Medicine has its place in a moment of crisis. For instance, when you’ve been working too hard and the pressures are mounting, you may experience what feels like a heart attack but is determined to be a panic attack instead. Medications can relieve anxiety and prevent future heart-related events. In an acute scenario like this, I fully support it. If your house is on fire, you want to call the fire department, not a medical detective.

Sometimes a quick intervention is warranted to quell the emergency. You take medications long enough to implement changes in your life that are beneficial, but if your health keeps deteriorating and you continue to suffer from mysterious ailments, you want an investigator. You want a Columbo of sorts to keep asking the pointed questions.

And since it’s your life and you live it all day, every day, you also want to get to the root of the problem and take care of as much of it as you can yourself. This is what I call a healing mindset, and it can be achieved by shifting your thoughts and intentions from merely treating symptoms to understanding why you’re experiencing them.

Shift No. 1. From Affliction to Conviction: Shift your head space from a feeling of affliction to one of conviction about what it will take to get better. Look at the whole picture, and connect the dots as you realize that your health problem did not happen overnight. This is not about a lightning bolt coming out of the sky; it’s about a conscious examination.

Shift No.2 From Helpless to Accountable: To become personally responsible for changes that had to occur in your life, you must hold yourself accountable for what went wrong — and also for what is going right. Look at your relationships, your well-being and your happiness. Chronic does not mean “intractable,” and it does not imply hopelessness. What it means is that you have to learn new habits and put them into practice immediately for your own benefit, holding yourself accountable for your own aches and pains.

Shift No. 3 From Passive to Interactive: A typical doctor-patient interaction lasts about four to seven minutes and can be rife with mishaps. Communication flows in a one-way direction, if at all, often because the doctor is pressed for time and has only a limited set of options: referral slips, prescriptions and other critical time-saving devices. To truly get well, you have to find an expert, someone you can learn from and who will participate in your treatment. Find a partner, someone you can trust for exceptional advice and insight.

Shift No. 4. From Cured to Recovering: For most of us, there is no such thing as “cured.” True healing is not something that occurs only over a set period of time. Like alcoholism, the illness is never truly gone. Instead, we are recovering. We will heal ourselves for the rest of our lives, living in recovery so that we can preserve the good moments and minimize the setbacks.

Douglas J. Pucci, D.C., FAAIM, offers the latest science and clinical data on neurotoxic illness, hormone disruptions, and chronic disease at his seminars. He provides nutrition, comprehensive testing for health biomarkers, brain and body care, and more to improve the lives and well-being of his patients. For more information, call 201-261-5430 or visit GetWell-Now.com.