Three Important Discoveries from Nature’s Medicine for your Brain and Mood

Ever since I immersed myself in the field of health sciences over 25 years ago, I’ve been passionate about understanding how regular day-to-day exposures and habits affect our mental and cognitive health.

With the closing of a decade, I thought I might mention 3 discoveries/areas of research in natural medicine, or actually nature’s medicine, that have the capacity to offer profound benefits to our health, if widely shared.   What are they?

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Changing Minds and the BackFire Effect

I Couldn’t Believe!

I remember a few years ago when talking to a chiropractor, he told me about John of God from Brazil.  John of God is a healer who channels many spirit guides to commit a huge range of medical miracles.  The chiropractor told me that John of God attracts thousands of people from all over the world.  He told me about the experience, how he had to wait in long lines to see him.  He described the “visible operation” he had chosen, and told me that he had been cured.   The story seemed so beyond my belief system that I developed an unfavorable view of this chiropractor.   I was so uncomfortable with the story that I wanted to roll my eyes and run away.   I kept my distance from him (for other reasons as well) after that.

This isn’t the only time I’ve run from information presented to me.  I rolled my eyes at the Law of Attraction for years!  And when someone told me in the early 90’s that physicians had done a hemispherectomy on a child, and that it wasn’t expected to result in serious consequences, again, I rolled my eyes, and decided that he was rather naive.

I’m not the only one that runs from information that falls outside of their belief systems!

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A Cause of Sundowners and Psychosis

Generating a theory of psychotic episodes and epilepsy

After watching a couple of episodes of medical mystery shows on TV, I developed a theory that episodic seizures or dissociative behavior might have to do with parts of the brain going into a hyperflammatory state.  In the show Diagnosis, little Sadie developed frequent seizures after an infection.  And in another show, several sweet children turned into periodic monsters after another infection.

This theory made sense to me because there is evidence that inflammation is being implicated in an increasing number of psychiatric conditions.   Also while low level inflammation helps cells repair, once inflammation gets too high, it can get very destructive for the surrounding tissue.

I wondered if I would get a chance to test my theory with my clients.

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Why We Need an Integrative Approach to Brain Health

Many unanswered questions

During my graduate degree in Neuroscience in the 1990’s, the more I learned, the more I realized how young the field was.   While the lectures were comprehensive, when I’d start to try to take what I learned into real world scenarios of how these mechanisms affected the individual, there were more unanswered questions than answers.    No wonder the solutions to so many mental health, psychiatric and neurological conditions felt so inadequate!

So as a patient, when doctors would tell me that I would have to learn to just accept my condition, or alternatively that “it was all in my head”, I knew both answers meant that the doctor didn’t know how to help me.

And because they didn’t have solutions, and I wasn’t crazy about taking the drugs they were peddling, I started looking to see what Alternative Medicine had to offer.

My Search for Integrative, Holistic Brain Health

I tried acupuncture, chiropractic care, cranial sacral therapy, Body Talk, Neurofeedback, brainwave entrainment, yoga, meditation, herbs or supplements.  I adjusted my nutrition to optimize my mental and cognitive health, and maintained a well balanced exercise regimen.

But other than addressing diet and exercise, none of these methods, addressed root causes.   I believed root causes had to be addressed from more than just the traditional Western medicine point of view.   Whatever I was searching for, it had to be embracive of the wisdom imparted by healers from a variety of schools of thought.

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Debunking the Myth that there is No Science Behind Energy Medicine

I can’t tell you how many times I have heard that there is no science behind energy medicine.   There has been tons of research coming from David Feinstein, Ph.D.  Dawson Church, Ph.D., Bruce Lipton, Ph.D., Dr. Joe Dispenza, Dean Radin, Ph.D., and many others, demonstrating the power of energy medicine.   But despite this, there are still many who seem glued to the idea that energy medicine is not evidence based.

One of the leading contributors to this myth is Wikipedia.  Many of its arguments used to claim there is no science to support energy medicine come from the lab of one researcher, Edzard Ernst, Ph.D. 

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One Simple Experiment to Measure Positive and Negative Energy

Most people intuitively know that the energy we project does matter, but according to Joachim Krueger Ph.D. in Psychology today, there is no way to measure the difference between positive and negative energy.

I beg to differ.  I interviewed by Joshua Blatman for his Survivors2Thrivers podcast.   Watch this little demonstration of what happens to coat hangers depending on the energy Joshua projects. Then feel free to try the experiment with wire coat hangers at home.

The experiment:

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