DR. G'S HEALTH DIGEST October 19, 2003 You should have already received an announcement of a free lecture Dr. Gersten is giving this Wednesday, October 22nd at 7:30 pm. For information and reservations, please call his office at 760-633-3063. His lecture will answer these questions, which are covered in detail in the article that follows. Where do you start your healing journey? What is your first healing step? What is your second step? What is the right kind of health care practitioner for you right now? Are all treatment modalities equally effective? ESSENTIALS OF HEALING by Dr. Dennis Gersten reprinted from The Light Connection, Oct. 2003 Given the wide array of healing modalities and the extraordinary number of health care practitioners in Southern California, many people are confused about where to begin their healing journey? Which is the first door to open? Is there a correct sequencing of healing modalities? Are there any essentials at all in the process of getting well and becoming whole? Through the years, I have run into numerous people who have had wonderful responses to a particular healthcare practitioner or a particular product. Yet, it is clear to me that there is no single product or treatment modality that heals all people of all conditions. In examining these complex questions, I have arrived at the conclusion that there are certain universal healing principles and general guidelines. These are the “essentials of healing,” the doors one must open in order to fully recover. For many problems it is critical that you open the doors in the correct sequence. I will start with the obvious and then progress through items that are more complex. What follows is a list, which, in total, contains the essential steps of healing. No one item is the whole answer. We will start with the process of how you decide on a treatment modality. 1. If you’ve been in a car accident, you do not want to start with aromatherapy. This is where conventional, allopathic medicine excels. You want the best ER docs who can set fractures, stop the bleeding, give you IV’s or blood transfusions, and then sew you back together. This is certainly not the only role of allopathic medicine, but given this situation, you know which door to knock on. 2. What comes first is whatever is a true emergency. What comes second is whatever is the most painful or disabling symptom. 3. What are your goals? It is very important that you know what your main problem is, as well as your symptoms and a diagnosis, if you have one. Is it your intention to get back to normal? Do you want to alleviate symptoms so you can cope? Do you wish to transcend the old you and become a new you? Can your healer take you where you want to go and where your goals are leading? It is vital that you are honest with yourself, and take stock of your situation, so that you know what your first step is. It is also essential that you clearly know your goals, so that your healer does not have to spend a great amount of time just trying to figure out why you are in his office and what kind of help you are looking for. 4. If you or family members are dealing with the major mental disorders of schizophrenia or mania (bipolar), and the condition is unstable, my experience over a 25-year period is that medications are the way to go. Nutritional therapies are only marginally helpful when someone is psychotic. Bipolar illness, once stabilized with medications, can be aided by a variety of complementary and alternative therapies, after the crisis is over, but the bipolar brain needs to be treated very carefully, even with gentler alternative therapies. There are many psychotic people with borderline personality disorder, mis-diagnosed as schizophrenics, who will often do better on non- medication treatments and worse on psychotropic medications. That is because they are not truly schizophrenic. 5. Toxins do not come out of your body on their own, whether it is the mercury from dental amalgams or from tuna, lead from lead-based paint, or a wide variety of environmental pollutants. Many people believe that once they have replaced their mercury amalgams with porcelain, the mercury has then left their body. It hasn’t. Heavy metals remain buried deep within the body tissues, causing damage wherever they are, accelerating free radical damage, and depleting our cells of glutathione, our body’s natural detoxifying agent. You MUST get the lead out through a process of chelation. Removing toxins is not necessarily your first step in healing, but if you have heavy metals, removing them should be on your list of things to do on the way to health and vitality. 6. Detoxification pathways must be healed. In particular, the glutathione that gets depleted through toxins does not spring back to life, even when you remove the toxins. Compounds including N-acetyl-cysteine and undenatured whey proteins (with names like Biologically Pure Protein and ImmunePro) will build up your reserves of glutathione. Glutathione is a linchpin in body chemistry. It has four major functions: detoxification, anti-oxidant activity, support to energy chemistry, and protection of DNA. It is not difficult to restore glutathione and is essential. 