Regaining Power Over Your Health

The following is adapted from How to Stay Out of My Emergency Room by Mona Balogh.

In my ER, we call them our frequent flyers. They touch down again and again from ambulances in the middle of the night. They’re wheeled in again and again by desperate, frustrated family members. We may even get to know them by name. We may hardly need to look at their charts.

They have congestive heart failure, but they ate a whole bag of chips. They have diabetes but failed to take their insulin. They overdosed on Vicodin. They drank themselves into unconsciousness. They didn’t change the bandages on their bedsores for a week. They laid in bed for a week and lost all their muscle strength, so they fell. They cut themselves.

Again.

This advice is mostly for frequent flyers. It’s mostly for people who have so lost their personal power to a disease, a habit, or a destructive behavior that they end up in my ER every six months. Or every month. Or every week.

Mostly that means people with chronic conditions like diabetes, dangerous allergies, heart conditions, obesity, or autoimmune diseases. Conditions that could be controlled with things like diet and exercise, but are not.

It also means people who have knowingly or unknowingly become addicts: opioid addicts, sex addicts, food addicts, alcoholics, heavy smokers, you name it. Among addicts, I include people trapped in habitual violence: gun violence, gang violence, domestic violence.

Maybe you see yourself on one of those lists.

If so, I am here to give you strength. I’m here to give you a truly new kind of personal power. I‘m here to offer you an entirely new way to see the world and your place in it. I offer a new path forward, both mentally and physically. A path that works for anyone.

Even you.

Maybe you’re not a frequent flyer, but you’re the caring husband, wife, friend, brother, sister, or parent who needs to understand what’s really happening and why and learn to cope. You might even be a professional: a doctor, nurse, or CNA looking for a new way to empower your patients, and protect yourself, too. If so, this book is also for you. You need to understand your frequent flyer.

I do not know a single person, including myself, who has not struggled to overcome a habit that damages their health. Who has not at some point felt weak in the presence of a bad habit. Who has not at some moment fought to maintain the balance of personal power that leads to health?

Not one.

Think, for a moment, what that means.

Destructive habits are strangely woven deep into the human condition — curiously fundamental to the daily wrestling match that constitutes life itself.

Whether we are aware of these habits, or whether they operate stealthily beneath our conscious minds, we must all learn to see and confront them every single hour of our lives, right up until the hour we die.

Not Another Load of Advice

I’m not one more doctor hectoring you to take your meds and follow your diet.

Instead, I ask that you look at the dark and the light halves of human existence. I ask that you examine the eternally opposing forces that lead us all to harm or to help ourselves, day in and day out. It explores the unacknowledged “power plays” which make every one of us prey to destructive habits.

Only by understanding these forces can we control and balance them. The forces themselves will never be eliminated.

I do not pretend to originality. These ideas here are not just old, but ancient. You might say they’ve been clinically proven by billions of trials over thousands of years. People much smarter than me have been thinking about this problem throughout the millennia. Those people found solutions — we just need to use those solutions in a modern context.

Once acknowledged and understood, we can use our Higher Self to retrain our brains with some very practical mental exercises.

These mental exercises will inevitably improve your health. I promise.

One warning: as you explore these subjects, you will encounter some hard truths.

Some very hard truths.

But without confronting those truths, no progress can be made.

The Bottom Line

Before we get to those truths, however, let me cut to the bottom line.

I’m an MD with twenty-seven years of experience in the emergency rooms of large hospitals, thirty-four years if you include medical school and residency. I’ve seen literally tens of thousands of patients. I’ve studied both Western and Eastern approaches. Here is what I have learned:

Health is life. Life is a precarious balancing act. But that balance is possible to achieve by anyone who still has their cognitive abilities.

Anyone.

No matter how sick you may be. How immobile. How addicted to pizza, donuts, cigarettes, tequila, Demerol, pistols, razor blades, soft couches in front of TVs, or the bright lights of the ER at midnight.

You too can regain power over your health.

You too can become independent.

You too can say goodbye to ambulance drivers and hospital orderlies.

With any luck, you may never have to look up into my masked face or feel the touch of my gloved hands again.

To learn more about regaining power over your health, you can find How to Stay Out of My Emergency Room on Amazon.

Mona Balogh is a retired emergency physician who received her medical degree at Southwestern Medical School. After she completed her residency in emergency medicine at Los Angeles County + University of Southern California Medical Center, Dr. Balogh worked in emergency rooms throughout Los Angeles. She also provided free healthcare to underserved populations in Los Angeles, and in Baja, California, with the Flying Samaritans.

Dr. Balogh discovered her passion for alternative medicine at an addiction medicine seminar, where she learned to combine evidence-based Western philosophies with Eastern therapies. Since then, Dr. Balogh has studied traditional Chinese medicine, herbal and homeopathic therapies, and acupuncture. She lives with her husband, Endre, in Chatsworth, California.