I have known that for years. Little cuts don't bother me, I don't think every little cut needs a bandage. (My kids on the other hand do. Thus the rule fun band-aid if it is bleeding, plain brown band-aid if there is no blood.) I'm not bothered when my kids eat stuff off the floor. Or occasionally out of the trash can. Coughs, colds - no big deal. I have even refused to pick up a child from school who had fallen and bumped her head. She sounded fine, I told the nurse to send her back to class. More often than you realize your body has prevented horrible disaster through the efforts of the many healing substances in your blood. And don't get me started on how much DNA your body repairs due to sun damage.This is not at all to say I am opposed to modern medicine. I am a physician, and I also marvel at what we can do. Being a pediatrician, immunizations stand squarely above everything else as the most amazing medical advance. They have saved millions of lives through preventive medicine - the best kind of medicine there is! People don't even realize their life was saved because they never got sick in the first place. Preventing infection through immunization is something that we take for granted these days, but something our grandparents marvel at, and something our great-grandparents would have begged to have the privilege of doing for their children. But I digress. I started this to talk about what the body can do for itself.
As part of my husband's cancer treatment he had bone, muscle and skin from his leg removed to rebuild the site where the tumor was removed. It was painful. I mean, really painful. He was on large doses of pain medications and would cry in pain if they were allowed to wear off. After a few weeks of this I became concerned. Why is he not healing? Why is this taking so long? And why are his doctors not worried, just tell me to keep giving pain meds? We could get the pain under control with large amounts of medication. (I always teased him they were Elvis amounts, but not up to Michael Jackson amounts of pain medication. Sorry if I offended anyone but when you are at the pharmacy every few days picking up more opiates you have to take a step back and laugh a little.) The doctors just said, "It takes time. Sometimes months." So just when I resigned myself to months of heavy duty painkillers and the long wean that would follow, the pain improved. I'm not saying we could suddenly stop all medications. I'm saying his pain could be controlled with long acting medication alone and didn't need break through medications.
Where a large piece of bone, muscle and skin were missing, healing was happening. Whatever had been so irritated or swollen and painful before was quieted, returned to a more normal state. He started to be able to walk, even walk faster than me, though off balance and needing a walker. Skin grew over the large surgical site. Red, bumpy skin, but none the less an effective barrier to keep out contamination and keep in moisture. Even more amazing, the site where the bone, muscle and skin were grafter healed beautifully. It was never really painful as the nerves to the area were severed in the surgery. But the skin grew pink and healthy, well perfused. It is amazing to see how the surgeons know how to connect things, then stand back and let the body heal.
It helps me remember that as a physician I can't heal anyone. I can prescribe an antibiotic but the body still has to return the site of infection back to normal, removing dead tissue and rebuilding. I can set a broken bone but the body has to reconnect and realign the pieces of bone. All of my interventions are mere tinkering, pushing things in ways that allows the body to heal itself.
That low back pain, that cold that is 5 days along, even that little pus pocket you drained yourself - most of the time these will get better on their own. So next time your physician tells you "This one just takes time to get better, there is nothing more we need to do", what she is really saying is, "All things are in alignment for your body to heal itself. Just give it time."
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