TAPPING INTO THE KNOWLEDGE OF THE AGES
Those of you who were around in 1972 likely remember what you were doing that summer. Change was in the air, and traditional belief systems were being challenged at all levels of society. The government was taxing us into the ground, while at the same time desperately trying to reassert its control. The politicians did not know the extent of the profound societal changes that were coming—nor did they embrace them.
But I did. I embraced the newness of ideas. I was right in the middle of it—along with the other free thinkers—and to us, the possibilities seemed endless. I remember believing that I could change the world, get the medical system back on track, and get the government off our backs. My family was young, my career was going very well, my research efforts were paying off, and I saw no reason not to explore everything this world had to offer.
It all sounds quite simple, but this was a pretty big leap. Up to this point, I was a relatively straightforward thinking, scientific-based neurosurgeon. But suddenly I started hearing about so many other therapies and spiritual ideas out there—about colonics, auras, crystals, different chiropractic approaches, balancing chakras, autogenic training, past-life therapy, and so many other emerging concepts—and I just wanted to know more and more.
As I’ve explained, I was very concerned that the traditional medical approaches, which were based primarily on offering medication or discussing surgery options, were not really helping the patients who were coming to the clinic. I was seeing the ones who no one else could seem to help. I was propelled forward by my own conscientious drive to do good for them, to find better solutions that would relieve them of their pain and depression.
There wasn’t really any way to tell at the time where all this would take me, but before long I became the founder and first president of the American Holistic Medical Association (AHMA). Through meetings across the country, I found myself aligned with an incredible group of like-minded individuals by the mid-1970s, and we all agreed to seek the possibility of establishing the AHMA. There was just so much information and misinformation out there on holistic medicine and alternative therapies as related to medical care, that I knew the time was right to put a credible organization in place so that we could keep advancing and refining the knowledge.
So when we sat down together, we easily compiled a total of about 3,000 physician names just from the contacts already present in the room. Over the next six months, I took the lead to organize a campaign to gather more supporters who might be interested in membership. Of course, the American Medical Association refused to allow our ads in any of its publications, so we just got the word out ourselves through the good old postal system, since this was well before the Internet!
And so it was in May 1978 that we held the founding meeting of the American Holistic Medical Association in Denver. We had 212 physicians and medical students present and spent several days developing a consensus on the bylaws and constitution. We also had an all-day scientific meeting and held elections for the first official board and officers.
Knowing that I already had a heavy patient load and an extensive travel schedule, I hoped someone else would be selected to serve as president. However, they elected me. At the end of the meeting, the members gave me what became one of my favorite bolo ties—a silver phoenix with turquoise representing the bird rising from ashes. I have always treasured this gift of the phoenix as a sign that we were starting something big—something that represented our tapping into true medical wisdom and spiritual healing—that would change the world.
Conscientious People Are Very Good at Causes
Maybe I was elected to that leadership role with the AHMA because the group that was assembled could see that Chardy and I were just the kind of conscientious individuals who would work night and day once we took something like this on. Well, they were right. We did work night and day. It didn’t matter that I had a busy clinic and a full career on the go, or that Chardy was a full-time mother of three with her own community and professional interests, projects, and passions.
Notwithstanding any of this, we added the cause of holistic medicine to our plates and made it work. The other leaders of the AHMA movement did as much as they could, too; and as a collective, we were always planning something. Since it was the days before e-mail and social media, we addressed thousands of envelopes over the next few years, spoke on the phone all the time, and got together for conferences and group meetings as often as we could. The AHMA hosted professionals from around the world who would come to speak on their specialties, and they hosted me and others when we would travel abroad.
One place I always enjoyed visiting, and where I was always warmly received, was at the offices of the Association for Research and Enlightenment (A.R.E.) in Virginia Beach, Virginia. Chardy and I began attending their annual conferences starting in 1972, which began a lifelong association with the A.R.E. group that has been extremely valuable to me. The founder of the A.R.E. was Edgar Cayce, who is generally considered the father of holistic and energy medicine and arguably the most talented and prolific intuitive of the 20th century. I have researched and referred to his work extensively in many of my previous books.
