Medical, Surgery, & Cancer

Above and beyond a particular medical condition, medical procedures and surgeries, with their associated events like anesthesia, chemotherapy, radiation, life threatening diagnosis are all events that can dramatically affect our emotions, as well as our nervous systems. What is particularly important is that the vast majority of people that have been affected by these events don’t even know it. Perhaps the scar has healed, and the illness has gone, and so the person imagines that they are healed.

Surgery, to the level of consciousness that the primal parts of the brain and nervous system, is tantamount to being stabbed in a controlled way. Despite the fact that this is either a chosen procedure, or even a life saving procedure, the nervous system is incapable of comprehending this.

The experience of immobility caused by medical procedures and hospitalizations can deeply affect the nervous system of the patient, especially when the inherent impulse of the nervous system is to escape the invasive and uncomfortable events happening simultaneously.

A common occurrence in surgeries has been to rely on only the general anesthesia to block the patients pain caused by the knife. However, what has been shown to be the case is that the physical body, the tissue, the nervous system, all “feel” the pain and attack of the knife, even though the “patient” is unconscious. Bracing in the tissues or muscles, fear, overwhelm, and many other results may reside long after the scar heals.

The long term dissociative effects of anesthesia are only now beginning to be understood. To begin to speak to this, let me start by speaking about the general world of adrenaline, and “fight or flight” which we have all heard about. When a threat appears in our environment, or nervous system moves into high alert, which attempts in an unconscious way to determine whether to fight off the threat, or to run from it (flight). If indeed the system chooses one of these actions, it does it with gusto, and perhaps succeeds in fight or flight. Should there be a threat, and the choice has been made, and does not succeed, then the threat moves in closer. or appears to. This typically results in a third option arising: freeze, or, in the technical version: dissociation. Dissociation supports the person by numbing from the pain, and allowing some distance from the terror of the situation, perhaps, allowing for escape from the threat.

Eric has volunteered at the San Diego Cancer Research Institute since 2008 in their Integrative Medicine program supporting cancer patients with Somatic Therapy, Somatic Experiencing, and Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy.