HOLISM - The Bigger Picture

When working with patients, i see my role as being able to take a ‘birds eye view’ of the situation. A person might present with lower back pain and rightly be concerned about the discomfort and loss of function that they are experiencing. Some times the cause of the pain maybe obvious, other times it may have seemly come on ‘from out of nowhere’.

Even if the pain steamed from a specific accident or injury, how we were feeling, what we were thinking and our current life situation at the time can effect how we express symptoms and then how we heal from them.

I see my job as taking a holistic, birds eye view of my patients presenting complaint and pain pattern.

As humans our life is made up of lots of different experiences, some physical and some emotional, all of which our bodies react to on a structural and physiological level. We can even develop our posture around how we are feeling emotionally! If you were asked to act feeling happy, sad or angry you would probably be able to change your body posture to convey all of those emotions.

So when your back just ‘went’ after picking up a sock off the floor, the chances are that this movement was just ‘the straw that broke the camels back’ and that this incident was on the surface of past layers of life experiences, accidents, illness, trauma or stress, some of which might have occurred a long time ago.

Bodies can hold tension locked inside, you may have heard of the phrase ‘issues in the tissues!’. Many of my patients have an ‘Ah ha’ moment when they recall an incident that their body has remembered that perhaps their mind has forgotten.

Having the birds eye view on the situation enables me to see the person as a whole and help them to shift out of an old pattern of being into a new, more comfortable one.