DrT's Blog from the Health After Trauma Project

An Article by Gail Fonda

Exercise and Life

By

Gail Fonda

All of us have daily responsibilities that can be emotionally very taxing and hard to live with. Sometimes I am so stressed out just from waking up at 6:15 AM every morning and doing what needs to be done just to get to work. I sometimes wonder how I can keep going on.

My husband and I have lost many family members in 2005, so we were happy to be rid of the year. In addition, we lost our beloved Alaskan Malamute, Timber, to a brain tumor. We expected him to live another five years or so. We were totally devastated. Our only comfort turned out to be placing his photo and memorial on Rainbow Bridge, a site for grieving animal parents.

My job is not that professionally fulfilling, it's a rather dull and repetitive, but secure, government job. I had trouble maintaining regular employment over the years, which I think stems from coming from a dysfunctional family and trying to make my way in the world with little or no direction in my life. Though I graduated from college with a B.A. in Journalism, I never had the confidence or self-esteem to reach the goals I had hoped for myself.

I needed to find some kind of outlet for my anger, anxiety, frustration and depression at not knowing what my life is supposed to be about. Why am I alive? I asked myself that since childhood and I still don't know the answer now that I am in middle age.

I drifted from boyfriend to boyfriend and job to job, questioning my own existence. But I finally got married, quite late in life, to a professional person who can at least offer me strength, encouragement and everything I need, both monetarily and psychologically. But I still needed to gain strength in other ways.

I began writing over the Internet nine years ago, hoping to make some kind of name for myself. It's been a tough road, since I am not a famous person and I don't have any particular specialty. But I think I found a little niche for myself.

I can write about relationships, since I've had so many, I can write about women's issues, since I've lived through so many traumatic experiences myself. I can give advice on what not to do, so that, hopefully, other people don't have to suffer what I suffered. Maybe I can offer help to others, emotionally, when I needed some myself, and there was nowhere for me to turn.

I have my writing, my dogs and my exercise. I've been exercising on a regular basis for about 22 years now. It gives me mental strength, physical strength and helps get rid of negative attitudes I've had my entire life.

Whatever anyone does for a living, it can get dull, boring and can bring you down. The endorphins I get from exercising helps tremendously. I've changed exercise routines and exercise facilities over the years, but, when I skip even a week of exercise, my moods become grim again, I get angrier quicker and the old negativity about life returns.

Exercise also helps lower my blood pressure, reduce hot flashes and helps prevent my migraines. I've had those all my life and they're horrible! Exercise will help maintain a healthy weight in addition to the psychological benefits. Just do it, and you'll find out for yourself how valuable exercise really is!
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Gail Fonda is the author of "My Private Hell: Struggle & Survival," available through PublishAmerica.com. You'll read about the details of her personal journey from dysfunction to a healthier lifestyle with exercise.

Healing Christmas Music

This is the time of year that brings joy and sometimes tears. Good musical memories cheer the holidays on in good spirit. I was delighted to get an announcement from colleague Alice Cash regarding her new CDs. The two songs on her website that can be sampled were enough to show me that her touch on the piano was just right for me. (This is somewhat major as I am as picky about piano music as I am about listening to sopranos.)

Check out the samples at her web site by clicking here.

Enjoy.

DrT

Tip of the Day: Protect Your Mobile Phone Now

Do you have too much to do in too little time? If so, you might find my learning experience of yesterday valuable.

Phone call interruptions punctuated all of yesterday. Every last call was a business "cold call."  Verizon Wireless tech support told me that there was no way to block incoming calls but did suggest that I could use the national do-not-call database to protect my cell phone from unsolicited calls.
Of course, I didn't remember how to access this database--fortunately Verizon Tech Support knew how to do it: visit the national hot line website to add your cell phone. Click here to do this now.

Enjoy your new peace and quiet.

