Did you know that there are several hundred medical specialties? Doctors are practicing compartmentalized medicine, treating only the symptoms instead of treating the spirit, body, and brain together as one. Doctors trained in Integrative Medicine, like Dr Alina Olteanu, are showing patients the limitations of this approach by practicing spirit-body-brain medicine.
They are educating their patients about the fact that compartmentalized medicine does not work because it does not treat the whole person and is, therefore, unable to bring about long-term, sustainable health and wellness. They teach their patients how they have been 'trained' by the medical world to think of themselves and their children as made up of separate parts, and when one part is not working well, we seek a doctor who specializes in treating that particular part. In the years gone by, this sounded like a great idea, but medicine has evolved to the understanding that we are ONE integrated system where all the parts depend on and affect each other for health and wellness.
A patient could go to a neurologist for bad migraines or to a gastroenterologist for chronic constipation. Still, if these doctors are only treating the symptom and if no one is taking a step back and taking a close look at the entire person, spirit-body-brain, the health issue resurfaces or gets progressively worse or new and different symptoms appear.
Of great concern to this unique duo of doctors is what this approach is doing to children who are grappling with learning, behavior, or mood challenges. Many children are labeled with all kinds of diagnoses and treated for the label. But a child is SO much more than his or her diagnostic label.
No matter what symptoms adults or children have, there are always three layers of healing:
- Physical body healing: This is influenced by genetics also by our lifestyle and diet, digestion, sleep, exercise. It includes everything we put into our mouths, onto our skin, and breathe into our lungs as well as including the way we use technology.
- Brain healing: Optimizing brain health includes eliminating environmental toxins and improving nutrition through healthy diet and nutritional supplements, like omega 3 for example. Because the brain and the gut speak to each other, healing the brain also includes our gut health and microbiome. There is no coincidence, for example, that the majority of children with learning, behavior, or mood problems have some gut problems and vice-versa. Children with tummy discomfort frequently are anxious or moody. Brain healing is also influenced by the beliefs we carry, the thoughts we think, the feelings we have, and how we behave.
- Spirit healing: The Olteanu-Gluckman spirit-body-brain approach is based on the scientifically proven fact that feeling good, behaving positively, loving life flows from a healthy inner spirit. Conversely, a hurting spirit creates a hurting body and a hurting brain. While the concepts of the "physical body" and "brain" seem self-explanatory, let us share with you what we mean about a child's spirit. This is the essence of your child. It is the unique expression of the who the child is.
One more major factor
- Chronic stress is the root cause of the majority of health issues. Stress throws the spirit, body, and brain off balance and triggers symptoms in each of the three layers of healing. Dr. Alina Olteanu describes it this way: 'Attempting to heal any disease without addressing the real underlying root cause, which is the stress level, is like trying to put out a fire with a water hose while also pouring gasoline over the fire.'
Parent-Child Relationship
- There is a myriad of reasons why we can be stressed, but in the case of a child, the most primary cause of stress is a parent-child relationship, which is not meeting the child's unique needs. As Dr. Sandy Gluckman likes to say: "Our children arrive with the perfect parenting manual. They have come to teach us. We need to learn from then what works for them and what doesn't.'
With all the love in the world, parents can inadvertently hurt their children's spirit, either by not understanding their children's unique needs or by not being healthy themselves.
A healthy parent-child relationship starts with healthy parents, in spirit, body, brain. Parents cannot give their children what they don't have, or more precisely, what they are not. We cannot expect our children to be happy, self-confident, brave, calm, and peaceful if we don't embody those qualities in ourselves.
Remember:
- 1. Treating just one symptom, in isolation, does not lead to true healing.
- 2. A child's spirit-body-brain health starts with a healthy parent and a healing parent-child relationship.