7. The gastrointestinal (GI) tract must be healed if any illness is to be fully healed. I believe that healing the GI tract is the starting point for treating most chronic illness. The GI tract, if opened up, takes up the space of two tennis courts. Its four major functions are: absorbing nutrients, keeping toxins out, acting as the largest part of the immune system, and functioning as a second brain by producing large amounts of neurotransmitters. In my work, if there is an intestinal problem, I will use the Comprehensive Digestive Stool Analysis (CDSA) to analyze and treat the problem and will repeat the test in three months to see how we have progressed. If I have treated someone for a problem that, given my technologies, should have been cured or dramatically improved after several months of treatment, I will consider that the GI tract has still not recovered. I will also consider that there are heavy metals or other toxins that are preventing full recovery. I find very few alternative health care practitioners who disagree with this “healing essential.” No matter how long it takes, work on the GI tract until it is healed. 8. For almost all chronic illness, there is massive metabolic chaos, including tremendous amino acid abnormalities. In general, a metabolic foundation must be re-established through scientific nutritional testing and supplementation with key nutrients to reverse metabolic chaos. This is especially true in chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, and other fatigue states. If a metabolic foundation is not restored, then treatment becomes guesswork, and often only works temporarily, if at all. 9. In energy-depletion illnesses, it has been my overwhelming experience that, until a metabolic foundation is in place, which allows people to build up their reservoir of energy, chi, or prana — energy-based treatments don’t work very well. In other words, I have not seen homeopathy or acupuncture to be helpful in the early phases of these illnesses. However, they may be quite helpful down the road, after you have walked through the essential initial healing doors. Acupuncture can be quite helpful for pain associated with chronic conditions, but when you have little to no chi, energetic therapies have no chi to move around, to shuttle through different meridians, and into energetic balance. 10. Whatever symptom you have, treatment must always take into account the brain/mind. Everything is done in respect to, or related to, the brain/mind. In other words, if you are being treated for a thyroid disorder, consider first the impact the imbalance is having on your thoughts, emotions, and mental state. Without “control central” working at full speed, we will never feel well. 11. A clinician needs to know if his patient has a psychiatric emergency, such as being acutely suicidal. A healer may help with a pain in the back, but if the patient intends to go home and overdose, remember that the healing essential is to keep the person alive. These points are obvious to a psychiatrist but not necessarily to other healthcare practitioners. As the patient, do not expect your healer to be so psychic as to know how you are feeling. If you know you are experiencing a true mental/emotional crisis, please tell your healthcare practitioner so that he can prioritize carefully what needs to be done first. Then he needs to take steps to keep you alive, whether that means sending you for an emergency counseling session or to a psychiatric hospital for a brief stay until risky suicidal thoughts pass. 12. Establish structural integration. If your problem is musculo-skeletal, the first door you want to open may be to a chiropractor, physical therapist, orthopedist, or specialist in physical medicine and rehabilitation. A chiropractor is in a better position than I am about advising you in this area, but correcting spinal and skeletal imbalances becomes a priority at some point. It seems to me that chiropractic, for example, can be door #1 if your primary concern is low back pain. Or, you may have to walk through many other doors before chiropractic treatment becomes the logical next step. This is where we move from “healing essentials” into gray zones where there may be several modalities, several doors of equal importance. 13. Balance energy. If your general constitution is strong, acupuncture and Oriental Medicine may be your first door, but if you have very little chi to begin with, you need to go through the first steps in your healing journey before you will be ready for a professional to help move and balance energy. Chi, or energy, can be blocked in certain areas, which the acupuncturist can fix. Often the acupuncturist intends to re-direct chi, moving it through different channels than it is currently running through, or moving chi into organs that have energetic deficiencies. Not to be left out are energetic healers who do either hands on healing, massage or even distant healing. Energetic healers are also guided by principles of re-integrating a multitude of energy systems that are out of balance. But don’t expect energetic healing to remove heavy metals, restore glutathione, or build a solid metabolic foundation. 14. If you have seen a variety of health care practitioners, periodically you want to go back to the basics to make sure you don’t have a major medical problem that an allopathic doctor may be in the best position to diagnose and treat. A baseline of standard lab work along with a thorough physical exam should be done on a regular basis, especially with slippery problems that are not getting better. Go back to the basics to make sure you don’t have something like kidney failure, diabetes, or cancer. 