Tell me about your practice philosophy. How did you go from traditional medicine to a practice that integrates bio-energetic testing and alternative treatment modalities?
After completing my pre-medical education at Texas A&M University, I started my medical career path at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School at Dallas. After graduating from Southwestern, I completed an internal medicine internship in Dallas at St. Paul Hospital, followed by two more years of residency in anesthesiology at Parkland Hospital in Dallas. Next, I spent a fellowship year at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center working in a pain treatment clinic.
From there, I began a ten year career as an anesthesiologist and pain management consultant in San Angelo, Texas. During this time, I received a flyer advertising an acupuncture seminar in San Francisco. My interest in an alternative mode of therapy was immediate. The possibility of learning a new, potentially more effective technique was compelling. When anyone looks back on the path their life has taken, there are always events that stand out. For me, it was the San Francisco acupuncture seminar. On the airplane returning home I already knew my whole life career would change based on a new and totally different understanding of health and disease. While I continued my traditional anesthesia practice, I went through the UCLA Medical Acupuncture for Physicians Certification program. In the latter part of 1988, I traveled to Shanghai where I spent three months for extra training in acupuncture. The medical paradigm of Traditional Chinese Medicine was my first exposure to an alternative medicine. At the time, conventional medicine was understood to be the real or legitimate medicine. Other healing paradigms such as acupuncture, herbal medicine, homeopathy, chiropractic, nutritional supplementation and expanded consciousness therapies were passed off as unimportant alternatives and not deserving study as real medicine. For example, during four years of my medical school training, I received exactly two hours devoted to nutrition. Healing paradigms other than drugs and surgery were never mentioned.
Having seen first hand the amazing and in many cases life-saving benefits of conventional drugs and surgery in acute emergency situations, please understand, I am not saying this paradigm is of no use. I am, however, voicing the frustration I experienced all those years when conventional drugs and surgery thinking were applied to chronic, non-emergent, yet progressively debilitating maladies. Here I refer to conditions such as mood disorders, allergies, arthritis, irritable bowel syndromes, insomnia, high blood pressure, and the current mother of all waste basket diagnoses: fibromyalgia. By contrast, alternative medical paradigms treat each patient as an individual so that within a group of five people, all of whom have right knee pain, stiffness and swelling, successful treatment might be derived from five different acupuncture combinations, five different herbs or five different homeopathics. Conventional medicine starts with one drug. If that is ineffective, another drug, usually a steroid, is added. If the drugs are ineffective, there is always surgery.
Gradually I began to realize that our medical system has been conditioned to accept several key assumptions. These assumptions have created a system that is enormously expensive and ineffective. According to the World Health Organization’s ranking of World Health Systems, the United States ranked 37th on quality, 2nd most costly as a percentage of gross domestic product. But the United States ranked 72nd on the overall level of health. This is due to the number of people who do not get true prevention and general healthcare.
Let’s look at these misleading assumptions:
Assumption #1 – The symptom is the disease. Therefore, if one has a painful, swollen joint with restricted range of motion the disease is arthritis. In the current medical system there is a category of drug which is appropriate to abate, lessen, or nullify that symptom. Dr Deepak Chopra emphasizes that interfering with the mechanisms of disease, i.e. treating symptoms with drugs, is not the same thing as treating the cause of the disease. We all know this because anyone under treatment for chronic arthritis, for example, who stops taking the prescribed drug(s) experiences an immediate return of the joint pain. Joint pain is mis-identified by conventional medicine as the disease itself. So, as Dr. Chopra says, interfering with the mechanism of arthritis by prescribing a drug is not treating the cause of the arthritis. A drug treats or hinders or interferes with the effect of the disease, but does nothing to address the cause of the disease. Analogously, when there is a fire in your house, disabling the smoke alarm is not the same as putting out the fire. Similarly, clipping the wire to the temperature light on your car dashboard that displays an overheated engine is not same as repairing the defective cooling system. Yet, every day, nationwide, conventional medical drugs and surgery thinking confuses the effect, i.e. the symptom, with the cause, i.e. the actual disease. How did Big Pharma evolve to such an all pervasive influence over American Medical education and healthcare policy? In 1911 Abraham Flexner was hired by the Rockefeller interests to survey American medical schools and their curricula. This survey would in large part determine the continued funding of each institution by the federal, state and local governments, so there was a lot of riding on the outcome of Flexner’s report. Flexner chose as his model medical school, Johns Hopkins in Baltimore MD. The Hopkins faculty was totally committed to the drug and surgery paradigm. Consequently, as Flexner crossed the country evaluating curricula at one institution after another, those who did not exclusively promote drug and surgery education were downgraded for providing what was thought to be inferior medical instruction. A substantial number lost their funding and were forced to close. Many others who survived were forced to restructure their educational offerings to conform to the exclusively drugs and surgery model. It may surprise you that at the time of Flexner’s report, in the first decade of the 20th century, fully 40% of American medical schools taught courses in nutrition, herbs, homeopathy, joint manipulation, lymphatic massage and other so-called alternative modalities. Would it surprise you that Flexner, a creature of the Rockefeller trust, would be influenced by his paymasters? Recall, Rockefeller owned Standard Oil, the largest petroleum enterprise at that time and now, in the world. In addition to each barrel of oil contributing to fuel for cars and trucks, chemical precursors for plastics, agro-chemicals, and lubricants, a considerable portion of each barrel goes to Big Pharma for drug manufacture. Was there a conflict of interest? If you want further information on the pervasive influence of Big Pharma on American medicine, please read The Truth about the Drug Companies by Marcia Angell, MD; Random House, 2004. Dr Angell is board certified in internal medicine and for a number of years was on the editorial staff of the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine. She explains how the drug companies have become the over-whelming financial driver behind every medicine related issue from the FDA, to the pharmaceutical lobbyists in congress, to the real reason for exorbitant drug costs, to the treatment recommendations your doctor advocates in his office.
