Holistic Approaches to Injury Recovery | Crossroads Health

Holistic approaches to injury recovery

Experiencing a physical injury puts stress on your mind and your body, making it difficult to conduct daily activities that are necessary for your health and wellness. Though many treatments you’re likely to undergo during the healing process will address treating the affected area, your entire body is experiencing the effects of the injury as well.

Nowadays, people are looking toward a combination of holistic and traditional medical practices to speed up the healing process and support their mental wellness in the process. Let’s review how mind-body therapies can positively contribute to the healing process and what options are available to holistically help you heal from injuries.

What Is Holistic Care?

Holistic medicine is a comprehensive way to address the health of your entire person. It tackles mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual needs with the understanding that all these components can and do affect each other. Holistic care recognizes the mind and body are connected and must be equally nurtured for optimal healing.

In reference to physical injury recovery, holistic treatments can include examining the effects of your injury on your mental wellness and finding ways to address both at once. This may include integrative treatment that couples medication, physical therapy, and psychotherapy treatments such as cognitive behavior therapy (CBT), along with altering your lifestyle to truly benefit from the effects of these treatments.

Common Holistic Injury Recovery Methods

As mentioned above, holistic injury recovery requires an extended focus on examining and treating the entire person as a means of promoting healing. Since your mind and body are connected, nurturing this connection by caring for your mental health can only enhance recovery.

Many holistic healing treatments require fine-tuning your mind to be more in sync with your body, employing methods like gentle movement, conscious breathing techniques, and meditative practices to enhance recovery. When getting over an injury, addressing your negative emotions and finding useful ways to pay close attention to your bodily responses is incredibly necessary to prevent exacerbating your pain.

Pain management is a significant part of the healing process. Hypnotherapy is a holistic approach that teaches you how to redirect your focus away from pain sensations. This method isn’t for everybody, but those who experience benefits have communicated positive results in as little as four sessions. Over time, even those who have experienced acute pain, like spinal cord injuries, can use hypnosis to help their brain deviate from pain sensations to more pleasant thoughts automatically.

Stress also has a large effect on the healing process. When employing stress-relief methods during injury recovery, you can effectively manage any pain while boosting healing along the way. Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) programs can teach you how to be more in tune with your body, helping you stay present while altering your perception of stress and pain. Most programs are eight weeks long and involve daily practices like yoga and meditation. Folks with physical ailments like chronic back pain have been reported to see improvement through MBSR programs.

Another method many people include in their treatment plan is acupuncture. This Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) practice intends to restore harmony in the body and encourage a natural form of healing. Thin needles are inserted into acupoints on the body to target meridians, which are energy pathways that influence wellness. It is thought that, by inserting these needles, you can enhance circulation and catalyze muscle fiber regeneration by stimulating neurotransmitters.

Examining muscle function can also lead to useful insights about mind-body connectedness. Applied kinesiology treatments test muscle strength by putting pressure on muscles to see if they “lock” or “unlock.” Locked muscles indicate strength, and unlocked muscles are determined as weaker.

By understanding muscle weakness, you can identify which corresponding organs and bodily systems may need to be treated to help heal injuries. This holistic method can help identify allergies and sensitivities, along with determining supplemental nutrition needs. Addressing these issues can greatly accelerate the injury recovery process.

Supporting Mental Wellness During Recovery

Creating a supportive mental wellness environment for yourself makes injury recovery much easier. Since you likely have to slow down and step back from work or any exertive hobbies like running or hiking, you may find yourself feeling lost or depressed.

Therapy can be useful for navigating these emotions. Having a trained professional available to help you create detailed goals and plans for your recovery, along with introducing you to pharmacological treatments that may alleviate any mental health issues, can make a huge difference.

No doubt you’re anxious to shake off your injury and get back to an active lifestyle. It’s definitely worth examining how you can be adventurous, even during recovery. You can research destinations that are amenable to your physical state and focus on safety resources, such as registering with the Smart Traveler Enrollment Program (STEP) if you’re going out of the country. Getting adventurous within reason can aid your well-being.

You should also be sure to surround yourself with friends and family who can provide you with the care and support you need to get through this tough time in your life. Spending time with friends and family can distract you from other parts of your life that your injury is forcing you to neglect or put to the side.

Enjoying time in nature with loved ones can restore your sense of joy and purpose as well. Exposure to nature is known to decrease blood pressure, increase positive immune responses, and lower feelings of sadness and depression. Try low-impact activities like gardening, beach walking, bird watching, or simply enjoying a meal outdoors.

Maintaining proper communication within all of your relationships can relieve a lot of mental strife during injury recovery. It is easy to get wrapped up in managing your pain or to feel too weighed down by depression to communicate effectively.

Let your friends or romantic partners know what you’re going through and give them a tentative timeline of when you’ll be able to resume normal activities. Also, let them know how you’re feeling at the moment. Sharing your thoughts rather than keeping them inside creates less of a burden for you to carry each day.

Guest post by Charlie Fletcher