The Fix: How a More Integrative Body-Mind Approach Creates Lasting Health

By Dr. Alison Caldwell-Andrews

This book is intended to help you create change in your life. You may be stuck, discouraged, or frustrated. You may have already decided to give up. Perhaps you think you can't change, or that your physical or emotional health problems are too overwhelming. A fresh approach to how your mind and body work together to create total health will help you get on track to a healthier, happier, and more abundant life.

Dr. Alison Caldwell-Andrews is a clinical psychologist, researcher, teacher, herbalist, and psychotherapist. Currently in private therapy practice, she works with a wide range of patients, using many of the principles of integrated mind-both health you will learn in this book. As a former faculty member at the Yale University School of Medicine, she published over 30 papers in medical journals, provided peer review of others' research and received two grants in mind-body medicine from the National Institute of Health.

Known as a creative therapist and a fascinating presenter, her open-minded thinking has led her to develop the remarkably effective approaches to change—lasting change—that have improved the physical and emotional health of countless clients and associates. When those around her tell her she actually makes science interesting, she is baffled because science just IS interesting.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dr. Alison Caldwell-Andrews
• Release date: Jun 29, 2016
• ISBN: 9781310270970

Dr. Alison Caldwell-Andrews

Alison Caldwell-Andrews, PhD, FAIS is a Licensed Clinical Psychologist offering examination, diagnosis, treatment and consulting services for persons confronted with a range of emotional, behavioral and relationship problems. Individual and group therapies are offered. In addition, Dr. Caldwell-Andrews is an entertaining and informative public speaker on topics of mind-body health and motivation. Dr. Caldwell-Andrews is committed to offering quality care in the context of compassion, ethics and effectiveness. Her practice is located in central Connecticut with easy access from I-91, or Route 9. Training and Experience Dr. Caldwell-Andrews received her PhD in Clinical Psychology from the University of Kentucky in 2000, and next completed a post-doc in Mind-Body Medicine at the Yale University School of Medicine. Then, as research faculty at Yale, she conducted clinical research studies on interventions designed to reduce anxiety in adults, families and children. During this time she published nearly 30 articles in peer-reviewed journals, acted as a reviewer for several journals, and personally received two grants from the National Institute of Health (NIH). Learning to do real-life clinical research at an institution like Yale was invaluable in providing exposure and training in clinical research methodology and statistics. Dr. Caldwell-Andrews brings this experience to her own personal research efforts in the area of mind-body medicine. Dr. Caldwell-Andrews received first-rate training in therapy during graduate school and during her internship in Community Mental Health. “Seeing the really tough cases – the people who were all but left behind by their families and by general health care – changed my perspective. I learned not only how to help people who were incredibly discouraged and unmotivated, but also how to better work with people who were lucky enough to not be in quite that difficult a position. I came out of that training with a deeper sense of compassion for humanity and for human frailty.” Training in Dialectical Behavior Therapy started in 1996 under the wonderful tutorship of Dr. Martha Wetter, and Dr. Ruth Baer. Dr. Caldwell-Andrews completed a graduate school course in DBT equivalent to the Intensive Training, and also twice worked through the Intensive Training materials with her colleagues, under the direction of Dr. Wetter. She completed an Advanced DBT training led by Dr. Marsha Linehan (1999) and co-led a 40-hour DBT training workshop for state mental health workers in Kentucky. Dr. Caldwell-Andrews has been in private practice since 2006, and at her Middlefield office location since 2008. She became a Fellow of the American Society of Stress in 2013. Treatments offered: Cognitive Behavior Therapy Dialectical Behavior Therapy (Individual and Group since 1996) Behavioral Treatment for Obsessive Compulsive Disorder Behavioral Treatment for Anxiety, Panic and Phobias Specializing in the Sensitive Personality Self-Compassion Training (Individual & Group) How emotions drive your behaviors and what to do about it. Treatment for self-harm and eating disorders What gets in the way of your goals and how skills use won’t ever be enough.

