Help Your Body Heal Better

When we are sick or in pain we want someone to heal us or take away the pain and unpleasant symptoms as soon as possible. Rarely have we been taught that some of our symptoms are the body’s best resource to regain balance. In fact, in most cases it tends to spontaneously regain health.

And it is that each one of us is unique. We are made up of immune, genetic, endocrine, thermoregulatory and behavioral systems that express this unity. But at the same time we are linked to the environment and our relationship with it influences the entire system.

Balance with nature

The response capacity of our body depends on the care we give it, rest, water, air, diet or attitudes towards the disease. However, the climate, what we eat, the air we breathe, the microbes that surround us, are also part of that balance.

Many mechanisms of body rebalancing are known : the mother’s breast adapting to the child’s needs, adaptation to effort, height or temperature, the ability to seal a bone fracture, to respond to an infection …

Knowing signs and symptoms that a person presents, their biology, physiology, the action of plants and medicines… it helps us doctors to be more effective; But knowing the mechanisms of the body and understanding the side effects of medication can lead to one or another attitude towards the sick person.

Know how the body regulates itself to facilitate healing

This thinking has existed in most medical traditions. The Greeks called these mechanisms of the body the vis naturae medicatrix, the healing power of nature. Today this healing power, that ability of the body to self-regulate and regain health, is analyzed in medicine from many points of view and its physiology is probably better known than ever, but it is still a little spread and sometimes misunderstood idea.

Claude Bernard, in his book Application of the scientific method in medicine , maintains that the body works as a whole, but precisely his method has ended up serving to study the human being in parts: cells, organs, devices, systems.

WB Cannon, for his part, defined homeostasis or the power of self-regulation as “the tendency of the internal environment to balance itself independently of the external environment.” Today we know the importance of the external environment.

It is not a question of trusting a magical and unknown vis medicatrix , but of trusting what we know and trying to discover or learn what we do not know and act with humility and respect in the face of the patient.