15. Is it possible that there are many doors you can enter as the starting point in order to reach the same goal? Given the same problem, can amino acid therapy do what acupuncture does or what energetic healing does? Many people don’t know where to start and there are many wonderful, helpful treatment modalities. To answer this question, go back through the first six items. If your current treatment modality has not delivered what you were looking for, go back to see what has been done with the first six essentials. If they have been missed, decide when you want to deal with those higher priority items. If you have handled emergencies and established a metabolic foundation, you may be at a point where a variety of treatment modalities can be appropriate and equally helpful. We now get into items about the doctor-patient or healer-healee relationship. These items are less about which door to open next, and more about what to do in the room you’ve already entered. 16. Does your healer make sense to you? Does he have a model that explains all or most of your symptoms, and does he have a treatment modality that can assist you with all or most of your problems? If he doesn’t make sense to you, open the door and go elsewhere? If his treatment modality will help some of your problems, decide where you will go for assistance with the problems he cannot help you with. 17. Is your healer someone who is prepared to refer you to someone else when his modality has provided everything it can? Can he tell you the limitations of his tools and techniques? Can you ask about those limitations and are you comfortable asking what the next logical step is after your work with him is complete? Do you feel that he holds onto you after you have received maximal benefit? Support your healer when he recommends another avenue, rather than trying to make him the one who must help you with everything. 18. Is your healer able to say, “I don’t know,” and are you willing to hear that? The healer who is able to admit he does not know everything is confident. 19. Once you have opened a particular door, have met with your healer, hit it off with him, and decided his modality makes sense, the next step is to commit at a 100 percent level to the treatment. If you do not make that level of commitment, you will never know, at the end of treatment, if you got the maximal benefit or not. 20. Once you have chosen your healer and have established trust, do your best to let go and let him do his thing. Most likely, your healer will need to take you into some uncharted territory in order to maximize your healing. He will need to take you beyond the paradigm that created illness in the first place. Trusting can be hard for some people and letting your healer work in areas that you initially might think are foolish is often essential. For example, you may be seeing a chiropractor for low back pain, and you might be surprised if he focuses on adjusting the small bones of your ankle. It might not make sense to you, but should make all the sense in the world to your chiropractor. Change means “crisis” and “opportunity.” You have the right and the responsibility to try to understand your healer’s strategy. Once you have entered into the healing relationship, then accept the opportunity that arises when your paradigm is challenged. Many people react with fear at this stage and experience healing as a crisis. They may put up barriers in the healer-healee relationship. 21. Do you feel better after your meetings or consultations? If not, is the problem with the healer, with you, or is it just not a good fit? Strive to work with people with whom you click. If you don’t click, don’t blame your healer, but rather take stock of the situation, and make a conscious, non-blaming decision to find a better healing relationship. 22. Stage your treatment and recovery with your healer. You should know that Phase I of treatment takes a certain amount of time and that you can expect certain results in that time frame. What are your long-term goals, after the current crisis has been handled? Do you want your current healer to be part of your long-term health plan? What is the end point of treatment? Ask yourself this question and ask your healer? 23. Do you fight your way through difficulties and are you going to WILL your way back to health? That is often not a good strategy. Healing energy flows. To be prepared for healing is being like the bamboo — strong but also bending and yielding. Make clear, conscious treatment decisions at each step along the way and then let go into the healing process. With this set of essential steps and attitudes, you will be better equipped to find the right healing modality and the right healer. And you will be prepared to enter into a true healing relationship. Dennis Gersten, M.D. practices nutritional medicine and psychiatry out of his Encinitas office and can be reached at 760-633-3063. https://www.afibbers.org/forum/read.php?9,631,631#msg-631 Wed, 24 Jun 2026 08:57:11 +0000 Phorum 5.2.23 https://www.afibbers.org/forum/read.php?9,631,800#msg-800 https://www.afibbers.org/forum/read.php?9,631,800#msg-800
As for Moly I get about 50 mcg daliy from my multi Vs.