So by around 1971, I had begun lecturing around the world on various topics—at medical schools, universities, hospitals, and churches—with up to 100 appearances each year. I think that by 1978 I was living the busiest year of my whole life! I spent 180 days out of town that year on scheduled workshops and lectures, and pretty well loved every minute of it. I was able to do it because Chardy had full control of things at home and supported me wholeheartedly. Likewise, my staff at the clinic knew the rehabilitative pain program inside out and kept things moving along seamlessly.
Along with my travels, I was often asked to speak on national TV programs, and so I appeared on The Tomorrow Show, The Joan Rivers Show, Geraldo, Good Morning America, Today, The Oprah Winfrey Show, the Wisdom Channel, and dozens of other regional and local television and radio programs.
I am retired from most of this today, but over the years I produced more than 325 publications on a wide range of traditional medical issues and alternative-medicine topics, including 29 books. I have no plans to stop publishing books, and I enjoy compiling and sending a free weekly newsletter that still goes out to thousands of subscribers. And for more than two decades I have hosted the most popular call-in radio show in the Ozarks here in Missouri on KWTO 560 AM. I plan to keep that up as well for as long as they’ll have me. Each week, there are always more callers seeking advice, and now the program is streamed online so that anyone in the world can tune in on Thursday afternoons. And I do get calls from all over the country!
Tracing the Roots of My Own Conscientiousness
I firmly believe that one of the great gifts I received in this life was my parents. Even though they raised me to attend and follow the traditional teachings of the Methodist Church, they did not indoctrinate me with rigid religious beliefs that strangled creativity and free thought. I grew up with permission to explore fully the multidimensional reality of life on both the material and spiritual planes.
My mother herself would occasionally visit a psychic woman in our town, for example, so I grew up accepting the world of intuition. Lil Brown, as she was known, was accepted throughout the southeast as an excellent psychic; supposedly she had been consulted by the governor and other prominent figures. So it did not seem strange at all to me that certain people knew things that others did not, or that some individuals could foresee the future. But I also accepted that not everything a mystical person said was the God-given truth; for every respected intuitive, there appeared to be dozens of others who were complete flakes. (This isn’t unlike the odds within the ranks of our current politicians, now that I think about it!)
Anyway, it was always entertaining to hear what Lil Brown had to say. Shortly before I left for college, my mother asked Lil to do a reading for me. She said, “You will become well known, but you will never be President of the United States.” That was a relief! I can’t imagine a worse profession than being a politician, although I have been said to have some of the same gifts, such as my ability and conviction to speak and be heard.
Even as a child, I was encouraged to develop my own point of view, and that’s also where the roots of my inquisitiveness, conscientiousness, and openness to new ideas began. I stated out loud at age four that I would become a doctor, and no one was surprised; they encouraged me from that point on to excel in that direction and toward any goal I set for myself.
Since I was blessed with remarkably nurturing parents, who were themselves hardworking and conscientious souls, I always knew that my life had a purpose. I conscientiously followed that purpose, even though sometimes I was not absolutely clear where I was going.
Early in my own spiritual journey, I realized and accepted that each of us has a choice about what we come to this earthly life to learn. I believe that we choose the main people we will come in contact with in this realm, even before we’re born, so that we can learn the right lessons and fulfill our purpose.
This means that whether your parents were good or bad, you chose them. Likewise, that boss who drives you crazy or the spouse who fully supports you—all your relationships, some seemingly bad and others good, were all chosen by you in order to learn. When you accept that each experience provides you with just the right challenges you need, you can accept that sometimes you have to deal with nasty individuals or face disappointing or tragic circumstances. It is the combination of all your experiences that helps you develop a stronger character and gives you the most appropriate abilities in order to achieve your life’s purpose.
Discovering Energy Medicine
In my own life, it appeared that my purpose involved both the worlds of traditional and alternative medicine this time around. I chose to study the medical science route first, and practiced as a neurosurgeon and researcher for many years before my eyes became open to other modalities.
