Self Help Blogger & The Limits of Self Help

It’s time for this self help blog blogger to address my thoughts about my recent health scare:  The limits of self help!

What do I mean by that?

As you know if you’ve been following my writing, I’m a big fan of taking charge of my own health, emotional and physical.  I grew up with a father who was basically a holistic doctor — he was a “regular” physician, but also very much up on all sorts of natural healing approaches, from herbs to Kneipp water treatments and so on. So I grew up with a lot of herbs, and am still a strong believer, and when I get sick, that’s where I go first.

Meanwhile, I also studied and was certified in Quantum Touch energy work, and have practiced that on and off for a number of years, on myself and on others.

I also do distance healings occasionally and I’m still a bit incredulous about how well it works, even halfway around the globe.

But the main beneficiary of my QT practice has been me.  That’s why I started it.  At the time, I was in constant pain and was seeing a chiropractor at least twice a week. I also had horrible insomnia and was using everything in the book and then some, and STILL had trouble sleeping.

But once I started using some advanced QT techniques, my back and neck pain improved to the point that my chiropractic visits dropped to once a month.  My chiro still doesn’t quite believe I’m not “seeing someone else.”

And I can sleep!  In fact, that was the biggest miracle that happened.  There’s this special meditation that I’ve written about elsewhere on my self help blog that basically helps me go to sleep more effectively than almost anything else.

In fact, here’s what happened when I first learned it:

We were doing that meditation in the workshop, and insomniac super-fussy sleeper me fell asleep right there in the middle on the room, lying on the floor!  How embarrassing — and amazing.  I did the same meditation again that night, and once again I fell asleep before I was halfway done!  Woohoo!

So I do QT almost every day, and overall I’m very happy with the results.

But here’s the rub…

When I noticed a huge very deep boil/cyst on my thigh, I threw some herbs at it and visualized health, and did a lot of QT.  And yet it got bigger and bigger.  I finally decided maybe I better go to a doctor even though I currently have no health insurance.

Of course, the question was where to go. I realized I had no time (or money) to go from one doctor to the next as they tried to figure out who was the right person for THIS particular problem…  And who would be able to give me the right antibiotic.

Finally I did go see a doctor.  Fortunately, I picked my friendly plastic surgeon, who had been removing a whole bunch of moles from me a few years back, and who also had proven to know exactly which antibiotics worked when I had “boil” problems in the past.

He immediately got out the anesthetic and the scalpel and cut the thing open.

And none to soon…

He told me that if i hadn’t come in when I did, I would have landed in the hospital with a septic leg — within a day or two.

That was a scary thought!  I had been really sick already, with a fever, and intense fatigue. And at first I felt even worse after the surgery.

But talk about serendipity. I’m so glad I followed my gut feeling to go find a doc NOW and that I picked just the right one who got me in that very afternoon and immediately took action.  I went on antibiotics (still am) and the leg is now just about healed.  In the meantime, I was REALLY sick for a week and I’m still quite tired even a couple of weeks later.

So what’s the lesson?  Use ALL of it.  Alternative and traditional medicine. They are not an either/or proposition, but an and/and!  Like it was with my dad. He gave us wick’s vaporub and herb tea, but he also gave us antibiotics when we needed them.

There’s a time and place for all of it, and it often works in tandem… So yes, self-help is good, but sometimes we need to let others help us too.

What do you think?  Please share your thoughts in the comments section below.

One thought on “Self Help Blogger & The Limits of Self Help

  1. sandy sims

    I feel this is exactly the quandry we have to become good at recognizing. The real desire seemed to be to resolve the problem and then allow whatever floated in such as calling your plastic surgeon to be appropriate. Connecting these dots seems to be the new continuous exercise.

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