The longer I live with chronic pain, the more convinced I am that modern medicine is excellent at saving lives and often terrible at helping people live them.
That is not an attack on medicine.
I am deeply grateful for surgeons, emergency rooms, diagnostics, imaging, specialists, antibiotics, and every medical professional who dedicates their life to helping people heal. If my arm bone is hanging on by hope and duct tape, I am not reaching for turmeric and positive affirmations. I want a surgeon. Immediately.
My mom shattered her foot in multiple places in a car accident. Her toe was essentially powder. No longer a toe. She needed surgery, pins, screws, and acute medical care. No amount of herbal tea or breath work was going to fix those bones.
Conventional medicine is extraordinary in moments like that.
But chronic illness and chronic pain are often different beasts entirely.
My body failed to coordinate its symptoms in a way convenient for modern medicine.
This is where many patients begin discovering the enormous disconnect between conventional medicine and a more holistic approach to healing.
And by holistic, I do not mean anti-science wellness influencers waving potions around while trying to sell bottled mountain air and enlightenment in the same online bundle.
There is a fine line between integrative medicine and someone trying to sell you powdered optimism for $89.99.
I mean looking at the body as an interconnected system instead of isolated symptoms.
I mean considering nutrition, supplementation, nervous system regulation, sleep, movement, physical therapies, mindfulness, environmental stressors, and individualized treatment options alongside conventional care.
Not instead of medicine.
Alongside it.
Because pain doesn’t stay politely inside one department.
The body cannot always be divided into neat specialties simply because the healthcare system is.
I recently listened to a podcast episode from Untangle: Exploring What it Takes to Be Pain Free featuring Stacey Roberts, and so much of the conversation echoed what I’ve experienced navigating chronic pain myself.
One point especially stood out to me. Roberts referenced pain scientist Lorimer Moseley from the University of Adelaide, discussing how conventional medicine often compartmentalizes the body into isolated systems. The gut, the brain, the joints. When chronic pain rarely behaves that neatly.
Pain spills into everything.
Your nervous system changes.
Your sleep changes.
Your digestion changes.
Your stress response changes.
Your sense of safety changes.
The nervous system remembers suffering long after scans stop showing it.
Pain is real, even when the cause is unclear.
For years I was bounced between specialists who all told me some variation of, “Everything looks normal.” 👍 👍
Which was excellent news except for the small detail that I was getting worse.
There’s an exhaustion that comes from hearing “everything looks normal” while actively deteriorating.
Every appointment felt a bit like medical speed dating except nobody wanted a second date with my file.
I was essentially told to go back to physio. This wasn’t really a medical issue anymore.
I believe in physiotherapy. Deeply. It has helped me tremendously. But there comes a point where patients stop needing another treatment and start needing someone to ask bigger questions.
Nothing discourages a person quite like enthusiastically trying a stretch or strengthening exercise that immediately makes things worse.
Every specialist confidently searches for answers inside their own department like medical-themed escape rooms.
Somewhere between “try yoga” and “have you considered drinking more water?” I began expanding my own research.
And I’ve lost count of the books and podcasts that begin with the exact same storyline:
“I was trained in conventional medicine. I trusted the system completely… until I became the patient.”
At first, these doctors often dismiss holistic approaches entirely. Patients mention supplements, meditation, dietary changes, nervous system work, or alternative therapies, and the response is cautious at best and dismissive at worst.
Snake oil.
Pseudoscience.
Non-compliance.
But then something shifts.
The doctor develops chronic pain.
An autoimmune condition.
A lingering injury.
Burnout.
A nervous system disorder.
And suddenly certainty cracks open into curiosity.
Chronic pain turns you into a part-time researcher, part-time philosopher, and full-time reluctant detective.
I have spent an unreasonable amount of my adult life trying to determine whether I am injured, inflamed, overtired, under-rested, dehydrated, stressed, or simply existing incorrectly.
Living with chronic pain means constantly performing the world’s least fun science experiment on yourself.
By year three of unexplained symptoms, I could practically earn honorary medical credits.
To be fair, holistic spaces are not immune to problems either. There is misinformation, exploitation, fearmongering, and an endless supply of expensive miracle cures marketed toward vulnerable people desperate to feel better.
Pain makes people easy to manipulate.
Both systems can fail people in different ways.
That’s why I don’t believe the answer is abandoning conventional medicine for holistic healing.
I believe the answer is integration.
An actual partnership.
Healing is bigger than symptom management.