One of the first new ideas I embraced was energy medicine, specifically in the form of acupuncture. As a neuroscientist, I knew that everything we do in medicine involves some kind of energy, and I accepted from my training and experience that all body systems are interrelated. Therefore, when I read about acupuncture and the concept that the body has 12 main meridians through which our life energy flows, this made sense to me.
Essentially, these meridians represent vector potentials from the organs of the body. Energy runs from the organs out along the specific paths (the 12 meridians) to the tip of each meridian (at the tips of the toenails or fingernails, usually) and back. I understood how acupuncture had a way of completing the circuits through needles, tapping, or massage. In doing so, the practitioner could restore the natural functioning of the patient’s vital organs, as well as improve their energy level and overall health. I enjoyed learning about acupuncture on my own for many years before finding ways to get more formal training.
Being the inquisitive person that I was, from the time I first started studying acupuncture I wondered what would happen if I introduced controlled electrical currents to these circuits or others in the body—an idea that was relatively new at the time. I did manage to perfect this technique and introduce it successfully in my clinic to help my patients overcome chronic pain, breaking new ground in this field.
A Western Form of Acupuncture
In January 1972, the Wall Street Journal featured an article about acupuncture. The American media jumped on what, for them, seemed to be a new and mysterious concept, because it had been used to treat New York Times journalist James Reston after an emergency appendectomy that he underwent while covering Richard Nixon’s historic trip to China.
The newspaper article quoted Janet Travell, M.D., Kennedy’s former physician and a leading expert in the field of myofascial pain, and she said, essentially, “What’s all this fuss about acupuncture? There’s a young neurosurgeon in Wisconsin who has a Western form of acupuncture.”
She was referring to me, of course. I met Janet first in 1966. Shortly after the article came out, I received a letter from Dr. Paul Dudley White, Eisenhower’s former physician and one of the first physicians to visit China after the thaw in tensions between the two countries.
Dr. White heard about my concept of Western acupuncture and asked me to visit him. In April, I flew to Boston to see this highly esteemed man, the grand Brahman of Boston medicine. At 84 years old, he had just flown back from Europe that day and was seeing patients. He spent a lively two hours discussing my work with me and how it related to acupuncture.
A month later, I received a phone call out of the blue. “I am Bob Matson, president of the Academy of Parapsychology and Medicine,” the man began. “We are holding a symposium on acupuncture in June at Stanford University. Dr. Paul Dudley White is to speak, and he said you know much more about acupuncture than he does. Would you replace him on the program?” Who could refuse that?
So in June of 1972, I flew to San Francisco for the meeting, and that was one of the events that changed my life forever. I presented a paper entitled “A Physiological Basis for Electro-Acupuncture.” Having some right suprascapular pain myself, I volunteered to have Dr. Felix Mann, a British physician who had practiced acupuncture in London for 11 years, work on my neck and shoulder. The session was filmed live for the 1,200 attending physicians.
While this was all very exciting to be part of, from my point of view the most critical aspect of this whole conference was meeting so many other highly respected healing professionals for the first time. In addition to meeting Felix, I also met Dr. William Tiller, who was a leading materials scientist interested in parapsychology. I met Drs. Gladys and Bill McGarey of the A.R.E. Clinic in Phoenix. Dr. Phil Toyama was also there; he was a Japanese American physician and acupuncturist, and I enjoyed getting to know him.
It was a particular honor to meet renowned spiritual healer Olga Worrall of Baltimore. All of them, especially Olga, went on to become lifelong friends and colleagues of mine—and fellow supporters of the AHMA cause.
A year later, during a trip to London in 1973, I arranged to take a one-week acupuncture course with Dr. Felix Mann. Felix had one of the largest white-energy auras I have ever seen around anyone, but I could not get him to discuss anything metaphysical. Despite his tight lips, he helped refine my use of acupuncture, which I had begun in the mid-1960s.
Incidentally, also in 1973, I met with one of the first delegations of Chinese physicians who came to visit the U.S. after the thaw in relations between the two countries. They had heard about my work with electrical therapy and asked to visit my clinic. In fact, they had started using electrical stimulation of acupuncture needles at the same time I did!
