Intuition And Health: What's The Link?
In the West, we don’t pay much attention to our intuition. Generally speaking, we prefer analytical modes of thought - statistics, data, evidence and the like.
However, intuition plays a vital role in human affairs. When you ask most successful people how they make decisions, generally they make them on intuition alone. They don’t spend hours weighing things up mathematically - they just get on and do it.
Many people experience the same sort of thing with health. They get a sense that something is wrong and that they need to seek urgent care, even though they’re not entirely sure what it is.
An Example Of Medical Intuition
To illustrate this point, let’s run through a fictional example. Mary is a 40 year old project manager working for a tech startup. She is working towards a client deadline that she has to meet, otherwise the project will fall through. As such, Mary begins putting in 14-hour days and working six days per week.
At first, she notices that she feels more tired compared to usual. However, she just brushes it off. After all, she’s been working hard and she is getting older. Things like this are bound to happen.
After some time, though, she soon realizes that what she’s experiencing isn’t normal, even though she is putting in long, challenging days. As a result, she decides to go and check herself into the hospital.
After conducting some tests, the doctors tell her that she has a tumor in her colon and it is bleeding. They recommended that she gets immediate surgery to remove the cancerous material and return her body to health. Two months later, she was in remission and getting her life back to normal.
In this example, Mary used her health intuition. She could tell something was wrong, even though she didn’t know precisely what it was. But she decided to act on it anyway. She told doctors that she had been feeling uncharacteristically tired which enabled them to take decisive action on her health. If she hadn’t done that and just brushed it off as nothing, she could have found herself in a far worse position.
Is Intuition Real?
Intuition seems to go against our sense of the world. We imagine that things happen in a certain sequence and that there are no ways that we could know things before they happen.
However, research does seem to suggest that intuition is real - at least in some cases. For example, investigators have shown people a series of images and found that their heart rate increases five to seven seconds before viewing something disturbing (even though they had no idea if or when it was coming).
Other people regularly report walking to the telephone before it rings or knowing who was going to be calling on the other end of the line.
Intuition is now something people are exploring with their health. They’re paying close attention to how they feel and then getting help immediately if they detect something wrong. In many cases, it has saved their lives.