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NOTE TO THE READER

The information presented here is educational in nature, and represents the author’s experience and opinion. This book is not intended as a substitute for medical advice from a physician. This book is intended as an information guide. The guidelines, techniques and approaches described in this book are not intended to treat, cure, prevent or diagnose any disease or to be a substitute for professional medical care, diagnosis or treatment. The author is not a medical doctor. You should consult with your physician before beginning any dietary, supplement or exercise regimen. A physician should be consulted if you are on medication or have any symptoms or concerns that may require diagnosis or medical attention.

The data this book is based on may change in the future and, as a result, some of the conclusions drawn herein may become invalid as scientific advances continue. You should seek the most up-to-date information on your medical care and treatment from your physician or qualified health care professional. This book is not intended to treat or diagnose any condition that requires the services of a physician. This book is intended for educational purposes only.

Dr. Caldwell-Andrews is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by her.

THE FIX

Table of Contents

Note to the Reader

Foreword

Preface

1. Science and Synergy

2. Mind-Body Connections

3. One Thing Leads to Another

4. Empiricism is for Open Minds

5. Three-Legged Stool

6. Making Food Your Medicine

7. Sleep

8. Exercise

9. Inflammation

10. Cardiovascular Health

11. Type II Diabetes

12. Depression

13. Irritable Bowel Syndrome

14. Self-Compassion

15. Act Yourself Into Change

16. Your Game Plan

Conclusion

Connect with the Author

Acknowledgements

Endnotes

Foreword

To me, the most interesting books are those that teach you something you didn’t know, and do it in a way you enjoy. And, if they can cause you to look further into the subject and find even greater personal benefit or excitement (or at times even discomfort), they become something more. They become more than just a good read, or a fresh perspective. They become, to me, a work.

The Fix is just such a book, because it treats natural health in a way that either hasn’t been articulated or hasn’t been fully understood in the past. And it is clear that this book is just the beginning of much more to come—this is just the tip of the iceberg. For me, the personal benefits of reading it were evident from the first chapter.

My own strong feelings about mind and body natural health stem from very personal experiences in my own life and in the lives of people I am very close to, as well as from my 23 years of professional-life experiences. How my own feelings became impassioned enough to instill a sense of cause within me is not that much of a mystery, since my professional life allowed me to make hundreds upon hundreds of personal visits to homes, clinics and shops across the U.S.A. over many years. The sum of these involvements has left no doubt in my mind that everyone who lives on this planet is better off—much better off—with herbs as a resource for daily health, including during life’s toughest health challenges.

The existence, within this societal community, of both the desire for preservation of old ways and the desire for additional information and study has always been attractive to me, though that might run counter to some of the propaganda published about those who are open to natural solutions. Indeed, during all my years among this community I have witnessed an insatiable desire for any information regarding health, regardless of the specific health approach used, be it herbal, natural or otherwise integrated. One area where I have seen increased activity and study is that of the mind-body connection of various herbs and natural products.

It was during the time of my realization of this nascent evolution of the area of mind/body integrated natural health that I connected with Dr. Caldwell-Andrews. And since that time, I have been anticipating the release of her book. Whether you are new to the world of natural healing, or have decades of experience, this book will change the way you look at personal wellness. It will enhance your understanding no matter where you stand in terms of your practical use of herbal supplements or other natural products. And even if you don’t yet see the worth of the nutritional side of mind-body health, there is much more contained in The Fix which I suspect you will find convincing enough to change the way you live for the better.

And that is really what I personally hope the reader takes from this book, and why I have made mind/body integrated natural health my profession, as well. Thank you Alison, for helping us all move forward.

Greg Halliday

CEO Solle Naturals

Pleasant Grove, Utah

October 2013

Preface

This book is intended to help you create change in your life. You may be stuck, discouraged, or frustrated. You may have already decided to give up. Perhaps you think you can't change, or that your physical or emotional health problems are too overwhelming. A fresh approach to how your mind and body work together to create total health will help you get on track to a healthier, happier and more abundant life.

Chapter One

Science and Synergy

Everyone starts out in life with ideas about how the world works. Our brains do this for us automatically. Even infants can tell when a cup is close enough to the edge of a table so as to be in danger of falling off. Finding patterns in what we observe and identifying relationships between variables is a way of being human. It’s part of being alive. We explain our world. We ascertain causality. We learn to predict.

And we think we are right.

