4.43 Medical and Health Professions.
Many studies in recent years have shown that a suprisingly high percentage of modern illnesses have stress related causes. A significant percentage of heart and circulatory problems, ulcers, arthritis, migrane headaches, eye problems and other physical symptoms have been shown to be directly related to stress, a natural outcome of many people's existing strategies. Stress can be very functional (it is not inherently "bad") as a motivator and as a test mechanism.
For us "mind" (neurological processes) and "body" (the machinery governed by these neurological processes) are an interconnected part of the same biological system. Strategies are not merely cognitive activities within our representational systems. Our representational systems interface with other neural systems such that the neurological outcomes of our strategies affect our motor responses, respiration, autonomic control of glandular secretions, body chemistry, heart and blood pressure, metabolism and even the immunity system. The neural activity in one part of our biological system can't not have some effect on the rest of the system.
Neurolinguistic programming is a powerful resource for preventive medicine and in the treatment of psychosomatic illness. Psychosomatic illnesses are, by definition, not "all in the mind," but are the result of real interactions between biological systems.
By changing the way people guide and organize their behavior neurologically, through their strategies, (which involves changes in accessing cues and outcomes) people reorganize themselves physiologically. In our therapeutic work we have encountered instances, time and again, in which people we have been working with have had physical symptoms improve, clear up or go into remission when they have changed an old strategy, installed a new one, or utilized a forgotten resource strategy. Symptoms have ranged from minor colds, coughs, infections and warts to arthritis, nearsightedness, tumors and cancer.
Psychological attitude has long been recognized in the medical and health professions as a contributor to the ease and speed with which someone is able to recover. With NLP we are dealing with processes more encompassing and profound than simply attitude. Using NLP we have helped people to interrupt strategies that were contributing to the ailment and to design and implement strategies used to control and regulate major aspects of their physiological ailments. We have found (not surprisingly) that people who have similar strategies are prone to similar illnesses, and that one can predict the kinds of sicknesses a person with a certain set of strategies is most likely to get.
One effective tactic is to find an individual who has been able to recover easily and rapidly from a particular illness and model his strategies (for motivation, self feedback, etc.) Then teach these strategies or install them in others with the same sickness. In our workshops we sometimes conduct an exercise in which people who have completely recovered from former chronic ailments such as allergies or poor eyesight are paired up with individuals confronted with the same problem the others used to have. The task for the person who would like to get over his allergies, headaches, nearsightedness, etc., is to elicit the strategy that his partner has used. Once this is accomplished, it is his partner's task to help him install the strategy he have just elicited. (Installation procedures will be discussed fully in the final chapter of this book.) We have had many startling successes with this exercise.
We are in no way, of course, trying to discourage people from seeking proper medical assistance for physical ailments. What we are trying to communicate is that surgery, medication and other forms of chemotherapy, treat physiology directly and may fail to utilize fully the potential effectiveness of self regulation or control, or other avenues of symptom treatment. The cause for many physical symptoms can be traced to behavioral patterns and can be alleviated through alterations in behavior. The advent of biofeedback has produced abundant evidence that people can control autonomic physiological processes to a much greater degree than was believed possible a few years ago. There are many areas where culturally and institutionally accepted limitations can be successfully and usefully challenged. The primary goal of NLP is, as we stated in the introduction, to continue the evolutionary process of challenging limitations and to move more and more parameters of our experience from environmental variables (those outside our control) to decision variables (those within our personal control). When given the choice we would always opt for the avenue of treatment emphasizing internal personal control over those involving external factors outside of our control.
Innumerable accounts of the placebo effect seem to indicate that there are classes of symptoms and pathological processes that people may be able to cure on their own, without the use of active drugs.
Certainly, much can be done behaviorally to prevent illness. The development and installation of strategies that encourage finer discriminations in, and a larger vocabulary for, proprioceptive feedback (this will come through Ki, and synesthetically through internal representations in the other systems) can assist in gaining more direct access to forms of self examination and regulation.
Pacing motivation and learning strategies can be used effectively to encourage and promote good health habits. In fact, health professionals could utilize the same tactics described in the advertising section of this book to promote health care plans and preventive programs.
4.431 Informed Consent and Bedside Manner.
As with any profession, there will be a division of labor in the medical field with respect to strategies — that is, some strategies will be more suited to certain tasks than to others. There will be a difference between a strategy for diagnosis and one for surgery. A good diagnostician may have a strategy designed for gathering information concerning symptoms from the patient, and then internally checking through lists of symptoms and textbook pages until he begins to find similarities or patterns between the recorded symptoms of other patients and the one he is confronted with. Such a person may do well as a medical school professor but poorly as a general practitioner because his strategies for establishing rapid rapport with individuals on a one–to–one basis are underdeveloped.
The ability to discern strategies and establish rapport can be critically important for many of a physician's duties like prescribing treatments to the patient and for informed consent, where the doctor must tell the patient the risks of his or her operation or treatment. The strategies of an individual patient will determine how you should package the information to be communicated to him. Some people, if you tell them there is a greater than 50% chance of death or serious impairment, will become depressed, apathetic or fatalistic (their strategy tends to carry out the weaker part of a statistic). Such persons may incorporate the statistics as self–fulfilling. For patients who have a polarity strategy, however, it may be useful to tell them they could die, to stimulate them to flip polarities to access the resources they need to recover from or change their condition.
Some patients will suddenly adopt symptoms if you describe them in too much detail or with too much emphasis.
If a heart patient uses stress (Ki-) as a motivator, he will also build up stress as a means to motivate themself to relax and exercise more! (This is the "hurry up and relax … or else" syndrome.)