Patients do not need doctors to be omniscient. We need them to be curious.
Surgeons are trained to operate.
Doctors are trained to diagnose and prescribe.
Specialists are trained to identify patterns within their specialty.
We need practitioners who understand both the power and the limitations of their training. And openly work with other practitioners, conventional and holistic, to find a root cause and treatment plan.
This matters enormously to a patient just trying to survive.
The shoe that fits one person pinches another.
Chronic illness does not always fit neatly inside textbook timelines and diagnostic boxes.
Medicine’s symbol speaks of healing being available. Yet many people with chronic illness spend years moving through appointments feeling like fragmented symptoms instead of whole human beings.
Stacey Roberts described asking chronic pain patients to remember a time before they lived with pain. Then she asks them to imagine themselves in the future doing something that currently hurts. Picking up grandchildren. Bending over. Any repetitive movement, without pain.
And many people simply cannot picture it.
Their bodies have become so conditioned toward pain and protection that even imagining safety feels impossible.
This is your forest therapy practice for this week. Find a quiet place in nature and practice this visualization.
Chronic pain doesn’t only affect muscles and joints. It reshapes expectation. Identity. Fear. Hope.
Roberts discussed using visualization, breathing, mindfulness, and repetition to help retrain the nervous system’s response to pain.
That idea connects to what I’ve experienced through forest therapy and time in nature.
Regulation comes while standing beneath trees while wind moves through their branches overhead. The nervous system seems to recognize something there before the mind does. The movement. The rhythm. The reminder that not everything in the world is bracing for impact.
Healing and pain elimination are not always the same thing.
Chronic pain teaches your nervous system to scan constantly for danger. Nature quietly teaches it another language.
No performance. No productivity. No pressure to fix yourself.
Just space to exist in a body that has spent far too long preparing for the next flare.
You can read more about that experience in my post about forest therapy and nervous system regulation. 🌲 Activating Your Vagus Nerve With Forest Therapy 🌲
I appreciated many of the points Stacey Roberts made in the podcast. But I struggled with the title of her book, The Pain-Free Formula.
Not because I don’t believe improvement is possible. I do.
I absolutely believe there are things we can do to reduce pain, improve quality of life, calm the nervous system, support healing, and function better in our bodies.
But chronic illness eventually teaches many of us something medicine rarely does:
Sometimes the greatest medical harm is making patients feel invisible.
At some point I stopped obsessing over becoming pain free and started focusing on becoming supported.
I decided healing would come in time.
And if not, I would still be okay.
Not because I had given up.
But because I finally realized I had the tools, support, and guidance I needed to endure whatever my condition threw at me.
Ironically, that mindset shift brought me more peace than years spent desperately chasing the next solution.
Sometimes acceptance is more freeing than the absence of pain we searched for so desperately.
I hope Stacey Roberts never fully understands that distinction.
Because for her to truly understand it, she may have to suffer at a depth I would not wish on anyone.
At the end of the podcast, the host asked how she would redesign the healthcare system for chronic pain patients. Roberts discussed the need for more investment into preventative health, nutrition research, nervous system regulation, and understanding why certain non-pharmaceutical interventions help people heal.
And honestly, I think she raised important questions.
Because if someone improves through movement, nutrition, mindfulness, supplementation, therapy, nervous system regulation, or lifestyle change, why should that healing be dismissed simply because it did not originate from a prescription pad?
People in pain do not need to be fixed before they are worthy of compassion.
I do think our healthcare system needs to evolve.
Not because doctors are evil.
Not because science has failed.
Not because medicine lacks value.
Oliver Sacks suggests,
To restore the human subject at the center. The suffering, afflicted, fighting human subject. We must deepen a case history to a narrative.
Patients with chronic illness need practitioners who are comfortable saying:
“I don’t know.”
“Tell me more.”
“I believe you.”
“Let’s keep looking.”
Rachel Naomi Remen said,
The most basic and powerful way to cconnect to another person is to listen.
And William Osler advised:
Listen to your patient; he is telling you the diagnosis.
Listen. Not just for the keywords that trigger familiar treatment pathways. But for the whole story.
For the grief patients carry. For the exhaustion. For the devastation of losing trust in your own body. And for the courage it takes to keep asking for help after years of disappointment.
Healing should never have become a battle between conventional and holistic medicine.
People in pain deserve both.
And if you’ve ever had to redefine what healing or success looks like inside a difficult body, I wrote more about that here as well. You Are a Success Story
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