I don't know how you find the time to do so much research. I can barely find the time to keep up with new posts. Thanks for all that you do.

Adrian v49]]> Adrian AFIBBERS FORUM Thu, 23 Oct 2003 19:26:20 +0000 https://www.afibbers.org/forum/read.php?9,631,796#msg-796 https://www.afibbers.org/forum/read.php?9,631,796#msg-796
Just another reminder, as I've posted to others, go to the conference room and read all the posts, but in particular read the one I just posted on Molybdenum, but all the others are great, too. Glad to hear you found a new doctor. Let me know how she works out. You might ask her if she uses Great Smokies for any of her diagnostics.

Richard]]> Richard AFIBBERS FORUM Thu, 23 Oct 2003 18:59:20 +0000 https://www.afibbers.org/forum/read.php?9,631,794#msg-794 https://www.afibbers.org/forum/read.php?9,631,794#msg-794
I've been coasting since february ( perhaps marshaling my forces or consolidating my strength would be a better way to put it ) when I last talked to my cardiolgist. I hesitate to call hoim my cardiologist because I felt like I was brushed off and taken for granted by him. I'm not sure but I think he missed the part where I told him I was in Afib >50% of the time. After the TEE where, I didn't get to talk to him as he was gone when I woke up, He wrote a letter to my doc explaining that there were no abnormalities, normal function, and because of my young age that aspirin therapy would be sufficent for thrombotic treatment. If I was to have a recurrence of the Afib then a reassessment would be in order. HELLO!! MCFLY!! Afib every 2 days.

After I read that I stayed away from docs and stayed current with the forum. It has been said before, there is more knowledge to be gained here than at some Dr's. offices]]> Adrian AFIBBERS FORUM Thu, 23 Oct 2003 16:53:33 +0000 https://www.afibbers.org/forum/read.php?9,631,686#msg-686 https://www.afibbers.org/forum/read.php?9,631,686#msg-686
Adrian v49

ps. there's allways the yellow pages.]]> Adrian AFIBBERS FORUM Tue, 21 Oct 2003 14:43:05 +0000 https://www.afibbers.org/forum/read.php?9,631,648#msg-648 https://www.afibbers.org/forum/read.php?9,631,648#msg-648 Ella AFIBBERS FORUM Mon, 20 Oct 2003 19:49:21 +0000 https://www.afibbers.org/forum/read.php?9,631,647#msg-647 https://www.afibbers.org/forum/read.php?9,631,647#msg-647
Adrian
My Doctor is in Vancouver, my friends daughter flies in from Alberta just to see him he promised her a 50% reduction to her fibromyalgia, she is now 75% better.

Here is his web site, click on homeopathy to find out his thoughts on illness and what he does about it:

[www.reflexology.bc.ca]

His name and phone number ect.


Please address all your questions to:

Dr. Vladimir Shmitsman M.D.R.D.

President of International Academy (Research Institute) of Reflexology and

Reflexotherapy;

Director of Reflexology Department at Reflexology Software Ltd.

Telephone
Canada - (604)-298-2982
FAX
Canada - (604)-298-9669
Postal address
210 - 3680 Hastings Street, Vancouver, B.C. V5K 2A9 CANADA
Electronic mail
General Information: alexk@reflexology.bc.ca

Ella]]> Ella AFIBBERS FORUM Mon, 20 Oct 2003 19:44:49 +0000 https://www.afibbers.org/forum/read.php?9,631,644#msg-644 https://www.afibbers.org/forum/read.php?9,631,644#msg-644
I wish you success in your search. It is a very difficult process. If I were you, I would contact Great Smokies (www.gsdl.com) or www.metametrix.com and see if they know any doctors in your area that use their labs. If you could even locate molecular labs in Canada, you might be able to locate a good doctor through them. Sometimes, sports medicine docs have a different outlook, as well. Good luck, Adrian. Let me know if you find one.

Richard]]> Richard AFIBBERS FORUM Mon, 20 Oct 2003 19:09:13 +0000 https://www.afibbers.org/forum/read.php?9,631,640#msg-640 https://www.afibbers.org/forum/read.php?9,631,640#msg-640
Adrian v49]]> Adrian AFIBBERS FORUM Mon, 20 Oct 2003 18:41:00 +0000 https://www.afibbers.org/forum/read.php?9,631,631#msg-631 https://www.afibbers.org/forum/read.php?9,631,631#msg-631 October 19, 2003

You should have already received an announcement of a free lecture Dr.
Gersten is giving this Wednesday, October 22nd at 7:30 pm. For information
and reservations, please call his office at 760-633-3063.

