What’s a natural treatment for postpartum depression? Postpartum depression may be the label given to you for pain, fatigue, vivid dreams waking you at night, nausea, anxiety, or symptoms mislabeled as depression. Are you taking medication because you were told you have “postpartum depression,” or to decrease your frequency of “panic attacks?”
We use natural remedies for safe, integrative postpartum depression treatment.
Postpartum depression: inappropriate diagnostic label
“Postpartum” is the Latin word for “after childbirth.” It denotes a limited time period directly after childbirth—some references say that it can be up to six weeks after giving birth—but it is definitely not ongoing. Are you still labeled with a diagnosis of “postpartum depression” even years after giving birth? It’s BS. The diagnostic label doesn’t match the time frame. For example, feeling depression four years after giving birth is not postpartum depression because you are not postpartum anymore. If you have not given birth yet, you are not postpartum either! The postpartum diagnosis doesn’t fit; it is premature, inappropriate, and you are not growing into it.
The depression misdiagnosis
Definitions: Depression & Panic: “Depression” can be the lowering or reducing of something. Panic on the other hand describes frenzy. Are these the same? No, they are opposites. A psychological label of “postpartum depression” may get you taking a medication with a drug that supposedly treats depression and anxiety (Effexor®), but you still get “panic attacks” anyway.
What is the purpose of that? All it does is temporarily make everything less noticeable without fundamentally changing anything about your underlying condition. This type of treatment is not a sustainable choice.
Effexor® is an example of a class of drugs in the “serotonin-norepinephrine re-uptake inhibitors” category. They inhibit normal processes that happen on a microscopic level in the brain. The manufacturer’s website gives a strong warning that states “Patients who are started on therapy should be observed closely for clinical worsening, suicidality [sic], or unusual changes in behavior.”(1) There are many other unwanted side effects of this class of drugs just like the similar SSRI drug class. Side effects include physical and psychological dependence, anxiety and agitation, insomnia, bizarre vivid nightmares, nervousness, and sleepiness.(1,2)
Did you get that? Your symptoms may be the side effects of the drug you are taking!
Drugs just suppress symptoms
If you were to stop taking your medication, what do you think would happen? Don’t feel defensive. Psychoactive drugs are addictive, they need to be weaned-off over time. This is just a hypothetical question. Do you think your “panic attacks” would soon come back, more frequently?
Do you see what’s happening here? The treatment is temporary and now you could be feeling stuck. Is there still no plan to wean off this addictive substance? It is ironic that a slogan for selling Effexor® is “Break The Cycle” which insinuates that a person could take this addictive drug for a short time, then just stop and be better. Is that the way this drug is prescribed? Clearly not. After years of taking this drug, have you broken out of any cycle?
You need the correct path to fully heal from this awful condition. The only way, is to take a step back from two faulty premises that a prescribing doctor initially assumed, and bestowed upon you: the misguided belief that your problem should be labeled as “postpartum depression,” and the disempowering belief that your feelings are “caused by your brain:” two dangerous medical beliefs. What’s your alternative to years of addictive antidepressants?
Integrative treatment vs. depression treatment
Your depression is a symptom, not the cause. According to Dr. Joe Dispenza, the brain is a processing station, receiving four hundred billion pieces of information per second. Your brain is not the cause of the information; it is the receiver. The brain interprets of all the sensory information delivered to it from the body.
If the information coming to your brain is distorted, irritating, insufficient, excessive, or random, then your brain will react to those aberrant stimuli. Your brain reacts normally—it’s the information it receives which is aberrant. In chronic disease like neurodegeneration, the brain eventually changes too. Depression is a symptom that things are off track.
What got you off track is not your brain. It is the many processes in the body that need support first. Why would they use a drug that shuts down the brain’s ability to normally react? Wouldn’t that be bad science and bad medicine? We have been bombarded with false information about the brain’s role in too many erroneously labeled “mental disorders.” Tragically, this misinformation dominates depression treatments.
Old beliefs, outdated perspective
Why do doctors “manage” women that way? One reason is because of an outdated, demeaning and dangerous medical belief: “It’s all in your head.” If any of your medical decisions are based on such an outdated opinion, then the treatment protocols used on you will be outdated too. Optimal health will never have a chance to manifest for patients embedded in a medical system that proclaims: “it’s all in your head.”
