Whats Your Shoe Size Got To Do With Chronic Illness
Transcriber: Yuwei Wu
Reviewer: David DeRuwe
We’ve all been to the doctor, haven’t we?
There’s usually a queue
before us and after us, right?
I asked my doctor recently,
“What would you do to transform
how disease is treated?”
And I wasn’t expecting his answer,
“I’d spend more time with each patient.
A patient gets an appointment
with me. It’s not a session.
I don’t have the time to get to know
what is going on in each person’s life.
I don’t know what their circumstances are,
what their relationships, finances,
nutrition, or even
their confidence is like.”
Even if I met this doctor 10 years ago
when I was diagnosed
with a serious degenerative disease,
the likelihood is that I would
still be told pretty much the same advice:
“Try not to stress
and maybe take some extra vitamin D
along with your medication.”
Let me take you back 10 years.
I’m 31,
a few months after having
my second daughter,
and I’m in a hospital in Dublin
after I’ve just had an emergency MRI
because the entire right side
of my body is numb.
The doctor says, “Miss Wyatt,
the number of lesions on your brain
would be normal for an 80 year old.”
That was the day I found out
I had multiple sclerosis,
but this is not a talk
about my MS diagnosis that day.
What I want to talk to you about today
is what got me here to this point,
having overcome it,
and a secret sauce that I believe
is missing in chronic illness treatment.
Now, if you were to walk
into a shoe shop and say,
“I’d like a pair of shoes please,”
do you think you’d get
the right pair of shoes straightaway?
The assistant may guess by looking
at your shoes what size your feet are,
but they don’t know what style, color
or the purpose of the shoes.
In fact, even if you tell
the assistant what size you are,
there’s a multitude of choices.
What am I talking about here,
and what does this have to do with MS?
Well, apart from my total love
affair with many, many shoes,
this is how we are currently
treating disease.
We only treat the physical
manifestation of the disease,
and the mental and emotional care
are usually left with the patient
at home by themselves.
If 100 people present
with the same illness,
they are all given the same
or very similar treatment,
but we all know and in my experience
with my own clients,
it cannot be one size fits all.
Look, I am not trying to bash
the medical system.
Not at all.
In fact, we are so privileged to have
access to the care that we have.
And in my experience,
when we do treat the whole human being
as well as the disease,
people get to maintain
independence, have confidence,
reduce fear, stay employed,
keep relationships intact,
and trust in their own ability
to influence their health,
alongside their medical
practitioner, of course.
But we do miss the secret sauce,
and let me tell you about it:
“Karen, your MS has burned out.”
Now, what did I do to hear those words,
those coveted words, from my neurologist?
Typically, MS isn’t something
that just goes away.
Pretty much every message
that I get on social media
is another person living with MS
or a chronic illness
asking me for the diet
and the exercise routine that I used,
and I could give that to them
and leave them to it,
but I know from experience
and with my own clients
that it is imperative to discover what
each person’s thoughts and beliefs are,
and even more importantly,
their levels of ongoing stress
that are affecting them first,
before we do anything else.
Andrew Bernstein brilliantly said,
“Remember, stress doesn’t come
from what’s going on in your life.
It comes from your thoughts
about what’s going on in your life.”
Now, I believe we need
to start with how we think,
perceive, and process
what is happening first.
Our brain is so powerful, and it’s a tool
that determines so much for us.
The answers we’re getting now
from research give us the ability
to be more in control of our lives
and influence our health
more than ever before.
Dr. Laura Kubzansky, co-director
of the Center for Health and Happiness
at Harvard School of Public Health says,
“People with higher levels
of positive emotions
do a better job of managing stress.”
We need to spend more time
focusing on the positive biology,
looking at what happens
to the cells in our bodies
when everything is working correctly
rather than just paying
attention to the illness,
and what happens when the body -
what happens to the body
when something is going wrong?
Chronic illnesses are just
that … they’re chronic.
They’ve not just appeared overnight,
and they have been building
over a long period of time.
We must unpack what the triggers are
that may have added to the onset.
In psychoneuroimmunology,
it is widely recognized that chronic
stress leads to chronic inflammation,
which leads to autoimmune diseases
and the bigger risk of developing them,
and said another way,
our emotional health
directly impacts our physical health.
Now there’s more than 100 billion
neurons communicating
with our autonomic nervous system
every single second.
Although primarily unconscious,
many aspects of our nervous system
can come under conscious control.
More and more neurological studies
are pointing to this
and reporting an association
between stressful life events
and exasperation in disease.
Building trust in ourselves is imperative.
That way, we get to know ourselves
from the inside out.
Learning to realize my influence
on my health was the most and the biggest,
probably most patiently-awaited gift
I have ever received.
Now here’s the thing
I want you to remember,
and for me, it was the hardest thing to do
because I had lived my entire life
saying and thinking and believing,
“I don’t need anyone’s help.
I can do it by myself.”
So that’s what I did.
took the long way around.
I was the master martyr.
Not seeking any support.
And honestly, I was really worried
what people might think of me
if I did ask for help.
God forbid, pity me.
Maybe even see how scared I really was.
So much so that I even refused to go
to a meeting about MS that my mom
had researched in a local hotel.
I was afraid that I would see
someone worse off than me,
and maybe what was coming down the line.
So I continued to try to find my own way,
searching online for a solution to fix me.
There was so much information.
Most of the time I came away
more scared than inspired.
What I didn’t have back then
was any compassion for myself.
Six years ago, I was living at my mom’s
with two kids, no job, no relationship,
overweight, sick and depressed,
and having given up
a really successful career.
No one was coming to save me.
And in the middle of all of that,
someone asked me,
“What are you grateful for?”
(Laughs)
I couldn’t think of anything,
and that terrified me.
This is where everything changed.
It was so simple.
I chose to make myself happy.
I was tired of suffering;
it was exhausting.
I flooded my heart with love,
my body with nutrition,
and I began to trust myself.
We all search for a quick fix
and the fastest route,
but it is not always the best way.
We need to support the whole human being,
and in my experience,
we need a scaffold of supports
for people dealing with illness,
allowing the person
to be heard, to be seen,
and their individual needs considered,
such that they build their strength
from the inside out.
We need psychosocial supports.
There’s 316 million people in the world
with an autoimmune disease.
So what could happen if we properly treat
the whole human being
rather than just the symptoms
that we present with in hospital?
Perhaps we’d have a real chance
at halting progression in disease.
I’m honored to get to see
with my clients, over and over again,
that a combination of psychological,
physiological, and physical practices
have the whole person cared for,
not just their symptoms.
This gives opportunity for the individual
to craft and create their own self-help,
leaving them renewed
with confidence and autonomy.
I’m committed to transforming
how disease is treated
and having people realize
their own influence on their health.
Just like a shoe shop has many variations
of fit, size, and style,
I want to ask you, “What does
your personal self-care toolkit look like
and include for those times of stress?”
In the words of Carl Jung: “The shoe
that fits one person pinches another.
There is no recipe for living
that suits all cases.”
Thank you for listening to my TEDx talk.