An Awakening of Medical Intuition
Around this same time, I became very interested in medical intuition. In December 1972, I flew to Chicago to meet Henry Rucker, a charismatic and highly intuitive person I had felt guided to meet. As I walked in for the one-hour appointment we had made, Henry said, “I’ve been waiting ten years for you. My teacher told me you would come.”
Our appointment ended up lasting three hours, and he knew more about me than I did about myself! I was impressed enough to invite him back to La Crosse, Wisconsin, so I could find out more about his gifts as a medical intuitive. I wanted to see how effective he would be in making medical diagnoses in a clinical setting dealing with patients.
So it was in January 1973 that Henry arrived in La Crosse along with seven other psychic friends. They were part of the Psychic Research Foundation of Chicago, and all of them were keen to see if they had the talents I was talking about related to psychic diagnosis.
I had asked my 25 patients whether they would be interested in working with this group from Chicago and having a psychic diagnosis done. They all agreed. One at a time, the patients entered my office. Then Henry and his psychic friends each wrote down their impressions of the patient without asking a thing.
Henry himself was 70 percent accurate, and, when everyone in the group agreed on a diagnosis, they were 98 percent accurate. The results were impressive, and I knew I wanted to work more closely with Henry. I wanted him to counsel my patients, essentially to become a pastoral counselor at my clinic that was housed within St. Francis Hospital in La Crosse.
Henry had founded a metaphysical church called something along the lines of The Church of the Holy Light of Hermetic Wisdom, and I told him I was concerned that the name of his church would not work. As we explored other names, I thought about the name “Science of Mind,” which I had recently discovered. No trademark or national registration of that name existed, so Henry and I founded The Science of Mind Church of Chicago. Henry was introduced as a pastoral counselor at my clinic, and before long, his reputation as a phenomenal counselor spread rapidly. A good number of area nurses, physicians, and even other clergymen sought consultations with him.
For example, our minister asked to see Henry because his 16-year-old son had a terrible problem with drugs. In fact, the young man was incarcerated at a reform school in Florida. Henry heard about the case and reassured the family, “Don’t worry. He will be home soon.”
The following day, the son phoned his parents and requested that he be allowed to come home. He had escaped from reform school. His parents agreed to take him back, but under the condition that he attend a counseling session in Chicago with Henry. The boy walked out of that session and asked, “Why didn’t anyone ever talk to me like that before?!”
After that, the son never touched drugs again and has had a successful life for these past 40 years. One hour with Henry was better than years of conventional psychotherapy. He was, without question, the best one-on-one therapist I have ever known. He had a sense of what was wrong with a person, not only physically but also spiritually, and I saw how his unique form of intuitive counseling helped patients overcome mental and physical illnesses, addictions, and chronic pain of many kinds.
The year after meeting Henry, I came across another medical intuitive who also had tremendous accuracy. His name was Dr. Robert Leichtman, a board-certified internist by training. When I tested Bob, he was 96 percent accurate as a medical intuitive on making psychological diagnoses, but only 80 percent accurate on physical diagnoses. He said that was because he trained himself to “visit the mind.” Very often, he would write three to five pages describing in great detail the individual’s personality traits, both good and not so good. Like so many of these fine people whom I met over the years, Bob and I became lifelong colleagues in this field.
Working with Past-Life Regression Therapy
In the early 1970s, I found out that many alternative therapists used a type of treatment called past-life therapy (PLT) as a way to help clients overcome some mental, physical, or spiritual block that they might be facing that was causing them grief in this lifetime.
Many answers would arise through this therapy, which involved being hypnotized or placed in a state of reverie and then taken on a guided tour of previous experiences in this life that they may have blocked or returned to memories of previous lifetimes—memories that are stored in our souls. Some people easily visit their past lives when guided to do so through therapy or meditation, but a smaller percentage find it hard to reach back and visit these experiences. I expect, perhaps, that some people just aren’t ready to face those memories, or there is simply no need for them to do so at that time.