Assumption #2 – Disease care is health care. In addition to cogitating on the whole issue of the symptom/disease confusion and the financial implications of who that benefits, I confronted another confusion of terminology and that is – health care vs. disease care. To me health care implies preventative medicine, i.e. lifestyle choices that promote wellness and optimal function. Preventive medicine also engenders a mind and body that function at a much younger biological age than their chronological age. This is in stark contrast to the disease care paradigm we are in now which is both too expensive and ineffectual for most chronic debilitating conditions. Preventive medicine in the conventional paradigm is blood screening and imaging to find pathology. This is fine so far as it goes but unfortunately it is not true prevention. One of the more fascinating revelations when I studied in Shanghai was that in the Traditional Chinese Medicine, the only time patients paid their doctor was when the patient stayed healthy. At the first onset of symptoms, payments to the doctor ceased. Our system stands this paradigm on its head and only pays the doctor while the patient is sick. Disease care is not the same thing as health care.
Assumption #3 – One paradigm treats all. Have you heard the expression “Every man with a hammer sees everything as a nail”? This in a nutshell is the assumption I had in common with most healthcare providers. We think that what we’ve been trained and certified to do should be effective for everyone. However, I always noticed that the teachers I most respected demonstrated proficiency in multiple healing modalities. This makes sense – the human mind, feelings, chemistry, and structure are sufficiently complex that one-size-fits-all thinking is rarely effective.
Assumption #4 – We must wait until symptoms of illness manifest before we seek treatment. It is as if we must wait until the engine temperature light is on, before filling the radiator. As we shift from Newtonian to Quantum physics based medicine, we recognize that organs and tissues display energetic imbalance long before tissue pathology occurs. Einstein told us by his famous equation that matter is energy. Therefore, the physical body is also an energetic body. Conventional medicine acknowledges this relationship by virtue of routine electrical measurements of brain and heart function. So far so good, but conventional understanding of energetic information stops here. Dr Richard Gerber, who at the time he wrote the first edition of Vibrational Medicine, Bear &Co, 1988, was on the internal medicine faculty of the University of Michigan Medical School. He very cogently presented the evidence for a more subtle energetic or vibrational frequency emission from all matter – living and non-living. Dr. Gerber introduced us to the subtle energies that influence humans both positively and negatively and define us in both health and disease. He also surveyed those therapeutic traditions such as acupuncture and homeopathy that mediate subtle energy healing. These therapeutic traditions deliver energetic inputs that restore organs and tissues to their proper resonance. The scientific underpinning for bio-energetic testing that I do is laid out in terms laymen can understand and appreciate. This book explains the scientific principles behind bio-energetic diagnosis and treatment. Subtle energetic imbalances that I discover in various organs, glands and tissues, allow me to make course corrections with life-style interventions that prevent future pathology. Bottom line, the body displays energetic imbalance long before evidence of physical damage occurs.
Assumption #5 – The body is incapable of healing itself. So it follows that some external intervention is necessary for healing to occur. The truth is, for most chronic conditions, healthcare providers are simply facilitators. Most dysfunction that ultimately rebalances or re-aligns to a healthy state, results from activity of an internal healer not from the doctor or therapist. The placebo response, where one out of three improves with a sugar pill, should alert us to a subtle healing activity which responds to nothing other than belief. WOW! The assumption that the doctor, therapist, nutritionist, herbalist, acupuncturist, etc. is the healer is flawed. Health care professionals should instead be viewed as facilitators who merely assist the patient’s own vital force in achieving a restoration of health. Like I mentioned, ideas have power – both to hurt and to help. If the healing belief is strong enough, even a placebo will achieve remarkable salutary effects. The opposite is true of negative beliefs. When thoughts are destructive the internal healer is facing a brick wall. And so, I might add, is the health care facilitator.
Turning from the mistaken assumptions, I will now bring my journey up to date. In 2008, I moved my practice to Fort Worth, Texas. Also during this year, I was certified in Age Management Medicine, which trains physicians to be pro-active with one goal in mind: long life with optimal mind and body function right to the end. My desire for obtaining this training and certification was motivated by a study I read describing characteristics healthy centenarians had in common. These one hundred year olds were living by themselves, cooking their own meals, driving their own cars, etc. In short, they were fully functional human beings. When the characteristics of these remarkable folks were tallied up, some clear and striking commonality emerged. These were people who had a distinct sense of their physicality and experienced very little weight gain or weight loss in their lifetime. They tended to be independent thinkers, with the ability to say no and set boundaries. They all had a good sense of humor and a tendency to be thankful for each day. Most centenarians were moderate coffee drinkers. A few still smoked. They ate three meals a day with no in between snacking. They got seven to eight hours sleep at night, and placed a high value on daily exercise. Most were avid readers and had a good grasp of current events. I felt so fortunate to see the results of these studies because they reflect the exact habits of mind, attitudes, and life-styles (absent smoking) that I value and share with my family and my patients. In conclusion, this journey has given me a rather formidable skill set for promoting wellness in mind and body. My goal for those who entrust themselves to my care is a life of both quality and quantity.