Why People Sabotage (or Reject) Health and Healing

A young father who has battled cancer with success by radically changing the way he lives asked me the following question last week: “Why is it that so many people want the easier path (a vaccine, or a pill to treat symptoms) as opposed to doing the work and building up their immune systems?”

It’s such an important question, especially as we all sit in homebound purgatory watching newscasters fixate on a COVID-19 vaccine as our singular hope for a “normal” future. (Despite the sobering reality that for 10 years attempts to develop effective vaccines for SARS and similar MERS-triggering infections have been mixed at best, unsuccessful at worst.)

I chewed on his question all night and into the wee hours of dawn before even attempting to answer him. The reasons vary, and vary greatly, from person to person. Economics, personal belief systems, geography, bigotry, religion, politics, biology, and chemistry all take turns playing pivotal roles.

It would take an entire book to answer completely, but I managed to string together a general reply. I hope anyone who is currently struggling with self-sabotage, self-loathing, and chronic fear of their health and/or body will consider it, and what we may want to do about it in this brave new world:

Reason One: The Myth of “Medical Magic”

One of the many challenges of childhood is that if something goes wrong with our bodies we have to go to someone else to fix them.

First, in pain and panic, we rush to a parent. If the parent is not a Healer (most are not, and that’s totally okay), or if we are very seriously injured/sick, they rush us to a doctor or a surgeon. That doctor prescribes a pill, syrup, medicine, or surgery. These professionals almost never take time to explain to the child or parent how much, if any, of it works.

If we’re lucky the medication works and we get better. To a child this appears to happen by magic, because we have no understanding of what that medicine is doing inside our bodies, where that medicine came from, or what substances besides that medicine can trigger the same healing processes within our bodies.

As a nation the United States no longer makes any effort to teach children nutrition, biology, or healing, even when children are sick and could benefit emotionally and psychologically from understanding what is happening within them.

And so we begin our lives with “how to heal” and “how to recover” presented to us as secret knowledge. It is magic, belonging mostly to men like Dumbledore and hidden from muggles like the rest of us.

That’s a terrible foundation upon which to build a relationship with our bodies, illness, and healing.

Then we get older.

As adults we eventually cultivate personal relationships with allopathic medical doctors who invest hundreds of thousands of dollars to go to — as it appears to us muggles anyway — Hogwart’s School of Allopathic Witchcraft and Medicine. They sacrifice countless sleepless nights and limitless sweat equity and even a personal life to master the healing magic which cured us of infections and broken bones as children, and has likely saved the adults we mingle with now at one time or another. We rightly applaud them for doing so. Med school is brutally hard work.

But if these future doctors are studying in a place like the USA or Canada, they learn allopathy as The Only Way To Heal.

Medical students learn from text books printed and written by for-profit companies with financial stake in people NOT being able to heal without a pill or surgery. Yes, I know this sounds conspiratorial. But we’ve known it to be true for a long time, and most of us are rational enough to understand the dangerous conflict of interest this creates in medical education.

This enmeshment between pharmaceutical profiteering and medical educations brings us to Reason #2.

Reason Two: True Healers vs. Just Doctors

Some doctors — perhaps too many — are not True Healers. They are not inherently compassionate or curious. They often have never been life-threateningly sick themselves, and so have little experience as a patient to inform what kind of Healer they want, even NEED, to be. Some enter medicine exclusively for prestige, money, or notoriety. Others enter it because they are forced to by parents, despite having little passion for healing as an art form. (And healing is indeed an art, requiring massive amounts of passion, creativity, and discipline.)

Those medical students who are ill-suited for healing work sit right next to the True Healers in class. They receive the same diploma upon completing their education. Those who barely pass, who are not gifted or caring or curious or creative, are named “doctor” the same way their exceptional classmates are. They go out into the world and begin to practice medicine on human bodies and minds, and are paid handsomely for doing so.

Some of these sub-par healers ignore the oath that they take upon becoming doctors, which is “First do no harm,” because they cannot charge a person money or advance their careers if they do nothing. You may have guiltily indulged in the stories of such doctors for entertainment. You may even have learned about their exploits in school, or read about them in your free time.

