An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. The old adage encourages each of us to take action whenever possible to prevent illness, injury, or disease. It’s timeless advice that can keep us safe and healthy. Routine health checkups help our healthcare providers get a baseline of our health, including our physical and mental history, so they can monitor our care over time. Many allopathic doctors are not trained to assess your mental, as ell as emotional health from the impact of childhood trauma. Therefore they often are not aware of various trauma response. Holistic Doctors are trained in various aspects of the human to include mental, emotional, as well as physical impacts of trauma response.
Don’t Wait to be Asked about Childhood Trauma
Now more than ever, healthcare providers are tuning into mental health issues that present as physical illness based on trauma response. We’ve all completed paperwork reporting our health history including what illnesses, injuries, or familial histories might affect our health. Be sure to include any childhood trauma experiences in your history.
Don’t be afraid to share childhood trauma history with your holistic doctor, even if they don’t include it on their intake. Knowing about traumatic experiences you’ve dealt with can help them offer you preventative care as well as make better decisions about current treatments as well as helping the impact of trauma response on the body.
Some key trauma’s worth reporting include-
Accidents or acute illnesses
Abuse or neglect
Domestic violence
Victimizations
Significant losses
Familial histories of alcohol or drug abuse
Any of these or other childhood trauma can help your holistic doctor better understand what influences could be affecting your overall health.
Discuss Coping Skills with Your Holistic Doctor Too
Everyone deals with stress in their own way. Coping skills are conscious and subconscious strategies people use to manage difficult things. What causes trauma for one person may not affect another in the same way. Similarly, what one person does to cope, may look nothing like what someone else does. Reporting your typical coping skills to your holistic doctor can help them identify dangerous coping skills or connect the dots between your health and the coping skills you may engage in. For instance, drug, alcohol, or food are often used as coping skills for trauma response. That means addictions and obesity may be connected to childhood trauma and require a specific type of support.
Read Also: Emotional Trauma and the Connection with your Physical Health
Take a Team Approach to Your Health Care
Having a primary care physician is common, but you may need more providers on your team such as a holistic doctor. If you’ve experienced childhood trauma of any kind, singularly or repeated, you may benefit from including a holistic doctor on your team that has diverse training. Working with multiple types of providers can actually increase the quality of your care and oftentimes prevent manifestations of physical illness in your body.
Your history greatly impacts today and tomorrow. Be confident in sharing the past with your healthcare providers, even if you see yourself as a survivor and moved on. The truth is, what happened may affect your health and you deserve to be the healthiest version of yourself as possible. Help your health care provider connect the dots by giving them a full account of your physical and mental health history.