His lecture will answer these questions, which are covered in detail in the
article that follows.

Where do you start your healing journey?
What is your first healing step?
What is your second step?
What is the right kind of health care practitioner for you right now?
Are all treatment modalities equally effective?

ESSENTIALS OF HEALING
by Dr. Dennis Gersten
reprinted from The Light Connection, Oct. 2003

Given the wide array of healing modalities and the extraordinary number of
health care practitioners in Southern California, many people are confused
about where to begin their healing journey? Which is the first door to open?
Is there a correct sequencing of healing modalities? Are there any essentials
at all in the process of getting well and becoming whole?
Through the years, I have run into numerous people who have had wonderful
responses to a particular healthcare practitioner or a particular product. Yet, it
is clear to me that there is no single product or treatment modality that heals
all people of all conditions.
In examining these complex questions, I have arrived at the conclusion that
there are certain universal healing principles and general guidelines. These
are the “essentials of healing,” the doors one must open in order to fully
recover. For many problems it is critical that you open the doors in the correct
sequence.
I will start with the obvious and then progress through items that are more
complex. What follows is a list, which, in total, contains the essential steps of
healing. No one item is the whole answer. We will start with the process of
how you decide on a treatment modality.

1. If you’ve been in a car accident, you do not want to start with aromatherapy.
This is where conventional, allopathic medicine excels. You want the best ER
docs who can set fractures, stop the bleeding, give you IV’s or blood
transfusions, and then sew you back together. This is certainly not the only
role of allopathic medicine, but given this situation, you know which door to
knock on.

2. What comes first is whatever is a true emergency. What comes second is
whatever is the most painful or disabling symptom.

3. What are your goals? It is very important that you know what your main
problem is, as well as your symptoms and a diagnosis, if you have one. Is it
your intention to get back to normal? Do you want to alleviate symptoms so
you can cope? Do you wish to transcend the old you and become a new
you? Can your healer take you where you want to go and where your goals
are leading? It is vital that you are honest with yourself, and take stock of your
situation, so that you know what your first step is. It is also essential that you
clearly know your goals, so that your healer does not have to spend a great
amount of time just trying to figure out why you are in his office and what kind
of help you are looking for.

4. If you or family members are dealing with the major mental disorders of
schizophrenia or mania (bipolar), and the condition is unstable, my
experience over a 25-year period is that medications are the way to go.
Nutritional therapies are only marginally helpful when someone is psychotic.
Bipolar illness, once stabilized with medications, can be aided by a variety of
complementary and alternative therapies, after the crisis is over, but the
bipolar brain needs to be treated very carefully, even with gentler alternative
therapies. There are many psychotic people with borderline personality
disorder, mis-diagnosed as schizophrenics, who will often do better on non-
medication treatments and worse on psychotropic medications. That is
because they are not truly schizophrenic.

5. Toxins do not come out of your body on their own, whether it is the mercury
from dental amalgams or from tuna, lead from lead-based paint, or a wide
variety of environmental pollutants. Many people believe that once they have
replaced their mercury amalgams with porcelain, the mercury has then left
their body. It hasn’t. Heavy metals remain buried deep within the body
tissues, causing damage wherever they are, accelerating free radical
damage, and depleting our cells of glutathione, our body’s natural detoxifying
agent. You MUST get the lead out through a process of chelation. Removing
toxins is not necessarily your first step in healing, but if you have heavy
metals, removing them should be on your list of things to do on the way to
health and vitality.

6. Detoxification pathways must be healed. In particular, the glutathione that
gets depleted through toxins does not spring back to life, even when you
remove the toxins. Compounds including N-acetyl-cysteine and undenatured
whey proteins (with names like Biologically Pure Protein and ImmunePro) will
build up your reserves of glutathione. Glutathione is a linchpin in body
chemistry. It has four major functions: detoxification, anti-oxidant activity,
support to energy chemistry, and protection of DNA. It is not difficult to restore
glutathione and is essential.