True Healers, with or without an MD, are very unlike these doctors. True Healers want to see people heal and will use every viable tool on the planet to help an individual into recovery. A True Healer MD — please note that they absolutely do exist, and we should be grateful for them — knows when a miracle pill (antibiotics, anticoagulants, antivirals, etc. are indeed miracles when used properly) is the answer…but they’ll also happily admit when the solution is physical therapy, nutrition counseling, brain retraining, movement, sunlight, trauma healing, re-education, etc., even if it means referring a patient to someone else and not being paid at all.

Doctors who are not True Healers are not artists, but passable mechanics spot fixing the body the way an adequate machinist patches up an aging car. Sometimes they use duct tape when they really shouldn’t. Sometimes they use jargon to try and sell you a lot of crap you don’t need, because business is business, right?

The problem is that these kinds of doctors don’t just slap tape on a broken bumper or sell you overpriced washer fluid. They also actively work to discredit systemic resilience and “alternative therapies” (nutrition, movement, meditation and breath work, plant medicine, light therapy, nervous system retraining, trauma healing, etc.) because if those therapies are utilized successfully they cannot make money selling pharmaceutical patch jobs.

Take Dr. Jackie Cleggett of Louisiana, featured in the true crime docuseries The Pharmacist on Netflix, for example: Cleggett was a doctor, but not a True Healer. She was a doctor with a real medical degree, a gorgeous car, two lovely children, a huge house…and a desperate need for money to fund her outwardly admirable, upper-class lifestyle. (She also may or may not have been an addict herself.)

If Dr. Cleggett had required her patients to take an active role in their care, to address their addictions and traumas, and to try alternative management therapies for their pain BEFORE prescribing highly addictive opiates, she never would have become a millionaire. If she had read the research that she as a pain specialist was required to read, she would never have been ethically able to continue practicing the lucrative style of “medicine” that she did. She would never have become rich, and would not have been able to numb her own profound suffering using legalized heroin and a whole lot of ill-gotten cash.

But she didn’t. And so a lot of people died.

Dr. Cleggett was not an anomaly, as our national opiate crisis has laid bare. She was just another allopath who, for a variety of reasons, was ill-suited to her career and her title.

Doctors like Cleggett do as much work to suppress clinical evidence and medical breakthroughs on alternative modalities and ancestral techniques as they can, as The Pharmacist illustrated. (Cleggett’s work in Louisiana persisted even as peers called and begged her to stop prescribing the way she did, citing valuable studies on the damage her drugs of choice were doing.) They have to ignore or discredit anything which would empower people to fight disease or dysfunction from the inside out actively as a threat to their livelihood.

A more recent example: Just a few weeks ago “experts” appearing on outlets like LiveScience and CNN were saying there was “no evidence” Vitamin C is useful in the treatment of COVID-19. They reported this even as True Healer MDs in hospitals around the planet used IV asorbic acid on critical patients with medically relevant benefits, then SHARED PRESS RELEASES ABOUT IT so that other patients could be helped as well.

But the “Just Doctors” the United States media featured poo-pooed this research away. Some even laughed at it. The did so in front of millions of viewers.

Until a few True Healer whistleblowers in New York went public on their use of IV vitamin C in epicenter hospitals like Cedars Sinai and NYU. Today, right now, hospitals across the country are utilizing this valuable adjuvant therapy, as well as studying it in proper clinical trials.

Despite all this, right now on the National Institutes for Health web site we still have government physicians recommending less than 100mg of Vitamin C a day as the RDA for adults. That’s about 900mg less than the baseline starter dose any True Healer who works with sick patients recommends for overall wellness, let alone sustained health.

The pathetically small fraction of North American children who are being taught any kind of nutrition in school are still being taught to take in 8–10 servings of heavily processed and inorganic grains per day, or to drink 3 cups of milk for “strong bones.” They are not taught which foods contain vitamin C, which foods actually contribute to strong bones, or what foods reduce their likelihood of getting sick as they grow up.

