Making decisions about your health care can be really hard sometimes. The part of you that’s devoted to living a natural and holistic lifestyle might balk at the idea of taking medication, but you can feel so scared and out-of-options that the meds start looking like the only choice you can make. It doesn’t take a
Create space for yourself to make the best decision.
life-threatening condition to create this kind of panic. Many women have told me that they don’t like the idea of relying heavily on anti-biotics, but when the stabbing burning pain of a urinary tract infection sets in, they don’t want to “fool around” with anything but the strongest anti-biotic their doctor will prescribe. Afterwards, some part of them feels guilty for making this choice.
You can feel pressure from so many places—from your own suffering, from your friends & family, and from doctors and alternative care providers who really want to help you but are tied to their own paradigm. In order to make the best decision for you, it’s important to take a step back and connect with your own heart and your own thinking.
I’m here to tell you that whatever decisions you make in order to take care of your health are ok. It’s time to let yourself off the hook of perfectionism and to embrace the truth that the wide variety of healthcare options that are open to you today are there to serve you, not to confine you. It’s perfectly ok to choose to work with pharmaceuticals, herbal medicine, energy healing, surgery, dietary changes, bodywork—-each of these modalities has a lot to offer and a set of potential drawbacks. Use whatever you need.
But how can you make the best decision for you? The following three guideposts will help you to approach creating your care plan with your values and your needs at the center.
Give yourself time to explore all of your options. Do everything you can to take time to make the decision that’s right for you. Do research on your own. Enlist the advice of multiple practitioners. And if you’re faced with a decision that needs to be made immediately, there’s nothing to prevent you from doing research after the fact and gathering the information that you need. Make space for your decision-making, even if that just means taking five minutes to breathe before giving your doctor an answer.
Check in with your gut, but use your head. When I was 16 and sick with a potentially life-threatening autoimmune disorder, the option that my family and my doctor both thought was the best was to have my spleen removed. I didn’t know very much about the full range of complementary care options, but something in me just said no to that surgery. It wasn’t fear of the procedure itself; it was a sense that what everyone was telling me about the spleen just being an “extra” organ didn’t feel right. My intuition said no. There was another treatment option open to me, and my parents and my treatment team supported me choosing the other option—at least for a time. I went on to experience a complete remission of the condition. I was really glad I didn’t have the surgery—but if that had been my only option at the time I would have done it and it would have saved my life. Listen to your intuition, but check that intuitive information with insights from your rational mind and the information that your providers share with you.
Remember that it’s not an all-or-nothing proposition. Even when you’re working with serious medical interventions like surgery, there are many complementary practices that you can safely engage concurrently with your treatment. Energy medicine like Reiki, Therapeutic Touch and prayer are all completely safe to use with even dramatic interventions. Other modalities like acupuncture, herbal medicine, and bodywork can integrate beautifully with allopathic care, but make sure that you’re working with practitioners who are very well-versed in how their modalities interact with drug and surgical therapies. And find a physician who you trust who you can tell about the complementary therapies that you’re using. Good communication between you, your physician, and your complementary providers is essential to keep you safe and healthy. If your current doctor won’t accept that you want to include complementary care in your program, find another doctor who supports your right to have the kind of healthcare that you want. There are lots of doctors out there who are excited to learn more about complementary options and will approach this work with an open mind and your best interests at-heart.
Putting it into practice: Take a moment right now to visualize yourself putting these ideas into practice. Mentally rehearse telling a provider that you need more time to make a decision. Imagine yourself checking in with your intuition and then putting your intuitive knowledge into dialogue with the information that’s coming from your providers and your rational mind. It’s much easier to do these things in-the-moment if we’ve rehearsed them mentally beforehand.
