There are, in my eyes, many ways to deal with a condition like Atrial Fibrillation (AFib, AF).
As follows I will describe my way:
Since the day I got the diagnosis AFib, most doctors told me that AFib is a serious illness and I would have to live with it until the end of my life and there is no hope to really improve or heal it (…but of course they had some surgery and loads of pills for me, that might help, but also that wasn’t sure). To be honest this was not very constructive to me or in other words, it was not my way of playing this game!
So I decided to change my point of view instead of taking over one to one what the “medical system” has told me about what their “truth” for me is.
This means I said to myself this is just only one perspective, but there are also many others. If we look back in time Western medicine is still a very young discipline that has made or was involved in many of the biggest failures in human history, so there is a good chance, I thought, that they are also wrong again this time in my case. (Note: But we also shouldn’t forget that each era in Western medicine “produced” people who courageously fought for their patients and humanity. One of them was Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis, who saved millions of women and their children until today from death by determining the real reason for the childbed fever. Dr. Semmelweis found out that the childbed fever could be prevented or at least reduced significantly in most cases by (in simple words) making medical personal wash their hands very intensively before supporting during birth. In those times he had to fight against much ignorance and resistance in his own guild facing the truth that doctors (including him) were “killing” the people (even if without intention) and not the destiny as told until that time. As we know today he probably paid for that “truth” with his life.)
To sum it up, from my todays perspective it all starts with two questions:
- How do I define this new ‘AFib condition’ by myself?
(What means: “Do I see it as an illness, a condition, a symptom, some sign of the universe to change my life, etc. ?”.) - Do I see it as a permanent or temporarily state?
Personally, after some key moments and conclusions (as I will state below), I have decided to see AFib as a temporarily condition that shows me that I got out of balance in my life and it is my job now to find my balance again. This point of view also provides a much better feeling to me what is a first step in lowering my burden and desperation, because it is connected to the idea that I can do something myself by starting my own search and rescue journey immediately.
As I have stated before something I have learned from my own AFib story is being much more sceptic in general about things I have been told (or I was telling myself) about what is “truth”.
Today, “truth” for me has something to do with probabilities, since I (as a human being) will never have all the (correct) information at my disposal, but it is important to know that others also don’t have!
So to say:
“Sometimes it is dangerous to believe in what you think, especially when it is the only single source of truth!”
Of course I also needed to change my mindset of “blind trust” in Western medicine (but not only that), because I wrongly had seen it as an “all in wonder solution”, a single source of truth, or in other words as the holy grail. But letting this mindset go was maybe the most hard part of it all, because on the one hand Western medicine promises promises in a comfortable way to have a solution for nearly every problem and tells us that it will now take over all the responsibillity, but in my eyes at least it doesn’t, it tells that only who follows their guidelines is a responsible person. Mostly this “responsibillity” means following treatments by pills or surgeries, but as I have experienced it, these kinds of treatments are very often only adressing symptoms, but not the root cause of the problem.
In my actual thinking AFib is also some kind of a symptom that a complex system shows when it is out of balance.
Example: If the blood pressure is very high because a lot of fatty, salted and sugared food is consumed daily, too little exercise is done, the daily stress is not compensated etc., then it is only symptomatic cosmetics to take medication to depress the “value” following the guideline alone, because the cause why the body has lost its balance is still not eliminated.
So my conclusion (or new mind set) out of this is that I should give a little bit more trust into evolution and my own body / soul system – “they (body and soul)” are not against me and I should use common sense to find ways to keep them into a healthy balance again.
The next step that “boosted” my new mindset was well-founded hope. This well-founded hope was based on some practical examples that were showing to me that “my doctors” must be wrong when they say “there is no healing possible (especially no natural based one).
The following three things (you can also find in the library of this blog) gave me a good start on creating my new hope basis:
- A study: PREVEntion and regReSsive Effect of weight-loss and risk factor modification on Atrial Fibrillation: the REVERSE-AF study.
- A book: “How I cured my AFib” from Jay Clarke
- Another book: “Slick AF: The AFib Rabbit Hole” from Kristian Davidson
These “Three” were great examples to me making my hope grow, but to be honest the biggest “hope booster”, in my eyes, is something that has been made by self experience, what was still missing until this point.
This “self experience” came up when I had found out by try and error that I could stop (terminate) my AFib-episodes by a simple interval training procedure. This procedure I have called “MyBackToSinus”-Procedure which you can find explained in detail here in my blog.
This “BackToSinus”-Procedure was showing me by practical example that I can influence my AFib condition myself dramatically in a positive way by shortening my AFib-episodes to a fraction of their normal duration. So this new “finding” raised my hope and my confidence level significantly. The procedure was extremely lowering my burden and gave me back much of my life quality. Before I had this procedure I had to wait from 5 up to 23 hours before my heart jumped back to sinus rhythm. Now I can terminate the episodes in a time somewhere between a few minutes and 2,5 hours, depending on my body condition.
Of course this is not a cure, but it increased my life quality dramatically and this is a very important healing factor too.
Based on my own experience and the experiences / studies of others shown before I am sure that there are more hidden fatcors that could be discovered and influenced in a positive way and lead to a complete healing process of AFib.
Note: Please don’t missunderstand me, in many cases I am really thankful that we have this Western medical system, if e.g. you have a broken leg, or a rusty nail stuckin’ your head etc., then it is a really great thing to have people on your side that are there to help you out. But in some cases and in my eyes AFib is such a case, the Western medicine has a “blind eye” or lets say systematic weakness in recognizing options that might be really helpful in curing (not only treating) people being in this condition. This, from my perspective, is much based on the way this system sadly tries to do profit maximization on the shoulders of its patients and medical personel. (Please see therefore also my former posts: Why Treatment, Fix and Cure (in AFib) are not the same and The “Worst case” Medicine.)
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