Awareness is such a valuable and necessary asset. For the healing process, it helps both doctor and patient to initiate and continue treatment. But in healthcare, this age-old tool is all but forgotten.
For the doctor, using their ears and eyes to behold the patient in front of them is a lost art.
For the patient, self-awareness is a seemingly ever-elusive goal that the constantly expanding “self-help” section of the bookstore cannot help them attain.
A patient has so many clinical clues to offer that cannot be found on an intake form: mannerisms, the sound of their voice, body type, social preferences, and the ways in which they explain their issues. Healthcare practitioners have been taught to focus on the symptom. By doing this, it is easy to lose sight of the context, or the company, that the symptoms keep.
Much like how cushions are the essence of a couch. If you take away the cushions, is it still a couch? Patients are more than their symptoms. If symptoms are the lone focus, isolated from the patient, and if a patient’s nuances are largely ignored – what exactly is being treated? It certainly isn’t the whole patient.
Influences from Past Traditions
Today, personalized medicine is rapidly gaining interest by doctors and much sought after by patients. Practitioners are beginning to see the errors of not acknowledging the individual’s needs.
The promising future of genetic and epigenetic research is bringing new depths to which treatments can be tailored to each patient. This better understanding of how our genes interact with every facet of our lives, and with every microbe in our body, scratches only the surface of our healing potential.
But as it says in Ecclesiastes, what has been done will be done again. Meaning, considering all things under the sun, there is nothing new, but reinvention of the old. For thousands of years, practitioners of the oldest healing traditions (Chinese medicine, Ayurveda, Homeopathy) have all prioritized awareness of each patient’s uniqueness.
A cornerstone to these approaches is Constitutional Therapy. Your constitution, simply, is your state of being. It is the sum total of your physical, mental, emotional, and social make up.
Constitutions are expressed as our internal workings impact how we interact with our external environment. Some of these qualities are inherited and some are the product of events in our life.
Constitutions and Illness
How we encounter acute and chronic illness is not just encoded in our genes, but manifested by our constitutions as well. In fact, much of our inability to heal from the acute and chronic, have a connection to our constitution. Without addressing each constitution type, it becomes more difficult to be fully released from the grip of disease and dis-ease.
“No knowledge is perfect unless it includes an understanding of the origin, i.e. the beginning; and as all man’s diseases originate in his constitution it is necessary that his constitution should be known if we wish to know his diseases.” Paracelsus
As I stated earlier, constitutions have been described in various healing methods throughout time and throughout the world. I have found all approaches (whether 2,000 years old or 200 years old) to be of benefit when working with chronic conditions.
After all, they came into practice through the keen observation of intrepid healers and were tempered via inspired thought. Each had their own slant that was infused by the existential, social, and spiritual viewpoints of their time.
Homeopathy and Constitutions
Some of the greatest contributions to supporting constitutions have been through homeopathy. Samuel Hahnemann (the Father of homeopathy) found that specific medicinal substances embodied similar characteristics to that of the patient. Thus, using his Law of Similars (like cures like), a constitutional remedy could be found by matching the nature of a natural substance with the nature of an individual.
A homeopathic constitutional remedy should encompass the sum of the individual’s physical, emotional, and mental state of being. When selecting a remedy, it is assumed that all processes within the organism are interdependent. Thus, physical afflictions have a mental-emotional component, mental-emotional afflictions have a spiritual component, and spiritual afflictions can have a physical component.
Hahnemann was also known to urge doctors under his training to take down a patient’s symptoms in the patient’s own words. By doing this, he was encouraging doctors to go beyond the scientific/clinical terminology. This opened awareness to the context of the patient’s symptoms within the power of their story.
Limitations to Constitutional Therapy
Patients and doctors should be cautious to use constitutions as a label. True, a well-selected remedy can offer significant leverage in a patient’s healing. However, there is such variety across humanity, and there is no way any or all methods of classifying constitutions can reckon such diversity.
Moreover, according to the principles of biological medicine, constitutional therapy cannot have lasting effect unless the terrain, or milieu, of the body is addressed first. But the two are hinged together and offer significant momentum in any chronic illness case.
As Dr. Thomas Rau (a leader in biological medicine) refers to it, constitutional therapy is the “crown” of the biological medicine approach. But something needs to hold the crown up and that is milieu therapy1.
Dr. Rau has found that for the body to be able to process a constitutional remedy, the body needs to be able to access its regulatory energy. In other words, a terrain muddied by toxins, infection, and inflammation has little ability to process the healing information carried by a well-chosen homeopathic remedy.
Constitutional therapy combined with terrain therapy offers a tremendous boost to healing from any illness. Knowing your constitution takes a partnership with a well-trained practitioner. Unfortunately, it is not something that an online quiz can deduce.
The Awareness Advantage
Utilizing awareness of the entire patient, including their constitution, achieves a specific goal – making certain the energy of the body can be revitalized after dealing with illness.
A doctor’s role is to help patients learn to need their doctor less. Perhaps just as important, is for the patient to learn more about themselves.
By better understanding the whole person, the patient can be coached, educated, and encouraged back to vitality.
Doctors, be aware and be present with your patients. Don’t reduce the limitless dimensions of the created being in front of you down to their two-dimensional intake forms.
Patients, stop neither at the self-help books to better understand who you are, nor at defining yourself by your health condition. You were made for more than that!
References:
1. Rau, Thomas. Biological Medicine. Hoya: Semmelweis-Institut, 2011. P 34.
