My Journey with Vitality--- the emerging field of Vitality Medicine
‘Vitality Medicine’ is the natural result of my life’s experiences and gifts. I was fortunate to have been born to parents with strong convictions and a consciousness centered around health and wholeness. Their convictions were not limited to our little selves or our personal lives. To this day, my dad, now in his seventies, aims for radical global change. My parents showed us how to live connected, seeing our family as the microcosm of what could be true in the macrocosm.
My parents met in their early twenties at a yoga class, each already practicing transcendental meditation daily. Once together, they made conscious choices on what reality they wanted to create and what the beliefs would be the underpinnings of the culture of our family. Our “family as a catalyst for change” was the intention that went into our very births (birthed at home), in our upbringing (eating organic and whole foods), living close to nature in the country, and attending Waldorf Schools. We were also always taught that we were loved and deserving of love and that humans could be trusted. We were taught that our bodies were our temples, and that they are wise. Don’t pollute them with bad food and substances and they will work impeccably for us.
When there was discord in our family the explanation is, “oh, don’t take it personally, so and so is just tired.” In other words, you are not at fault, others are not at fault, we are just tired and therefore not behaving at our best. My dad always tells us that when we are rested, we can move mountains. ‘Rested’ means so much to my family. ‘Rested’ means eating well, taking time to recover and have inward time, and do what it takes to maintain the natural balance our body knows.
The high intentions of my parents and the resulting cohesion within myself and my family is perhaps the most incredible gift of my life and strongly determines where I am today.
My decision to become a chiropractor was a direct result of watching my dad help everybody as we were growing up through his work. He would treat (through manual chiropractic adjustments and muscle work) anyone who we came across in need: Huichol Indians in Mexico, Tibetan nuns in Nepal, cousins in Minnesota, patients at the office, me and my siblings, and our friends at home…. With my embedded ideal of changing the world, I realized that if I wanted to see tangible changes daily, what better way to do this than working with my hands (the meaning of chiropractic) in health care.
Since graduating from chiropractic college in 2008, I have felt blessed every day to do what I do. My search for making a better world through helping individuals and families led me to branch out beyond chiropractic and delve professionally into cranial sacral therapy, nutritional therapies, and Functional Medicine. It is an adventure being part of health care. From my upbringing where the understanding of the innate intelligence and wisdom of our bodies was basically our religion, I am continually shocked at the dominant framework around health in the United States.
In healthcare there are so many compassionate and caring medical professionals. Gratitude is what permeates my days for my colleagues. Gratitude also that we have medical professionals, access to good medicine, surgery, diagnostic testing, and more.
What is challenging for me is some of the dominant ideologies within mainstream medicine. Some say it started with Descartes in the 1600s when he mechanized the human body. The human body became seen as a bunch of separate pieces, even the mind and the soul were separate from the flesh. I call this the “body as machine” paradigm.
“[O]n the one hand I have a clear and distinct idea of myself, in so far as I am simply a thinking, non-extended thing [that is, a mind], and on the other hand I have a distinct idea of body, in so far as this is simply an extended, non-thinking thing.” Descartes
This mechanistic view of the body is a result of the dominant paradigm of reality we live in based in separation. In either/or. In duality gone wrong. Lost is the balance of the yin yang and focus on symbiotic interconnection and wholeness. We are mired in an either/or hierarchical and now polarized duality framework. The ‘soup’ (mainstream western culture) has a hierarchical structure where one thing is favored over another and considered better. For instance, individual over collective, the triumph of humans’ power over nature, men over women, rich over poor, white over black, and more. You know the ‘either/or’ drill. Ranked hierarchy in-built to the very fabric of our western societal structures. Take a women’s studies or ethnic studies class to learn more, read about systems of power.
The practitioners of medicine did not intend to slip into this mechanistic dualistic view. It was the thought structure of the society we all were born into in this country. This reality of separation does not see the interconnections within not only the human body but also between the body and the natural environment within which it lives (both planet earth and cosmic). The body is not seen in a holistic way but it ‘exists’ as separated into parts and thus specialized into different medical specialties. Of course these specialized areas of medicine are essential, but a larger meta-view on the body as whole and connected with innate intelligence can be felt missing.
Being specialized as a medical professional is awesome, we get to be really good at the thing we are most interested in. The problem is time. Not until around 2011 when my brother-in-law was in general surgery residency was there a revision in a national law made that limited residents to 80 hours a week of work max. Before that, they were encouraged to do more and did! When our medical professionals are so pressed for time, they do not literally have the time to communicate with other specialists about your case. Who holds the big picture of your health in this system? No one.