But as for myself, I have come to learn of dozens of specific past lives that my soul has lived in centuries gone by. I feel that learning of these experiences did lead me to a greater level of understanding of my own path this time around—specifically, why certain things have happened to me and why I am the way I am.
One of the first past-life therapists who worked with me told me that I was trying to cram seven lifetimes into one! Another time, a woman gave me a past-life reading that seemed amazingly real to me. She said my neck problems in this life were related to a life I had lived in the ancient Middle East as a leader of a small Jewish tribe. I led the tribe into war against another tribe, but we were defeated. I spent the rest of that life in a yoke working like an ox, which certainly explained some of the chronic-pain episodes I suffered with at various times in this life.
In the fall of 1972, I met with a small group of friends once a week for PLT sessions, and we took turns guiding one another to visit past lives that lived on in our subconscious memories. On one occasion, I suggested that we try to progress into the future rather than the past. My friend Gary led the session, during which I saw myself living southwest of La Crosse and riding horses across rolling hills with my wife, Chardy. In the distance, I saw a white building, which I knew was related to the future of medicine somehow. This was pure precognition—because I did end up building a medical-research center on our ranch in Missouri 30 years later. And that building is now a home for the future of conscientious psychology!
In my opinion, the premier past-life therapist today is a man named Dr. Morris Netherton, who teaches and certifies past-life therapists in a two-part, three-week program at Holos Institutes of Health Inc.
Discovering the Mesmerizing Dr. John Elliotson
My most recent past-life experience is the one life that I feel most strongly to be true. It came to my conscious mind in January 1973. I had traveled to Aspen, Colorado, for a meeting of the Neuroelectric Society and was sitting in the audience at the time.
Just before my talk, Dr. William S. Kroger, a specialist in obstetrics, gynecology, and endocrinology and an expert in hypnosis, tried to convince us that acupuncture was hypnosis. I sat there strongly disagreeing, figuring he was full of crap, when he said, “. . . and, in the last century, there was a British physician who demonstrated that you could operate on mesmerized patients. His name was John Elliotson.” (A mesmerized patient would be one who was under hypnosis.)
At the mere mention of John Elliotson’s name, I felt as if someone rubbed a big piece of ice down my spine. I thought, My God, I was John. I just knew that this was true—the feeling was so strong. After the talk, I asked Bill for more information, but he knew little else. Prior to that evening, I felt neutral about the concept of reincarnation; however, at that moment, I suddenly felt absolutely certain. I was the reincarnation of this doctor who lived 100 years before, and I wanted to find out more.
When I returned home, I asked our hospital medical librarian to find more information about Dr. John Elliotson, but she found nothing. So I flew to London to find out for myself.
Upon touching down at Heathrow Airport, I got into a cab and said, “Take me to the Royal College of Surgeons,” because I figured that they would have records of this man. But as the cab turned right, I was lifted off the backseat (quite literally!), and I felt that icy feeling go down my spine again. I knew we had to go in the opposite direction, and I gave the driver instructions suddenly to turn around and head the other way.
Sure enough, I found a small, round, brick building. I got out of the cab and went over to it. Once inside, I knew I had been there before. I somehow recognized every room, even though I had never visited anywhere near this place in my lifetime as Norm Shealy! But I knew each corridor intimately, because it was the place where John Elliotson had worked.
I then decided to visit the Royal College of Physicians to research his background further, and I confirmed that Elliotson had been born in 1795 and died in 1868. He was a British physician who introduced mesmerism (the early name for hypnosis) into England, and he had indeed worked in that same building I had just discovered.
Two Men, Two Different Lifetimes, but a Shared Existence
While in England, I went on to learn a great deal more about John, and there were so many striking similarities between his life and career path and my own life this time around, that I became truly convinced that I was the reincarnation of this man.
