Dr Rachel Carlton Abrams - BodyWise: Discovering Your Bodys Intelligence for Lifelong Health and Healing

For Jesse, Kayla, and Eliana.

You heal my heart every day.

I have been a primary-care physician (similar to a general practitioner in the UK) for more than 2 decades on the front lines of modern medicine, hearing the health issues women struggle with most. I have held the hands and hearts of countless patients as they share the pain and suffering that these issues have caused in their lives. At least 75 per cent of my patients have the same constellation of complaints.

Theyre tired. They dont sleep well. Theyve lost their sex drives. They suffer from some kind of chronic pain, such as headaches, back pain, or pelvic pain. They experience depression, anxiety, or both. And quite often, they also have allergies, autoimmune problems, or some other sign of their bodies attacking themselves. They may not have all of these symptoms at once, but they often have most of them over time. I certainly have.

For years, I kept asking myself why so many women have some or all of these symptoms. Could this really just be coincidence? Might these symptoms all be connected? And might there be a way to address them together?

As an integrative (or holistic) physician, I am fortunate to have the time to really listen to my patients and to hear what is behind their symptoms. I schedule an entire hour with my new patients to hear about their concerns and complaints and learn about their lives in great detail. Over and over, women talk to me about the same life challenges. My patients feel pulled in multiple directions by their many roles and responsibilities. They feel torn between taking care of their families and friends and performing at work. They are overwhelmed and exhausted by the blessing and burden of all their commitments. They answer societys call to be superwomen, yet regardless of the age and life stage, from recent college graduates in their twenties to retirees in their seventies, so many women are depleted by their lives. They are quite perceptive about their busy worlds, but they lack deep intelligence about their most important instrument their bodies. My general practice colleagues see a similar epidemic of these symptoms. This set of complaints is so common that I have come to see it not just as a random collection of symptoms but instead as its own diagnosis: chronic body depletion.

Listening to your body is not just about avoiding future illness. It is about wellness and vitality now and about your being able to have the life you and your body will love.

Chronic body depletion occurs because of the demands that modern life puts on our bodies and because we have lost touch with our bodies intelligence. Many women in my practice and among my friends and family have come to accept extraordinary levels of pain and discomfort as normal, not realizing that their bodies are literally screaming at them to pay attention before more serious disease occurs. Yet listening to your body is not just about avoiding future illness. It is about wellness and vitality now and about your being able to have the life you and your body will love. Ive come to see a persons body intelligence what we could call your body quotient, or BQ as a fundamental measure of your health and well-being. Body intelligence is equally important for men, and if you are a male or transgendered person reading this book for yourself or someone you love, welcome! I have many males in my practice, but chose to focus this book on women so that I could speak clearly to womens unique relationships to their bodies. But the principles and practices of being bodywise are just as relevant to males.

As someone who gets migraines, I know the value of pain relief, when we need it, as well as anyone. And yet, patterns of headaches or other kinds of pain can be the bodys communication to us about something of value in our lives. After working at a large general practice for 7 years, where I was seeing patients every 15 minutes, I began to consider leaving to open my own holistic practice. Practising medicine with enough time to listen to and honour the hearts of my patients was what I desperately wanted, but I was afraid. I had young children, and I was concerned about the demands of starting a private practice. I had certainly never been trained to run a business, and I was concerned about failing financially and not being able to pay the mortgage or the grocery bills. And, I was also afraid that my more traditional physician colleagues would shun me for practising holistic medicine, which accepts that other healing traditions can have as much efficacy as, and at times more than, Western medicine. There is now a lot of research that demonstrates which complementary treatments work, and which dont, but at the time, this was all very new. So, I delayed leaving. And, as I became increasingly frustrated with my inability to give my patients the kind of care they needed, I began to get neck pain for the first time since my medical internship, and migraine headaches for the first time in my life.

I initially thought that the headaches arose from the neck pain and tried a course of physiotherapy. The therapy helped with the neck pain, but not with the headaches. It took my kind and talented osteopathic colleague who was treating me for neck pain to whisper in my ear, You know, its interesting that you only get headaches on your workdays, not when youre home with your kids. Hmmm. I began to realize that my body was trying to tell me something important. After much reflection and hand-wringing, I came to the difficult conclusion that I needed to leave my job to preserve my own well-being. I had stayed in a work situation that drained me physically and emotionally and was feeling fatigued and depressed. This was my body speaking to me.

Finally, despite my fears, I listened to my body wisdom and resigned from my job. Interestingly, even though my contract required that I continue to work in my position for another 6 months, my migraine headaches completely disappeared. My body wisdom helped me in fact, forced me! to transition to the necessary next phase of my healing journey.

Now, as a holistic doctor in private practice, I have never enjoyed being a physician more than I do today. Instead of draining me, my work fulfils, challenges, and inspires me. If I arrive at work in a bad mood, I leave in a good mood, uplifted by my incredible colleagues and the profound healing I get to witness in my patients.

Our symptoms are simply our bodies trying to tell us what they need. We tend to pathologize and medicate the very signals that our bodies send us to direct us toward health. These symptoms are not annoyances that we need to numb or just outright ignore, they are important messages that we can use to seek our own wellness. I help my patients listen to the language of their bodies and, together, we treat the underlying causes of their symptoms, so they can avoid more serious disease and discover real, lasting health.

I live and practise medicine in the US, and particularly, in sunny California. You will notice that some of the terms and references that I use are necessarily based on the US healthcare system, such as it is. But all of the medical information and the bodywise practices are universal, for both women and men, and are as applicable in South Africa as they are in the UK (two of my favourite places). Most of the supplements that I recommend are widely available at your local health shop. And if you cant find them there, take a look online. Just be sure to get them from a reputable supplier (Appendix A is helpful with this!).