When she recovered, she found herself in the ladies' room. How did she get there? She didn't know. She also doesn't know when she left her desk or how she got from the office to the bathroom. Did she open the door? Who did you meet along the way? None of it. A deep feeling of fear came over her: "What's wrong with me?" On that Tuesday in April 2017, Simone Finmans came to the conclusion that she had to get treatment, but not continue with it.
Traditional treatments led her down a dead end, a hopeless world of pain and pills. Finmans, now 52, has had to suffer from recurrent severe headaches since he was 12. In recent years, she learned that the condition, which often plagued her for days on end, was called a "migraine." Her latest episode, which preceded that brief amnesia, lasted four days. As usual, Finmans swallowed painkillers. She had taken thousands of pills in her life, and now she was asking: Were the migraines attacking her memory? It's time to do something about it. She was going to the clinic recommended by her neurologist, who was said to treat pain in an unusual way.
| | naturopathic clinics
The Essen-Steele Miners' Hospital naturopathic clinic is located in a worker's district in the Ruhr district. From the outside, it looks like an ordinary hospital, but inside it is much better than normal: spacious and bright, with smells of wood and herbal oils, and a park through floor-to-ceiling Windows.
However, there is no illusion that you are in a spa. The clinic is considered a naturopathic treatment and academic center in Germany. "Many of the people who come here are judged by other hospitals to have terminal illnesses with no hope of cure." "Some people hear doctors say, 'There is nothing more we can do for you,' or 'You have to live like this,'" said Dr. Gustav Dobbs, the chief physician. These patients are considered "incurable" because all the treatments of modern medicine have no effect.
Dobbs, 63, is a physician, nephrologist and intensive care unit physician. He became interested in traditional Chinese medicine from an early age, mastered acupuncture and worked to combine modern medicine with natural remedies. His 54-bed clinic is staffed by medical students who have completed training in "natural healing." They practice "integrative medicine", a form of medicine that unites the best of modern medicine and natural remedies. In addition to needles and ultrasound equipment, doctors, nurses and professional therapists use unique tools: cabbage leaves and cloths, glass cupping POTS and leeches, laser acupuncture machines and meditation chairs.
In Germany, there is the Immanuel Hospital in Berlin, which combines a large emergency clinic with a specialist naturopathic research unit. The Robert Bosch Hospital in Stuttgart also has a naturopathic unit, which treats cancer patients as a complement to modern medical anticancer therapies. In the United States, integrated medicine is well established in the patient population because of high demand. A consortium of universities and medical schools, including prestigious institutions such as Stanford, Harvard, Yale and Johns Hopkins, is working on this. The U.S. Department of Health spends more than $350 million a year on research in this area and has established the National Center for Complementary and Integrated Health.
Finmans remembers visiting the Essen clinic for the first time. She entered a room with three beds. "The first conversation with the doctor lasted a full hour and was very good." She said. She was examined at length by paramedics and professional therapists. "After that, I got a daily and weekly plan. I thought, well, I'm not going to be able to walk anymore." Morning exercises at 7:30, followed by kitchen lessons, talk, yoga, relaxation techniques and acupuncture. "Other than that, all I have to do is blank out." "Finmans said. That means: no cell phones, no computers, no coffee. Instead of giving her migraines medication, she was told to fast. According to the graded headache model, natural remedies are used first, and if they do not work, traditional medicines are used later. Finmans was skeptical: "So the treatment plan they had for me was withdrawal. Not being able to take painkillers immediately when the headache was severe, as I usually do, was deeply frightening, because I had been doing it for years. I don't think I'll make it without my medication."
It wasn't until she was 47 that Finmans was diagnosed with migraines that she suffered from three to four headaches a month, lasting several days at a time. "Every time, I feel like a rat is eating my brain." "She recounted. After her diagnosis, she put her hopes on new drugs, triptans. They were more effective, but only for four years. Then again, the single mother has to suffer. She had no patience with the child because of the pain. She felt bad and tried to distract herself by doing housework. After her illness, she was able to do her job as assistant manager perfectly.
| curative effect is startling |
Finmans is one of about 12 million People in Germany who suffer from chronic pain. These patients have back pain, neck pain or headaches, rheumatoid arthritis or wear and tear on joints, irritable bowel syndrome or chronic enteritis, or fibromyalgia -- a condition in which patients experience pain in different parts of the body at the same time. Despite this, only about 1,100 specialist pain therapists practice in Germany, and only 2% of patients receive specialist treatment. It takes an average of six to seven years to see a pain specialist.
It's much easier to take medicine. German pharmacies make 500 million euros a year in sales of over-the-counter painkillers alone. Then there are the huge amounts of prescription drugs. Sales of prescription drugs for migraines, for example, rose nearly 60 percent in a decade, and the number of times doctors prescribed the powerful opioid painkiller fentanyl more than tripled between 2000 and 2010, even though three-quarters of patients were not the drug's primary intended target -- cancer patients suffering from cancer-related pain.
