Hello and welcome to The Own Your Health Podcast.
I'm Cyndi Lynne, and I can't wait to
help you step into your health power.
So a question that I get frequently or a comment
that I hear is I don't possibly know enough, or
when will I know enough to feel like I can
really start owning my health? Where I can really start
taking over responsibility for managing some of my health?
And my answer is always the same,
you know enough to get started now.
So you may not know enough to change
your medications or to stop taking medications.
And that wouldn't be a first step anyways.
Knowing enough can mean knowing about your body.
Knowing enough can mean paying attention
to how your body responds in
different situations to different circumstances.
Knowing enough can simply mean knowing that you
want to take responsibility and then seeking out
the information you need to take each step.
See, no one starts out knowing it all,
and no one ends up knowing it all.
I don't know what kind of journey my health will take,
but I do know I'm confident that I can learn what
I need to learn to manage it, and that I can
learn who and when I want to pull in as a
consultant, as a resource, when I want to use a physician,
when I want to use other healthcare providers.
It's not a matter of knowing everything about a
particular condition that you might have or everything about
your body, because face it, your doctor doesn't.
No doctor does know everything about your
body or everything about a specific condition.
If you're lucky, one will take
the time to learn with you.
But you don't have to depend on
luck to take the time to learn
yourself, to pay attention, to make observations.
We've talked about a number of things
in these podcasts that you can do.
In the recent White Coat series, we talked
about things like monitoring your own blood pressure,
learning how your body reacts, how your blood
pressure reacts in certain situations gives you a
tremendous amount of insight, insight that your doctor
couldn't possibly collect in an office visit.
So starting with small steps like that,
and of course, those steps will be
different depending on what conditions you're monitoring
or what situation you're dealing with.
But starting with those small, easy, basically risk
free actions help you develop the confidence as
you go forward and start taking more initiative
and start making bigger decisions for your health
and start viewing your healthcare providers as partners
on your journey to owning your own health.
So when will you know enough? Never.
But you don't have to.
You don't have to know everything.
You know enough today to get started.
And I encourage you to seek the resources you need,
not to do it for you and not to manage
your health for you, but seek the resources you need
to learn so that you can ask better questions.
Because of course, that's a big part of managing
and owning our health, is learning to ask better
questions to get higher quality of information so that
you can make truly informed decisions.
And as we talked in the last podcast, the
paradox of choice, it's important to find out enough
information to narrow your choices so that you can
make the very best decisions for yourself.
And then after you make that decision, knowing full well that
you did the very best you can with what you had.
And ladies and gentlemen, that's
exactly what physicians do.
They do the best they can with what
they have at that point in time.
They gather information, they look to their protocols
or standards of care, and they act accordingly.
You too can gather information that will help you
make better decisions, better choices, and ask better questions,
which will ultimately get you to better resources.
It's a cyclical process, and I think that's what
people don't always understand going into this journey.
If you've dealt with a chronic illness
for a long period of time, then
you've definitely seen those cycles, the cycles
of learning, exploring, finding a potential solution.
Perhaps that solution works for a
period of time, maybe it doesn't.
But then you continue that cycle of
investigation, questioning, gathering data, making a new
decision, and then evaluating that.
So this iterative recyclical process is always going on with
our health, and it's going on with our health in
very simple ways as we make our daily decisions about
what exercises work for us, what feels good in our
body, what doesn't feel good in our body, what feels
good to eat, what doesn't sit so well with us.
All of these kinds of questions and responses or activities
and outcomes are a continuous cyclic process that we don't
even realize we're already doing in many ways.
And we have the advantage, when we own
our health, to gathering this data and trying
things on a much more rapid basis.
So, for example, if you see a physician and
he recommends a specific diet, he may choose to
see you again in three months, six months, to
see how that's working out for you.
If you choose the diet and you pay attention and you
monitor how you feel day in and day out, you're probably
going to get your answer in two or three weeks of
if this is something that's working for you, or this is
something that your body doesn't like at all, or this is
something that is really bad for you.
When you pay attention, when you gather
that data and you make those decisions
yourself, it allows you to pivot.
It allows you to make changes so much more quickly.
It allows you to make adjustments.
And then when you make the adjustments and go
through that evaluation cycle, seeing if something really works
well for you or something needs to be tweaked
a little bit more, you can do that.
So with something as simple as diet in the, say,
three month cycle that healthcare practitioner would put you on,
you could make two or three adjustments or changes to
get where you needed to be, to get where you
feel good, where your body feels healthy, where you're getting
the changes that you want to see.
It puts so much more control in your hands.
And you know enough to have that control.
You know enough to take that lead.
And I've said before, if this is something that
sounds just awful to you and, and you prefer
to have another individual manage all of your health,
then you're probably not in the right place.
And maybe you got on this podcast
by accident, and I love you dearly.
I probably won't be able to help you.
But if you're the person that wants to take control,
if you want that responsibility and that authority over your
health, then you're absolutely in the right place.
If you'd like some guidance on better
questions, to ask on directions to look
on resources, I'm always here to help.
Not to tell you what to do, but to
tell you how to think about better questions, what
the options are, and what actions that you can
begin to take to really own your health.
So until next week, go out and own it.
