Читать книгу Medical Intuition - C. Norman Shealy Md PhD - Страница 6

While I was growing up my mother visited a little black lady outside our town, Lil Brown, known throughout the southeast as an excellent psychic. Supposedly, she had been consulted by our governor and various prominent people. Her technique was to have a client tell the problem. Lil would then dream on the solution and come up with a passage from the Bible. She then used that passage to give a practical answer. A remarkable use of scripture as a metaphor! In fact, just before I left for college, my mother had Lil do a “reading” for me. Lil told me, “You will be well known, but you will never be president of the United States.” I do not remember ever wanting to be president! Indeed, I cannot understand why anyone would want that position.

Three years later, while I was an undergraduate at Duke University, I was asked by the director of “The University Players,” to write a radio skit on Dr. J.B. Rhine's work in parapsychology. I spent three months interviewing this first professor of parapsychology and observing in his lab. I was convinced that he had exhaustively proven that individuals could “guess” correctly the contents of closed envelopes, precognitively know what was coming next, and do psychokinesis—influence the rolling of dice. The work was fascinating but left me frustrated—why did he not do something useful with this parapsychological wisdom?

The terms used in those days were psychic, clairvoyant, psychokinesis, viewing, and precognition—all anathema to “academic” psychologists!

The skit was produced in the spring of the year, and I went on to medical school in the fall of 1952. For the next eighteen years I was preoccupied with medical school and graduate training in neurological surgery and my beginning clinical practice. Actually, I chose that field because I thought somehow it would help me understand the brain-mind. In medical school I had two major experiences with what I later would recognize as intuition. In my sophomore year, in Physical Diagnosis class, I made a diagnosis, which was correct, but which the professor felt I should not have been capable of making! He accused me of cheating and wrote a scathing report for my student file. Two years later, he apologized and asked me to intern in the Department of Medicine. He said he had withdrawn his earlier report from my file. In my junior year, I made a diagnosis of sarcoidosis of the pituitary gland in a patient who had entered the hospital over the weekend. Sarcoidosis is an autoimmune disorder that can be very serious, especially when it involves the brain or master gland. The professor of endocrinology was shocked when I presented my diagnosis and said to me, “You are a medical student. You can't make such a diagnosis.” It was the first case of sarcoidosis of the master gland seen at Duke, and Professor Engel and I wrote a definitive paper on the subject.

Meanwhile, my research throughout medical school was investigating the physiology of the amagydala of the cat. The amagydala is strongly tied to emotions. Then, during my neurosurgery residency, I developed interest in the physiology of pain and continued that when I joined the faculty at Western Reserve Medical School. There I discovered the physiological foundation for pain mechanisms, a paper for which I was given the first Harold G. Wolff Award for Research in Pain. Remember this event, as it later became one of numerous synchronicity aspects of my life, a concept or term which, at that time, would have had no meaning! I met, at that meeting of The American Headache Society, Dr. Janet Travell, President Kennedy's physician, and a leading expert in myofascial pain. Out of my work came also my first two inventions—TENS, Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulation, and DCS, Dorsal Column Stimulation—both now used worldwide. Again, a beginning of what I would later know as intuition at work!

From age sixteen, I had planned to be a professor of neurosurgery. In early 1966, I was offered an opportunity to be interviewed to take over a major department of neurosurgery. As I had experienced by that time major meetings with a large number of chairs of Departments of Neurosurgery, I suddenly realized that I really did not like many of them. They were often arrogant, rude, or alcoholics and not individuals with whom I wanted to socialize! In fact, neurosurgeons had a reputation from the early days in the twentieth century of being the rudest of all specialists! I phoned Dr. Talmage Peele, my mentor since I entered medical school; I had done my amagydala research in his lab; and his response was, “Junior, you are ruining your career.”

Suddenly, I made a critical decision—to leave academia. I took a position as chair of the new department of neuroscience at the Gundersen Clinic in LaCrosse, Wisconsin. The Gundersen Clinic was at that time the tenth largest private clinic in the United States. One of its founders had been president of the American Medical Association, and my position at Gundersen Clinic would allow me an opportunity to be clinically active but do some continuing research. Over the next five years, I was by far the busiest I have ever been, often working eighteen-hour days and seeing hundreds of patients with the broadest variety of neurosurgical problems. During that time our department expanded to include three neurosurgeons, three neurologists, and a neuropsychologist. I was able to have wonderful laboratory assistants who could carry out the research protocols that I developed. I even worked with a palsied orangutan, Shakey, in whom I demonstrated that electrical stimulation could indeed control tremor. In collaboration with Dr. Ted Tetzlaff, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin, LaCrosse, we demonstrated electrical control of seizures in rats as well as control of penile erections in monkeys.