7. The gastrointestinal (GI) tract must be healed if any illness is to be fully
healed. I believe that healing the GI tract is the starting point for treating most
chronic illness. The GI tract, if opened up, takes up the space of two tennis
courts. Its four major functions are: absorbing nutrients, keeping toxins out,
acting as the largest part of the immune system, and functioning as a second
brain by producing large amounts of neurotransmitters. In my work, if there is
an intestinal problem, I will use the Comprehensive Digestive Stool Analysis
(CDSA) to analyze and treat the problem and will repeat the test in three
months to see how we have progressed. If I have treated someone for a
problem that, given my technologies, should have been cured or dramatically
improved after several months of treatment, I will consider that the GI tract has
still not recovered. I will also consider that there are heavy metals or other
toxins that are preventing full recovery.
I find very few alternative health care practitioners who disagree with this
“healing essential.” No matter how long it takes, work on the GI tract until it is
healed.

8. For almost all chronic illness, there is massive metabolic chaos, including
tremendous amino acid abnormalities. In general, a metabolic foundation
must be re-established through scientific nutritional testing and
supplementation with key nutrients to reverse metabolic chaos. This is
especially true in chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, and other fatigue
states. If a metabolic foundation is not restored, then treatment becomes
guesswork, and often only works temporarily, if at all.

9. In energy-depletion illnesses, it has been my overwhelming experience
that, until a metabolic foundation is in place, which allows people to build up
their reservoir of energy, chi, or prana — energy-based treatments don’t work
very well. In other words, I have not seen homeopathy or acupuncture to be
helpful in the early phases of these illnesses. However, they may be quite
helpful down the road, after you have walked through the essential initial
healing doors. Acupuncture can be quite helpful for pain associated with
chronic conditions, but when you have little to no chi, energetic therapies
have no chi to move around, to shuttle through different meridians, and into
energetic balance.

10. Whatever symptom you have, treatment must always take into account the
brain/mind. Everything is done in respect to, or related to, the brain/mind. In
other words, if you are being treated for a thyroid disorder, consider first the
impact the imbalance is having on your thoughts, emotions, and mental state.
Without “control central” working at full speed, we will never feel well.

11. A clinician needs to know if his patient has a psychiatric emergency, such
as being acutely suicidal. A healer may help with a pain in the back, but if the
patient intends to go home and overdose, remember that the healing
essential is to keep the person alive. These points are obvious to a
psychiatrist but not necessarily to other healthcare practitioners. As the
patient, do not expect your healer to be so psychic as to know how you are
feeling. If you know you are experiencing a true mental/emotional crisis,
please tell your healthcare practitioner so that he can prioritize carefully what
needs to be done first. Then he needs to take steps to keep you alive,
whether that means sending you for an emergency counseling session or to a
psychiatric hospital for a brief stay until risky suicidal thoughts pass.

12. Establish structural integration. If your problem is musculo-skeletal, the
first door you want to open may be to a chiropractor, physical therapist,
orthopedist, or specialist in physical medicine and rehabilitation. A
chiropractor is in a better position than I am about advising you in this area,
but correcting spinal and skeletal imbalances becomes a priority at some
point. It seems to me that chiropractic, for example, can be door #1 if your
primary concern is low back pain. Or, you may have to walk through many
other doors before chiropractic treatment becomes the logical next step. This
is where we move from “healing essentials” into gray zones where there may
be several modalities, several doors of equal importance.

13. Balance energy. If your general constitution is strong, acupuncture and
Oriental Medicine may be your first door, but if you have very little chi to begin
with, you need to go through the first steps in your healing journey before you
will be ready for a professional to help move and balance energy. Chi, or
energy, can be blocked in certain areas, which the acupuncturist can fix.
Often the acupuncturist intends to re-direct chi, moving it through different
channels than it is currently running through, or moving chi into organs that
have energetic deficiencies. Not to be left out are energetic healers who do
either hands on healing, massage or even distant healing. Energetic healers
are also guided by principles of re-integrating a multitude of energy systems
that are out of balance. But don’t expect energetic healing to remove heavy
metals, restore glutathione, or build a solid metabolic foundation.