In the ‘body as machine’ model where the body is ‘an extended, non-thinking thing’, it doesn’t matter what you eat or how you treat it, it is merely gas into a gas tank. In this disconnection with natural systems and what nature provides as whole foods, the dominant foods people now consume are hardly even “real” foods. The most popular foods, the ones we see advertised on TV (if you have a TV, we don’t) are packaged “food” often chemically manipulated, highly processed, and/or even invented by humans in a lab. They are not organic, requiring chemicals to be sprayed into our soils and exposing farm workers to carcinogenic pesticides until recently were considered safe. As with conventional wheat, it is sprayed with RoundUp (glyphosate) before harvesting to make it easier to process. When you develop a disease from that high sugar “packaged food” like Type 2 Diabetes, no problem! Take medicine to fix it and keep drinking soda, just make it diet soda! The demands placed on the human body are incredible. The miracle of your body is, that for the most part, your body keeps re-balancing through its incredible inbuilt system of homeostasis in spite of the crap most people put in it.
In the 1960s and 1970s, the “alternative/preventive/integrative/complementary” health care model was formed as an “alternative” medical model. There have always been holistic mindful movements in medicine, but this one really gained hold and became legitimate as even insurance companies started to cover the treatments.
This alternative model includes my beloved Functional Medicine that was created in the 1990s to bridge the gap between mainstream and alternative medicines. Functional Medicine views the body as a whole system and aims to include all systems (including gut, liver, gall bladder, and adrenal gland health, etc) to come up with comprehensive and more ‘natural’ treatments before an emergency or disease occurs. These treatments first focus on diet, supplements, herbs, and lifestyle recommendations. This has definitely been a successful next recursion of health care and a helpful complement to mainstream medicine.
However, being aware of how a reality based in separation influences even the most progressive of models, there is an underlying missing perception of the body as ‘whole and complete’ even within Functional Medicine. I have observed that many forms of Western alternative medicine overly diagnose and recommend protocols that keep people in a model of “body as deficient.” By hyper-analyzing every little detail; narrowing blood reference ranges; founding labs that create their own tests and markers of “normal,” then reducing things to finding a singular “root cause”, the innate capacity of the human body to heal is suppressed. People can get so stressed about their gut health or food sensitivities that it actually causes them to lose faith in the magic of their own bodies. A mental perception persists of “your body cannot do this on its own” and “you need this herb/supplement/medicine to heal.” The focus is on deficiencies not on trusting/restoring the body’s innate strength, stamina, and capacity of wholeness has me troubled. While these models view the body as a whole system, the body is not considered to have its own intelligence, its own Mind of Creation, and its own innate ability to heal.
After my training and then having time in the field, we all, as health care practitioners, have our own access points into health and healing. My unique access point results from my upbringing and chiropractic training, a model focused on vitality and trust in the innate intelligence of the human body. My dad actually wrote this in a humorous and wise letter to my sister upon the birth of her first baby in 2017,
“With your new bundle of amazement please always look at the vitality that is behind its crying, yelling, and other baby profanity. If your baby’s vitality is intact, you can usually ignore most of your baby’s other symptoms.” Dr. Dale Jacobson, DC
He has been tracking vitality since before I was born. The name ‘Vitality Medicine’ came to me over time as a new territory of exploration. I repeatedly found that I was tracking vitality through my hands to what was happening in the body beyond joint restrictions, etc.
When the name “Vitality Medicine” came to me I surprised at the inclusion of ‘medicine.’ In my search for why that word emerged, I studied the etymology of the word. “Med” means to ‘take appropriate measures’ and this is definitely important to me in occupying the healing role. While our bodies are innately vital, they also need tending. They appreciate the good care and will respond well to it. For instance, you cannot skip dinner and expect to have a good night’s sleep. It puts unfair stress on your blood sugar handling mechanisms and over the long term may burn out your adrenal glands (which monitor blood sugar). There is only so much ‘mind over matter’ that we are capable of-- if your thyroid is low, it is near impossible to have good energy levels since the thyroid regulates the rate of metabolism of every single cell in your body.
I also resonated with the Native American definitions of medicine: “magical influence; something supposed to possess curative, supernatural, or mysterious power.” According to Ken "Bear Hawk" Cohen, "Native American medicine is based on widely held beliefs about healthy living, the repercussions of disease-producing behavior, and the spiritual principles that restore balance." Also important to me is the Middle English use of medicine as a "moral, psychological, or social remedy; safeguard, defense." For me, ‘medicine’ embodies curative power, care, sanctuary, healing, treatments that promote restoration of homeostasis, and the alleviation of suffering.
In future articles I will flesh out more on Vitality Medicine. Stay tuned!