Meanwhile, my research with chronic stimulation of the spinal cord in cats and monkeys had proven successful enough that in 1968 I presented my work at the American Association of Neurological Surgeons in St. Louis. The paper was so controversial that physicians jumped up on the stage and grabbed my microphone. The paper was the first ever given at that meeting that was turned down for publication in the Journal of Neurosurgery as too controversial. It was subsequently published in Analgesia & Anesthesia. Two years later, I presented my first eight cases of DCS in human patients with advanced, incurable pain. Suddenly neurosurgeons wanted to jump on the bandwagon and do the procedure!

I had developed the original equipment with Tom Mortimer, who had done his master's and doctoral research in my lab. When he graduated, he joined the faculty at Case Institute of Technology and went on to become a famous biomedical engineer. He suggested that I invite Medtronic, the leading manufacturer of pacemakers, to manufacture the Dorsal Column Stimulator (DCS) devices. They agreed initially to support the Dorsal Column Study Group, a consortium of neurosurgeons who planned to operate on a total of five hundred patients and follow up on them, over five years, before we made the procedure publicly available. I tried from the beginning to interest Medtronic also in TENS, but they refused until one of their research engineers left the company and began manufacturing the first TENS devices. Two weeks later, his replacement at Medtronic produced a smaller device, using the electronics I recommended! As so often happens in industry, greed crept in. Another company started advertising DCS to the neurosurgical community and Medtronic followed suit. The study group had barely inserted stimulators in 480 patients, but few followed five years. And, unfortunately, the design of the electrode was changed from my initial design. That led to many complications and forced me to abandon the approach. Forty years after my first DCS patient, I was invited to receive a “Lifetime Achievement Award” for the creation of DCS, even though I have not inserted a DCS since 1973!

Meanwhile, in the fall of 1969, my family moved to a farm outside LaCrosse and began our work with Appaloosa horses. My wife has been the major force in that work, but our involvement with horses opened the door to my old, dormant interest in psychic phenomena! In October 1970, I flew to Colorado to visit Sun Appaloosa Ranch, where the owners were retiring and had some champion horses for sale. I drove down from Denver to Castle Rock, and when Joyce Cannon opened the door, I knew her at a deep soul level! We spent a couple of hours discussing psychic phenomena and even past lives, which I had never before even thought about! I wound up purchasing eight of Ralph and Joyce's horses, and we became good friends.

Two weeks later, I received Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain from Joyce. Wow! That really did the trick. I was excited to see how far parapsychology had come in eighteen years. Another week passed and Joyce sent me Shafica Karagulla's book Breakthrough to Creativity. Here was proof of practical application of clairvoyance! I wrote to Shafica and asked for an address of Kay, who had been mentioned in the book as highly accurate in making medical diagnoses just by seeing the patient. She told me to “find your own psychic.” I was disappointed but began asking colleagues if they knew any good psychics! I was lucky to stay out of the insane asylum.

In November 1970, on my monthly visit to the University of Minnesota, where I had a teaching appointment, I said to one of my colleagues, “Pain is the most common symptom that takes patients to a physician, but no one has specialized in pain management.” His response was, “An interesting idea, but who would ruin his career doing that!” I was immediately convinced that I should found a comprehensive pain management clinic. Over the next nine months, the idea incubated. In July, I visited Dr. Wilbert Fordyce at the University of Washington to see his five-year-old Behavioral Modification, or Operant Conditioning, Program. Working with just one hundred patients in the five years, he hospitalized them for two months. His program was what I would call passive behavioral modification. But he had a 60 percent success rate doing little but ignoring their pain and weaning them from drugs, as well as a modicum of physical activity. He felt that if he had only a 10 percent success rate with these chronic pain patients, then society would break even. The cost of these patients to the medical system is enormous! In August 1971, I made the decision to leave Gundersen Clinic, as I needed space in which to develop my ideas. I went across town to St. Francis Hospital, where I was allowed to take over an entire floor in the oldest part of the hospital to develop an inpatient pain management program. Not being born Catholic, little did I suspect at that time how strongly I would be attracted to St. Francis— and have been for many centuries. More about that in a later chapter.