Often we cling to ideas because they represent familiarity and safety. Sometimes it’s useful to cling to past ideas. Sometimes it’s impossible to let go. Sometimes letting go is fraught with anxiety, somewhat like jumping off a cliff. These experiences are all part of the human experience. Most of us have had moments when we figuratively did jump off a cliff in our search for truth, and found that there was no void after all.

The truth had been there all along.

We are all scientists in one sense or another. We all evaluate our observations about the world. In order to profit from our observations, we must be prepared to change what we believe is true when we find new information. We must constantly reevaluate in the light of our current experience.

Imagine you are learning to cook, and you believe that boiling everything is the right way to cook. If you are not able to question your assumptions about the importance of boiling, you’ll never be able to truly taste the reality of what you’ve prepared! Your bias will make it so that you can’t be a good observer. Boiling may stay true for you, but here’s the outcome: you’ll never be a great cook.

Science is the continual challenging of barriers to knowledge through acts of rigorous observation. Observation in this sense does not refer simply to scientific study design, research methodology and data collection, but to something more fundamental: It refers to our willingness to develop an awareness of how our biases affect the ways we perceive the world.

I’m referring to rigorously observing in the present moment so we can actually see what there is to be seen.

Nonetheless, we are limited. We don’t know what we don’t know. We cannot include variables that we don’t understand. We may have glasses on our faces that we are unaware we are wearing!

One of the assumptions many of us cling to is the idea that we are more advanced, smarter and more sophisticated than people in previous eras were. Many of us still cling to the notion that the average person in Columbus’ day truly believed the world was flat. We certainly believe that past eras were vastly inferior when it comes to health care. Indeed, modern-day advances are miraculous and some have the potential to be more life-saving than the medicine of ages past. But the existence of these advances doesn’t mean that what we knew centuries ago was merely superstition. It also doesn’t mean that modern medicine is always better, or is never harmful. For example, according to some experts, one of the leading causes of death in the United States is preventable harm resulting from medical treatment, or faulty advice to patients.

I find it interesting that in past eras, people in general used to find herbs much more useful, valuable and effective than we, as a people, find them today. I think the reason we don’t see their effects as reliably in our modern times is that we have significantly changed the context we live in, and overwhelmed our bodies and minds. We are so laden with baggage that the herbal supports that used to help our ancestors don’t seem to affect us the same way. Many herbs are mild enough to only provide a gentle nudge. Others are stronger. Then, there are some that are quite strong, so strong that they are rarely administered because they are dangerous. These last kinds of herbs are the ones that were grasped by the pharmaceutical industry and turned into medications. And they come trailing side effects.

Snake Oil and Salesmen

Certainly some of the prevailing herbal folklore of ages ago was superstition, and we can and should classify it as snake oil. Some of what is on the herbal and pharmaceutical markets today is also snake oil.

There always has been and there always will be snake oil and snake oil salesmen.

But it’s a challenge to resist snake oil when you have no way of knowing what qualifies as snake oil. You may not know how to tell whether or not you’re talking to a snake oil salesman. And sometimes the rock bottom fact is that the salesman doesn’t even know that he or she is selling snake oil!

One of the more memorable experiences I had in graduate school was that of taking the required Qualifying Exams, covering everything we should have learned up to the end of graduate school. The Research Design and Methodology exam was one of my favorites. Since I am a total research nerd, this test examined my fun stuff: research methods and logic puzzles! I began it with enthusiasm. The object was to dismantle a published article and find any and all methodological and statistical errors. The more I looked, the more errors I saw. Some of them were glaring! I wondered where the article had been published, as that information had been blacked out in our copies. My first thought was to assume it must have been published in a very low-quality journal. But as I continued to write my criticisms, I changed my mind about that. Sure enough, when I checked with the instructor after the exam, the article in question was from one of the top three journals in its area, a journal with a rejection rate of 90%! If 90% of the articles submitted to this journal were rejected, you would think that the final 10% would be the cream of the crop. Not so. The article I had critiqued was an embarrassing methodological mess. I’ll always remember the lesson I learned from that exam: just because you hear or read something from a respectable authority doesn’t mean it’s correct or even worthwhile.

