A systems view of biological health

Section 4: Application and Practical exercises

13 : Specific applications : 1. Slow healing

Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 : also see my full Copyright statement.

Slow healing of physical injuries   

The body needs to be safe-enough in order to divert substantial resources to self-healing of physical injuries and/or immunological challenges. If its biological-level assessment is not safe-enough, then the injury/infection may be encapsulated and put in a pending tray for future attention.

Consequently, if there is any retained shock / overwhelm after an injury, it is not at all unusual for the injury to not heal fully. I have seen this a lot in my clinical work for all kinds of medical procedures, from local anaesthesia day-procedures (including dental work) through to chemotherapy and radiotherapy treatments, full-scale operations of all kinds, and other medicalised events such as giving birth. For instance, every case of unresolved diastasis recti [1] I have treated was actually a case of retained shock/distress, and the muscles returned to normal only when the tissue (and other) shock was fully addressed. The over-medicalisation of our society has over-medicalised birthing, which has resulted in a deep sense of feeling insufficiently supported in birth for many women - resulting in turn in trauma/overwhelm. Relatively low but still significant levels of shock are normalised in society and therefore largely invisible, only starting to become visible when issues such as post-natal depression are diagnosed. [2]

Healing from medical procedures is interrupted particularly where no pre-med was given, or where the operation included some kind of medical emergency or the person was particularly fearful before the operation, or the care given before or after the op was not so good, or where there was a slight over-dose of anaethsthetic (to give just a few examples). It is also surprisingly common after what seem like relatively minor accidents (including RTA's), broken bones and other injuries.

The issue is retained overwhelm/dissociation, which is relatively invisible to our cultural perspective (most people thinking that pain rather than loss of sensitivity is a sign of something being out of order). Fear of the body and the injury is also a typical cause of delayed healing, because the body-mind confuses the cognitive fear of the body for fear of an external threat - and so does not allocate resources to healing. This is fairly common for fractures. If someone is raised from childhood with a fear and distruct of their body, these issues are not trivial, because they are related to self-identity and world-view at a level that is well below any possibility of cognitive behavioural change. Fortunately trust of the body is also "natural" so it may be surprisingly easy to re-gain. Unprocessed (retained) fear from one event then easily becomes entangled with subsequent events, and so experienced fear can be quite large for things that otherwose would not seem to be so big. All of this, if uninterrupted, runs in feedback loops, often also ending up as central sensitisation ...