After Care

What is a Healing Crisis?

Also known, more positively and more accurately as a healing response, your body naturally moves through a process of cleansing, rebalancing and regeneration as it repairs and replaces damaged tissue and cells and flushes out toxins.

If too many positive changes occur at once, it can stress the body and create what is known as a healing crisis.  This is when you temporarily feel worse before you feel better.  This is totally normal but is often misinterpreted as illness as the symptoms are similar.

These reactions are only temporary and should clear within 24-48 hours.

Please note that not everyone will experience a healing crisis.  Your reaction will depend on the level of toxins in your body, your general health and your energy level.  These reactions tend to occur after the first treatment.

Understanding that you may feel worse before you feel better, due to the detoxification process, is crucial to your rebalancing and not giving up on the process.  Your body heals from the inside out as it works its way back to homeostasis (balance).

Your body becomes congested with toxins and waste materials when:

  • You have been eating a poor diet for a long period of time.
  • You have been coping with chronic stress.
  • You take little or no exercise on a regular basis.
  • You exercise regularly, too  much or have a very active lifestyle.
  • Long term exposure to chemical and environmental toxins and in food build up in the body (e.g. artificial sweeteners, cigarettes, alcohol, drugs, chemical cleaning products, fertilisers, pesticides, beauty & hair products, food additives, air pollution, water pollution).
  • You have been taking prescription medication for many years.

The presence of these toxins negatively impact the body’s ability to run smoothly and stresses its systems.  This is part of the reason why we start to feel our aches and pains as we age.  Therefore positive diet and lifestyle changes must accompany a programme of massage in order to maximise long term, lasting benefits from the treatments.

Sometimes after an holistic treatment you may experience one or more of the following symptoms:

  • Tiredness/fatigue/lethargy/heavy feeling in limbs
  • Headaches
  • Mucus discharge
  • Frequent urination
  • Inflammation
  • Nausea
  • Flu-like symptoms
  • Chills
  • Aches & pains
  • Diarrhoea
  • Constipation
  • Irritability
  • Low mood/depression
  • Emotional – a need to cry (this is another way of letting go of negative emotions or energy that has built up over time and flushing them out – you may not even know what it is about).
  • Skin eruptions, rashes
  • Head cold
  • Mental fogginess
  • Dizziness
  • Lethargy
  • Need for extra sleep
  • Sleep disturbance

Advice

  1. Drink lots of water after a treatment to help flush out the toxins and waste products and speed up the detoxification process.
  2. Try to avoid washing the skin/showering for a few hours after the treatment to allow the oils to have their full effect on the body.  If you must wash, please use the remaining blend from the treatment and apply to clean dry skin to further enhance the treatment.
  3. Rest and sleep well, give your body the time it needs to heal itself.
  4. Eat healthily, lots of vegetables and fruit, can speed up detoxification.
  5. Remember that, although it may not feel like it at the time, this is a positive response.  These symptoms are temporary and you are one step further along the path to a healthier lifestyle as your body has responded to the treatment and has started to cleanse and rebalance itself. It is repairing and replacing damaged tissue and cells and building a healthier you.
  6. If you do experience any of the above, please try not to take over the counter medication to supress these temporary symptoms, it will halt the healing process and put further pressure on your liver.
  7. Please do call me if you have any concerns at all that you wish to discuss.