This posting was inspired by a recent feedback. I wrote it after I had heard from my client Dani. When in Goa, she usually comes for a few treatments, every year. Not that you could call her a ‘health nut’. She is just enthusiastic. She firmly believes in prevention and in maintaining good health. As she also spends quite a bit of time elsewhere, like for example in Bali and Thailand, she wanted to check out the quality of the colon hydrotherapy treatments there. And she did. Based on her experience she shared with me that the service and client care at Healthy Healing is one of a kind, totally unique, in the sense that it is by far the most holistic and integrated. “You know, there they just put the tube ‘up yours’, and expect the machine to do the job for them. There is no coaching with the intention of helping the client through the session and no explaining of what is happening. It all feels tediously mechanical. I missed your comments and your empathy. Without this kind of guidance, colon hydrotherapy does not appear to have quite the same benefit.”
Naturally, such words of praise are great to hear.
But they do more to me than make me feel good. They further motivate me, as they confirm my faith in the integrated medicine approach. Yes, it is crucial to address clients as people rather than ‘case histories’, to really interact with them. In both prevention and treatment, it is the way that works best, and is far more effective than fighting medical conditions as if they were removed from the person seeking help – simply by mechanically relying on conventional, or by mechanically applying, naturopathic techniques. When I consider the ramifications I find it disconcertingly unfortunate that most doctors have forgotten (because no one pointed it out to them when they were in medical college) that their voice, their word, is one of the greatest healing tools that they have at their disposal. If they hadn’t, they would be in the position to apply it with skill and sensitivity in the physician/client dialogue – and thus make a difference in people’s lives. The right word in the right moment has power. Words can heal.
When addressing the rationale for colon hydrotherapy, we should regard it as a way of working with the body’s inherent capacity for self-healing, from the gut-level up. Colon hydrotherapy is a natural and holistic form of treatment, precisely because it can trigger the body’s self-correcting mechanisms. It is not a mechanical intervention producing mechanical results. Rather, when with its help we reduce the intestinal toxic load, we thereby create a situation for the body to regenerate more easily. Colon hydrotherapy enables the body to find its own balance.
From this logically follows that colon hydrotherapy shows the best results when applied together with other treatment modalities that achieve the same effect, for example integrative cleanses. The opposite is also true. Colon hydrotherapy usually does not go so well with treatments that prevent the self-correcting mechanisms of the body from kicking in, like allopathic laxatives. Allopathic laxatives never address the root of the problem. They do not correct any causes. All they do is suppress the symptoms manifesting, for instance, as constipation. Thereby they undermine the body’s capacity for self-healing. Instead of lightening the toxic load in the intestinal tract they add more toxins to it. Colon hydrotherapy like herbal and other integrative cleanses never add toxins to the body. They only remove them.
Moreover, whatever the symptoms that a client may mention as the reason for seeking treatment, they will have underlying causes. These same causes, in turn, will have physiological, mental and emotional aspects, which reinforce each other in a downward spiral, in the progression of a disease. What has come down, however, can also go back up. We can make use of the same dynamic in order to reverse the disease process. The downward spiral can become an upward spiral. In other words, as physicians or therapists we can utilize the same physiological, mental and emotional interactivity for building on each other and supporting each other, in healing. Colon hydrotherapy will not cure anything on its own but can provide the cleansed environment for a better future; the upward spiral, that is. Which is why explaining everything that occurs in a session is of paramount importance. By way of explaining, we integrate the various aspects.
For instance, we need to inform the client about what is happening physiologically. For one thing that colon hydrotherapy relieves the body of metabolic waste: you know, all the stuff that has accumulated over the years, and keeps accumulating: like chemical toxins, or free radicals from food, drugs or the overall environment – thus damaging the cells of the body and impairing their proper function. It will also flush out retained feces. Which is absolutely necessary because, if they are not, they will lead to a pathology called ‘dysbacteria’, or an abnormal mix of bacteria, considered to be a cause of cancer and other degenerative diseases. When everything is thus properly explained, the client connects to the treatment also mentally and emotionally. He or she can picture the healing process, thus reinforcing it.
Dani is right, “Without this kind of guidance, colon hydrotherapy does not appear to have quite the same benefit.” Thus integrative colon hydrotherapy points to two things that need to come together for therapeutic success:
1. That it be combined with other integrative approaches
2. That the client be fully informed and thus become the process s a whole person
Thank you, Dani, for reminding me.