UPDATE: What’s Changed and What is Our Greatest Weapon

It may feel as the weather warms up, and time passes, like we can relax the guidelines around social isolation. We cannot.

Please continue to wash your hands, don’t touch your face, avoid contact with others and stay home except to exercise outdoors.

I know that the extension of the quarantine through May 15th and possibly through the end of May, is challenging for many, and not in the least, financially.

If you know someone who is struggling financially, I encourage you, as we move through this time, to share resources, blankets, food, medicine, toiletries, encouragement. To share gifts of time: tutoring, mentorship, prayer and neighborly acts like yardwork or food shopping for others.

It may feel with social isolation, like you want to lean back.

Lean in. There is so much you can do to share what you have without being in contact, and for many, we can’t get through without gifts from others.

We, at Associates of Integrative Medicine, are modifying our protocols to the following. If you have any symptoms that are unfamiliar to you, not just respiratory symptoms, please call Dr. Roy on her cell phone immediately. (248) 260-8866.

Perhaps some of you have seen new information about the virus that it can precipitate stroke in younger individuals (30s and 40s), who are CoVID 19 positive. We do not know yet if this represents an emerging feature of how the virus behaves, but a stroke needs to be addressed in the first six hours of symptoms.

Symptoms include slurred speech, blurry vision, inability to use one side of your body, drooping in the face. They happen immediately. If this happens, to you or a loved one, you must call 911 and/or go to the nearest emergency room immediately.

Do NOT take aspirin. Aspirin is helpful if the stroke is due to a blockage that is caused by a clot in the blood vessel. It is not helpful if the stroke is due to a ruptured blood vessel in the brain. Without an image we cannot tell the difference.

If you are currently on aspirin therapy as part of your supportive care, you must call the office at (248) 798-2942 or contact us at aimnatural.org, to make a 10-15 min appointment to restructure your plan.

As a doctor, it’s tough to balance between giving you the right kind of information and keeping you calm, grounded and without fear. It’s forcing me to continue to share philosophically as much as I am sharing clinically.

Because that’s where I want you, calm and grounded. If I can’t keep you fearless, at the very least, let us consider that Fear is the rich fertile soil for Faith.

If we cannot avoid it, we can at the very least, lean into it, and rely on our faith. Faith doesn’t have to mean a belief in God, but faith in something…the universe, a greater consciousness, absolute good, is necessary to keep you well. And choosing to have faith may represent a radical step forward in your own healing.

It’s important to remember that faith is actually a practice. It requires looking without our eyes, hearing without our ears, attuning ourselves to how the world around us is gifting us with answers all the time.

When the material world is giving us information all the time that IT is the reality, faith requires us to consider that the material world is “A” reality, NOT the reality.

Did you know every single thing on earth, from the coffee maker on your countertop, to your beating heart, is made up of different combinations of 118 elements?

Did you know that the human body is made up of mostly a combination of only six of these elements? Yup. Oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus. Put them in one combination, they make a nose. Order them differently, they make a hand.

Let’s consider my hand.

If I look at my inelegant hand, what do I see?
Stubby fingers, wrinkled knuckles, plain wedding band, skin and nails.

If look closer, let’s say with a magnifying glass, what would I see?
Ridges, oil glands, hair.

How about under a microscope?
Cells and nuclei, and all the machinery in a cell, mitochondria, golgi apparatus…

What if I used a really, really, powerful microscope, perhaps one not invented yet, that could freeze a moment in time?
I would see atoms with electrons circulating around it.

That means, friends, my hand is, at its most basic level, just energy.

This may be mind bending for you, but it’s a quantum principle and leading edge in scientific discovery. If we look at matter at its deepest level, we find we are just energetic beings in an energetic world. It’s pretty extraordinary. And it begs the question, is radical healing possible without radical thought?

I’d like you to turn off your tv. Turn off the radio. Turn off your feed. Tune out social media on the virus. What we read, listen to, watch, has an impact on our ability to hear, see, experience what is outside of our known world. It makes us believe that only what we can see is real. But this
is not ever true. Certainly not scientifically. We can’t see a virus, can we?

In faith, thinking of ourselves as energetic beings, studies have shown, people achieve radical results in healing. Isn’t it possible, that faith is not the province of the uneducated or the foolish, rather is a frontier of truly understanding the human body on a level that can result in radical healing?

Our ancestral cultures held no separation between healing and a connection to the sacred. It is only today, within in this “American” culture that we draw a line between what is rational and what a deep engagement with the mystery of what we cannot see.

If faith seems hard, begin your practice with meditation or guided visualization. These can teach you to be still enough to experience something outside of your knowing.

For many Healing Trauma from Healthjourneys.com is a great place to start.

For others, the 21-day beginners meditation with the Chopra Center is an option.
https://chopracentermeditation.com

Meditation has been found to:
—Lower blood pressure
—Lower heart rate
—Alter levels of melatonin and serotonin
—Suppress cortisol
—Decrease inflammation
—Reduce pain
—Reduce anxiety

But perhaps most importantly, it’s been shown to IMPROVE our IMMUNE response.

Interestingly, spiritual meditation has been found to be superior to secular meditation and relaxation in terms of decrease in anxiety and improvement in positive mood, spiritual health, spiritual experiences and tolerance to pain. And a recent study published in the British Journal of Psychology looked at 35 studies that examined whether the intention of one person, prayer or positive thought, can interact with and influence the health of another person. They found a statistically significant positive difference across all 35 studies.

If you are struggling financially and you need to see one of us, choose Dr. March. She is a less expensive and just as skilled a responder as Dr. Roy. And every one of us should be using the nutrition and counseling benefits offered by insurance at this time. Make an appointment with
Jessica to start to work through grief, anxiety, depression, marital stress, stress eating, boredom, and let your insurance pick up the cost. We are waiving co pays for May so it is NO COST to you.

I want you calm, grounded and fearless. But if I can’t get you fearless, I will accept that fear, at this moment in human history, is necessary, especially if faith is its flowering fruit.

Faith that gives us the eyes to see that we are not our bodies. We are our souls.

Faith that gives us ears to hear the voice of all consciousness.

Faith that gives us hands, not to touch our face, but to touch others with no contact at all.

To your radical healing,

Dr. Roy