Daylight savings caught us off guard, so my wife and I decided to roll with it. The plan was to make brunch together while watching this video with Megyn Kelly sharing her reaction to the movie Bombshell, which we finally got around to seeing the night before. 

My Surface Pro was perched on the counter for viewing, my wife had eggs frying in a big cast iron skillet and I’d just finished preparing a really nice looking salad when I knocked our glass pepper shaker out of my hand trying to put it back in the cupboard. BAM!! It shattered in chunks and shards across the countertop, peppercorns scattered along the kitchen floor.

My wife found a solution to the problem. She recommissioned a shaker from an old set to replace the one I’d broken. I opened the cupboard and found myself drawn to how different they were. I knew they would function just fine together but they won’t nestle side by side any longer because they don’t match. And in some strange, clear way I recognized my parents. They’ve been together over half a century now, although in many ways, they’re not the best fit.

My father is the taller slimmer shaker with the peppercorns inside. The replacement. He often choses to retreat and seems to feel more comfortable in the background. My dad’s peppercorns registered with me right away. They look recessed compared to the salt crystals inside the shorter rounder shaker taking up space in the foreground. My mother. 

She was 26 years old with two young kids to care for when her first husband died in a tragic accident while in the military. Years before, my father had been stationed at the same Air Force Base in New Hampshire with my mom and her first husband. When my dad learned about his friend’s death, he wrote to tell my mom that he would visit when he returned from overseas. He kept his promise.

Lucky for me.

My mom isn’t doing so well these days. She’s been struggling with various health issues, relying on regular doctor appointments, specialists, prescription and over-the-counter medications. A pattern she’s been repeating for years.

Every time we talk, she reiterates how dad has to do everything around the house, including take care of her. Not being able to do much for herself any more carries a heavy emotional price. Plus she doesn’t like my dad in the caregiver role. She doesn’t like how she feels treated. He doesn’t communicate enough caring when he helps her, she claims, which can make her hesitant to ask for the assistance she needs. Defined by pain and limited mobility, her ill health increases opportunities for petty friction, old resentments and never fully healed wounds to play out between them against the uncertain backdrop of leaving this world. 

She knows my dad will always be there for her, even though he’s rarely been able to be there in the way she really wants him to be. It saddens me sometimes. I try looking at their relationship as a reminder to pay attention to how I behave in my own marriage. Find value by shifting my perspective. Regardless of what my dad might actually say, my mom often detects a tone in his voice that can rub her the wrong way, that often spotlights just how dependent she’s become.

They gave her antibiotics for pneumonia when shortness of breath landed her in the hospital last week. She tested negative for covid. Once they stabilized her oxygen and got the edema in her legs more under control, they monitored her for a couple days and sent her home. 

Even before this recent visit to the emergency room, I felt like she was taking too many pills. I think it’s alarming, particularly for seniors, who can easily become pharmaceutical guinea pigs. Her hospital doctors tacked on three more prescriptions. My mom’s list of medications is two pages long. 

Prescribing medications that mask patient symptoms is the backbone of a healthcare model that almost always leads to another prescription for some other symptom (high blood pressure, for example) and then another pill (let’s say a diuretic) followed by another one (perhaps a steroid to suppress immune function this time). 

After years and years of this kind of medicated manipulation, at some point down the line, the body gets overwhelmed because the meds never corrected the problems the symptoms were signaling and because of the long-term toxic damage from prescription driven treatment protocols. It’s a nightmare. 

Unfortunately, my mother has been on this medical merry-go-round for quite some time. They make illness seem so routine, you may not even realize you’re along for the ride until things really start going sideways. 

The good news is you don’t have to suffer through your final decades or put your faith in a profit-driven healthcare system that ramps up your toxic load. There are much better options. The truth is your body is already programmed for healing. All you have to do is give it what it needs. Whole food nutrition, good clean water and regular movement. Not a single pill required. Paying attention to your body--your most essential asset, the vehicle you depend on 24/7/365--is your most important job. The sooner you choose to change behaviors and beliefs that aren’t serving your mental or physical health, the better positioned you’ll be when your golden years arrive.

A Paradigm Shift

Nearly 50 years ago, Dr. John W. Travis introduced something he calls the Illness-Wellness Continuum. Travis opened the Wellness Resource Center in the mid-1970s in Mill Valley, California. It was the first center in North America dedicated to wellness as a practice of whole person health. 

Notice how the Illness-Wellness Continuum identifies two paradigms underlying human health and wellness: Treatment Paradigm and Wellness Paradigm. The objective of the Treatment Paradigm is to get people who aren’t feeling well to a neutral point where they are no longer experiencing signs or symptoms of illness. That’s how low the bar of success is. 