I was already being sent four hundred chronic pain patients from around the world to consider DCS. I was selecting only 6 percent, rejecting the other 94 percent as too disturbed emotionally to have even this relatively benign procedure. Now, you have to realize that I knew virtually nothing about psychology or psychiatry. The worst course I ever took anywhere was psychiatry at Duke. On the final exam, they gave this asinine directive: “List five qualities of a good psychiatrist.” I wrote “Crazy as Hell” five times. They threatened to flunk me until I replied, “Do you want me in this class again next year?”

In October 1971, I opened the world's first comprehensive pain clinic, The Pain Rehabilitation Clinic. Those four hundred patients I was being sent each year were the first to experience my form of “active” behavioral modification. They were hospitalized and gotten out of bed at 7 a.m. and not allowed to return to bed until 9 p.m. They were assigned many active physical activities, sent to the YMCA five days a week for water exercise, treated with my intuitively received electroacupuncture, the old crude electrical stimulator patented in 1919 by C.W. Kent, a naturopath from Illinois, and ignored when they mentioned or demonstrated pain behavior. I enlisted a young psychiatrist to do “Group Therapy” with my key insistence that they must not be allowed to complain about anything. Little did I know! A year later, I sat in on one of his sessions that I found appalling—it was largely a bitch/moan party. I have never since indulged such pandering in group wallowing!

In January 1972, Dr. Janet Travell was quoted in the Wall Street Journal, stating that all the publicity over James Reston's control of pain in China after his December appendectomy wasn't that important. “There's a young neurosurgeon in Wisconsin who has a Western form of acupuncture!” Acupuncture was suddenly a hot item. I had been doing my totally spontaneous form of electroacupuncture since 1966! (Synchronicity number 2). Soon thereafter I was invited by Dr. Paul Dudley White, Eisenhower's physician, to visit him to discuss my Western form of acupuncture –-major beginning of Synchronicity number 3! In April 1972, I flew to Boston to consult with Dr. White, truly one of the great Brahmins of American Medicine. At 84, having just flown in from Greece, he was busy seeing patients. We spent two hours enthusiastically discussing my work and I flew home.

A month later I received a phone call: “I am Bob Matson, president of the American Academy of Parapsychology and Medicine. 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?

I went to the symposium, which was attended by twelve hundred physicians. I met many who became lifelong friends, among others:

• Dr. William Tiller, chair of the Department of Physics and a leading materials scientist interested in parapsychology

• Drs. Bill and Gladys McGarey of the A.R.E. Clinic in Phoenix

• Olga Worrall, renowned spiritual healer

• Dr. Felix Mann, British physician specializing for twelve years in acupuncture

• Dr. Phil Toyama, Japanese/American physician and acupuncturist

I learned from Dr. Toyama that the technique I had been using, of placing a needle in the center of pain and stimulating a needle below the pain to one above the pain, was one basic principle of traditional acupuncture—although they had been twisting the needles for manual stimulation. Later, I was to learn also that the Chinese began using electrical stimulation of needles in 1966—the same year I began doing that— another synchronicity! But perhaps the most important life-changing event at Stanford was talking with the McGareys. I told them I was planning a symposium on pain at the end of September. They said, “You should meet Dr. Bob Brewer. He is a surgeon who thinks like you. He is planning a symposium in Virginia Beach, at the A.R.E. the end of August.”

Thus began what for me became the “rupturing of the mental hymen,” as I learned later from Dr. Andria Puharich. Now you need to know that I had never heard of the A.R.E. or Edgar Cayce! “The Week of Attunement” symposium was a highlight of this life. I learned about colonics, color therapy, trance mediumship and, above all, reincarnation. I also met Dr. Genevieve Haller, a wonderful chiropractor and dear friend. Her husband, Jeffrey Furst, had just written The Return of Frances Willard. When I asked for a referral to a good psychic, he suggested Henry Rucker. That led me full steam ahead into medical intuition!

I learned that, off the program, Dr. Lindsay Jacobs was going to do a past-life therapy session. I was able to get in to watch it, and it literally blew my mind! I said to myself, “I must try this but I can't do it in front of anyone else—maybe I was a prostitute in a Greek war camp!” I have to assume I was! Otherwise, it would not have entered my mind! Dr. Jacobs agreed to do a private session. It was indeed transformative. I saw myself as a physician in Egypt three thousand years ago during a cholera epidemic. We stopped the epidemic by burning the bodies. I recognized my wife and my son of that life as people in my current life—friends. I also realized that, despite my concerns about the path of modern medicine, it was my journey to help change it. For two hours after that experience, I wandered on the beach, lost in my first true “peak” experience, seeing in those ineffable moments the interrelationship of all.