For example, Elliotson had a limp from childhood. At age nine, I was told I would have a limp forever, but instead I overcame it. Elliotson had striking black curly hair. As a young child, I desperately wanted black hair; I always hated my own blond hair. At about age five, I snuck up behind an aunt of mine who had black curly hair and cut off a lock. At age 16, just as I prepared for college, I asked my mother to dye my hair black so I could finally feel normal. While I loved that look at the time, I didn’t keep my hair black, as it was too much trouble to maintain.
Elliotson was the first physician in London to give up wearing knickers and high socks. At age nine, I refused to wear knickers, and my mother and I had more than one battle royal about it. She could not understand it, but I stood my ground—I would not wear them, and she couldn’t make me. In school, Elliotson was a Latin scholar, and so was I. In fact, I found the language easy to master compared to many of my school-age peers who hated learning it.
I found out that, like me, Elliotson was a medical pioneer in the field of pain management; he was the one who introduced narcotics to the medical world in London as a new form of controlling pain. In this life, my passion has been to get patients off their dependence on narcotics and find other ways to manage their pain.
In the academic world, Elliotson was the first professor of medicine at the University College London Hospital. Even though I was going into neurosurgery, I interned in medicine. He also introduced the stethoscope in London; I think perhaps that this is why I felt attracted to the field of internal medicine.
Elliotson introduced mesmerism in London. I began doing hypnotherapy and PLT sessions with no formal training, because it came completely naturally to me. Elliotson demonstrated that mesmerized patients, those under hypnosis, could make medical diagnoses, and I’d begun working with medical intuitives before I ever heard his name or knew anything about his work in this field.
Covering Even More Common Ground
Furthermore, Elliotson had made a reputation for himself as a physician who gave lectures to the public. Since 1971, I have done far more lecturing to the public than to physicians, that is for sure. And even more of a coincidence, Elliotson left academic medicine because of opposition he felt to his public demonstration of mesmerism; no one would accept this new therapy as having any validity. Six months earlier in my life, before I knew anything about this man, I had written an anonymous novel on the hypocrisy of medicine with regard to accepting new ideas. It was always a bugaboo of mine, and I’d left medical academia because of bureaucracy!
As I explored John’s work further, I came upon his Harverian lecture given 130 years earlier on exactly the same topic, and it used many of the same examples that I did in 1972!
I count this experience of discovering my connection to Dr. Elliotson as the beginning of a major philosophical awakening in my life. This was proof positive to me that not only do we reincarnate, but we often carry with us many traits, beliefs, and values from previous lives. With all that John accomplished, I knew that he had to have been a highly conscientious person. I feel that many of my personality traits and my conscientious nature come from the influence of having been him in a past life.
Over the years since the point that I spontaneously “knew” that I was John, I have consulted with more than 100 psychics and intuitives about my experiences, and they all agree that I was indeed John.
Benefits of Past-Life Regression Therapy to Resolve Pain and Depression
My story of John’s life and my relation to it can also be read in Walter Semkiw, M.D.’s, Return of the Revolutionaries. By the time this book came out, I had experienced many other spontaneous recalls and at least 20 guided PLT sessions where I gained more insights about my current life. Many of my spontaneously revealed incarnations have been confirmed by one or more talented intuitives.
As a result, I have also conducted hundreds of successful PLT sessions with patients, friends, family members, and students. This is the most powerful psychotherapeutic tool available to us. As Denys Kelsey said to me when I was fortunate enough to have a session with him, “Twelve hours on my couch will equal 18 months of the best conventional psychotherapy.”
I consider Kelsey the patriarch of PLT, and I wholeheartedly agree with him. In fact, I’ll even take it one step further: A single PLT session can be better than 18 years of conventional psychotherapy! I no longer “believe” in reincarnation; I know that this is the reality in which we live.
That is why in 1972, shortly after I began adding autogenic training to the daily activities of my patients, I also began doing PLT sessions with those who seemed to have the greatest blocks to overcome. The power to heal that we were able to access in a clinical setting using this therapy was incredible. I helped patients uncover many fascinating stories that facilitated their healing over the years, but one of the very first cases is a good example of the benefit of this kind of therapy, so I will recount it here.
