Movement is at the heart of all healing, and better than most prescribed drugs for conditions affecting both Body, e.g., metabolic disorders, and Mind e.g., mood disorders like Stress, Anxiety, and Depression.
It is well known that our healthcare system operates by creating an environment that ecologists refer to as a ‘Landscape of Fear’. They are referring to the ecosystem level persistent fear experienced by prey animals – in this case, The People – who implicitly fear contact with their predators, who roost in the rafters of our inequitable healthcare system, with its hidden fees and clinicians who generate revenue without consideration for moral or ethical standards.
More specifically, revenue generation schemes that call us in for “necessary screenings”, which often lead to very expensive outcomes associated with failures of care, i.e., misdiagnoses or overdiagnoses.
This issue has been discussed at length in the 2011 book, OVERDIAGNOSED: Making People Sick in the Pursuit of Health, by Gilbert Welsh (MD) and colleagues. Similar observations have been made by Donald Berwick (MD), a former administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
Sadly, less than 5% of medical doctors currently operate at this high level of awareness or consideration for their patients.
“Guidelines issued by medical specialty societies in North America are often at odds with European guidelines and those of independent North American organizations that have few or no vested financial interests in the medical services at stake,” write the authors of a recent peer reviewed article .
Today, many people I see exhibit behaviors suggestive of captive bonding relationships, aka Stockholm Syndrome, i.e., being trapped in an unsatisfactory relationship with their PCPs. Public response to Covid-19 brought these public sentiments, i.e., widespread distrust of medical doctors, to the surface.
My reading of the applicable statutes and regulatory guidance suggests that nothing is going to change until The People wake up to what is going on and take away the power we have vested in these misguided and overpaid clinicians.
Movement, as healing, reflects a low cost and scientifically well established therapeutic option that can heal both Body and Mind. Movement therapies break the root cause of all constraint or stagnation patterns in TCM. They are culturally modifiable and scalable therapies that can be provided in community settings without engaging the services of high priced clinicians.
Western medicine, a tangled thicket of conflicted reductionistic thinking, has been challenged by these low cost models of care, and integrative health perspectives that promote self empowerment.This is apparently because no (cerebral) neural networks associated with Mind were apparently known to influence the autonomic and endocrine systems that control our internal organs. That picture is changing, as noted in a recent report.
These findings also suggest that extended failure to move one’s torso regularly, e.g., unwillingness to get up off the couch (Couch Potato Syndromes), can affect the proper functioning of our sympathetic nervous system (SNS), via our adrenal glands.
The SNS part of our autonomic nervous system (ANS) pumps adrenaline into our blood, when we need instant energy to get moving. Dysfunctional SNS patterns can manifest as blind rages, or as timidity.
As people who are trained to command respect know, we have to get up off the floor if we want people to stop stepping on us. The poor are in trouble because they allow the rich to manipulate and to exploit them, and thereby gain accumulated advantage, a process known to sociologists as the Matthew Effect.
Time to wake up and get moving?