At the naturopathic clinic in Essen, doctors are not giving up on traditional painkillers. "I had a migraine attack the very first night." "I was first given peppermint oil to rub on my forehead, wasabi foot baths, willow bark and ginger capsules, then a nasal spray with a local anaesthetic, and finally an aspirin drip," finmans recalls. After that, my condition improved day by day." Her initial doubts about the hospital soon dissipated.
Of the 1,300 patients treated at Essen's naturopathic clinic each year, half come for chronic pain that cannot be relieved. "Pain relievers are a boon for cancer treatment and emergency medicine, such as during fractures or after surgery." But chronic pain is not one of them. There's no need to treat chronic pain the same way you treat acute pain, with ever-increasing doses of pills and injections. Our integrative medicine attempts to reach both the body and the mind through specialized treatments, rather than looking at them separately."
Serious natural remedies are far from color-packaged, mostly low-dose ginkgo sugar-coated pills, hop tablets or sunflower drops, even though they often appear on drugstore shelves labeled "natural." Only a fraction of these goods are really useful. Modern naturopathy, in addition to plant-based active ingredients, includes professional massage, heat and cold therapy, traditional Chinese and Indian medicine, yoga, relaxation techniques, attention training, starvation therapy and a meat-free full value diet (a diet philosophy that favors fresh and unprocessed foods and whole grain products). The scientific basis for these therapies is solid. Researchers have analyzed hundreds of years of valuable experience and repeatedly asked the question: Does it work? Is it more effective than other methods? Why does it work?
From 2013 to 2018, Dobbs's fellow physicians and affiliated research specialists published more than 200 articles in leading professional journals, including 70 on pain. Some treatments have had surprising results: cupping patients with neck pain, for example, reduced their pain by about half after five sessions over two and a half weeks, lasting an average of nine months. The researchers explained this by increasing blood supply to the tissues and making the muscles more relaxed. Or studies of leech therapy in patients with knee wear: after a week, pain was reduced by 60 to 70 percent, and lasted for up to six months. The explanation is that leeches inject 30 highly effective painkillers into the body while sucking blood. Or the effect of yoga on neck pain: after eight weeks of treatment, the subjects felt nearly 60 percent less pain, and after a year, 40 percent felt half as much pain as when the treatment began.
It is also because the results are so convincing that almost all statutory and most private health insurance providers in Germany now cover the cost of two weeks of in-patient treatment for a combination of modern medicine and naturopathy. Natural remedies are popular among patients: two-thirds of Germans have tried them, according to a Survey by the Bertelsmann Foundation, and chronic pain sufferers are particularly keen on them because of the side effects of painkillers, such as liver and kidney damage, bleeding in the intestines or stomach ulcers.
| | break the vicious cycle
In July 2018, on the ground floor of the Essen Clinic, walter Miller, a former miner who had worked in the mine's first aid station for 20 years, learned an important principle of naturopathy: strong stimulation, high efficacy. Every day for a week, Miller -- a tree-like man with fingers like vice vice -- lay like an ascetic on a "pinprick pad." It's a flat styrofoam pad with thousands of plastic serrated teeth. 'The sting was painful at first, but after that the skin warmed and the comfort spread, the pain lessened.' He said. For years, Miller suffered from severe back pain. After spinal fusion surgery, the pain moved to his leg, forcing him to take a variety of drugs every day and walking only 50 meters at a time before arriving at the Essen clinic, at the top of a 1-10 scale of pain intensity. Now, after a full week of treatment, he can walk 400 meters in a park and his pain level has been downgraded to 5.
The principle is simple: a new stimulus takes the body away from the old pain, and this can be done with needling pads, ice water, acupuncture or scrapping. To scrape, the therapist uses an object to scrape the back of the eucalyptus paste until it becomes red. The treatment increases tissue blood flow sixfold.
In Germany, most patients attribute pain to purely mechanical problems, such as wear, stenosis and pressure. But a study of patients with back pain showed that only 15 percent of cases could find a specific cause on an X-ray. "The mechanism of pain is very complex and we don't fully understand it. It's a combination of receptors, nerve fibers, messengers, spinal cord and brain." Dobbs said. How much pain a person perceiving depends on conscious and unconscious assessments of brain signals, memory and forgetting, stress and relaxation, helplessness and trust -- all of these feelings play a key role.
"Chronic pain is learned pain. To put it figuratively: maybe a pain starts out as a gut path, but the signal path of perception strengthens over time into a highway." He said. Now, his team is trying to blunt or clear the pulse from that path with treatment. Therapists stimulate this process in a number of ways: alternating mild and intense stimulation stimulates the body's response, exercise, relaxation and meditation exercises strengthen the mind and body, while accumulating knowledge and adjusting diet in preparation for everyday life outside the clinic. "All of this leads to a rewriting of pain memories," Dobbs said. "Pain is reassessed and perceived."
