Sick-care, or Healthcare?

The world doesn’t need another quick fix; it needs a clearer path back to the body’s own wisdom. In this round-up episode, we take a candid look at the gap between sick care and true health care, and why so many of us have been taught to outsource our wellbeing instead of learning how to read our own signals. From Christmas prescriptions to the hidden messages in children’s shows, we trace how culture normalises the pill-first reflex and what it costs us in confidence and clarity.

We unpack the nervous system as the control centre for stress, sleep, digestion, immunity, and mood, and show how early awareness prevents overwhelm before it spirals. Rather than pitting medicine against lifestyle, we build a both-and approach: doctors as partners and teachers, medicine as a powerful tool, and you as the expert in your own experience. Expect practical, grounded strategies that prioritise basics over secrets: consistent sleep, whole foods, daily movement, breath, light, and connection. We also spotlight evidence that movement during treatment can improve outcomes, reframing exercise as an ally to clinical care.

Looking ahead, we preview our embodiment arc: holotropic breathwork, fire walking, walking on glass, and even arrow-breaking as carefully held rites of passage that shift stuck emotion through the body. These are not stunts; they are structured challenges that rebuild trust in your own physiology and expand your capacity for life’s stressors. You’ll leave with simple self-audit questions to help you respond to your body first, then collaborate with your GP from a place of balance and agency.

If this resonates, share the show with someone who needs a nudge back to their body, and leave a review so more people can find it. Subscribe for the upcoming embodiment series and join us as we trade quick fixes for real, embodied change.

Transcript

Welcome And Purpose

Naomi Mills 0:01

Welcome to You Are the Answer, the podcast that helps you reconnect with the most powerful healer you know, your own body. I'm Naomi Mills, chiropractor, healthcare professional, and believer in the natural intelligence within us all. In this podcast, I explore what it means to trust your body, decode its signals, and take ownership of your well-being without quick fixes or health fads. Whether you're just beginning your journey or deep in transformation, I'm here to guide you back to the truth. You are not broken. You are the answer.

Laying The Foundations

Sick Care Versus Health Care

Naomi Mills 0:42

So, welcome to episode 10. Thank you so much for joining me. This is going to be a little bit of a roundup episode, actually. Really wanting to put into context everything that I've spoken about with you on the first nine episodes. This has been about laying the groundwork for the times we're going to have ahead. I really want to be able to talk about things that feel really relevant that are coming up in my life and in my practice. But I feel that it's really important to lay those foundations so that you can go back and understand what is your central nervous system, why is it so important, and more importantly, why is it an overwhelm and not serving you the way it was designed to?

Naomi Mills 1:29

And that takes me to a very important topic today: sick care versus health care. Really telling that just before Christmas, a client of mine who works at the local GP surgery came in and said, My goodness, I feel like I've written a prescription for everybody in the town today. And she was sort of laughing and saying they're wanting Omeprazole for their Christmas dinner in case it upsets their stomach, and then Zopiclone to make sure they fall asleep at night!

Naomi Mills 2:00

And I thought, yes, this is the world that we live in now. That there is a knowledge that we are going to overindulge or do too much, and we're turning straight to medicine to try and undo that. And I'm not saying you're not going to overeat or have a few too many drinks at Christmas or do whatever it is that's going to make your sleep disturbed.

Culture Of Quick Fixes

Naomi Mills 2:24

But isn't it funny that the shops and the and the GP practice can't close for a couple of days without everybody panicking to make sure they've got all their medicine? And that's not on the people necessarily. It says something to me much greater about the culture that we live in.

Doctor As Teacher

Naomi Mills 2:44

In my day job in primary health care, many, many clients are being told to essentially live with poor health and problems for as long as they possibly can before any intervention will or can be done. And it seems like we live in this system that was supposed to care for our health, but it's now becoming about are we sick enough to qualify for help? And one of my favorite things when I was doing research for my book was realizing that the title doctor actually comes from Latin and it's meant to be about teaching. And I know there are other countries in the world where you might go to your local doctor and they would teach you about changing your diet or your habits or your lifestyle before they even offered you medicine. But that's what the word doctor really comes from. It's about teaching us to be well.

Naomi Mills 3:44

I don't think that is what is happening these days. So the focus for me behind this podcast and the book and all the work that I do clinically and in my event space is really about empowering you with the knowledge and understanding of your health, being the doctor teacher, so that you can make decisions that are most aligned and best for you.

Mission To Free You From Stress

Medicine As Tool Not Savior

Naomi Mills 4:15

Quite a few years ago now, I did some work on discovering what my personal mission might be that then gets expressed through my work. And the best thing that I could come up with was the idea that it's my mission to help free you from your stress. Now I can't come into your life right now and take all the physical, chemical, and emotional stressors out of your life. I can't plonk you in a different living environment or magically click my fingers and any illnesses or problems that you have magically go away. For me, the only way I can help to free you from your stress is waking you up to it, is making the unconscious conscious so that when we do overindulge, for example, at Christmas, we do choose to do things that we know are not in our best interest for our physical or mental health, it's done consciously because there is a place for conscious scrolling or conscious indulging. But the key there is that you are aware of it at the time and it's not running on this automated survival system that we've been talking about over the last few episodes.

