More Than the Sum of Our Parts: The Role of Unconscious Stress in Chronic Illness

The ultimate goal of any naturopathic medical practice would be to identify and treat the cause of the condition instead of mitigate or suppress the expression -the symptoms -of disease. Through our holistic lens, problems in later life that inherent to the biology is a mission to establish, maintain, and restore health, and,therefore,thatdisease may be the result of a blockage or impediment for this process. In our mission to find out the cause of illness, then, we must understandthe nature ofthese impediments to health and workin orderto take them off.

We do this by first exploring an individual's determinants of health: the inborn, behavioral, social, cultural,environmental, and spiritual factors that can either promote health or, if issues are uncovered here, may serve as obstacles to some person's healing process.These determinantsare “the 'terrain' or even the soil from which health or illness arises,”1and just like no house could be built on the shakyfoundation,health cannot arise from an uneven terrain. To remove obstacles identified here, DrsFinnellet al advise in their article”A Hierarchy of Healing: Origins from the Therapeutic Order and Implications for Research”that we should “strengthen inborn factors, remove disturbing factors, and establish health-promoting factors,” which are accomplished through actions taken directly by the patientsthemselvesand avoid any kind of medication, herbal or otherwise.1But how many of us are incorporating this into our treatment plans?And, more to the point, just what does this advocacy for self-responsibility seem like?

Unrecognized