An important goal during a stay at the clinic is to break the cycle of pain, fear and helplessness that often lasts for years. "We know that when patients feel powerless to do anything about their pain, they feel hopeless, and that can exacerbate the pain." Chief physician Marco Werner explains. So for many patients, the first step is to find a way out of the vicious cycle. He and his colleagues use treatments to stimulate the body to respond, such as increased blood flow, more relaxed muscles, reversible infections and altered pain perception. Then came the second step, Werner says: "The patient realized for the first time in a long time that his pain was actually alleviating. Then he will regain hope and start doing something for himself."
In this process, the patient is responsible for himself from the very beginning. There is no promise of a pill to make the symptoms go away, or of a doctor to cure them in the short term. Essen's experts are pinning their hopes more on self-help and self-efficacy. "We know that stress, stressful living environments, and a meaty diet all elevate the body's inflammatory parameters." Psychosomatic medicine therapist and yoga teacher Anna Paul says, "This is a place where we tell patients very specifically what they can do on their own to improve various conditions." Experts work to convey hope, not despair. In doing so, patients learn new skills: how to incorporate short-term meditation into their daily lives, how to recognize their stress limits earlier through attention training, or how to cook healthy vegetarian dishes and make delicious bread spreads.
1. Cold water Treatment: This treatment relies on the "lightning casting" power of cold water at 15 degrees Celsius on the body. 2. The healing power of cabbage: A woman's aching wrist is wrapped in moist cabbage leaf 12.
| | a change of self
Essen's therapists don't just focus on affected areas, like broken joints or infection levels in blood. "We prefer to ask: How can we make patients stronger?" Psychosomatic therapist Paul Says, "What can patients learn from us to take home for themselves?" To do this, patients need to be aroused to change their interest. In conversations with patients, Dobbs sometimes makes this clear: "If you want to reduce pain, you have to change your lifestyle. It is in your own hands."
Gabrielle Barandis is an example of how important it is to be able to apply the techniques learned at home to help yourself. The pediatric nurse had been suffering from rheumatoid arthritis for 42 years, and the pain in her hands, wrists, shoulders and knees was so intense that things often slipped out of her hands -- she was so weak, the pain so intense. She could barely climb stairs and often lost sleep at night. She lived like this for decades, taking countless painkillers and cortisone, and her knuckles stiffened. "The worst part was sitting on the couch crying and taking painkillers." She said.
Four years ago, during a two-week treatment at the Essen Naturopathic clinic, she learned that meat contains arachidonic acid, a substance that triggers inflammation, and how plant nutrients can be beneficial to pain patients. While still in the clinic, she felt much better after fasting and diet changes. When she got home, she stuck to a no-meat, no-sweet, no-strawberry diet. If she's grilling with her family, she puts bell peppers stuffed with fresh cheese, fish or shrimp on the grill. For four years, she didn't need painkillers. She still enjoys cooking meat for her family, such as beef stew and meatloaf. "I enjoy cooking, but I give up eating a lot. If the pain comes back, the price is too high." "Ballandis said.
Dobbs likes to send his patients home with the words of Joe Kabatzin, an American molecular biologist and attention trainer: "Imagine you make a parachute. If you suddenly fall out of an airplane, you simply pull the ripcord and open the parachute. But if you're starting to weave your parachute then it's too late."
Migraine sufferer Finmans took his tips to heart and used them in his daily life to arm himself and face life's disappointments positively. Her prescription: schedule 15-minute relaxation exercises in the morning and multiple short breathing meditations or back stretches, her favorite yoga practice, during the day. In times of stress, she consciously imagines herself in a "place of peace and strength," such as sitting on a bench in an Irish bay overlooking the ocean. "I'm not doing three things at once like I used to." She said. In the clinic, she learned that she had always been too hard on herself, because she had to be strong after her parents divorced, and then she had to be strong as a single parent. "I always took on too much and didn't take good care of myself. And now I know I don't have to." For a year, Finmans stopped taking his medication and didn't have a recurrence of his migraines.
S acupuncture mat
Thousands of plastic needles stimulate painful areas but do not Pierce the skin. After the initial mild pain, there is a warm feeling. The mat's effect may be achieved by increasing blood flow and stimulating nerve cells. It is effective for neck and back pain.
S movement
Experts recommend devoting at least two and a half hours a week to getting physically active. Exercise lowers blood pressure and stress levels, and increases pain tolerance. According to research, headache sufferers can reduce their headaches by between a fifth and a half by regularly jogging.
S a vegetarian
Diet affects inflammation, and a vegetarian diet can control the symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis. Meat contains arachidonic acid, which is broken down by the body into substances that promote inflammation. Not only does a vegetarian diet reduce pain, but a diet that includes more vegetable oils and fruits and vegetables also has other benefits.
S scrapping
The therapist scraped the patient's back with a round spatula. This can cause minor bleeding and the skin can turn red for a few days. So far, only sporadic scientific studies have demonstrated its effectiveness: scraping seems to help with back and neck problems, migraines and tension headaches.
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