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What Your Doctor Won’t Tell You: The 6 Secrets of Energy Medicine Jed Diamond, Ph.D. has been a health-care professional for the last 45 years. He is the author of 9 books, including Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places, Male Menopause, The Irritable Male Syndrome, and Mr. Mean: Saving Your Relationship from the Irritable Male Syndrome . He offers counseling to men, women, and couples in his office in California or by phone with people throughout the U.S. and around the world. To receive a Free E-book on Men’s Health and a free subscription to Jed’s e-newsletter go to www.MenAlive.com. I wrote an article recently called Energy Medicine for Men: The Ultimate Power Tool for Guys Who Want Their Lives to Work. Here is more about Energy Medicine and how you can use it in your life. I graduated from U.C. Santa Barbara and began medical school at U.C. San Francisco in 1965. My desire to help people goes back as far as I can remember. I’m sure it’s related to the fact that my father tried to commit suicide when I was 5 years old. I felt responsible. My father became increasingly depressed when he couldn’t find work and he was unable to support the family. In my childhood mind, I thought “if I hadn’t been born, he wouldn’t have a family to support and therefore I must be responsible for his wanting to end his life.” I became a psychotherapist, in some ways, to work out my guilt feelings and to find out what goes on in a person’s mind that would induce them to kill themselves. In a broader sense I wanted to understand why men are the way they are (and hence women are the way they are) and if there is any way we can learn to live happily ever after. I don’t have the answers yet, but I’ve been enjoying the journey. Medicine and the healing arts have changed a great deal since I began learning about them in 1965. But you aren’t likely to hear about information from your family doctor or from the
medical/pharmaceutical complex of which he (or increasingly, she) is a part. The Wizard of Oz: A Doctor Named Mehmet Bridges East and West Most people have seen the smiling Dr. Oz on the Oprah Winfrey show or on his own T.V. program The Dr. Oz Show. He is personable, caring, and perfectly bridges the East and the West. Mehmet Cengiz Oz was born June 11, 1960 in Cleveland, Ohio to Turkish parents Suna and Mustafa who had immigrated from Konya, Turkey. Dr. Oz is fluent in both English and Turkish and is a holder of both Turkish and American citizenship. His academic credentials are impeccable. In 1982 he received his undergraduate degree from Harvard University and in 1986, he obtained a joint M.D. and MBA degree from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and The Wharton School. He has authored six New York Times best sellers including You: The Owner’s Manual, You: The Smart Patient, YOU: On a Diet, YOU: Staying Young, YOU: Being Beautiful as well as the award winning Healing from the Heart. However, he’s not just an engaging television personality and well read author. He is Vice-Chair and Professor of Surgery at Columbia University. He directs the Cardiovascular Institute and performs around 250 heart operations annually. He also heads the Complementary Medicine Program at New York-Presbyterian Hospital. "Alternative medicine needs to deal with the body's energy— something that traditional Western medicine generally does not,” says Dr. Oz. “We're beginning now to understand things that we know in our hearts are true but we could never measure. As we get better at understanding how little we know about the body, we begin to realize that the next big frontier in medicine is energy medicine. It's not the mechanistic part of the joints moving. It's not the chemistry of our body. It's understanding for the first time how energy influences how we feel."
Dr. Oz practices what he preaches. At New York Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia Medical Center, every patient recovering from heart surgery is offered massage therapy and cranial touch therapy thanks to Oz's advocacy. The goal is to stimulate the flow of energy in hopes that something from Eastern medicine can make a difference in the West. "I think that we're beginning to globalize medicine now," Oz said. "You have to take Eastern approaches and bring them to the West, and share West with the East." What is Energy Medicine? Energy medicine is one of the domains of “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) identified by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) which is part of the National Institutes of Health. Complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) is a group of diverse medical and health care systems, practices, and products that are not generally considered to be part of conventional medicine. •
Complementary medicine is used together with conventional medicine. An example of a complementary therapy is using aromatherapy to help lessen a patient’s discomfort following surgery.
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Alternative medicine is used in place of conventional medicine. An example of an alternative therapy is using a special diet to treat cancer instead of undergoing surgery, radiation, or chemotherapy that has been recommended by a conventional doctor.