These are minor examples of suppression as executed by mediocre mechanics of the human body. Unfortunately, their opinions are often bolstered and spread by an emerging and incredibly dangerous army of amateur skeptics with internet access.

Reason 3: The Epidemic of (Amateur) Skeptics

“As humans, we rely on other people to inform our opinions,” cognitive scientist Celeste Kidd, an expert in curiosity and learning, explained to Berkeley News last month. “We especially pay attention to authority figures and majority opinions. We also pay more attention to the beliefs of those we like over those we dislike.”

This part of our human nature has historically been pretty helpful. It led us away from the “Miasma Theory” of disease (which claimed “bad air” from rotting garbage or stagnant water caused plagues) and to the much, MUCH more useful Germ Theory that got everyone on board with sanitizing medical equipment between patients. It meant that people like Clark Stanley, the O.G. snake oil salesman, stopped being able to scam sick people with useless bottles of liquid petroleum posing as medicine. It’s caused millions of people to follow the teachings of genuinely good and kind people, like Gandhi or the Dalai Lama, for the betterment of humanity.

But today, as we sit within a social media revolution that has enabled Influencers and politicians to publish thoughts worldwide with the click of a button, our preprogrammed human tendency to form beliefs with the help of others is becoming a liability.

Unlimited access to critical information and great ideas conversely means unlimited access to misinformation, propaganda, and utterly shit ideas. Kidd shared a recent example of the pitfalls:

“President Trump repeatedly and confidently suggested that an old malaria treatment, chloroquine, could treat coronavirus, in the absence of scientific evidence to back that statement,” Kidd said. “He said it was ‘safe,’ that he had a ‘good feeling’ about it and that it could be ‘one of the biggest game changers in the history of medicine,’ even after Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, corrected him. An Arizona man, heeding Trump’s advice, ingested an aquarium cleaner that contained an ingredient called chloroquine, and died. The words of authority figures, like heads of state, hold particular weight in influencing people’s beliefs and can be deadly.”

The dangerous issue of misinformation being released by powerful non-experts is compounded by the sheer number of “expert skeptics” working tirelessly to “debunk” information that might actually be pretty good. Two recent examples: Flat Earthers, who have decided it’s time to expose to centuries old “lie” that the earth is round, and QAnon members, who preach that COVID-19 is a hoax perpetrated by the “Deep State” to derail the reelection efforts of President Trump.

No one anywhere is safe from the epidemic of skeptics anymore, least of all people working in integrative medicine and healing.

Skeptics have declared basically every healing modality from acupuncture (clinically proven to work depending on the diagnosis) to breath work (clinically proven to work, again, depending on the diagnosis) as “quackery” or “snake oil.” They’ve gone on TV, or given interviews to major consumer magazines, sharing their scathing “expert” opinions in segments or pieces too short to ever be a comprehensive, ethically-sound presentation on that therapy.

Fun Fact: Many of these “expert skeptics” are not experts at all. They just speak or write well enough to pass. (Tracie Egan Morrissey, Dr. Phil, and yes, President Trump, are just a few you’ve likely seen yourself in pop culture.)

The internet, our newspapers, and glossy magazines are full of them. And so sometimes the average person does learn a great piece of information about immunity, their own biology, or healing. They read how full spectrum turmeric extract reduces inflammation as well as some NSAIDs, how vitamin C can counter tissue damage in viral infections, or how breath work can combat chronic hypertension. They then jump online to make sure this good news is true….and some skeptical asshole, who has done incomplete and/or deeply biased research, pops up saying “YOU’RE WRONG AND YOU’LL DIE BECAUSE YOU’RE WRONG.”

That’s an utterly terrifying moment for a sick person looking to become well. It can even become a deadly moment for a sick person looking for hope.

The epidemic of skeptics as it operates currently seems to paralyze some people into doing nothing, trying nothing, and believing nothing. How can the average secretary or manager, overworked and underpaid in an office job, effectively argue with an “expert” epidemiologist on Medium, or a journalist with 500,000 Twitter followers, saying they’re wrong? They feel they can’t.