When Less Health Care Becomes More

I was delighted to open up the March/April 2007 issue of Spirituality & Health magazine and find inside on page 69 an article by friend and colleague Hazel Henderson, noted futurist and humanitarian economist. The article, Alternative Future/s: 14 signs of intelligent economic life in the universe, takes a whack at our current state of healthcare.

"Industrialized medicine is in crisis," She writes. Noting the widespread dissatisfaction among patients, doctors, nurses, and hospitals, she points out that "Studies show the U.S. spends more than any other nation on medical costs per person--without better outcomes than countries spending half this amount"

"Thus, competing practices become a "rapidly, growing new sector of our economy," she continues. These emerging practices focus on:

• Prevention
• Natural approaches to wellness.

Of note, the natural approaches to wellness often cost less. Hazel sums it up this way, "Nowhere is redefining success more emblematic than in alternative health care and medicine, where less is more, and love and personal caring are valued over high-tech interventions."

Bravo, Hazel!

Modern medicine, so wonderful in so many ways, seems to have lost its way in dealing with complicated, chronic healthcare problems that require more than a pill or day surgery. The rising epidemic of autoimmune disease, chronic pain problems, and other non-specific ill-health disorders cries out for recognition of a mind-body approach to patient woes and distress.

Patients swept up in this growing epidemic seem to know more about having medical problems that present both as a disease and a general sense of being at dis-ease than modern medicine recognizes. Perhaps the time now comes to focus on some of the natural approaches to wellness used by past generations of family doctors: listening, respecting, and caring instead of blindly ordering one expensive medical test after another.

Speaker and author Ellen Taliaferro, MD lives in Half Moon Bay, CA and serves as the Medical Director of the Keller Center for Family Violence Intervention at the San Mateo Medical Center in San Mateo, CA. She is the author of three books: WellWriting® for Health After Trauma and Abuse, The Physician's Guide to Intimate Partner Violence and Abuse, and A Handbook: Respond to Intimate Partner Violence - 10 Action Steps You Can Take to Help Your Patients and Your Practice. Dr. Taliaferro can be reached by calling 650-393-3660 or through her websites www.healthaftertrauma.com and www.wellwriting.org

To learn more about Hazel Henderson and her work, please visit her website at www.hazelhenderson.com.

Our Future in Violence Prevention

Today, Bindu Akkanti, MD writes from Boston to check in and say "Hi." She had news, big news. Since I last had the pleasure of working with her in Dallas at Parkland Hospital where she was a medical student at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School, she has moved to Boston with her new husband, a radiology resident at the U of Mass.

Bindu is now in her second year of Internal Medicine residency and planning to go into academic medicine. She has applied for an upcoming public health summer program. The big news for all of us in the Health After Trauma Community is that she hopes to pursue nonprofit work after her training.

Bindu became acquainted with the issue of violence prevention through our Violence Intervention Prevention Center at Parkland Hospital.

If you bump into Bindu while roaming through her hospital, you no doubt will find her in scrubs and a white coat. Contrast that with this delightful scene from her wedding:

Welcome to DrT's Blog from the Health After Trauma Project

I keep meeting many interesting folks on my journey to underscore the link between yesterday's pain and trauma and today's health.

This blog is a running journal of travels, writings, and musings about the connection between yesterday's adverse events and today's state of wellness.

Many of you have strong thoughts and feelings about this topic. Others are just now making the connection. Scientific articles and studies are now beginning to lay the groundwork for connecting the dots between yesterday's past and today's health.

As you will see, when you tune if from time to time, I am a strong believer in using journaling or expressive writing to discover how to connect the dot's between adverse experiences of the past and the status of today's health and wealth in your life. So much so, that I have created a technique called WellWriting which harnesses expressive writing exercises to achieve wellness and well-being. This technique evolves from my own exeperience as a physician, as a person seeking wholeness, and on the works of others who have validated the use of journaling to promote wellness and acheivement.

This blog has several categories and more can be created upon demand.

If you would like to become a contributor, you can do so by commenting on the blog content. If you would like to be able to add posts to the blog, please email me at DrT@healthaftertrauma.com.