Monthly Archives: September 2021

How To Detoxify Your Environment

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By Georgianna Donadio, MSc, DC, PhD

Detox Your EnvironmentWe are bombarded every day with hundreds of chemical toxins in our environment. Plastic particles, heavy metals, pesticides, cleaning toxins, air pollution and hundreds of other chemicals find their way into our lungs, blood stream, immune system and body systems.

Here are 10 easy tips from the National Institute of Whole Health, to help de-toxify your environment and purify your body, preventing illness and even early aging.

Tip #1: Protect your body from pesticides by thoroughly washing your fruits and vegetables to remove most of the pesticide residue.
If you can find, grow or afford organic produce, this is your best assurance against ingesting unwanted pesticides.

Tip #2: Use cotton, polyester or hemp over plastic bathroom shower and window curtains. Plastic emits toxic chemicals easily eliminated by using alternative materials

Tip #3: Don’t inhale gas fumes when you are filling your tank and avoid exhaust fumes when jogging or walking in a heavily trafficked area. We know that gasoline contains lead and other pollutants and should not be inhaled>

Tip #4: Use only natural body creams or replace them with olive or walnut oil. The chemicals found in body creams and lotions as well as makeup and other beauty products can be carcinogenic and should be avoided.

Tip #5: Avoid all second-hand and third-hand smoke. Exposure to second- or third- hand smoke kills over 50,000 people every year.

Tip #6: Keep over the counter pill use to a minimum. Studies show a direct correlation between high over the counter drug use and liver and brain damage, as well as an increase of Alzheimer’s disease.

Tip #7: Wipe your feet or take off your shoes of before coming into your house. This will reduce the amount of lead dust and allergens you can bring into the house from your shoes.

Tip #8: Lather up. Using soap liberally when you are showering or bathing is the best and most natural way to eliminate environmental toxins from your skin, which is the largest immune component of your body, and also the part of the body most in contact with the external environment.

Tip #9: Eat low mercury fish. By choosing cod, flounder, wild Alaskan or Pacific salmon – as well as clams and shrimp – you can avoid mercury rich foods. Swordfish, mackerel and tuna fish all have higher levels of mercury than the white fish mentioned.

Tip #10: Replace highly chemical house cleaners with the now popular green cleaners that do not irritate the lungs or skin.

By following these 10 simple ways to detox your environment, you can save your liver and immune system the work of detoxifying these chemicals out of your body. This will, over time, prove to be a “life saver” – literally!

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The Origin of Whole Person Health Care

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By Georgianna Donadio, MSc, DC, PhD

The origin of whole person healthcare

There is no doubt that today more and more people are turning to whole health and alternative modalities for their health concerns and disease prevention. This popular movement, winning one out of every two Americans as converts, may seem to some like a new idea or a “health revolution”. In reality, it is in a return to period in time, over 400 years ago, when health was seen from a more whole person, integrated and even spiritual perspective.

Early Health Care

Until the early 1600’s, the realm of human health was believed to represent a person’s spiritual state. If one was healthy that meant they bore not demons. If one was sick, that meant they needed to purge sickness, which was seen as “possession” or a spiritual incorrectness that had to be remedied. The prevailing church of the day, ruled by the Vatican, exerted a huge influence over the medical community and how people viewed the cause and cure of their disease.

A Declaration

In 1612, physician Rene Descartes, a powerful, influential physician and scientist, declared, “I think therefore I am” , stating that the mind and body were two separate, unrelated parts of a human being, and as such the study and treatment of the human being needed to be separated into the mind or spirit portion and the physical bodily portion.

Descartes lead the political movement to separate the body from the soul, a separation in which he and his peers literally brokered a deal with the Vatican, which was reluctant to give up control over its flock. However, the “scientific revolution” was gripping the culture and the church knew it was prudent to agree. Thus, the division of mind and body began and the practice of medicine started down the slippery slope to where we find ourselves today.

Since this division set up a medical system that treated only physical health, it became considered, by the mass majority, that this form of medicine was the only legitimate form of health care. However, over the course of the past 50 years people have grown sicker and increasingly dissatisfied with the medical system.

The Start Of Whole Person Health care

This led to an increase in the use of “untried” remedies and treatments which offered success and often cures for varied ailments. These “alternatives” treatments attempt to address the whole person rather than just the physical body. Because of the success of alternative treatments, and their resultant popularity, we are currently experiencing a renaissance of the “whole-person” body, mind and spirit approach to healing.

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Health and Function of Your Pancreas

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By Georgianna Donadio, MSc, DC, PhD

Whole Health - Are You Caring For Your Solar Plexus?

The Pancreas, in yoga and energy circles is often referred to as “the solar plexus” chakra. From our whole health education, we know that the pancreas is one of the hardest working digestive and metabolic organs of the body. Both an endocrine and exocrine gland, this truly amazing organ/gland is the “end organ” of all digestive activity in the upper intestines. The health and function of your pancreas is of the utmost importance to your overall health and is probably the most abused gland/organ in the body.

The pancreas works 24/7. It deals with digestion as well as stress adaptation, reproduction needs, cellular nutrition needs and brain glucose imperatives. The pancreas is the belonging component of Maslow’s Hierarchy and it is evident that it expresses “the sweetness of our lives” (or not) when we look at its function and malfunctions and how intimately it is connected to our body’s glucose regulation. Like the adrenals, which we could not live without for long, without a properly working pancreas we would fall into a coma and die within days. Physically, it is intimately connected to our digestion, absorption and assimilation functions.