Here’s something to be aware of as you begin reading this book. If you haven’t been accustomed to actively questioning authority or many of your own assumptions about health and common medical practices, you may find the first couple chapters of this book uncomfortable. In these early chapters, I raise many questions about conventional medical science as well as alternative modalities. It’s fine for you to find these questions anxiety-provoking, annoying or dangerous. If you want to skip to later chapters for their practical information, feel free. You can always come back to the earlier chapters when you want more details about what makes science tick.

Synergy is Primary

The concept of synergy underlies everything I write about in this book. Having good health is not merely about identifying a single problem or finding a single solution. Health is about synergy: the interactions between two or more variables, which result in effects that are either bigger than or different from the additive value of each of the individual variables.

Our modern scientific methods are not well designed to examine synergy. We are pretty good with problems that have single or even a few variables. We much prefer to examine one variable at a time in order to be certain of our results. So the idea of including synergy in studies rarely occurs to most of the folks who are running the lab coat shows. Synergy doesn’t lend itself to a well-designed research study.

But the problem is that life doesn’t happen at the speed of one variable at a time. Health is a context that includes everything in our lives and the manner in which all of those things affect each other. It may be that synergy has more to do with your health than any one particular health principle.

I observed a problem recently in a study that examined antioxidants in food. The author discussed what happened when the researchers extracted the antioxidants from food, put them into pills and administered them to humans. The researchers were surprised that the antioxidants didn’t work as well as they had expected, based on how well those antioxidants had previously worked in the lab. So the study author concluded that, instead of antioxidants, there must be some other thing in the food that created its good effects.

What if it’s the synergy created by foods—real, whole foods—that’s good for us?! What if we can’t ever reduce this synergy to a list of active ingredients because what’s going on is ten-thousand variables’ worth of synergy? What if the way we eat and digest food interacts with the way we prepare our food, as well as with the way our bodies have been interacting in the world for the past day, week, month and decade? What if all of those variables, plus the way the food was grown, harvested and marketed, affected our health outcomes? Happily, I see that some researchers are indeed coming to such conclusions.

Synergy is an essential part of holistic thinking. Context is everything.

Here’s an example: You feel as if you’re coming down with a cold. You reach for help from the herb Echinacea. But, perhaps Echinacea is not going to work for you this time, not against the context of the rest of your life. You see, the use of Echinacea can be very complicated. Spring harvesting yields five times more of some of the beneficial ingredients as compared to fall harvesting. The root and leaf have different effects. If you start to take Echinacea the very moment you begin to feel sick, this early treatment makes a difference. If you’re eating the Standard American Diet (SAD) that includes a high percentage of processed foods and antibiotic-laden meats, that SAD context may overwhelm the power of Echinacea.

So if a study attempting to determine the usefulness of Echinacea is carried out on people who carry a large burden of effects from the contexts they live in (i.e., diet, pollution, stress, etc.), that study may not show any positive effect of Echinacea. Lack of results here might mean more about context than about the value of that particular herb.

Finding Clarity

It takes a lot of formal education to become the kind of scientist who regularly publishes articles in medical journals. All of that schooling and experience compounded with scientists’ personal history, result in many layers of bias upon bias, steeped in yet more bias. It’s makes it hard to see anything with fresh eyes, and even harder if seeing with those fresh eyes threatens scientific ego. Sometimes experts are so full of hubris that they are blind.

When we are attached to being right, or when we become panicked about feeling unsafe because the world just offered us a startling new idea that doesn’t fit into our beliefs, we are much less able to have moments of clarity.

But real breakthroughs are made by those who can live with that panic, and still step over their conventional lines in the sand.

Real learning happens when we begin, with our experienced eyes, to practice seeing through the eyes of a beginner. Thus instead of simply hearing sound and fury, we begin to hear music.

The poet, Rilke said it well:

"I tell you that I have a long way to go before I am—where one begins...

You are so young, so before all beginning, and I want to beg you, as much as I can, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

Resolve to be always beginning—to be a beginner!" [a]

[a] Translation by John Moody.

There are principles in this book that I currently think are correct. But I could be wrong. They are based on the best knowledge that I possess right now, and empirical knowledge is always subject to change.

