Healing Crisis: Don't Worry Mom, I'm Just Growing!

By Melissa L. Block
Issue 119, July/August 2003

Editor's note: This article features the ideas, knowledge, and advice of Dr. Philip Incao, MD. Dr. Incao received his MD from Albert Einstein College of Medicine in 1966. Dissatisfied with the limitations of modern medicine, he spent two years in Europe studying anthroposophic medicine, which he has practiced since 1973, first in rural upstate New York, and then for the last seven years in Denver, Colorado. Anthroposophic medicine was founded in the early 1920s by medical doctor Ita Wegman in collaboration with Rudolph Steiner, the founder of Waldorf education and anthroposophy. According to Dr. Incao, anthroposophic medicine or, as he likes to call it, "Steiner holistic medicine," is "based on a marriage of our rational thinking with our deeper intuitive faculties to foster a growing understanding of the human spirit's role in health and illness." Dr. Incao was the first president of the Physicians' Association for Anthroposophic Medicine (PAAM) in the US . He lectures frequently nationwide, is a consultant to many Waldorf schools throughout the US , and is a member of the advisory boards of Alive and Well AIDS Information Network in Los Angeles , the National Vaccine Information Center in Virginia , and the Foundation for Health Choice in Washington , DC .

Long before my now-almost-three-year-old daughter, Sarah, was even a twinkle in my eye, I had the privilege of meeting Dr. Philip Incao, one of only a handful of American physicians who openly question the safety of vaccinations as well as other conventional medical practices. I left the meeting with a fat folder full of Dr. Incao's writings and the scientific studies that supported his arguments. Once I began to pore over them, I couldn't stop. Not only did Dr. Incao make perfect sense of the baffling rise in all kinds of chronic disease in American children; he also revealed to me the reasons I had suffered from so many bouts of strep throat and lung infections during my own childhood-and how the conventional ways in which those illnesses were treated had led to my adult battles with asthma and allergies.

With the guidance of the Santa Barbara Midwives, I birthed Sarah at home-16 days post-date-right into my husband's hands. She weighed 9 pounds, 12 ounces and looked not in the least bit like a newborn. As I sat around the house in my robe, nursing and sleeping, regaining my strength, falling in love with this brand new person, the realization that she was mine to protect hit me hard. Pondering the vaccination question again, I wondered how to best support her health? I didn't want her to fall prey to any microbe that came her way. I decided to call Dr. Incao.

By the time I hung up the phone, I felt confident. He had given me common-sense advice: don't take your baby out in crowds while she's small; when you do take her out, keep her close to you, in your arms or in a sling; keep her warm; breastfeed her exclusively for the first six months; put her to bed early; don't overstimulate her. He told me how to deal with fever, and how to support my baby's body through whatever illnesses might come along. Most important, he helped me to recast my ideas about what illness is--that it isn't something to be dreaded or even to always be avoided. Instead, he encouraged me to regard feverish illness as a sign that my child's body was developing the ability to heal itself.

Sarah had a bout of mastitis at the age of one month, for which I unquestioningly gave her the penicillin and Tylenol the pediatrician prescribed; even the midwife I spoke with agreed that this type of infection had to be dealt with in this way, and once we started the medication, it cleared up quickly. Over a year passed before Sarah fell ill again. One afternoon, she woke from a nap and refused to nurse. She was burning with fever, listless, and vomiting frothy white mucus. I feared the worst. Meningitis? Some virulent strain of flu? I took her temperature and called the pediatrician's office. They asked me a few questions and concluded that Sarah probably didn't need to be brought in. I hung up the phone and lay there with her for hours as she slept, waking every so often to vomit. We went to bed; I cuddled her hot little body to mine until morning, worrying that we were in for days of more of the same.

Morning came, and when she woke, she was her smiling, rambunctious self again. I could have wept for joy: her immune system was so powerful. I knew then that I had made the right decision.

My parents believed--as did most parents of their generation--that illness was an enemy to be eradicated by any means necessary. As soon as I began to show the slightest symptoms as a child, I was toted to the doctor's office and given antibiotics. By the time I was in my twenties, I had developed severe asthma and allergies. Today, I believe that this is because those natural childhood illnesses were never allowed to run their course.

Now I know that symptoms are not illness; rather, they are signs that the healing process is beginning. When we suppress symptoms--when we interrupt what Dr. Incao calls the healing crisis--we prevent our children's bodies from healing.