Curing AFib begins with asking “better” questions

Being on an Atrial Fibrillation (AFib, A-Fib) Self Cure Journey it is sometimes very helpful to get some “hints” for taking a senseful initial direction. In my experience many of these hints are hidden on “the road” that is pointing to the “root cause(s)” of that problem(s) I want to get rid of. In this case it is AFib.

This road is sometimes very rocky and hidden but in my eyes it is always there. One big problem in finding this road (or not leaving it accidentally) is that in the Western society we are systematicaly trained and guided to search with higher priority for symptomatic and not for curative treatments (a cure). In some cases this might be acceptable (especially when a quick fix is much better than a probable desaster), but on the long run it could be also very dangerous following this strategy. (Note: Please see also my former post about: Why Treatment, Fix and Cure (in AFib) are not the same.)

In my experience the body does not send any symptoms for fun, they are sent to make us aware of a critical situation. Putting only the symptoms down by a symptomatic treatment (especially if happend in an unreflected way) is like removing the flashing warning light in your car – the light is off but the problem is still there and will probably increase unnoticed in the future.

Another problem is that the symptomatic treatments often have more serious side effects by themselves than keeping the condition that should be treated as it is. Note: That’s the opposite to the car example, if you remove the warning light this has (mostly) no extra side effect than hiding the problem.

But anyway there are some simple techniques existing for asking for the right direction to the “Root Cause(s) “. The “symptoms” can here be seen as helpful “stops in between” on the journey to get a better orientation.

Note: Another misunderstanding in modern medicine sometimes results out of the mindset that “root cause” means there is only one single cause (or factor) for a specific medical condition. In fact very often we can find more than one cause that leads to a specific condition, what means the root cause can be multifactorial.

One of these “asking techniques” I will explain here further down.

Asking Questions:
Do you remember the times when you were a kid making your parents crazy with loads of questions like: “Why do I have to wash my hair every day?” “Because you will smell badly if you don’t do that.” “But why should I…?” “NO discussion anymore you WILL wash your hair!!!”… This was some kind of an inverted “quiz” where the “quiz master” himself (maybe one of your parents) answers the questions and can stop the game whenever he or she wants, (often) before the “real” fun begins.

As a kid, in my opinion, there were mainly three reasons for such a “quiz”. One was (the hopeless try) not to “wash your hair” a second one was to make the quiz master (your parents) as crazy as possible (let’s see how resilient they are) and the third one was to gain real knowledge. As a side effect the kid, in all three cases, learns how to ask more and more smarter questions.

Sadly the very important third reason of gaining knowledge is often overseen, especially by adults, when a kid asks questions. The result could be that kids might stop asking questions for gaining knowledge, maybe for lifetime. The ability of gaining knowledge in my experience is also the most important one for choosing a good “initial” direction in life and also for an AFib Self Cure Journey (or whatever you are heading to).

Note: Being on a Self Cure Journey the “quiz master” is often impersonated by your doctor. … “Why should I take those pills if they can’t cure my AFib?” “NO discussion anymore take your pills or shove it.” (This is only showing the summary of some of my consultations.)

I remember a situation when I was a kid and got thrown out of my Karate class, because I had asked one simple question to the trainer:

“Why do I have to cross my legs while moving sidewards, it seems to make me more attackable?”, I asked.

“You don’t have to ask questions here, you can ask questions when you are a black belt!”, he answered.

“…but isn’t that too late?”, I questioned him.

“You better take a shower and go home now!”, he shouted.

Note: Until this one question I was never too late, I never missed one training session over years (the “Black Belts” often did not even show up for training for weeks. After this experience I never went back to that Karate class, I went somewhere else were I could ask questions and got helpful answers. By the way: In my eyes a white belt changes (literally) to black from alone by sweating, bleeding and gaining knowledge by questioning.

Being on my journey for curing my AFib I always remember myself to do the same thing again as in the Karate class many years ago. If a doctor or health care professional is not willing to answer my questions I leave him or her and search out for someone who is willing to give “real” answers to me. I am an adult now and I decide myself “who washes my hair”.

But how to ask good questions?

As a consultant in production industry, it was my job to ask many questions that brought me as close as possible to the root cause(s) of a problem of my customer.

By doing this I always had a simple picture in mind:
Imagine if someone (maybe yourself – but you don’t know it) has cut off the waterflow upstream a river, now you can “fix” as much as you want downstream, it will (mostly) not support your goal to get more water somewhere below the cut off point.

Regarding AFib, it is my goal to find out what the “root cause” (my upstream cut off point) is, because there I would expect a good chance to find a hint for my cure.

One quite effective technique to get to the root cause of a problem is to use the 5 Why method invented by Sakichi Toyoda, the founder of Toyota Industries. (It is quite similar to the “quiz”-technique (shown further above) we used to make our parents crazy, but a little bit more structured.)

It works as follows:

I have to ask 5 questions (maybe to a doctor or sometimes also to myself) starting always with “Why…? ” every next “Why”-Question references to the given answer to get deeper to the root cause of my problem.

Example (Simplified – please don’t take the answers too serious):

Q1: Why do I have AFib?
A1: Because your atrium is too big.

Q2: Why my Atrium is too big?
A2: Because your Blood pressure is permanently too high.

Q3: Why my blood pressure is too high?
A3: Because you drink not enough water and eat too much fatty unhealthy food.

Q4: Why do I eat that kind of food?
A4: Because I am always stressed and want to eat as quick as possible.

Q5: Why I am always stressed?
A5: Because I am setting wrong (unbalanced) priorities for myself.

In my experience the most important thing here is to train myself not to stop asking too early and also verifying every answer as good as possible. Of course it is possible to go to deeper levels of questioning than five but after 5 Whys I mostly got some new information. The 5 Why method can be helpful to support a structured thinking process.

When I was asking some of my doctors questions the most ones stopped giving answers very early, some after the second question. Often I experienced conversations like: “Why do I have high blood pressure (and do I really have one)?” “I don’t know the most people have this condition without a known reason, but you can take some of these pills, then it will be ok.”

or: “Why do I have AFib?” “Because your atrium is too big?” “Why was this not shown in the high resolution MRT?” “I don’t know but are you the doctor or me?”

Asking the “right” questions is not only a way to get to the root cause, it is also a little shield against the “One big hammer for all kind of problems”-medicine. Whenever I got a “big hammer”-answer like: “It is your age.”, “You had bad luck.”, “It is your genetic predisposition.” or “There is no known reason”, I immediately knew I was leaving the “road to a cure” and in best case we will fix some of the symptoms here, but that will mostly lead myself to new problems. The helpful therapists I met were guiding me through my questions with good answers and sometimes also new questions that provided new knowledge and healing approaches to me.

So at least I think using the 5 Why method is a good start, but I always needed to verify the answers as good as possible to ask a better question next. If the answer ends up early in a loop or into something the responding person couldn’t really know like: “Your atrium is too big (but never shown on any MRT, etc.).”, then I got very careful about going on with this person talking about my further therapy or other health issues.

Another helpful hint I have experienced while using the 5 Why method is, if the answers are more focused on symptoms than on causes then, I have to go to a more deeper level with my questions.

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