They way that eat, move, live and think has a huge impact on the health of your body and the pain that you feel. Living healthfully gives you more control of your healing than you could even imagine.
Holistic Pain Relief: The Importance of Stress Reduction
Interview Transcript:
Reporter:
Hi, welcome back new on Daybreak today, we’re joined by Dr. Heather Tick. She’s in Tucson for a book signing tonight and Antigone Books. I’m holding her book, it’s called Holistic Pain Relief, Dr. Tick you’ll be signing these books tonight but let’s go ahead and talk about stress. You talk about stress a lot in your book, so how do we stay away from it?
Dr. Heather Tick:
Well, I don’t think we can actually stay away from it. I think what we have to do is develop mechanisms, or habits that help us to deal with it better. So we have to make sure we take enough time for ourselves instead of just, you know, maybe put ourselves on our own to-do list.
Reporter:
I feel as i get older I get more anxious, is that normal?
Dr. Heather Tick:
Well, I think that there’s a natural instinct to do things more slowly as we get older. Slowly, carefully, not that we’re aging too fast, it’s just that we like to focus on things a little more carefully. And we actually need the time to do it, but life keeps rushing by
Reporter:
I know life just keeps going in today’s world. Talk about sleep, a lot of us are not getting a lot of sleep and how does that trigger stress?
Dr. Heather Tick:
Right, well not getting enough sleep – during sleep, we heal, so our brain heals, our body heals and we make what we need for the next day in terms of natural chemicals and hormones that we need. If we don’t do that then we’re not well prepared for the next day and stress does affect us we have two sides of our stress system. The stress system and an anti-stress system. The stress system actually increases inflammation which then also increases pain, and it decreases our healing. Whereas the anti stress system which is the one that we trigger when we take our time to eat, when we take our time to breathe, when we exercise, that reduces inflammation.
Reporter:
Talking about pain, you want to talk about painkillers and how that affects us what is your stance with the painkillers?
Dr. Heather Tick:
Well, we need to be very careful with drugs and with procedures and things that doctors do surgeries because they can’t fix everything, we really need to get our body to heal. It’s like the analogy would be if we go to the dentist twice a year but don’t brush our teeth in between.
Reporter:
That would be really gross.
Dr. Heather Tick:
It would be! We really need to know how to look after our bodies and not just depend on painkillers which have a lot of side effects.
Reporter:
And one thing that you brought here with you could help?
Dr. Heather Tick:
Yea, this is a great little device for doing self massage so you can reach around behind yourself and you can get areas along your shoulder blades along your spine you can come up here and treat your neck. It’s great little device for self massage on it.
Reporter:
Yeah, where do you find something like that?
Dr. Heather Tick:
I got mine on eBay, but you can get it at massage stores and health stores have them. It’s called a Theracane. It’s a great little device. It was fun getting it on the airplane.
Reporter:
Okay, I bet!
Dr. Heather Tick:
Yeah, one last thing. I wanted to make sure that people knew, because last time we spoke about diet and I talked about turmeric and lentils, I want to make sure they know that chocolate, dark chocolate is health food. So, it’s not all bad news.
Reporter:
Can we add milk chocolate on there?
Dr. Heather Tick:
Milk actually decreases the healthiness of chocolate. It has to be seventy percent dark chocolate and then it’s health food. And I give it to people as a prescription.
Reporter:
Oh, wow really?
Dr. Heather Tick:
Well I mean, I can’t actually get the drug companies to pay for it, but I do recommend it.
Reporter:
Yeah, awesome, perfect, well thank you so much for joining us today and don’t forget tonight at seven o’clock in Antigone Books, you can meet and greet with Dr. Tick and get your book signed by her. Remember, it’s Holistic Pain Relief, so if you can relate to a lot of the symptoms that she’s talking about and you want to learn more, check out this book, Holistic Pain Relief. But before we go and we toss it to break, if there was one thing you’d like people to take away from addressing their chronic pain, what would that be?
Dr. Heather Tick:
What you eat think feel and do has more influence on your health overall than anything else, than genetics, and that anything that physicians can do for you. You need to realize how powerful you are in terms of dealing with your health and having good health is the way to reduce pain.
Reporter:
Alright, perfect, well thank you so much. We’ll see you tonight at seven o’clock in Antigone Books.