That evening, Joel Andrews, a trance-medium harpist, played a concert for the entire audience, and I had my first out-of-body experience, floating above the crowd! Indeed, the “Week of Attunement” thrust me well into another world. A few weeks later, Joel visited me and did a harp concert in the chapel at St. Francis Hospital, and I did my first recording of a guided imagery exercise for past life therapy. That was part of the first holistic medical meeting, with four hundred attendees! We also had Dr. Wilburt Fordyce; Dr. Richard Sternberg, a leading chiropractor; Dr. Fred Barge, a Christian Scientist expert; and a few others outside “convention.” The local medical society spent two hours attempting to get me censored for having the chiropractor on the program! Fortunately, I had more friends than enemies and it was not passed.

In the fall, I visited Olga Worrall at Mt. Washington United Methodist Church in Baltimore, where, for over thirty-five years, Olga and her husband, Ambrose (who died in 1971), conducted spiritual healing services every Thursday morning. Three hundred people crowded into the tiny church for the laying on of hands. Among the miracles that began that day, I was allowed, after the service, to examine a professor of English from a major university. She had advanced breast cancer, eroding through the skin as a black, gangrenous malignancy. One month later, a letter from her stated that her cancer had totally disappeared! This began my interest in spiritual healing. I wanted to publish a book, Twenty-five Cases Suggestive of Spiritual Healing. I began to have Olga send me letters so that I could get permission from the patients to obtain their medical records.

Eventually, my interest in spiritual healing became the book Sacred Healing. Equally important, Olga shared with me one of my favorite all-time booklets, Essay on Prayer, written by Ambrose in the '50s. Several other booklets by Ambrose were also treasures, and Olga gave me permission to reproduce the booklet to keep it in print. She also approved my doing a guided meditative tape of the Essay on Prayer. Much later that booklet became the foundation for my DVD on holistic healing, Medical Renaissance—The Secret Code. Olga also introduced me to Religious Science and Science of Mind.

Shortly after that week, I phoned Henry Rucker and arranged a one-hour consultation with him for December 19th. As I walked into his office, Henry said, “I've been waiting nineteen years for you. My teacher told me you would come.” I spent three hours with Henry, who told me much more about me than I could have dreamed! At the conclusion of our visit, I invited Henry to come to LaCrosse to see how well he could diagnose patients.

One month later, Henry arrived with eight other psychics, eight of the nine being black. I noted that they had just doubled the black population of LaCrosse! Meanwhile, I had told my twenty-five in-hospital patients what I had in mind, and all were quite eager to participate. One at a time they were brought into my office, and each of the psychics looked at them or a handwriting specimen. They were not allowed to ask any questions. When they all were in agreement, their diagnoses were 98 percent accurate. There were three paraplegic patients—all from different causes—gunshot wound, trauma, and infection. The team correctly gave the cause of paralysis! I took Henry on rounds in the hospital. One of my patients had had surgery a few days earlier and had spiked a white blood count to forty-two thousand. We were concerned that a latent leukemia had been evoked by the stress of surgery. Henry stated that there was just a problem with the liver and that the patient would be fine. Two days later, the results of the bone marrow exam came back, and it turned out that he had a leukemoid reaction to the anesthetic—a very rare event. The patient left the hospital well within a couple of days!

I was hooked! I wanted Henry to work with me. At the time, I was a consultant with a Fortune 500 company, and I asked them for a $50,000 grant to study psychic diagnosis. They gave it with the caveat that I must never mention their name in association with the study! I had a ball! Going on word-of-mouth referrals, I visited a total of seventy-five “psychics” around the country. They were given only a photograph of patients with name and birth date. I had designed a form that could, at best, give a 10 percent chance of making a correct diagnosis by chance. Most of the psychics were 50 percent accurate—five times chance and highly statistically significant!

Five of those I studied were 70 to 75 percent accurate; truly amazing. Incidentally, physicians are said to be 80 percent accurate with an initial history and physical exam of the patient. The results were published in the A.R.E. Journal, (Shealy, C.N. “Perspectives on psychic diagnosis.” A.R.E. Journal, September 1976; 11, pp. 208-217), which may be read in Appendix A.