The second reason is in the way that the current medical paradigm generally compartmentalizes symptoms into segmented, local areas of the body, and labels those areas (or areas immediately adjacent) as the cause of the problem. Examples are Adult ADD or brain fog. Acknowledging interconnections in the body is not the medical norm today. Medicine’s history of unnecessary tonsillectomies, appendectomies, and stomach bypasses for weight loss, illustrates their general concept of “independent body parts,” not integrative parts.
It’s no wonder that we have people being told “it’s all in your head,” and getting treatment with antidepressants for a “mental disorder,” whether the symptoms are those labeled as depression or panic attacks. Unfortunately, it’s part of the established status quo of conventional Medicine. However, there are integrative medicine systems, outside of this status quo. You have a choice.
Not a brain disorder
Your brain reacts to the information it receives. When that information is grossly irritating, your brain will react. Therefore, we must address the irritation from your body, bombarding your brain.
Natural integrative medicine
An integrative chiropractic doctor who uses natural functional medicine has an advantage in addressing the body vs. a conventional doctor. The key advantage is the chiropractor’s starting premise: Your body should be able to regulate itself, if your healing potential were not blocked to some degree. In integrative medicine your depression is not the starting point, it is the end point. The “mental disorder” starts in the body, not the brain. We focus on the starting points of depression, understanding your body as the source. Your body parts naturally affect and depend on each other, integrated by a master controlling system called your nervous system.
Biological information comes from every part of your body. It integrates through your nervous system and your brain interprets the information (basic brain neuro-science). All of your body parts connect. The dangerous medical belief: “it’s all in your head,” ignores these facts.
Example: After an injury, the body and brain respond. One response may be that the spinal muscles get tighter. Then, back pain may be next. The body-brain responds, domino after domino. The heart starts to pump faster or harder (references 3,4,5), sleep becomes impaired, the onset of nausea, impaired attention, nervousness—all these are symptoms relating to the initial stimulus. The body-brain sequentially responds. Is the solution to shut down the brain’s responsiveness with an addictive drug? No!
“Depression is not a disease. It’s a symptom.” – Kelly Brogan, MD
Integrative chiropractor for depression?
Chiropractic with nutritional kinesiology and functional medicine help to reestablish normal function, rejuvenate, and rebuild health—even after drugs and and surgery have left their scars. Chiropractors can use entirely alternative, non-drug, physical procedures to help your body. We use natural remedies like whole food concentrates, whole herbs, and homeopathic remedies, instead of poisonous pharmaceuticals that yield so many devastating side effects.
Alpha-Stim SCS
We also have the Alpha-Stim in Orange County. The Alpha-Stim® SCS can be an adjunct to better recovery. You can try the AlphaStim at our clinic. The Alpha-Stim SCS (Stress Control System) cranial electrotherapy stimulator (CES device) can help with treatment of anxiety, depression, insomnia and other stress-related “disorders;” a drug-free treatment which helps your brain produce relaxing, calming alpha waves.
Break the cycle
In order to really “break the cycle,” the integrative chiropractic doctor may use a multifaceted physical, nutritional and neuro-emotional (not psychological) approach to your body.(4) There is no magic medicine for all people experiencing depression because the causes of depression in individuals may be entirely different for each person. Each person needs a simple physical exam to determine their best integrative, non-drug, non-medical treatment.
Addictive drugs confuse your brain and shock to your nervous system. Protect yourself from addictive antidepressants with a safe, natural remedies system; a safe, drug-free approach for optimizing health. It is time to fundamentally get better, and that is a beautiful thing. Call today. Start now.
References:
1. https://www.effexorxr.com
2. www.petitiononline.com/effexor (page no longer available)
3. Chaitow, Leon, Soft-Tissue Manipulation: A Practitioner’s Guide to the Diagnosis and Treatment of Soft-Tissue Dysfunction and Reflex Activity (1987)
4. ‘Muscle contraction related to heart’ Humphreys, P. W. and Lind, A.R., Journal of Physiology (1963), pp. 120-1355.
5. Jacobson, E., ‘Principles Underlying Coronary Heart Disease,’ Cardiologia (1955), pp. 26-836.
6. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 1999 Jun; 88(3 Pt 1): 1019-28.