“Mind over Medicine” Dr. Lissa Rankin
I enjoy reading books from doctors who get it. Who value a relationship with their patients more than filling up the time slots and making money. Lissa Rankin gets the intimacy between patient and doctor. You know she gets it when she writes suggestions for health care practitioners such as these:
15 Ways Healers Can Amplify Their Art:
1.) Listen
2.) Open your heart
3.) Make eye contact
4.) Take your hand off the doorknob and sit down
5.) Be present
6.) Offer healing touch
7.) Invite your patient to be your partner
8.) Avoid judgment
9.) Educate but don’t dictate
10.) Choose your words with care and remain optimistic
11.) Trust your patients intuition
12.) Be respectful of other practitioners who are treating your patient
13.) Reassure your patient they are not alone
14.) Encourage stress relief
15.) Offer hope
I am happy to say that I have a team of amazing doctors and health care professionals who are willing to listen to me and fight with me, not against me. It took me years to assemble my team. I Love that Ranke has a list and I believe it would be a great thing to share with my own doctors, not to make them feel guilty but to remind them that we are all human beings and require love in order to heal. I suggest you share this list with your own health care team too.
Another great thing about Ranke’s book is that she shares her own healing journey. Somehow hearing about a medical professional who experience illness brings a sense of oneness between me and her. A sense that hey she can understand exactly what pain feels like and isn’t a robot walking into the room to dispense pain and torture in order to promote my healing. To me, pain and torture in order to heal does not sound like something that would heal a person. Neither does having a medical professional give you the stare of I don’t understand what you are going through and here is what works from statistics and that is what we are going to try.
I love that Ranke promotes patients sharing and receiving information with my own doctors. Sharing what I am learning, experimenting, and sharing the results in an open dialogue with someone can be an intimate and rewarding relationship.
Some more suggestions for patients from Ranke are:
To Live A Vital Life Prevent Disease Optimize Disease Remission You Need:
1) Healthy Relationships: A strong network of family, friends, and colleagues
2) Healthy, Meaningful way to spend your day
3) Healthfully expressed creative life
4) A healthy spiritual life
5) A healthy environment free of toxins
6) Healthy mental and emotional life free of fear, anxiety and depression
7) Healthy lifestyle- good nutrition regular exercise, and adequate sleep
The most eye opening part of her book came at the end of it in the “Writing Your Prescription” section. Ranke believes that patients can write their own prescriptions for healing. Meaning along with the doctor or team of healthcare professionals coming up with a plan of action for healing, because the patient often times promotes bad health simply by being in toxic relationships, eating poorly, drinking poorly, not getting enough sleep, or even by believing that they will never get well and in order to heal illness and to have a great life belief in conjunction with a healthy lifestyle helps one heal and prevents disease. She states case after case where people are eating healthy, are not obese, who are even getting great exercise but yet they are becoming ill. Turns out many of them, actually a major majority of them were in toxic and unhealthy relationships that promoted illness and not being well. Reading these statistics brought up many different things about my own past. You see, many of you have been reading about my journey since I started blogging about it 2 in a half years ago and I still do not have an answer to what the heck my body is doing. The tests just show high amounts of inflammation and high amounts of ARNCA and yet the biopsy’s come up negative for things. They just concluded I have an auto-immune disease that just affects my throat and causes a subglottic stenosis. Perhaps my two highly toxic relationships could have been the culprits in making me ill. Perhaps in my choosing to be in flight mode in these two relationships caused major harm to my body and my body was screaming at me since I was not listening to the other symptoms. I know, a lot to think about and consider. Yet, I am not going to play the blame game. I made the choice and I can make the choice to put up the boundaries so that my brain does not go into flight and fight mode constantly and then releasing the harmful cortisol hormone which can cause illness.
I recommend this book to anyone with an illness and who wants to actively pursue being well. I think it should be required reading for physicians to learn to be partners with their patients. Though I have to say I have 6 of them in my life who work well together and who work well with me. I am blessed in that aspect of my life, but I know many of the people I know who are ill do not have that major blessing. For them, perhaps this book will help them have a voice in speaking to their physicians and healthcare professionals about what they need. At the end of the book she has all these questions to help you figure out what you need to heal. I liked that and now I know what I need.
Happy breathing and healing…
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