When the Body Became a Machine and the Diagnosis Became Your Cage


When a Diagnosis Becomes a Cage

Too often, we walk into a doctor’s office seeking answers and walk out with a diagnosis that quietly begins to define us.

"You’re hypothyroid"
"You’re depressed"
"You're diabetic"
"You're ADHD"

What starts as a medical label can become a psychological straightjacket, constraining our sense of possibility of healing. A seed of hopelessness can be planted in someone’s psyche, often becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy, severing a person’s connection to the possibility of getting better.

But you are not your diagnosis. That’s just one version of the story and often, it's the most limited one. When we over-identify with a condition, we risk collapsing our entire identity into it. We lose our curiosity.

Rather than seeing the body as a messenger revealing what needs our attention, we "shoot the messenger" instead, treating it like nothing more than a broken machine in need of fixing.

What if illness was not something that happened to us, but something that happened for us, to get us to pay attention?

This shift requires reclaiming our self-authority. Your doctor may hold medical knowledge, but you hold the wisdom of your lived experience.

Invite curiosity. Ask yourself: What might my body be trying to communicate? What part of me is asking to be healed, not just fixed?

Which brings me to my next point: It's time to rethink 17th century French Philosopher Descartes' theory that mind and body are separate.


Healing the Split: Reuniting Mind and Body in Modern Medicine

Descartes’ theory of dualism - his claim that the mind and body are separate substances - laid the philosophical groundwork for modern medicine. It allowed science to study the body as a machine, distinct from the soul or spirit. This separation was radical in the 17th century, liberating medicine from religious doctrine and enabling the birth of anatomy, physiology, and surgical precision. It gave us the stethoscope, the MRI, and the scalpel.

But the price we paid was profound.

By slicing the self into parts, Descartes gave medicine permission to ignore the whole. The body became an object to be diagnosed and repaired, while the mind, emotions, and lived experience were exiled to the realm of the subjective - irrelevant, unmeasurable, or worse, imagined.

This has hurt us.

We’ve inherited a system that treats symptoms in isolation, prescribes pills for pain without asking where the ache truly lives, and overlooks the role of trauma, emotion, and environment in the genesis of disease. It has taught patients to mistrust their inner knowing, to outsource authority, and to believe healing lies only in the external.

But the tide is turning. Medicine is slowly remembering what shamans, mothers, and healers have always known: the mind and body are not separate.

The mind and body are not just interconnected, but are one continuous whole.

In the mind-body unity, if symptoms arise in the body, the mind is always involved.


Quote Of The Issue

“Learn to read symptoms not only as problems to be overcome but as messages to be heeded.” - Gabor Maté, When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress

Dr. Dominika Zarzeczny

Naturopathic Doctor


📧
hello@drdominika.com
🌐
www.drdominika.com


Unsubscribe · Preferences • Milverton Blvd., Toronto, ON M4C 1X4

Hi! I'm Dr. Dominika Zarzeczny, ND

First inspired by the work of Dr. Gabor Mate, Dr. Dominika has focused much of her career on helping her patients connect the dots between early adversity and trauma and their impact on lifelong health and well-being. She knows that the reversal of chronic illness involves the nervous system, and so she has dedicated her practice to helping patients master their own nervous system to positively influence their mind and body, behaviours and ultimately health outcomes. Her explanation of disease doesn't pathologize or blame, but is nuanced, humanized and filled with hope. She trained with various psychologists and experts in the field of psychological trauma. She incorporates the principles of neuroscience, attachment theory, mindfulness, Polyvagal Theory and compassionate inquiry in her approach with patients. Combining these with her naturopathic training, she likes to say that she works at the intersection of science and human experience.

Read more from Hi! I'm Dr. Dominika Zarzeczny, ND

In This Issue: Permission to Ease In (Summer’s Not Over) (<30 sec) The Viral Skipping Trend Really Works! (< 30 sec) Quote Of The Issue Permission to Ease In (Summer’s Not Over) As September rolls in, many of us feel that old cultural pull: shake off the “lazy days” of summer and launch into Fall at full throttle. But pause for a moment: who really benefits from that frenzy? A frantic, anxious person is the perfect consumer. The truth is, this urgency is manufactured. Nature never rushes its...

In This Issue (< 4 min): We Have Become Hormonally Modified Why Being Told What to Do Rarely Works A Mindful Pause We Have Become Hormonally Modified Here we are, we do our very best to avoid foods with added hormones or genetic modification. And yet, without realizing it, we’ve become hormonally modified ourselves. The combination of processed foods, chronic stress (causing stress hyperglycaemia), sedentary lifestyles and food consumption patterns (e.g. overeating, frequent snacking, eating...

woman holding medal that says 10KTO

In This Issue (< 4 min): The Secret Healthy People Aren’t Telling You I Met My Edge And I Liked It Quote Of The Issue The Secret Healthy People Aren’t Telling You We’ve been taught to reverse-engineer health, as if forcing ourselves to eat kale and hitting the gym three times a week will make us healthy. But true health doesn’t start on the plate or at the gym.It begins in the mind.When you know yourself really well and know how to attend to your thoughts, emotions, and bodily sensations -...