Whole Health - Are You Caring For Your Solar Plexus?Regarding Selye’s Stress Model, the Pancreas is “the proper or improper nutrition of our body” and all of its systems. It is the nutritional component of the Whole Health Five Aspects.

The virtue of the Pancreas is temperance or balance – not too much or too little consumption. This means not eating too much food, especially carbohydrates, which lead to hypertrophy of the beta cells of the pancreas. This leads to hyper-secretion of insulin which is the main disturbance in many chronic diseases.

The deadly sin of the Pancreas is very similar to that of the adrenals (greed). For the Pancreas the deadly sin is gluttony. Gluttony is when we eat too much, consume too much and create imbalance in our pancreatic function and whole body nutrition and chemistry. It is the act of gluttony, or taking in more than is appropriate or necessary that leads to most of the digestive problems and pathologies we see today.

I cannot emphasize strongly enough the importance of a comprehensive, whole person understanding of the digestive system. If there was one course and only one I could teach for the rest of my career it would be the digestive system, because to understand its anatomy, physiology and the whole picture of its function and integration with the rest of the body is utterly magnificent – and absolutely essential if you wish to facilitate authentic Whole Health with your patients or clients.

Integrity Influences Your Healthy Choices

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Healthy Choices

Driven by personal history and ambition, successful people offer perfect examples of the potential outcome of serotonin-driven self-soothing. This invites us to ask and answer questions about self-esteem and self-care. In exploring theme, we often find that integrity and healthy choices tend to go hand-in-hand.

When we understand the relationship between our unconscious mind, our self-esteem, and the stress of looking for love “out there,” it becomes clear that what is at the core of our “super sizing” or over-eating is not solved by the diet of the month or the next how-to best seller. Rather, what is called for is an examination of:

  • Ego State
  • Personal World View
  • Treatment of Nature and Others
  • Values
  • Beliefs
  • Consumption
  • Accumulations

Aspects of Whole Health And Self-Awareness

When these aspects of self are aligned with choices that lead to moderation rather than ambition, that produces balance rather than extremes, which debunks the thinking that “more is better.” We then select the foods we innately know are healthy, even when we must choose from a fast food menu.

In a culture comprised of 5% of the world population, using 75% of the world’s resources, we have come to accept access as a way of life. The 1980’s Robin Leaches’ TV show, Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, tainted our appetites for over-consumption, which has brought us to where we are today– obese and chronically diseased.

Making Healthy Choices With Integrity

World wide, healthy cultural traditions offer us an opportunity to re-think our approach to the way we live. Folk wisdom invites us to ponder:

How much do I really need to —–

> Have?
> Eat?
> Own?
> Control?

What do I need in order to be content? And, what role does gratitude in my life is? Having a calm, well-functioning nervous system can be a main objective for all of us instead of trying to trick the body into doing what is not natural with the latest diet craze or supplement pills available.

Asking Different Questions

It may be time for us to not only change the question we ask ourselves but the questions we are asked as consumers. What if, when making food purchases, the questions were “supersize or downsize” and the choice we make could result in significant weight loss rather than weight gain? That might put us on the road to health instead of heart disease and diabetes, which more and more research shows comes from stress and poor food choices.

So, are your food choices congruent with your personal values?

Brain Function: Where Do Emotions Come From?

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Where Do Emotions Come From?

Have you ever stopped to wonder where our  emotions come from? Or even what are emotions, and what purpose do they serve?

Most of us perceive our brain as being for “thinking” or intellectual functions.  We often think of ourselves, our personality as what is going on “from the neck up”.  In fact, there are several parts to our brain which contribute to who we are and how we form our personality – not just our cortex.

The cortex is what we refer to as our “smart brain”.  Most of us know individuals who are brilliant academically or intellectually, yet – they are emotionally dysfunctional almost in the extreme. We often presume erroneously that our thinking brain should be “smart” enough to exercise dominion over our emotions.

However, the missing piece of information here is that our emotions actually are a survival adaptation mechanism that each of us develops as we process our early environment and social conditioning.

Some of us learn to be assertive or aggressive in our environments to adapt and some of us may learn to become passive or try to become invisible to stay safe and secure. Nothing is more powerful in the human being than its drive to survive. Hence, our emotions win the day in the battle between thinking and feeling.

It is helpful of us to understand that our emotions represent how we learned to adapt in our surroundings and environment, especially during the first 0-5 years of our development. Our familial “input” taught us, as did Pavlov with his dogs, how to respond to the stimuli we received as infants and toddlers.

This embedded neurological conditioning is not overcome by the thought process, as the thought process for humans is the “newest” component to our primordial brain. It is in the survival adaptive portion of our brain where we form our “personality” and where we become conditioned to create and interact within relationships.

When we understand the possibility that interpersonal issues which frustrate us may come not from “being difficult” or “bad intent” but rather from our drive to survive and our interpretation of the stimulation and environment we were conditioned by, then we can begin to be “kinder and gentler” towards ourselves and others.

In summary, our emotions are the way we learn to live and survive in our world. We cannot “think them” into changing, but we can step back and appreciate the service and challenge they offer us in our daily lives. We can also explore techniques that allow us to have greater control over our emotions.