Trusting Yourself And Doctors

Naomi Mills 5:30

Let's be honest, this isn't a new problem. Go back to the old nursery rhymes, Miss Polly had a dolly, or you look at what's being shown on today's TV shows around childbirth, for example, everything is put in this medical model. So Miss Polly had a dolly, they call for the doctor who writes for a pill. Like we are being ingrained very early on that the doctor is the healer, not our body, but the doctor. So rather than seeing medicine as I do as another tool to help the body to heal or survive where it's not able to on its own, it's seen as a solution. And I have a lot of empathy for clients who come in very frustrated and upset that the doctor they've been to see can't quote fix them. And if you've not listened to the episode on why you can't fix a human, I recommend you go back and do so. I also have a lot of empathy for the doctors, by the way, because that's an expectation that is completely unrealistic and unfair upon them. #

Naomi Mills 6:40

I believe many of our most important people, doctors being among them in our society, are working in a lot of stress, fight-flight, survival states because they're under so much pressure. And when I think about what I'm trying to teach my own daughter, who's 10 years old, about health and well-being in life, I don't know how much she's taking in from what she sees in my work and the events that we hold. But I will always remember her asking me which hospital she was born in. And I was like, What do you mean, what hospital you were born in? You were born at home. And I was trying to get my head around why she thought she was even born in a hospital. And those were the Peppa Pig days, and if you're a parent, you will have lived through them at some point, and that's what she saw on Peppa Pig. Mummy Pig goes to the hospital to give birth. So everywhere in our culture, all around us, not necessarily consciously on anybody's part to make us all think this, it is just a part of our culture that medicine is the answer. And of course, for me, I believe that you are.

Basics Over Secrets

Naomi Mills 7:55

So when you get to know your own body, when you have developed an awareness of your nervous system and what's going on with it, and the people that I've worked with for a prolonged period of time who really get on board with these concepts and start to pay attention, here are the things that I notice. First of all, they will tell me that they are beginning to notice their signals that their body is starting to feel overwhelmed so they can take action more quickly. They definitely notice that they feel more positive, they have more capacity for the people and things that stress them out in their life. And if something does go wrong, because looking after your nervous system does not guarantee that you will never be sick or never have a problem, absolutely not.

Naomi Mills 8:43

Life is going to happen to all of us. But they have this beautiful position where they both trust themselves and they trust the doctors. So they can have a much more balanced conversation with their medical providers about options. What can they do themselves? How might the medicine help? How might it not help in terms of side effects and things they need to get over? Because if we give all of the power outside of ourselves, whoever you're giving that to, if they don't have the answer and the fix, you are left feeling really disempowered and really scared and often powerless because you believe that there's nothing that can be done. In many instances, there's a lot of things that can be done that might help, and loads of them come from you. However, these are not the things that are going to be taught to you by your GP.

Embodiment Arc Preview

Naomi Mills 9:38

These are the things you need to discover for yourself and become so much more obvious and simple when you understand exactly how your central nervous system works, what it's responsible for, and how it's functioning. Also feel compelled to add a little side note here about the word basic, because if I hear anything in my clinical practice, it is sort of this disappointment that there isn't a secret to even more advanced nutrition or exciting exercises that nobody's ever let them into, or a special tweak to change their mindset overnight. So much of the work that needs to be done is simple, it is basic, and that's what's so beautiful about it. You don't need to be any more qualified or special than you already are. You just need to be the owner of a human body.

Naomi Mills 10:32

What really brought this home to me the other week was I was listening to another podcast and they were talking about bowel cancer and how exercise has been shown to boost people's recovery from bowel cancer treatment. So when they exercise while they're becoming treated. And I thought, isn't that a shame that that's such like a wow moment? Because to me, it would feel very obvious that exercise, one of the fundamental pillars for keeping your nervous system healthy and functioning, and your nervous system, which is responsible for helping run the immune system, which is what's going to be fighting this cancer, that when we add good nutrition and movement to cancer treatment, that's even better than when you just take the medicine. And it can't be a shock. It's really, really u

Today’s Health Key And Closing

Naomi Mills 11:27

nsurprising. And it saddens me that we have to research this and prove this when it feels to all intents and purposes self-evident. And I don't mean to sound sort of on my high horse there, but it really does get me to feel how far away from trusting ourselves we have really gotten. So with that in mind, over the coming episodes, I really want to go into my embodiment arc. That's what I'm calling it, where we are going to explore some of the more unusual ways and means that I use to help people become really connected with their body and shift some emotionally stuck stuff through using the body as its resource.

Naomi Mills 12:22

So we're going to talk fire walking, we're going to talk holotrophic breath work, we're going to talk about why you might walk on broken glass or break an arrow on your throat. These are self-empowerment exercises. These are tools that I use to help people move forward in their healing journey. And there's a lot of learning to come from that and understanding how so much of what we experience is being held in our body and how we can use the body as a really effective means to shift not just, you know, how we feel physically, but how we feel mentally and emotionally as well.

Naomi Mills 12:59

So I really hope that you will keep listening, you will join us for that. I want to share with you the health key from today, this takeaway little message for you to think about. And I'd like you to ask yourself just what messages were you given growing up about medicine, about health, about where your health comes from, about who's responsible for your health. Maybe have a think about the behaviors you choose or the actions you take. When something goes wrong, do you immediately think, what can I do for me? Or is your first instinct who can help me?

Naomi Mills 13:38

And none of this is wrong or bad or good or right. It's just about noticing your own wiring, your preconceptions, and how culture has helped to shape some of them. Because when you pursue your own health, you have a say in your future. And that really allows you to reclaim your self-worth. I don't want you to be in this imbalance of power when you are choosing what is right for your health and your life. I want you to be at the driving seat choosing what and who gets a say. So have a wonderful day, and I'll see you next time.

Naomi Mills 14:21

Thank you for joining me on You Are the Answer. If today's episode sparked something in you, share it with someone you care about and leave a review to help others find their way back to their body too. For more tools, inspiration, and resources to support your journey, head to www.youareanswer.co.uk. And until next time, stay connected, stay curious, and remember, you are the answer. And you always have been.