Healing is available to everyone

I remember meeting my first nurse practitioner. I was 21 years old, starting my nursing program. She was one of our professors. I resonated with her as a healer and I wanted to be like her when I grew up in my profession. In my undergraduate nursing program, I began to learn about being a healer. I learned about the importance of nutritional support. I completed psychosocial assessments. As I graduated and began taking care of patients, I saw the importance of these interventions.

However, conventional medicine told me the power was in the prescription pad and medications. Of course, there was great excitement the day I began my nurse practitioner program. I could not wait to receive my prescription pad and “really heal patients”. Much to my surprise I found that the longer I treated patients, the fewer prescriptions for medications I wrote. It wasn’t access to prescription drugs that facilitated healing most of the time. My patients demonstrated again and again, healing was realized when I spent time with them and listened to their stories.

Across my experience with adolescent substance abusers, school children, elders, palliative care patients and especially in family practice, the listening and collaborating together made the real difference. I began to see healing and curing as two very different things. A cure is not always possible. Healing is available to everyone.

The more I listened to patients and studied the science, it became clear to me that nutrition is critical to a healing, integrative practice. I chose the University of Arizona Integrative Medicine Fellowship because of its nutrition and lifestyle emphasis.

Food Memories

A little about my background. I grew up in a farm family. We raised our own beef and always had a garden. Our eggs came from the neighbor whose chickens roamed her yard. I remember a life centered around the weather, the crop, and seasonal foods. In San Antonio, we want to know how the Spurs played last night, who’s being signed, who will retire.

In my family, every spring my dad gave us daily reports on the dewberries, wild blackberries that grew along the fence lines in the field. Where they were, what color, green, red, black, the size, the sweetness. As they were beginning to ripen, he would bring some home in his lunch box or a can. We waited with anticipation for the day that we would grab our buckets and head to the field. We ate as many berries as we put in our buckets. We had purple tongues, teeth and lips. When we got home, my mom would mix up my grandmother’s special pie crust recipe and make a cobbler. Oh, I can smell it baking now. Sometimes, hot cobbler and a cold glass of milk was Sunday supper.

We picked peaches,  pears, figs and grapes and my mom, grandma and aunts would gather to “put them up”. That means canning, freezing, making bulk pies, jelly and preserves. And that was just the fruit. In the summer, we sat on the porch and shucked corn, snapped green beans, and shelled peas. I can see sliced tomatoes and cantaloupe on the table. These are my food memories.

Planting, tending, harvesting, and preparing much of the food that we ate. I began cooking when I was quite young, maybe 6 years old. By the time I was 10 or 12, I could prepare and serve a full meal. When my children were young, we lived much the same way.

Healthy Kids & Body Images

Picture perfect, right? There is a dark secret beneath this pastoral setting. My family was hypervigilant about weight and size. My mother and grandmother talked about dieting often. I was not aware until I was an adult that my mother weighed herself daily and did not eat if she had gained a pound. I heard talk of who was fat and how awful that was. I remember my grandmother saying, “Oh, she would be so pretty if she weren’t so fat.” Food became the enemy.

My sisters and I monitored everything we put in our mouths. I learned to feel guilty about everything that I ate. I learned to cut off from feeling the signals that my body was giving me about food. I look back at pictures and I don’t see any fat kids. Just pictures of kids running outside, playing in the sunshine, riding horses, working in the field, doing what healthy kids do.

Finding Joy in Food

Initially, I thought this was a woman’s problem. Over the years, I have discovered it is a societal problem that affects us all. I have met very few patients who do not struggle with food, weight, diets, body image and lifestyle diseases. Their weight and size seems irrelevant. There is a constant search for the perfect diet to produce the perfect body. I see deprivation, illness, depression, anxiety, all associated with food. Sometimes the actual food being consumed and sometimes the obsession with food is the concern. I have found no prescription that can alleviate this dis-ease.

What happened to the joy of waiting for that first, sweet dewberry or ripe, juicy peach of the season? What about sitting down to a meal with family or friends and relishing what is on the plate? Recreating that joy is the goal of my daily practice for myself, my family, and my patients.

Combining anti inflammatory nutrition with other integrative approaches such as mindfulness, movement, and meditation to name a few, has enabled me to partner with patients to achieve what they are wanting for themselves. I am committed to creating a safe space for healing.