Why you may need a Health Coach for all your health concerns
There are lots of conditions that traditional medicine does not have a solution for. Who are you turning to for help?
Right now, as I am writing this, I am in the middle of devising a new diet plan for a client who has had IBS for several years. She had gone to her GP for several years complaining of IBS, she got frustrated with the traditional medical approach (there is currently no cure for IBS conditions). Her conditions worsened in the recent while, and she found herself house-bound on many occasions, she simply couldn’t predict how her body would react to her breakfast foods, or a cup of tea, or a lunch meal. As her quality of life deteriorated, she reached over to me.
There are many health conditions where either traditional medicine has no solution (such as IBS, chronic headaches and fatigue, hormone imbalances and other), or the medical approach is only able to reduce the symptoms and not heal - to this category belong autoimmune diseases and a number of chronic inflammatory conditions such as heart disease, hypertension, arthritis and many more.
For most of these conditions, lifestyle factors are key at providing solutions. First, your lifestyle choices more often than not are the underlying causes of health issues that arise, and thus they give us the understanding of their origin and development. Secondly, once we identify the root cause of one’s condition, we are able to address the real reason and work to reverse it and heal the body.
Of course, there is so much more we know now about the role of lifestyle in prevention and cure of modern day diseases. The science of epigenetics informs us that about 80% of all modern-day diseases stem from our lifestyle choices, such as diet, sleep, physical activity and levels of stress. Our previous knowledge of disease origins centred heavily on genetic factors. Thanks to epigenetics, we now have a good understanding of how diet for example, can change gene expression. The foods you are eating can turn your genes on or off! We know this from studies on identical twins with the same genes but different lifestyles.
Our diet is perhaps the most important lifestyle factor to determine whether the body stays healthy or is disease-ridden. The true purpose of food you eat is to provide nutrients for every cell in the body. There are 36 trillion cells in the human body, and all of the functions - cardiovascular, integumentary, immune, endocrine, neurological, musculoskeletal, etc. work together, in constant interplay. For a really long time, the traditional medical approach has been to treat these systems in silos: to have one specialist address knee or back pain, another treat gastritis or IBS, another specialist look at eczema and asthma and someone else understand hormone fluctuations.
The paradigm is changing right now. We now have a much better understanding that the body should not be treated as a bunch of organs or systems that work in isolation. With the evidence gleaned from epigenetics, we know that the role of diet is encompassing cardiovascular, neurological, endocrine and immune systems, and that a person's knee pain may not be related to a physiological injury or ageing wear and tear, but to nutrient deficiencies that one has had. These nutrient deficiencies might also have even been due to the overuse of various medications in the past.
This is a case of one of my patients. This lady came to see me at my NHS clinic with chronic pain complaint. She introduced herself as a sufferer of chronic neck and upper back pain for over 10 years. She was soft spoken, had deep blue eyes and smiled calmly. She patiently retold me her chronic pain history, although I guessed it wasn’t an easy task for her, as she had done it so many times before with other medical professionals. Her manner was forgiving, she was hopeful for some miracle from our consultation. Doing my health assessment I gleaned her medical history: the acute pains she had been suffering from were not caused by her playing any sport, nor were they results of accidents. Yet, her pain was acute, it was real, making her life miserable. Having had chronic pain over a long time, she developed sleep disturbances. She didn't know where to begin pulling her life back together. Together her conditions were making her quality of life rather poor, and without any bright prospects for the future she wanted to know if Health Coaching could offer her any long-term solution.
When I met her, she was on a cocktail of medications. To address her acute pain, over the years her GPs changed several drug treatments: “Naproxen”, steroid medicines (which she took only for a short period of time due to their longterm implications) and later “Ibuprofen” and “Paracetamol”. Together with the latter, she was given “Omeprazole”, a proton pump inhibitor medication for acid reflux. In cases of regular use of “Ibuprofen”, proton pump inhibitors are prescribed standardly to prevent development of stomach ulcers. As my patient continued telling me her medical history, she included a recent case of osteoporosis, which she developed recently, and her doctors added bisphosphonates into her medicines list. She is only 52 years old, and having osteoporosis at this age is quite rare. Her current health treatment plan looked like this: pain-killers to reduce her chronic pain, antidepressants (SSRIs) for insomnia problems, “Omeprazole” for stomach and bisphosphonates for osteoporosis. This medications list along was not to be taken lightly.
This was a real conundrum for me to untangle: which one of these conditions and which one of the medicines’ side effects and longterm implications should I address first? As is the case with most of my coaching, I decided to start by empowering with information.
The painkillers that the lady was taking for such a long period of time created inflammation in her gut lining. The inflammation caused her heartburn and acid reflux on a daily basis. While proton pump inhibitors are the medicines that reduce acid and alleviate the symptoms, they are not meant to be used for longer than 6 weeks. Having low hydrochloric acid prevents the body from absorbing some of the most important minerals, such as magnesium, calcium, iron, and also vitamin C and vitamin B12. In 2017 the FDA , the American drug administration body, issued a warning that proton pump inhibitors needed to include longterm nutrient deficiencies and risk of fractures for patients before prescribing the drug.
My patient and I first discussed how badly she needed “Omeprazole” at this stage in her treatment, but there was the issue of her pain-killers that could weaken and inflame her gut lining, thus taking away “Omeprazole” was not providing a solution. Hence, we focused on her pain management. Through our discussion, it appeared that her sleep had been off for quite some time. Inadequate sleep patterns and lack of sleep not only make inflammation worse in the body, but recent research has shown that people with poor sleep have a lower pain threshold, in other words, lack of sleep makes pain more acute.
My patient and I spoke about a variety of strategies that could help her improve sleep quality. We examined common sleep issues - environmental and psychological and worked out a plan for adjustments she could make in her sleep schedule and her current sleeping environment. To help her with frequent struggling to fall asleep, or keeping to a regular bed routine pattern, we discussed deep abdomen breathing exercises and several types of techniques that quieten the mind - meditation and mindfulness. Here, both sleep and stress management tools went hand in hand, as sleep disruptions cause high cortisol levels, the hormone of stress. As cortisol goes up and stays up, falling asleep and sleeping through the night becomes rather difficult.
We then discussed her diet, which was really good, but as she was not aware of her magnesium and calcium, and vitamin D needing a boost, I suggested several foods that are rich in those. We spoke about the importance of having lots of probiotic foods in order to keep the gut healthy to avoid acid reflux.
No, I wasn’t able to take her pain away at this one health coaching session, but she came back several weeks later telling me the frequency of her pain was going down and she was sleeping through the night. She didn’t rely on “Omeprazole” anymore, and her acid reflux was nearly gone. She was elated by her regained energy levels and thrilled not to be relying on medications as it was her case in the past.
If you have health issues that won’t go away, or you feel traditional medical approach is not working for you, Health Coaching can do so much more for you.