Among the notable intuitives I studied was Jack Schwartz, who was 75 percent accurate and who told me that I was trying to cram seven lives into this one. He also introduced me to photostimulation with his I.S.I.S. I was intrigued enough to purchase twelve of his units and have an electronics person change them from flashing alternatively into right and left eye to flashing them simultaneously into both eyes, to enhance relaxation. Eventually, this led to my later devices, The Shealy RelaxMate I and II, and my first patent. Incidentally, Medtronic told me my ideas for DCS and TENS were not patentable, and in my naïve early days, I believed them! They actually patented both devices. I now patent all my discoveries and currently have applied for number 12. Incidentally, all of my inventions are related to my own medical intuition. More on that later!

By April 1973, I wanted Henry Rucker to become a counselor at my clinic at St. Francis Hospital. The problems—he was black, had no college degree (two years at a junior college), and had created his own metaphysical church, something like, The Holy Essence of the Wisdom of the Light of Hermes! I said, “It won't fly, Henry.” By this time, I had become quite acquainted with Unity, Religious Science, and Science of Mind and learned that all Science of Mind churches are independent. So Henry and I formed the Science of Mind Church of Chicago. Philosophically, we were totally compatible with Ernest Holmes' philosophy. I was ordained. I figured that I was so far out on a twig that if my physician colleagues objected to my research, I could truthfully say it was part of my religion. Henry was immediately accepted as a pastoral counselor in my clinic at St. Francis! Many of the nuns and physicians consulted him. And, of course, the creation of the church was a remarkable intuitive (synchronistic) foresight, as it became the foundation for our school, Holos University Graduate Seminary.

Henry was the best one-on-one counselor I have ever known. Although he was 70 to 75 percent accurate in making a medical diagnosis, his forte was counseling. The son of our congregational minister had had severe drug and behavioral problems for years. One hour with Henry and that young man came out saying, “Why didn't anyone talk to me like that before.” He has been free of drugs and behavioral problems for the subsequent thirty-six years! Henry was also a healer. One of the most striking situations was a six-year-old whose skull fracture had not healed in over a year. One session with Henry and the fracture healed rapidly. Later, we demonstrated that his healing could raise DHEA (dehydroepiandrosterone) with a single session. Henry worked with us until his retirement. He was a friend and confidant throughout the rest of his life. My children looked upon him as a major friend and counselor. He died at age eighty-four.

In January 1974 I was told by a friend that I should meet Dr. Robert Leichtman, a board-certified internist, who was quite psychic—by far the best of all those I studied initially and who will be discussed in a later chapter about the best Medical Intuitives. Suffice it for now to say that he was 80 percent accurate in physical diagnoses and 96 percent accurate in evaluating the psychological status of patients. Bob has also become a lifelong friend and advisor.

In 1974, I also entered my Ph.D. in psychology (which I completed in 1977) at the Humanistic Psychology Institute. It was one of the great learning experiences of my life. I focused on creating what I call the software of biofeedback, Biogenics. My first major public book, 90 Days to Self-Health, based upon my dissertation, was published the week I passed my defense of dissertation.

Bob Leichtman and Henry became for many years my major consultants when I had a problem with making a diagnosis or “getting through” to patients. Bob remains so today. Meanwhile, in May 1978, I was responsible for founding The American Holistic Medical Association. The major reason for this was my hope that spirituality would become a major factor in medicine. And, to me, medical intuition, intuition, synchronicity, and reincarnation are essential elements in the broad field of spirituality.

In April 1984, at the “Council Grove Meeting,” I met Caroline Myss, who introduced herself as “one of those,” when I had been discussing psychic diagnosis. I asked her how good she was, and of course she did not know. A few months later, I began calling her and eventually I demonstrated that she was 93 percent accurate in making a diagnosis physically or psychologically. We have worked together since that time, doing workshops all over this country, Canada, and Europe. In 1998 we began collaboration on The Creation of Health. In writing that book, I decided that we should not use the terms clairvoyant and psychic and we created the term Medical Intuitive. Although the concept had existed at least since the 1830s, this was the first known use of the term. So the birth of Medical Intuitive was officially in the fall of 1988. Since that birth, the term has become extremely popular.

Unfortunately, it has been all too popular. At one time there were 1,200,000 listings for Medical Intuitive on Google. At least 99.99 percent of those listed have had little or no training or documentation. Many have written to me but with evaluation have been zero accurate. Other sociopaths who claim to be Medical Intuitives have told me that I had leukemia (1988) and lots of other inaccurate garbage. Indeed, I consider this type of nonsense intuitive malpractice!

The main reason I am writing this book is to document the great benefit of accurate medical intuition! It is a field of great importance, which deserves qualified and competent Medical Intuitives. But first, we need to lay the foundation for the broad field of intuition.