In fact, just today I saw an article that ran counter to something I’d thought was correct for many years. It was research showing that being angry actually lowers cortisol instead of raising it. Based on past research about this subject, what I had previously known was that our feeling any threat, including being angry, raised cortisol levels.

I had to re-evaluate my thinking. Apparently our bodily response to strong emotions is even more complicated than I had known. I didn’t like my experience of reading that research. It made me question a truth I thought I knew. I wanted to walk away. I wanted to find flaws in the study. But when I looked into the research, it wouldn’t cooperate with being wrong! Instead I found a confirming study.

It was uncomfortable to find out that something I’d been teaching people for years may no longer be true. I had a choice: if I just ignored the information, no change in my life would be necessary and my position could remain right. At least for a few more years.

But being right is not the same thing as being effective.

I choose to be effective.

And I choose to have integrity. I can’t ignore what I see without losing who I am.

So now I get to fit these new data about anger and cortisol into my understanding of how things work. This continual re-fitting into an ever-changing world of understanding makes being human exciting!

To reiterate, true scientists keep learning and re-forming their opinions. Scientific rigor includes refusing to seek ego safety by clinging to static ideas about how the world works. Science is a commitment to constantly evaluate what you think you know, and compare it to what you are currently finding out. We identify what appears to be truth in the moment and we then temporarily rest on those ideas as we continue to figure out more about the world.

This book is not Guaranteed Truth. It’s a journey toward the truth, a fun journey about You. And right now, what I share with you in this book is as close to my understanding of truth as I have been able to come to, thus far.

This is my current story about how health works. This book is about tapping into the pervasive power of the mind-body connection. It’s about context and about synergy. It’s about behavior, including your thoughts, your emotions and your actions. It’s about six Big Ideas that I hope will change your life.

My fondest hope is that you will use this book to help you in your journey of continually, honestly reevaluating what you know and what you daily do with the fundamental instrument of your life: your whole Self—mind and body.

Chapter Two

Mind-Body Connections

You are reading this now because you have some interest in feeling good. Great start! I want to keep you encouraged and add even more motivation and information to help you in your quest to feel good.

People talk about feeling good as if it’s a wonderful gift, and it is, but it’s a gift we all can earn. It’s not about luck or fate. We may have certain limitations, but within those limitations we all can learn what we need to do to feel good.

We are in a health crisis, certainly in the United States, but also in the world. Traditional health care is expensive and out of reach for many people. Medications may help sometimes but they don’t always help and often not without unwanted side effects. Medication side effects have caused the largest popular backlash against conventional medicine in memory. More and more people are turning to alternatives—and there are a growing number of available options!

Much of conventional medicine lumps all the alternative options together (they are actually termed Complementary and Alternative Medicine, or CAM) and turns them into a giant mish-mash of hokey cures that are often considered entirely opposed to conventional medicine. Much of the public has the perception that all of these alternatives are equally hokey. When I walked the hallowed halls at the Yale University School of Medicine just a decade ago, that environment was filled with a strong sense of contempt and disregard for CAM in any form. Chiropractic, homeopathy, herbal, and even plain behavioral medicine were all met with varying degrees of sneer. I ran into bias when designing research, writing grants and publishing articles. Even though I had been hired specifically to work in the area of mind-body medicine, I was told I couldn’t publish certain statements despite what the data were telling us, because they were politically incorrect or no one will believe it, and my favorite: We can’t publish that—we are funded by [a pharmaceutical company] and this will make them unhappy. And these responses were applied to research in the area of behavioral medicine, an area that, compared to many other CAM approaches, enjoyed some status as a fairly legitimate and well-tolerated alternative to drugs.

Unfortunately I am not alone in this kind of experience.

Mind-body medicine is founded on the premise that the body and the mind are inseparably connected. This idea is ancient. It was a core understanding of healing practices in both traditional Chinese medicine and the Ayurvedic cultures. But according to our present-day conventional medical world’s ideal of objectivity, separating the mind from the body has been seen as progressive and more scientific. After all, the thinking has been that you can measure things in the body objectively, but you cannot measure thoughts and feelings nearly as objectively.

The usefulness of objective measurement, however, also depends on