I really get why medical misinformation is so seductive. After 23 years of living with a stigmatized chronic illness, I’ve got stories about medical trauma that would curl your toes. I could talk all day about paternalistic systems and medical bias and the overall failures of the medical system. All the times I was called a malingerer or drug seeker, all the times I got diet lectures instead of treatment, or all the male doctors that denied my symptoms altogether.
When people get judgmental and can’t understand why others fall for wellness quackery, I love to tell the story about the time I went to my Kaiser doctor and he told me to read The Secret. People often have good reason to develop mistrust. Medical practitioners have a lot of authority and power and not all of them are responsible with it.
But I am also a devoted science lover. It is thrilling to see new discoveries and re-evaluations show us more about our human experience. And I’ve spent my whole life in medical spaces and seen so many dedicated, brilliant, noble people going to great lengths to provide quality care in a system that sets them up to fail too.
It is a real razor wire to walk, advocating for yourself while simultaneously being skeptical of the system and respectful of the science. It’s a treacherous road. Trying to get symptoms diagnosed and treated in this day and age can be as big a feat as Hercules slaying the lion. Dealing with medical billing totally seems like a battle with a hydra. Every bill you pay seems to be followed by two more.
So of course, some of us fall off the Goop cliff into nonsense that wastes our time and money. Some of us will get excited about potential and accidentally follow an Instagram cult leader for a while. We might take our health into our own hands and investigate other options. The problem is that we often don’t have the tools we need to accurately evaluate those other options. We know so much less about how the body works than is commonly believed, and people will say literally anything if it means they get your money.
Charlatans and crooks will take one little piece of truth – challenging negative thoughts can make big changes in your life – and distort it into seductive promises – you can heal your diseases by giving me all your money as I tell you to think positively!
Eventually life experience shows us all that not every leader is worth following, not all authority is trustworthy, and not all promises are worth believing.
So since there is so little health advice that is appropriate for all bodies, how do we find what works? People trying to sell things will call ANYTHING self care. How do we measure the advice when nothing seems trustworthy at all anymore?
This is the secret to the Body Loyalty plan. The Marrow, Mind, and Muscle work together to give us a system of evaluation. This plan is a scaffold to support you as you make your choices.
Sustainable health goals are goals rooted in productive principles. What do I mean by sustainable? I mean behaviors that you can actually keep up. Even when you get sick, even as you get old, even as you parent small children or take care of aging parents. That you’re capable of participating in without drowning in debt. They are behaviors that actually give you more than they take. That you don’t have to white knuckle and dread every day for the rest of your life, but goals that actually help you build a life you enjoy living.
So let’s say you saw a blog post on some kind of health or wellness approach that sounded interesting. How do you know if it’s going to help or hurt you? See if it leads you back to the Marrow. Check to see if that behavior, within the context of your individual life, is rooted in a productive purpose.
Let’s take for an example something I have a particular hatred of: Juice Cleanses.
In my life, juice cleanses serve less than zero purpose. They are actively harmful and dangerous. I would never ever recommend them as something to try and I would campaign against companies that sold them. But people with kidney disease, bowel obstructions, or Crohn’s disease might be prescribed a version of a juice cleanse as part of a responsible and medically supervised treatment plan.
Nourishment – the Muscle describing what we eat – is tied in the Body Loyalty Plan to the Marrow of Self Care. When presented with a juice cleanse as an option for nourishment, both me and the kidney patient would evaluate if that choice would connect us to self care. Would it make us feel cared for? Is it necessary to self manage our medical care? For me the answer is “NO!!” and I run in the other direction. For a kidney patient, the answer might very well be yes.
Here’s another example: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.
Under some conditions – my Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, say – CBT has been the exact thing I needed. CBT can be great! It can get some really powerful results and it has for me. I’ve learned to confront fears and anxieties and learned how to evaluate them and turn down the volume on them.
But for decades now CBT has been recommended as treatment for ME/CFS, which, advocates will tell you, often winds up with a practitioner trying to gaslight a disabled person into believing things aren’t as bad as they say they are. If there is a cultural conflict between patient and clinician, CBT can be weaponized.
Awareness is the Muscle describing the choices that help us learn about our inner life. All the different therapy modalities, meditative practices, somatic therapies, and so on. When choosing what therapeutic tool will help me in each different situation, I measure it against the Marrow this Muscle is connected to – Self Talk. Does this modality make me treat myself with more compassion? Or in this situation does it compound my shame? If I’m dealing with compulsive behaviors, the answer is compassion. If I’m dealing with chronic illness, the answer is shame. So I reach for Mindfulness in that circumstance.
Trying to take care of our bodies in a system and country built to exploit bodies is incredibly hard work, and requires so much discernment. Not every alternative therapy is wrong in every situation, and not every doctor can tell us what we need. The answer isn’t in black and white never trust/always trust solutions, the answer is learning how to navigate the gray.
We can recognize that our personal health and happiness is not the goal of the powerful people running our systems, and that self care requires us to determine for ourselves what is right for us in our own situations. We can respect and rely on expertise and education and science and wisdom, while also knowing that we are the ones having our experience, and so the only one who can ultimately know what works.