At the time, I was treating a young woman with intractable pain and paraplegia (paralysis) following a gunshot wound through her abdomen and spine. For the sake of privacy, let me simply call her Lela. She told me upon admission to the clinic that she had shot herself accidentally while cleaning her husband’s gun. He was a policeman, so this sounded plausible.
However, when I did a PLT session with her, she recalled a remarkable story that sounded like the account of Anne Boleyn’s life, right up to the rolling of her head after the guillotine. Lela faced and went through death in this experience that she revisited.
Afterward I asked her, “Lela, what does this mean?”
She was amnesic for an entire hour, unable to remember the details. Fortunately, I had recorded the session and was able to play it back to her with her permission. Then I asked the question again. This time she replied, “I don’t know. The last thing I remember is that my husband and I were arguing. I was told when I awoke after surgery that I shot myself accidentally while cleaning his gun.”
She had just revisited a life where she had died as a martyred wife, and I could see this revelation as a form of allegory. I replied to her, “I know. You think your husband shot you.” Then she broke into tears, able to face the reality of her situation, which is the first step in healing.
Indeed, it’s never possible to know whether the past life that was revealed to her actually happened at some earlier historical time, but that is of no importance. The allegory is the key to the therapy. Lela made a breakthrough that day and was finally able to gain total control of her pain. Returning to health, she divorced her husband and later found work as a counselor in a pain clinic.
Continuing the Advancement of Medical Intuition
While at a meeting in April 1984, I met Caroline Myss, who introduced herself as one of those who could “read” human illness. A couple of months later, I phoned her and suggested that we test her accuracy. It turned out that she was correct 93 percent of the time in making psychological, physical, and biochemical diagnoses … as long as she didn’t diagnose more than eight cases per day. It was a thrill to meet someone so accurate.
By 1988, Caroline and I were writing two books together: AIDS: Passageway to Transformation and The Creation of Health. We also began to do workshops together in the U.S., England, Scotland, and the Netherlands, and she has since gone on to become a best-selling author herself.
From the beginning of our work together, Caroline’s belief that we have a purpose in life—a purpose to use the power within us responsibly, wisely, and lovingly—significantly resonated with me. It was the very essence of conscientiousness, something we both deeply believe in.
It was a joy to mentor her and contribute to her training. We spent countless hours discussing cases, clarifying medical terminology, traveling and presenting together, and in general talking a lot about how we could advance and help this profession. Toward this end, in the late 1990s Caroline and I established a comprehensive training course for individuals who were interested in becoming medical intuitives.
We went on to establish the American Board of Scientific Medical Intuition (ABSMI) to provide training in this field, leading to a board certification for those who were capable of passing the exam. As cofounders, Caroline and I wanted to ensure that standards were being met, but it turned out that few people were willing to put in the dedicated time for study and preparation that it took to be able to pass the final exam.
However, throughout the process, many of the students we worked with as part of the ABSMI program did become quite proficient as counseling intuitives, and many have gone on to use their gifts in that way. To be considered a fully competent medical intuitive, you must be able to make accurate physical, mental, or emotional diagnoses of recognized medical disorders, diseases, or illnesses.
Could Crystals Be Used for Healing?
Another field of study that I took great interest in was the power of crystals. In late 1987, I was approached by Lynn “Buck” Charlson, who asked if I would study the effects of crystals on healing. Buck Charlson was a brilliant man, a prolific inventor and innovator within the field of hydraulics, and he was also the founder of The Life Science Foundation. He said that if I agreed to study crystals, he would give me a research grant.
I spent months pondering the issue. On one occasion, I had a very strong psychic intuition that placing crushed sapphire crystal over the heart would eliminate the need for bypass surgery. As tempting as that concept was, I am a neurosurgeon, not a cardiologist or cardiac surgeon. And since cardiac surgery is one of the sacred money cows in medicine, and I was not a specialist in that field, I felt it best to ignore the suggestion! Instead, I opted to do research on the possibility of imprinting crystals to enhance happiness.
