Who needs Heather Hills Therapy Center?

People who are ill and want to take charge of their health

When our loved ones or we are sick, and we are desperate where do we look for help? The answer is we look everywhere. This includes

• Shifting our gaze inward to ourselves,
• Outward to others who we hope are more knowledgeable, or
• To a power that transcends our ability to locate and is imbued with our hopes.

In 1997, Americans made an astounding 629 million visits to complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) practitioners, exceeding the total visits to all primary-care physicians in the USA ()!

Why do so many of us use CAM therapies?

• Is it our distrust of authority born of our understanding of the frailty of all us?
• Is it a reaction to the depersonalization of managed care?
• Or the feeling of dissatisfaction when we do get to see our physicians:
• Do we feel too rushed, or that the doctor is inattentive or not connected to us as an individual?
• Is it desperation when we feel that conventional medicine has failed us?
• Could it be our need for a participatory experience, of enlarged self-identity when illness threatens us?
• Or maybe a need to have our spirituality nurtured?
• Perhaps it is a way to ward off a feeling of helplessness and hopelessness that might swallow us if we submit.

But, how do we know what or who to trust?

• Unfortunately, in such circumstances we can fall prey to some CAM therapies that are nothing more than snake oil.
• Sadly, because of dismal associations, one of the most powerful CAM therapies, use of the mind body connection, has often been relegated to the ash heap by conventional medicine.
• It is easy to see why this has happened. The field of mind body interventions is riddled with non-science, or poor science. Motivation of practitioners can be laudatory or self-aggrandizement. But, it can be hard to identify fakery and it is all too easy to become the victim of charlatans.

How do you avoid getting conned?

• Before you try any complementary or alternative therapy, you should ask for solid scientific evidence so that you will not be wasting precious time or money.

The good news is that the mind body connection has a solid evidence-based existence within the scientific discipline of psychoneuroimmunology (PNI).

PNI may be defined as the study of the interplay between the mind and the immune system. And you will find
real and significant science there.