Do Insurance Companies have more impact on how long you live than the drug companies? Some new data to think about!

Publications aimed at doctors are where I get a lot of my health information. This article on the role of health insurance companies in not only the opioid epidemic, but the overall cost and effectiveness of medicine - and the reason why we as Americans DON'T live as long as Europeans, Canadians and others is chillingly logical.

https://www.medpagetoday.com/blogs/revolutionandrevelation/68935

Trauma caused by hearing truth from your doctor; Is this a real problem?

Have you heard?  A new type of trauma, caused by medical doctors who tell you the truth about likely effects of your disease, and the pros and cons of various treatment plans.

Truth has now become the enemy.

I thought I must have misheard it, so I listened to the lecture twice.  Timothy Trujillo, in an AHA class on hypnosis for the cure of immune system problems, actually denounced doctors who show you pictures of your hair falling out as a result of chemotherapy, saying that the reason your hair falls out is that doctors tell you that it will.  If doctors lie to you and tell you that the treatment will be completely symptom-free, then your hair won’t fall out, you won’t have any nausea, the cancer will magically and entirely disappear and you’ll all live happily ever after in Neverland.

Mr. Trujillo is not alone.  The alternative health field is riddled with this nonsense – and then we wonder why licensed and competent healers despise us!  And why doctors won't give us a straight answer to a simple question! 

In case you were wondering, I am a practitioner of hypnotherapy and the mind’s ability to change water into wine is truly, truly remarkable.  However – and please pay attention to this! – that truth does NOT mean that all the laws of biology and physics can be changed by wanted it to be so.  My beloved, but sadly deluded, sister kept saying “It’s nothing, it’s just fibroids,” believing that saying it over and over again would make it true.  The cancer that was growing inside her killed her, because she refused to consider that repeating a sentence a thousand times does not make it a fact.

Chemotherapy kills cancer cells by targeting cells that are dividing rapidly.  That’s why you get gut problems and your hair falls out.  It also targets your cancer, you doofus.  If your hair follicles aren’t impacted, neither will the cancer cells be.  [Immunotherapy is very different, a targeted attack on just the cancer.  But it does not yet work on every kind of cancer, in every human body.  You need Star Trek and Dr. Mc Coy’s Sickbay to get that level of miracle.] 

The real medical communication problem is not the doctors who give you complete and accurate information about potential illnesses and potential cures and treatment – it’s the doctors who DON’T.  The doctors who have been too traumatized by terrified patients and their families, who are horrified that you actually talked about death or gave someone an accurate and responsible answer to “how long am I likely to live?”  

Another sister of my heart is 3 months into an estimate of 6 months to live and the honesty of her doctor gave her the ability to make honest and accurate plans for herself.  She took a cruise with her grand-daughters during which everyone could speak from the heart, with no one so terrified of loss that they ran away from the chance to speak their love. She did that, instead of the perennial "I can't afford it, maybe later," because she knows that she doesn't have "later" as an excuse any more. She is spending quality time with her husband and her friends and her beloved dog.  And me, at the 9,000-mile-distance that we have managed to surmount in spirit as well as occasionally in body over the course of 35 wonderful years.

With truth, you can take back real power, the power to choose how to spend the time you have, and let go of the phony power that denial gives you.  And I put all the “it’s NOT going to happen to ME!” that Trujillo et al. promotes into the denial category.  Try like hell to avoid as much pain as possible.  Try like hell to stretch 6 months to 6+.  But accept that it might be 5, and the pain can’t be avoided, and your best-loved goals and dreams will not be achieved.

You really want truth too, my friends, no matter how seductive denial is and no matter how terrified out of your mind you are.  Truth is the only possession you truly have, the only real power no one can take from you.  Truth is the only place where you are truly free.

Make a vow to yourself, today, renewable every day for the rest of your life:  In small issues as well as life and death, I choose Truth, no matter how messy or frightening or not-what-I-want-to-hear.  I choose Truth.  I have the courage to face Truth, and I will use Truth to lead me in all my decisions.