So they take their prescription pill that isn’t working great and comes with a ton of side effects, and stay stuck where they are indefinitely.

Given that the voice of the skeptical online masses is so rageful, abusive, and loud that it silences actual experts, is it any wonder average sick and scared people just quit?

Reason Four: Loss of Faith in Self, and/or Trauma

But the single BIGGEST reason in my practice, and my personal life, I see people reach for the magic pill instead of doing the work to build up their own body and their own ability to recovery?

It is “fear that I’m not worthy.”

At some point in our lives nearly all of us are told them that we are bad, not good enough, not capable enough, not deserving, broken, wrong, whatever.

Some of us take that horrible memory, stuff it somewhere, and forget about it.

But our bodies remember it, to borrow a phrase from researcher and practitioner Dr. Gabor Mate, one of the world’s leading researchers on how memory and emotions influence our ability to heal regardless of diagnosis.

Later, a True Healer tells us that if we do the work — exercise daily, eat right, go outside, get less screen time, take control of the nervous system through breathing and brain retraining, quit that crappy job, move on from that toxic relationship, work with the immune system like a beloved teammate instead of an enemy, face our traumas, feel our feelings, help others, reach for what seems like magic but is actually science, etc. — we can get better.

Suddenly, that fear we stuffed away as children begins to scream from its hiding place: “NOT YOU, LOSER. IT MIGHT WORK FOR OTHER PEOPLE BUT IT WONT WORK FOR YOU BECAUSE YOU’RE NOT WORTHY.”

We are terrified if we try that hard, work that hard, spend that much money on clean food and supplements instead of burgers and beer, have hope, experience a modicum of faith, we’ll do aaaaaaaalll that work….and reap zero benefits.

We’re scared we will try and fail, and that failure will confirm we are worthless. Maybe the people we want most to love us will even laugh at our failure.

It’s an utterly hopeless, cancerously negative place.

When someone is locked in that hopeless place, they can eat right and take all the vitamins and do all the yoga they want, even utilize mainstream therapies like surgery or stem cells, but the damage their toxic fear and toxic shame does to their HPA axis means they’re pumping stress hormones into their tissues 24/7.

Their loathing about how broken and worthless they are transforms into chemical compounds in the bloodstream — cortisol, adrenaline, etc. — and suppresses the immune and nervous systems. Their tissues don’t heal normally. Their hormones get dysregulated. Their organs struggle. They don’t sleep right.

They are very literally sabotaged from within.

It’s one of the hardest things any healer, true or otherwise, has to do, outside of silencing the aforementioned skeptics who trigger “nocebo responses.” Convincing people they’re deserving, worthy, and capable of getting better even after someone said they’re not can take years…years that some sick people don’t have.

(And not to get political, but it’s part of why the particular president we have currently disgusts True Healers so much. When an parental figure like a president gets on TV every day and screams, laughs, or quips about how everyone’s not good enough, everyone is “nasty,” everyone is a failure except him, he’s indoctrinating millions of people at a time with a lie that will keep them sick possibly for the rest of their lives. The generation of kids coming up under his tone and influence are, to use a super scientific medical term, “royally fucked.”)

This of these points are, of course, a very broad and largely un-scientific answer to one patient’s valuable question.

But it is the gist of my opinion at this point.

SO many people are to afraid to fail at getting better that they won’t even try.

Some are so afraid they’ll fail at getting better that they work to sabotage the efforts of others who try.

I have been someone who, in the depths of despair and EDS-related organ failure, believed I could never recover. Some days even as my once-failing organs do their job again, I am still one of them.

If you’re still reading, and if any part of you ever spasms with the weight of feeling you’re too broken to heal, read this and meditate on it next time you have a few moments of quiet:

You are worthy. You are not broken. That thing that person said about you that aches when you let yourself feel it? That’s not actually who you are, and THEY never even believed it to be true about you…they were just mad, or sad, or scared, or all three when they said it.

You are allowed to be more than that thing they said. You are allowed to try. You are allowed to ignore the skeptics.

If you fail it does not mean you cannot succeed.