To Heal or Not to Heal

To Heal or Not to Heal…

For almost four decades as a chiropractor and wellness practitioner, I’ve helped thousands move from helplessness and overwhelm to greater joy, peace and empowerment. You might assume that shift happened because their symptoms disappeared — that they were “cured.” Surprisingly, many people begin to heal precisely while symptoms are still present, and often because of them.

The key is learning to listen to the wisdom in the wound. That idea can feel counterintuitive in a culture that treats healing primarily as symptom relief. People often ask, “How can listening to a wound promote healing?” and “Does this mean my condition will never change?” Those are important questions. To answer them, it helps to reframe what we mean by “healing.”

Therapy that Restores: necessary but limited

Most of us think of healing in a straightforward way: something hurts, so we see a professional, get a pill, procedure, or surgery, and when the pain stops we return to life as it was. This model — which I call Restorative Therapeutics — is essential in many situations, especially life-saving emergency care. It buys time and eases suffering.

But when applied as the default approach to all health challenges, restorative care has limits. It’s designed to return you to the state you were in before the symptom began. If the root causes remain unaddressed — emotional, mental, chemical, physical, or spiritual — the problem is likely to recur, sometimes more severely. In short: fixing the symptom doesn’t always resolve the deeper message.

Symptoms as wise messengers

What if symptoms carry wisdom? What if they’re trying to teach you something about your life, your choices, or how you relate to yourself and others? Ignoring that message is like disconnecting the dashboard warning light in a car. The light goes out, but the underlying problem keeps damaging the engine.

Take a pinched nerve, for example. Masking the pain with medication may temporarily silence the warning, but if stress, posture, or emotional factors that caused the pinch aren’t addressed, the issue can worsen and require more invasive intervention later.

Working with innate intelligence - helping the body reorganize

Many ancient traditions — from China and India to Native America and Egypt — recognized an innate life force and an organizing intelligence within the body that knows how to heal. Integrative healing is a modern approach that supports that intelligence. Instead of merely removing symptoms, it enhances your body’s capacity to self-regulate and heal by removing obstacles to its expression.

At the Scher Center for Well Being, we begin by examining posture and the state of the nervous system. Longstanding stress and trauma often leave the nervous system in a persistent state of high alert — what I call Defense Physiology. The body cannot distinguish between an immediate threat, a perceived threat, or a remembered threat; thoughts or emotional memories can trigger the same physiological responses as real-time danger. When the nervous system stays stuck in fight-or-flight, energy goes to survival rather than repair, and many conditions can emerge.

Listening safely to and with the body

So how do we help the body listen and heal?  

We start by opening the channels of communication between the brain, spinal cord and the rest of the body so the body can switch into physiological safety.  This process is what I call 'being under the radar' of how you perceive what's going on in your body. Once your body moves into more safety, you can freely breathe into the entire spinal system allowing your brain to 'find' and shift how you are holding onto tension patterns that have been locked into your structures perhaps for decades.  The body responds more often to a whisper than to a loud shout. We just need to know what to whisper and where for the body to find it's way back home to itself often in a new empowered way. Then healing happens and wholeness is the reward.

To find out more about what we do at Scher Center, please reach out to us at [email protected] or call 505 989-9373.

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