Our healthcare system is based on this Treatment Paradigm of symptom management designed by pharmaceutical companies and supported by the industrial health complex. Because they want to steer clear of liability, we hear warnings about side effects from them all the time, but we don’t ever hear drug companies claim their medications will cure what ails you. Why is that? Because treatment is not designed to heal causes of disease. A pill for an ill may make symptoms disappear by treating the body so it can’t detect them any longer. But that doesn’t stop disability and disease progression. How helpful can that be? 

Being symptom free is more of a baseline than a measure of success for the Wellness Paradigm. Awareness is the first step toward high-level wellness. For example, most people aren’t thinking about their medications increasing their toxicity or that toxic overload is a major health threat. Expanding your awareness intentionally, as a practice, can help you better understand why you can’t rely on the Treatment Paradigm to find your path to wellness.

Prescription drug treatment causes your body to use energy and resources to capture chemical toxins, take them out of circulation and eliminate them. If your gut health, detoxification pathways or vital organs are compromised, you won’t be able to get rid of toxins efficiently, forcing your body to store them in fat cells, tissue and bone. The accumulation can result in anxiety, brain fog, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, depression, digestive disorders, osteoporosis, kidney and liver problems, all of which share the common condition of toxic overload.

I wish my mom knew about this stuff when she was my age. Maybe she would have adopted a healthier diet, shifted her mindset and led more of a longevity lifestyle. What condition would she be in today if she hadn’t taken so many medications over the years? Making a few different choices earlier on in life can pay enormous dividends.

My mom came home from the hospital, went to sit in her favorite kitchen chair and missed. Thank God she wasn’t hurt when she went down. She says she kind of slid to the floor, almost in slow motion. My dad couldn’t pick her up by himself, so he called two family members to help, neither of them younger than 80. The three of them couldn’t get her up either. They had to call the rescue squad.

My mother’s inability to get up on her own is, by definition, disability. Do you recall where disability sits on Travis’ Illness-Wellness Continuum? It’s not a position anyone wants to be in. At any age.

My mom had been feeling bad, no appetite and struggling with diarrhea all weekend. She sounded frail over the phone before going back to the ER. “Weak as water,” she’d say. She told me how proud of us she was, how much she loved her children and grandchildren. I felt an emotional disturbance grip my entire body. The sensation felt like I was about to lose my mom. She rallied, and they sent her home. 

A couple days later, after taking some of the new pills, her lips and tongue got really swollen. My dad called her doctor’s office. They told him to dial 911. Back in the hospital, Benadryl took the swelling down. They ran tests and observed her for 5 hours. Nothing showed up on her CT scan. All the tests came back with no cause to admit. Pleased with her results at first, my mom got really upset because they wanted to discharge her at 10 p.m.

She couldn’t believe it. Why in the world would they treat her like that? This was the third time she’d been there this week. How could the best possible option be to push her out of the hospital at 10 o’clock at night?

They didn’t even make arrangements to get her home. Instead they summoned my 85 year old father to come get her. He’s typically in bed by 9. What an ordeal. To help get her into the house, my dad called the two family crew members again. My mom’s remaining sister and brother. I think of my dad, my aunt and my uncle as the octogenarian Three Musketeers. 

The ripple effect of ill health is its own tragedy. How caregivers’ lives get consumed by having to help disabled loved ones for an extended period of time. Each of us has our own experiences with caregiving, with loss. What does it take to inspire you to make a commitment to do what you can not to become a burden to your family and to take responsibility for your own health and wellness?

I don’t know what’s in store for my mother. There’s no turning back any clocks but there’s always room for discovery and growth, provided we’re paying attention. She’s definitely not out of the woods, but I’m happy to report that she is feeling better. Her voice is stronger over the phone. She says she feels lighter, more upright, “not all squashed down” like when she was feeling so poorly last week. 

Today she told me how grateful she is for my father. Her appetite came back a little for the first time in a while and she asked him to go get her some take-out fried fish. Of course, I wish she would ask for different things from her husband and make choices that lead her away from the trap of the Treatment Paradigm. Right now, mostly, I want her to have moments of joy and to feel connected for the rest of her life.

No matter where you are on the Illness-Wellness Continuum, you can always choose the direction you’re heading. Think of this as my invitation for you to make a conscious shift to the Wellness Paradigm. Don’t wait until you’re disabled or scared by a diagnosis or struggling with some preventable chronic disease. I hope you can appreciate my mom’s health journey and, simultaneously, become empowered by it.

—DT