The following is a summary of that first successful project, which was one of the first of 12 research grants from the Charlson Foundation and later through The Life Science Foundation. Throughout those years, I visited Buck outside Minneapolis about four times each year to discuss our research endeavors and findings.
Eventually, I did settle on using a stone for healing energy, but not sapphire. Instead, I chose quartz crystal, which is piezoelectric. This means that when you put pressure on quartz, it creates electricity, indicating to me that it could also receive, store, and transmit electromagnetic energy, which suited my needs for this study. The human body is similar to this mineral, because it’s largely piezoelectric, especially in bones, muscles, tendons, and intestines.
I already knew that we could help 85 percent of depressed patients come out of depression through our two-week therapeutic program using education, music, exercise, autogenic training, transcranial electrical stimulation, and photostimulation (lights). Now I wondered, What results could we get using crystals?
For Buck’s study, I enrolled 200 patients with depression. Throughout the two weeks, I worked with each patient in groups of 12 to 15 in order to develop a personal-healing phrase for each of them. Each phrase needed to include healing qualities with six or fewer words and an image of healing. Subsequent groups followed the same procedure. On the last day of each two-week session, patients were given a shaped quartz crystal or a placebo glass crystal. In this double-blind study, the nurse who distributed the crystals and glass did not know who received which one.
Once patients had the glass or quartz crystal in their hands, I instructed them on how to imprint it. They were to pass it through a candle flame with the intent of erasing any information in the crystal. Then with each of three deep breaths, they blew into their crystal while mentally repeating to themselves their specific healing phrase and visualizing their image. Then each patient placed the crystal (or placebo) into a small, white-satin pouch and wore it around the neck during the day. For the first week, they were asked to re-imprint it daily by following the same routine, and then to imprint it once a week thereafter.
After three months, the patients came back for a follow-up evaluation. Of the 200 patients, 85 percent believed they received the real quartz crystal, even though they knew they had only a 50 percent chance. Nonetheless, the results were remarkable. Only 18 percent (about average for a placebo) of those who received glass crystals were still out of depression, but 70 percent of those who received the real quartz crystal were still out of depression. This study proved—beyond any reasonable doubt—that quartz could assist in healing. In fact, I don’t know of any antidepressant drug that comes even close to that effectiveness!
The World Beyond What We Can See
There are many more alternative therapies that I have explored and used for myself and my patients over the years. I have written whole books and compendiums on many of them, including Energy Medicine, Medical Intuition, Sacred Healing, and Life Beyond 100, but it’s not my intent to give an exhaustive discussion here on all of them.
Suffice it to say that alternative therapists, medical intuitives, and psychics in general get their inspiration in many different ways. For me, I would very often get an inkling of what was wrong or what was going on with a patient far beyond what I could have known given my training—or by reading their lab results or referring to what they told me. Other times, I would get more than just a hunch of an idea; rather, I would have actual conversations back and forth with angelic guides who identified themselves to me, sometimes by a name, sometimes just as my teacher.
Often I heard just a few sentences, but at times these conversations going on in my head would continue for up to an hour. These bursts of inspiration frequently come to me when I’m meditating, but not always. Sometimes, ideas just download into my head while I am feeding the animals on the farm or sitting in a meeting—anywhere at any time.
Virtually all of my own innovations—the 12 patents I have to my name that are related to pain therapy and the new products and supplements that I have developed—came about first from a point of divine inspiration. I would then use my scientific training to devise research studies that would prove and further develop what I had been intuitively given. Or in the case of my patients, my instincts would be validated in the course of my treatment of that individual.
Like so many of my colleagues in the holistic-medicine field, I have been blessed with being able to tap into the wisdom of the ages because I am open to it. But I firmly believe (as did Edgar Cayce and so many other leading thinkers) that all people in the world have intuition available to them as a tool to use in their lives. Some of us have just developed this skill to a higher degree than others.
I have been given and tested so many concepts throughout my career and done so much research that it has filled 29 books, and I’m sure that I have enough for 29 more. But most important to our discussions in this particular book are the practical lifestyle changes that we all can make that will lead us to a longer, healthier, and more conscientious life, and that is where we are going next.