What You Can “Do” About It
In consultation with a new patient recently, I was confronted with one of the most common misconceptions I see in the clinic.
She came in for an initial visit seeking help in her fertility journey. We did a deep dive into her full health history, reviewed treatments, bloodwork, supplements as well as recommendations from previous practitioners. She'd been trying to conceive for almost two years, was under extreme pressure at work, struggling with finances, and on top of that, her father was ill. Like most of us, her mental checklist, dismissed at bedtime, tumbled back into her mind the moment she woke. And, like most of us, the list never shrinks. This in itself was not what piqued my interest; these are real life stressors that we all face and need to talk about. However, something she said really got me thinking. She told me “I want to get this stress under control before I give myself cancer”.
I have very mixed feelings about this concept: if you can “do” your way into good health, then doesn’t it follow that you can “do” your way into poor health too? Yes, you can. But doesn’t it therefore follow that if you have poor health, it’s something you did or did not do? Certainly we can all take responsibility for how our choices affect our health, but there are some deep mistruths here too, myths that I see everyday, playing out painfully in my clinic with patients who believe that their illness is somehow their “fault”, as though fault and blame have anything to do with it. It’s a tightrope walk for me as a practitioner when making recommendations. I certainly don’t want to suggest that “anything goes”, that your efforts are futile, but I also hope to diffuse the myth of blame.
She was, of course, being colloquial, but it belies a deeper belief system that is ubiquitous, false, and dangerous. The idea that a disease like cancer is somehow the result of your life-stressors or thought patterns implies that firstly, cancer is caused by stress, and secondly that it is under our strict control. Cancer is a terrible disease which, despite decades of feverish research, remains a mystery. There are risk factors, certainly, such as smoking and alcohol along with exposure to certain chemicals, and UV rays from the sun, but still it continues to elude explanation and evade treatment. One thing is certain, though: you do not cause your cancer. Animals get cancer. Brand new, healthy breastfed babies get cancer, and it’s not their fault.
All that to say, I believe the same principles apply to infertility. My patient’s default seems to be self-blame, like an unnamed toxic thing is clacking away deep down inside of them; a stain they can’t find or remove. How do I simultaneously take them by the shoulders and declare “It is nothing that you did!” while also suggesting that “hey, maybe you could do this list of things differently”? It is a tightrope walk that I take very seriously. Yes, you have volition; yes you have power; yes there is a lot you can do, but at the end of the day it is truly and unequivocally out of your hands. And it’s not your fault.
