THE HEART SPEAKS

What Does Your Heart Want To Say?

February is heart health month, and the Red campaign is all commonly known to bring awareness to heart disease. Heart health is generally regarded to be largely impacted by diet and lifestyle, as in a sedentary life, and connected to your cholesterol profile. While all of this is true, mainstream medicine, nor the media, ever shares another powerful correlation, the aspects of our emotional heart and it’s impacts, good or bad, just as much as diet and exercise.

Women generally have a fear of cancer more than heart disease. Likely as often heart disease, is a “silent killer” as sometimes there are no signs of it, prior to a cardiovascular event. However the stats show the heart disease kills more women than men.

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“ The rate of death equates to one per second and the cause of death of 1 out 3 women is due to heart disease, compared to breast cancer is 1 out of 31. ”

These stats are staggering!

Many years ago, I was blessed to meet Dr. Mimi Guarneri, MD, a Cardiologist, who wrote the book, “The Heart Speaks.” It was her beautiful observation of her own personal loss of her mother to a heart attack in her 40’s, to her professional experience of how the heart is much more than a mechanical pump. The heart holds our emotions, which can have power and effect on our bodies.

This is a part of the reason I’m so passionate about helping my patients not only deal with their physical bodies, but their mental/emotional one’s as well. It’s not as easy, as it requires one to be open, transparent, and vulnerable. The intake form I use asks about childhood traumas, and many other various questions which would allow one to share more than just a check mark in a box.

A patient recently came to see me for hyperthyroid issues. Hyperthyroid, is excess thyroid hormones. We discussed her health, and I knew she had suffered from the loss of a loved one. I was asking her about exercising, and she said her gym equipment was in her home, but she just couldn’t bring herself to do it.

Almost intuitively, I knew the deeper underlying cause, and I asked the question and confirmed it to be true. Her gym equipment was in the old bedroom of the child she lost, just a few years prior.

Of course she couldn’t face the “gym” because she had yet to face the loss and hurting heart. While I can’t say her heart was “broken”, the Mayo Clinic does recognize Broken Heart Syndrome as a diagnosis.