Miriam has had her own personal experience of mind-body medicine. Her early twenties saw her getting very sick with extreme hypothyroidism that left her unable to walk or think properly. Miriam understood that her illness was directly impacted by years of accumulated stress, coupled with the disappointment of a recent setback in her academic life.
Miriam was given a prescription for thyroxine, and told that she would be on it for the rest of her life. Typical of those unenlightened times, her GP offered no explanation for the disease, and there was no discussion of any other treatment options. In Miriam’s own words “I felt like I had been given my prescription and kicked out onto the street.”
Miriam’s diagnosis ignited her internal fighter and made her determined to find a better solution. She gained her masters in Health Psychology in 2012 and had her thesis on the value of mind-body medicine therapies – as well as a systematic review into the efficacy of mindfulness for fibromyalgia – published in the International Journal of Wellbeing later that year.
In the same year Miriam weaned herself off her thyroid medication and started taking low-dose natural thyroid supplements instead. In 2015 Miriam discovered that she has Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis. She is now discovering how to switch off her auto-immune response using the mind-body connection. She’s making good progress and looking forward to where this takes her.
“All this education and exploration has always had two purposes: helping others improve their holistic wellbeing, and my own quest to find health. Through the process of working through my own health issues I came face to face with the reality of how powerful mind-body medicine can be.” – Miriam Henke, 2015
You can read more about Miriam’s health journey in her upcoming book, Deep Connection, due for release in early 2017,