14. If you have seen a variety of health care practitioners, periodically you
want to go back to the basics to make sure you don’t have a major medical
problem that an allopathic doctor may be in the best position to diagnose and
treat. A baseline of standard lab work along with a thorough physical exam
should be done on a regular basis, especially with slippery problems that are
not getting better. Go back to the basics to make sure you don’t have
something like kidney failure, diabetes, or cancer.

15. Is it possible that there are many doors you can enter as the starting point
in order to reach the same goal? Given the same problem, can amino acid
therapy do what acupuncture does or what energetic healing does? Many
people don’t know where to start and there are many wonderful, helpful
treatment modalities. To answer this question, go back through the first six
items. If your current treatment modality has not delivered what you were
looking for, go back to see what has been done with the first six essentials. If
they have been missed, decide when you want to deal with those higher
priority items. If you have handled emergencies and established a metabolic
foundation, you may be at a point where a variety of treatment modalities can
be appropriate and equally helpful.

We now get into items about the doctor-patient or healer-healee relationship.
These items are less about which door to open next, and more about what to
do in the room you’ve already entered.

16. Does your healer make sense to you? Does he have a model that
explains all or most of your symptoms, and does he have a treatment modality
that can assist you with all or most of your problems? If he doesn’t make
sense to you, open the door and go elsewhere? If his treatment modality will
help some of your problems, decide where you will go for assistance with the
problems he cannot help you with.

17. Is your healer someone who is prepared to refer you to someone else
when his modality has provided everything it can? Can he tell you the
limitations of his tools and techniques? Can you ask about those limitations
and are you comfortable asking what the next logical step is after your work
with him is complete? Do you feel that he holds onto you after you have
received maximal benefit? Support your healer when he recommends
another avenue, rather than trying to make him the one who must help you
with everything.

18. Is your healer able to say, “I don’t know,” and are you willing to hear that?
The healer who is able to admit he does not know everything is confident.

19. Once you have opened a particular door, have met with your healer, hit it
off with him, and decided his modality makes sense, the next step is to commit
at a 100 percent level to the treatment. If you do not make that level of
commitment, you will never know, at the end of treatment, if you got the
maximal benefit or not.

20. Once you have chosen your healer and have established trust, do your
best to let go and let him do his thing. Most likely, your healer will need to
take you into some uncharted territory in order to maximize your healing. He
will need to take you beyond the paradigm that created illness in the first
place. Trusting can be hard for some people and letting your healer work in
areas that you initially might think are foolish is often essential. For example,
you may be seeing a chiropractor for low back pain, and you might be
surprised if he focuses on adjusting the small bones of your ankle. It might
not make sense to you, but should make all the sense in the world to your
chiropractor. Change means “crisis” and “opportunity.” You have the right
and the responsibility to try to understand your healer’s strategy. Once you
have entered into the healing relationship, then accept the opportunity that
arises when your paradigm is challenged. Many people react with fear at this
stage and experience healing as a crisis. They may put up barriers in the
healer-healee relationship.

21. Do you feel better after your meetings or consultations? If not, is the
problem with the healer, with you, or is it just not a good fit? Strive to work
with people with whom you click. If you don’t click, don’t blame your healer,
but rather take stock of the situation, and make a conscious, non-blaming
decision to find a better healing relationship.

22. Stage your treatment and recovery with your healer. You should know
that Phase I of treatment takes a certain amount of time and that you can
expect certain results in that time frame. What are your long-term goals, after
the current crisis has been handled? Do you want your current healer to be
part of your long-term health plan? What is the end point of treatment? Ask
yourself this question and ask your healer?

23. Do you fight your way through difficulties and are you going to WILL your
way back to health? That is often not a good strategy. Healing energy flows.
To be prepared for healing is being like the bamboo — strong but also
bending and yielding. Make clear, conscious treatment decisions at each step
along the way and then let go into the healing process.

With this set of essential steps and attitudes, you will be better equipped to
find the right healing modality and the right healer. And you will be prepared
to enter into a true healing relationship.

Dennis Gersten, M.D. practices nutritional medicine and psychiatry out of his
Encinitas office and can be reached at 760-633-3063.]]> Richard AFIBBERS FORUM Mon, 20 Oct 2003 13:53:49 +0000