Two of the pioneers in Energy Medicine, David Feinstein, Ph.D. and Donna Eden offer a good summary of this emerging field in a recent article, Six Pillars of Energy Medicine: Clinical Strengths of a Complementary Paradigm: “While energy medicine is still a microdot on the health care landscape in terms of utilization, public recognition, and the economic resources allocated to its development, Norman Shealy, M.D., the founding president of the American Holistic Medical Association, has
predicted based on striking clinical and emerging scientific findings that ‘energy medicine is the future of medicine.’ “Energy medicine is based on the supposition that illness results from disturbances in the body’s energies and energy fields and can be addressed via interventions into those energies and energy fields. “It is one of five domains of "complementary and alternative medicine" identified by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), with others including biologically based practices (such as the ingestion of herbs, vitamins, minerals, and amino acids), manipulative and bodybased practices (such as chiropractic, osteopathy, massage, rolfing, and reflexology), and mind-body medicine (such as hypnosis, visual imagery, meditation, and biofeedback). NIH also recognizes whole medical systems, which may incorporate elements of the above, such as traditional Chinese medicine, Ayurvedic medicine, naturopathy, homeopathy, and various indigenous healing traditions.” The Six Pillars of Energy Medicine. Feinstein and Eden go on to describe the 6 pillars of energy medicine. Conventional medicine, at its foundation, focuses on the biochemistry of cells, tissue, and organs. Energy medicine, at its foundation, focuses on the fields that organize and control the growth and repair of cells, tissues, and organs, and on ways of influencing those fields. This affords energy medicine several strengths in comparison with the conventional medical model. Six of these strengths can, in fact, be thought of as the pillars that establish energy medicine as a significant development in health care. Table 1 provides an overview of these six pillars, the premises that support them, and an example for each of how its strength might be utilized in a clinical situation.
Table 1 Six Pillars of Energy Medicine (EM)
Pillar
Premise
Practice
1. REACH: EM can address biological processes at their energetic foundations so is able to impact the full spectrum of physical conditions
EM optimizes the energies that surround, permeate, and support body structure (e.g., cells, organs, blood, lymph) and body function (e.g., immunity, respiration, cardiovascular). EM methods also influence gene expression.
Disturbances in the energy flow of a patient with multiple sclerosis can be corrected by holding, tapping, or massaging specific energy points, bringing about changes in the disease process rather than the symptom suppression of most MS treatments.
2. EFFICIENCY: EM regulates biological processes with precision, speed, and flexibility
EM techniques address systemic as well as specific disease factors, send signals that are hundreds of times faster than chemical signals, and provide instant feedback to the practitioner so interventions can be adjusted for intended outcomes.
Balancing and strengthening the energies that surround and permeate the heart of a post-coronary patient leads to an internal environment that better supports healing and repair.
3. PRACTICALITY: EM fosters healing and prevents illness with methods that can be readily, economically, and non-invasively applied
EM utilizes specific movements, postures, and hands-on approaches that do not require high-tech equipment and do not result in unintended side-effects.
Assessing disturbances in the energy flow to the kidneys of a patient with renal failure allows interventions that are more flexible and precise than medication or surgery and can be used preventively, circumventing damage to a vulnerable organ.
4. PATIENT EMPOWERMENT: EM includes methods that can be utilized on an athome, self-help basis, fostering a stronger patient and practitioner partnership in the healing process
EM procedures can be self-administered to assess systems that are out of balance, implement corrective actions, and build resilient energy patterns throughout the body.
Cirrhosis patients can on a daily basis utilize techniques that balance the energies that impact the liver and enhance its ability to heal.
5. QUANTUM COMPATIBILITY: EM adopts nonlinear concepts consistent with distant healing, the healing impact of prayer, and the role of intention in healing
EM explores fields that influence consciousness and work over a distance ("macroscopic quantum interactions"), postulating why intention and expectation have salient outcomes, as illustrated in the placebo effect and distant healing.
Cancer patients can be shown how the energies of their thoughts and imagery affect their healing, and they can be taught techniques which engage the healing power of focused intention.
6. HOLISTIC ORIENTATION: EM strengthens the integration of body, mind, and spirit, leading not only to a focus on healing, but to achieving greater well-being, peace, and passion for life
EM is based on the principle that the body, mind, and spirit are integrally connected, and it promotes their harmonious integration.
Ulcerative colitis patients can be shown how psychological conflicts may exacerbate their symptoms and can be provided therapies which quickly alter the energetic foundations of those conflicts.
Feinstein and Eden conclude by asking, “What does this disregard for the role of energy in regulating biological processes mean for contemporary medicine?” It means more invasive procedures that are at the same time less able to target underlying causal mechanisms and less able to affect, with precision, the mechanisms it can influence. For instance, when electromagnetic imbalances stimulate the body to produce a chemical to restore balance, such as estrogen or progesterone, the chemical is produced in the precise quantities needed and only where needed.
Energy interventions designed to produce more estrogen or progesterone produce electromagnetic signals that cause the body to create the needed hormone using its own natural mechanisms. When medications enter the bloodstream, on the other hand, their dosage is based on averages and guesswork, and they travel to and impact parts of the body that are not intended, resulting for instance in the disastrous increases in heart disease, strokes, and breast cancer among women who have undergone hormone replacement therapy. Blandly called "side effects," between 100,000 and 300,000 people in the United States die each year from medications taken as prescribed, and unintended effects of medical treatment are by some estimates our leading cause of death. A team that surveyed government health statistics over the past decade concluded, "When the number one killer in a society is the health care system, then that system has no excuse except to address its own urgent shortcomings . . . beginning at its very foundations." For more information about Energy Medicine and the work of David Feinstein and Donna Eden, visit them at: Energy Medicine with Donna Eden-http://www.innersource.net/em/ Energy Psychology with David Feinstein— http://www.innersource.net/ep/ To learn more about my work: www.MenAlive.com
