By A Midwestern Doctor
The Forgotten Side of Medicine
August 26, 2024
One of the key themes I've tried to illustrate in my writings is that chronic illness has vastly increased over the last 150 years. A major cause of this is the disruption of the natural rhythms essential for our body's self-regulation and self-repair.
Modern Medicine (Allopathy) often overlooks this concept because it doesn't recognize the innate health of the body. Allopathic treatments focus on stabilizing or altering the body (e.g., ICU care or surgery) and hoping it heals itself, unlike other medical systems that enhance the body's natural recovery capacity.
Typically, Allopathy excels with acute conditions, while a health-augmenting approach is better for chronic illnesses, an area where Allopathy often falls short. Here are three reasons why the Allopathic model dominates:
- Economic Incentives: The Allopathic model creates many expensive treatments and diagnostics, making it highly profitable and incentivizing its dominance in the medical market.
- Cultural Psychology: Our culture's need to control and understand everything leads to methods that dominate nature rather than work harmoniously with it, opposing the philosophy of trusting the body's natural healing.
- Research Bias: Medical research favors treatments that show immediate, observable changes (like lowering blood pressure) rather than those that promote gradual, long-term recovery, skewing the focus towards pharmaceutical interventions.
The Impact of Natural Rhythms on Health
The health of the body relies heavily on the normal functioning of self-regulating cycles:
- Breathing: Slow, smooth, nasal breathing profoundly impacts health and longevity by regulating many critical physiological functions.
- Sunlight: Regular exposure to sunlight is vital for health, and its absence doubles the risk of mortality and can lead to conditions like depression or cancer.
- Physical Activity: Regular exercise is crucial, and a sedentary lifestyle leads to significant health issues. Those who walk daily often experience dramatically improved longevity.
- Mental Rest: The mind needs to alternate between rest and activity, but modern life often forces constant thinking and stress.
In short, many of the natural rhythms our bodies rely upon for self-regulation are heavily disrupted in modern society, which in turn results in a variety of consistent derangements to normal physiology that are now seen throughout the population.
The Importance of Sleep
Throughout my career, I've met many integrative practitioners who emphasize normalizing their patient's sleep as a crucial step in treating chronic illness. Sleep is a foundational process for restoring health, yet patients with chronic illnesses often suffer from disrupted sleep cycles, which can be challenging to correct.
Sleep is a tightly regulated cycle, highly responsive to environmental signals and essential for maintaining other critical body rhythms. During sleep, the body cycles through different phases, each with critical functions: deep NREM sleep heals the brain and drains toxins, while REM sleep consolidates memories and processes emotions.
A typical sleep cycle goes as follows:
Note: since REM sleep predominates later at night, not sleeping long enough disproportionately disrupts REM sleep. NREM sleep is responsible for eliminating unnecessary memories, whereas REM sleep processes the day's experiences and reinforces them into long-term memory.
Matthew Walker is one of the world's most vocal sleep researchers. In his book Why We Sleep, he argues that sleep serves several vital functions, including:
- Maintaining circulatory health and preventing heart attacks.
- Ensuring proper metabolic health (e.g., preventing hunger, diabetes, and weight gain).
- Supporting immune function (e.g., reducing susceptibility to the flu).
- Preventing cancer.
- Avoiding fatigue, brain fog, and serious accidents.
- Keeping you awake and alert.
- Healing and restoring the brain ( e.g., reducing the risk of Alzheimer's).
- Regulating hormonal function and maintaining fertility (e.g., sleep deprivation lowers testosterone levels).
- Processing emotional trauma (e.g., sleep is typically disrupted in PTSD, and PTSD often significantly improves once a drug is given which prevents PTSD from disrupting sleep).
- Interpreting emotional signals.
- Allowing rational control over impulses.
- Maintaining one's sense of reality (e.g., prolonged sleep deprivation can trigger psychosis, and sleep is known to be disturbed in schizophrenic patients).
- Facilitating creativity (e.g., many paradigm-shifting discoveries came from dreams, Thomas Edison was well-known for using dreams to concoct his inventions, and when people are woken up from REM sleep, they often demonstrate a radically improved abstract problem solving capacity).
- Reducing one's sensitivity to pain ( whereas sleep deprivation increases it).
- Facilitating the long-term retention of memories.
Any individual, no matter what age, will exhibit physical ailments, mental health instability, reduced alertness, and impaired memory if their sleep is chronically disrupted.
Even when controlling for factors such as body mass index, gender, race, history of smoking, frequency of exercise, and medications, the lower an older individual's sleep efficiency score, the higher their mortality risk, the worse their physical health, the more likely they are to suffer from depression, the less energy they report, and the lower their cognitive function, typified by forgetfulness.