that his personality does not return to its former happy nature. His food intolerances continue to worsen and he has constant bowel symptoms. The family now is on permanent alert to make sure his diet and medication needs are maintained.

The autumn that he is eleven, two changes come to Nathan’s life: he moves to a different school, and an unexpected new sibling is born. Through the fall, he develops some difficulty breathing after exerting himself, and also during the night. Just after the winter holidays, he has his first full-blown asthma attack.

What happened here? A child with all the advantages of modern life in a wealthy country reaches his twelfth birthday with chronic bowel inflammation, a severely restricted diet, mental-emotional disturbance requiring strong medication to control his behavior, and asthma, a life-threatening disease. Everyone involved has tried to do their best by him. Nathan has not even reached the age of making life choices; his parents look into his future and see uncertainties, fears, limitations.

If we look at this story through the lens of modern, conventional medicine, we see a sad and inexplicable series of events. Every time the child had a problem, he was treated appropriately by the standards of the dominant medical paradigm; through bad luck or bad genes, he just kept having new problems.

If we step back and see the bigger picture, quite a different narrative emerges. Nathan’s nascent immune system (we know now the human immune system is not fully functional until at least the age of seven) was challenged very early on, and was repeated thwarted as it worked to balance him and restore his health. Every time he expressed a sign of disturbance, it was suppressed; and each time it reappeared in a more serious form. Let’s look at the details.

With financial pressures and two young children, Nathan’s mother stopped breastfeeding him after two months, while the minimum needed for a good immune basis seems to be at least two years. Formulas, even the best of them, are not what a young human organism needs, and they should be used only in cases of real necessity. (Those cases certainly do occur, and integrating holistic nutrition and other care can really help offset the extra challenges the child faces.)

Natural infections in childhood build and coach the maturing immune system. Vaccinations manipulate the immune system before it has learned how to function, forcing it to react to an artificial, incomprehensible event. How each child’s immune system will be affected by this is impossible to gauge ahead of time, and if there is a problem, it often is not perceptible at the time. Except in cases of obvious adverse reactions, the concern about any medications in infancy and early childhood (not just vaccinations) is about the confusion and potential derangement they can create in the developing immune system.

Many holistic medicine practitioners know that a rash on the skin is a sign of detoxification. The immune system is literally pushing a disturbance outward, away from more vital organs. Nathan’s rash was suppressed, when it would have served him better to assist his body’s efforts to cleanse and rebalance itself, which is entirely possible with proper homeopathic treatment. With that outlet frustrated instead, the underlying disturbance remained unresolved. He became vulnerable to infections, but they were relatively superficial infections. The fact that he had high fevers with his otitis shows that at that stage his immune system still had a lot of energy to work with. It was trying valiantly to make sense of, and overcome, the original challenges, and now the infections too.

Antibiotics were used with the aim of killing invading bacteria (and the otitis might or might not have been bacterial; no one knows, because his doctor did not test to determine whether they were actually viral infections). Antibiotics severely disrupt both the digestive system and the immune system. These two body systems are intimately entwined, and anything that impacts one will impact the other. The gut is the stronghold of the immune system. Nathan gradually lost not only the ability to digest food, triggering intolerance symptoms, but his struggling immune system was dealt a heavy blow. Compromised gut health also has ramifications in the mind and emotions, as critical brain chemicals (such as serotonin, dopamine, and others) must actually be synthesized in the gut.

When the ear infections and fevers stopped, the adults around him were relieved. As a homeopath and holistic practitioner, however, I recognize that this was the moment when he dropped to a lower level of vitality. His exposure to infectious microbes was unchanged; he and everyone around him had the same exposures all through those years. His system was sensitized, which is why he was the only one to express infection. But at this point, his immune system reached a level of disability at which it could no longer react to protect him. The loss of the ability to produce a fever is of great concern in the overall, long-term evolution of health. The “stubborn problem” of recurrent infections was actually his body’s determined, repeated efforts to heal an underlying disturbance.

When the antibiotics forced his body to stop showing physical signs of sickness (except the ongoing, gradual destruction of his gut health) the disturbance moved to a deeper, more vital level. He began to have distress on the emotional and mental levels instead. No amount of questioning him, reassuring him, or disciplining him could help at this point; the trouble was contained in a deep place parents and psychotherapists could not reach. The natural life events of progressing to a new school and the birth of a new sibling came along, and Nathan simply didn’t have the resilience and vitality to welcome them, adapt, and thrive. Instead, his health dropped further, after so many years of struggle, and he developed a life-threatening condition.

I have said many times and I will say again, very explicitly: the point of a story like this is NOT to criticize or lay blame. We all do what we think is best, and when we are unsure, we follow the advice of those our society recognizes as experts. Medications are sometimes fully justified and life-saving. However, using them automatically and indiscriminately, without regard for the subtle and long-term consequences, has contributed to epidemic levels of degenerative, inflammatory diseases and disorders—in other words, immune systems reduced to a state of helplessness. The point of a story like this is to help prevent such a devastating downward spiral in other lives, and to show that there is hope for reversing it as well.

So, what could have been done differently? At every step, when the complex young organism known as Nathan expressed disturbance or imbalance, a knowledgeable homeopath could have given him finely-tuned, individualized support to help him resolve the disturbance—in other words, to evolve through it, his immune system learning from it and being strengthened by it. If the first complaint—a skin rash—had been addressed homeopathically, this young person’s health trajectory could have been entirely different. Of course it is harder to go backwards, to remove layer after layer of suppression, to bring an organism which has been disrupted back to its original potential. But very often it is possible to partially or fully restore health. One of the harms of the dominant medical paradigm of our day is its pessimism; because its methods cannot restore health and potential, it tells us all our ills are irreversible—that we can do nothing but degenerate. This is quite simply unrealistic and untrue. Life isn’t like that—linear, uni-directional. The missing piece, the hole we can fill through intelligent observation, is the fourth dimension.

I hope these thoughts turns on a light bulb or two… and that they offers a more optimistic point of view on troubles which are commonly accepted these days—often incorrectly—as inevitable and irreversible.

Spider web image by Ismael Juan