[This doesn’t preclude spirituality….. don’t raise that red herring, darlings]

And remember that the reason why I want you to choose Truth, is that Truth is also the only reliable road to lifetime joy.  The exact mechanism of that road is the subject for another day.  For now, just acclimate yourself to your own courageous soul, and let that butterfly called Truth get used to alighting gently on your shoulder and whispering into your ear.  Truth is the sweetest music of all.

Read the We’re #1 chapter in my new memoir Red State, Blue Heart to understand how denial kills thousands of black women in the USA every year, who should and would live, if they stopped believing that they can dodge reality by refusing to Claim it.  Can’t blame this one on racism, friends!  Our refusal to insist that we live our lives in accordance with facts has to end… before it ends more and more of us.

https://www.amazon.com/Red-State-Blue-Heart-Victoria/dp/1974032272/

It's a good year. No, it's a bad year. No, it's.....

We so blithely talk about having a “good” or “bad” year.  What we mean is a time in which we got what we wanted out of life - we had health, a good marriage, a nice income, low stress – or we had a time that presented many challenges, sometimes intense challenge on one front – exceptional health challenges or frustrating unemployment .  My “bad” years frequently feature being nibbled to death by ducks – dozens of mild to moderate problems, but constant and relentless  - that lead your psyche to believe that the Lords of Creation have it in for you (as a Christian client referred to it) or that life is just a constant struggle with one stumbling block after another.

2015 was a difficult year for me.  2016 is shaping up to have lots of challenges as well.  I lost 5 weeks of my life to a serious bronchitis attack and now my beloved sister is riddled with cancer and breathing through her last weeks, the latter hitting with almost no warning.   Why did my goddess, angel and animal spirit cards, not to mention my Akashic consults, all tell me that this was going to be a “good” year?  Are they wrong – or nuts?

Maybe the latter is closest to the truth.

I think the disconnect can be explained by a story from one of the Buddhist scriptures, which I will paraphrase and shorten.  A farmer had a young son who was an excellent helper.  That’s good, his neighbors told him.  Then the boy broke his leg and it set poorly; he would always have a limp.  That’s bad, his neighbors said.  Years pass and the nation is at war.  All the young men are conscripted for military service.  All the fathers lose their young male labor and have to work hard in the fields.  Except our farmer.  Because the boy limps, he is excused from military service.  That’s good, the neighbors say. The young man does not die in the war and remains to help work on the farm, albeit at a reduced capacity.

This constant mental categorizing event outcome as “good” or “bad” is the major cause of our life’s dissatisfaction.  If things aren’t good or bad, but just are, we can move on to maximizing the value of what we have, like the farmer.  His emotions weren’t up and down, fluctuating with the “story” that his mind created about reality, like his neighbors were doing.  Some people read the story and think that the moral is that you have to wait to decide if something is good or bad, because of course the story ends up “good” – the young man does not die.  But the real meaning is much more profound.

So what about me?  Maybe I can be very sad, weep and journal and be hugged, but my sister’s untimely death isn’t “bad,” per se, just very, very sad.  Maybe it just is.  Maybe the bronchitis just is.  [Compare this with “the bronchitis is actually good because it got me to cut back on the number of overseas trips I was planning for 2016, which were exhausting to think about, much less do” which is the psych cognitive-behavioral approach, and a very good one it is, too, in getting us to see another possibe interpretation of the available facts.  But with all its virtues, it is only turning bad into good, not walking away from bad and good as categories, period.]

So I don’t think all those cards and Akashic messages were wrong.  It was my interpretation of them that was off-base.  They didn’t say I would have a “good” year.  They said that many blessings were coming to me.  It was I who mistranslated that into “nothing sad is going to happen.”   When I take a more balanced look at the year, the blessings – so many more than in 2015 – stand out in stark relief.   My gosh, what a shower of blessings, in business, in health and in new friendships and spiritual relationships.   Not nothing but blessings of course.  But blessings there are.  And all of it – without being labeled good, bad or both/neither – just is.

If you ask me how the year is going, I may make you comfortable by saying, “Many blessings,” because small-talk doesn’t require philosophy or truth.  But know that I know what kind of year I’m having.  I’m having a year in which I am alive, and all of it just is.