by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health
The recent few posts here told a personal story about how I discovered firsthand the importance of not treating an injury and its pain as mere symptoms, but allowing a deeper personal, subjective experience to emerge. This is the key lesson I have been trying to...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health, Addressing Your Pain
The last couple posts have been telling the story of my experience as a patient and how I learned firsthand that pain is more than just its symptoms. After getting a variety of conflicting advice, I finally made myself the doctor of my own treatment and came to...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | Addressing Your Pain
In the last post I introduced you to a personal experience I had of subluxation of my right shoulder during a holiday in Paris. A trip to the hospital got me a sling and some drugs that either didn’t work or made me feel ill. What was to be done? The pain grew...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | Addressing Your Pain
In my last post I made some claims about pain that I want to illustrate with a personal example. This will take us a couple posts to cover, but it’s time well invested. During a holiday in October 2011, I had a subluxation of the right shoulder upon arriving in Paris....
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health
In my last post I contrasted mainstream health institutions’ attitude to health with the definition of the World Health Organization: “complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.” It is evident that patients with...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health
Understanding the patient’s purpose in coming to you is paramount for a doctor. The Latin root of “doctor” means “to educate,” but this often falls short of the mandate. We must educate patients about their symptoms, as well as the possible causes and all the options...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health
In my last post I made the point that doctors who allowed their assumption of detached objectivity to blind them to the meaning of their patients’ objectives and objections were missing out on a valuable venue for recovering health. The patients’ objections define the...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health
In recent posts I’ve established that patients have their objectives or agendas in their illness, which is revealed in the meaning they attach to symptoms, uncovered in their descriptions. In light of the objectives and objections of the patient, what is the role of...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health
I have spent my last several posts discussing the shortcoming of standard approaches to the subjective dimension of the SOAP formula. In the next series of post I’ll address the “O”: objective! The doctor’s task conventionally is noting the patient’s subjective vision...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health
My last post recounted an experience with an MS patient who seemed to prefer her disease to being cured because of the greater attentiveness and intimacy she felt it stirred in her husband. Not all patients will be so clear about their unconscious driving forces, but...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health
Early in my practice, I saw a patient, a psychologist, who had developed MS six months prior. She arrived in a wheelchair, guided in by her husband, who was also a patient of mine. I conducted a 2-hour interview and felt fairly certain of the treatment. A mere six...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health
For a second illustration of how important is a patient’s subjective meaning of their symptoms, I want to compare two different patients affected with the sequelae of polio. Both received the same treatment. I treated them both with a technique called BowenFirst™, a...
by Manon Bolliger, facilitator & retired naturopath with 30+ years of practice | About Your Health
The new paradigm in healthcare that I’ve been discussing in this series of blog posts is sometimes mistaken for simply alternative modalities of practice. The choice of modality is not unimportant, but neither is it a panacea for sound practice. Valuable as was my...
