Beyond the Pain

Thursday is Thanksgiving Day in the United States, an annual occasion to give thanks, to express gratitude — and eat your face off.

Sometimes it doesn’t feel like you have a lot to be grateful for. Especially when you are in excruciating pain.

I remember lots of times lying in bed in severe pain, wishing I could die. Didn’t seem like a lot to be grateful for.

Yet, every night, just before going to sleep, I would spend a minute ‘praying’ and telling God what I was grateful for. I developed this practice after reading an article on the power of gratitude. I’ve been doing it habitually for 6 or more years.

Sometimes, like those days when I spent the whole day with excruciating pain, it took a great effort to find things to be grateful for. Yet, I always did.

Why be grateful?

Because being grateful actually helps heal us. Research has demonstrated that changes in brain chemistry and the body happen when a person is grateful.

Give it a try.

What are you grateful for?

If you’re American, or not, why not take time this Thursday to tell someone(s) why you’re grateful they are in your life. Or, show your gratitude in some other tangible way.

Your body, mind, soul, and spirit will be grateful!

I currently work on contract to the Alberta Medical Association. My work
as a Change Management resource exposes me to a lot of physicians. Most are my
clients: family doctors, surgeons, and other specialists who need help managing
the change that comes with introducing new office systems.

Occasionally I meet the physicians who are part of the organization that
manages the program that employs me. Yesterday I had the pleasure of meeting
one of our board members who was reviewing the history of the program. As
someone who suffers from a ‘syndromal illness’ I
was struck by his comment that ‘we’ (that is medicine) had figured out causes
and cures for most of the ‘straight forward’ illnesses. And, that now Electronic Medical
Record (EMR) systems were needed to track and analyze the masses of data
required to track trends and connections and be used for research.

His comment made me think about the fact that what helped my getter better was
the data I gathered about my activities and symptoms. For more than 4 years
I’ve been doing a daily log of sleep, exercise, weather, illness symptoms, GI
symptoms, ENT symptoms, and others. This data has enabled me to see trends and
connections.

For example, I recently read an article on the value of Vitamin D and thought
I’d give it a try. The data from 2 trial runs clearly showed that when I took
it I suffered nausea. Without the log I may have made the connection. However,
with the log I was able to make the connection more quickly. By the way, I
talked with a friend who suffers pain and she too had tried Vitamin D and found
she couldn’t tolerate it.

So, yes I can see that getting more data on patients can be a good thing. The
good news is that you don’t have to wait for your doctor or clinic to start
gathering data about you. You can gather data about yourself to help you find
connections — and cures!