Allopathic medical schools spend too little time, energy and money on ancient, naturalistic research to know how to activate the self-healing placebo that each of us posses. The end result is ever-increasing levels of professional burnout in healthcare. This is because both of the two mainstream forms of medicine in the United States, allopathic and osteopathic, have demonstrated no consistent effort to identify the underlying causes of disease. If there was an intelligent design and abilities for natural remedies to work, we’d never hear about it because researchers have minimized the placebo that cures at least 20-30% of everything. We keep striving to make new pharmaceuticals as if 200,000 – 400,000 people don’t die every year due to medical mistakes globally. While the drug-makers bribe the lawmakers, the situation for mental health couldn’t be more dire. We make more and more drugs like there’s never been any reports of how to naturally cure cancer or cure Alzheimer’s dementia. Thus, modern Functional Medicine emerged from Canada in 1990 as a third form of American Medicine.1 Go Canada! And just in time because our mental health is really suffering. Can you believe that five % of boys in the United States now have autism? Are you ready to Mindshift?
Functional Psychiatry is a division within this new form of medicine and is useful in many conditions for symptom relief. Without asking questions about the root causes of disease, we trusted our leaders and we just kept drinking the water and food. Now ADHD, autism and neurologic disorders are so prevalent that they’re combining the titles into one syndrome – AuDHD to account for both ADHD and, in my view, neurotoxicity in the brain. Fortunately, naturalistic healing mechanisms are built into our bodies and nature itself to rapidly heal practically anything, if we could just understand how to apply them. I say, let’s figure this out together – Mastermind style. At Mindshift Care, you can participate in research or become a published author in a scientific journal. That’s how Mastermind Groups work.
Western Medicine Helps Serious Mental Illness
There are three Serious Mental Illnesses that are separated from among the other diagnoses in the mood department:
- Major Depressive Disorder
- Bipolar Disorder
- Schizophrenia
For everything except Serious Mental Illness, perhaps Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and a handful of others, Complimentary and Alternative Medicine may play a larger role in symptom relief than previously thought.
It is with that backdrop that I introduce topic…
What is Healing?
Healing – “a state of reduced suffering and steady progress towards complete recovery, both mind and body”
My place in this Functional Psychiatry story came in 2013 when the National Institutes of Health (N.I.H.) issued a rebuke of the Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of Psychiatry (DSM-5) two weeks before it was published. The NIH “stating the manual’s diagnoses lack validity because they are based on clusters of clinical symptoms rather than objective laboratory measures”.2,3 This occurred half-way through my Psychiatry Residency training program at Baylor Scott & White Health in Temple, Texas. I was supposed to be memorizing the DSM-5 to become board-certified. So, I didn’t memorize it heavily because I was in that transition phase where were weren’t tested on either the DSM 4 or 5. Instead, I looked deeper into the causes of illness that were masquerading as mental health symptoms, such as Toxic Brain Syndrome that mimics ADHD, because the way we currently diagnose psychiatric conditions still doesn’t reflect biology or pathophysiology much at all. Subconsciously, I didn’t value the DSM-5 very much from the beginning for these reasons, which allowed me to look at my entire training experience at Baylor College of Medicine’s Scott & White Psychiatry Residency training for answers into how it all really works. But what surprised me the most are the things I learned within a few years after graduation.
Sigmund Freud agreed with Carl Jung in the End
American Psychology was heavily influenced by Sigmund Freud, who taught an athiest view of psychology while simultaneously being affiliated with the Freemasons (athiest used here only to highlight the nothingness of spirit and absence of any intelligent design). He disagreed with his student, Carl Jung, who believed we each have a spirit, a shadow self, that has “bad” urges sometimes and we need to be aware of it, and bring it out into the light, in order to not be controlled by it. In other words, there is another layer of the self that played a role in making decisions, but Freud would hear none of it for like 40 years. Freud agreed with Jung at the end of his life, but not before his notions were gobbled up in the West, throwing away thousands of years of healing knowledge. In our arrogance, the West essentially accepted the notion that the Shaman had been wasting their time with healing practices that didn’t work. What we got instead was a corrupt, pay-to-play information space where corporations bribe their buddies in the Club in politics to control the education of the populace.
Teaching Healing to 3rd Graders
Healing is for all people and I’m convinced it’s time we start teaching 3rd Graders to heal. So, when I say “teach 3rd Graders to heal”, I mean teach them how to heal others, animals, and themselves. Instead of televangelists being the only one in the building with healing “powers”, I envision workshops with auditoriums where everyone is paired off practicing healing techniques on each other. Kids could learn in it 10 minutes and it could change playground behavior forever when there is an injury or a bully.
Two Prerequisites for Healing
I’ve found there are at least a couple of prerequisites for healing: being in active recovery, and living a peaceful lifestyle. I’ll take each of these separately. By “active recovery”, I mean a lifestyle commitment to self-improvement, as opposed to self-destructive addictions of all types. If you are trying to learn to love yourself, that is all that’s required. You don’t have to be good at it to get started.
Living a peaceful lifestyle is also a prerequisite for healing. I have helped people from practically every religion around the world, former gang members and violent prisoners. Anyone who can set aside their upbringing and intend on living a peaceful life going forward can participate in healing (though you might need an energy clearing appointment first to make it possible in the case of trauma, anger, or destructive tendencies). Carrying grudges and planning revenge are counterproductive to healing. Forgiveness and release of all people and negative experiences with peace and love is central to healing.
How to Introduce Someone to Healing
Flashbacks are electromagnetic waves moving around in your body, held as body memories. They amplify future emotions and usually occur in response to trauma. There are dozens of ancient, and several modern, approaches to healing the electromagnetic wave in the body without talking about what happened. I like to introduce people to energy body work in a 3-Step process for rapid results: 1) Watch a documentary that explains energy healing. 2) Make an appointment. 3) Get training to adopt an ongoing energy-release practice that works for you. You don’t have to discuss your trauma with me in detail. Rather 2-3 appointments close together may be enough to cause the Mindshift. If not, start with the Pet Therapy for PTSD and Sex Therapy for PTSD class and watch the documentaries they discuss with your adult loved ones. Hopefully, that will rapidly speed up your willingness to take the next healing steps in your journey. If that still doesn’t help you feel better, don’t hesitate to contact me. I can teach 3rd Graders to heal, I’m convinced of it. For everyone else, welcome to the Mastermind Groups. If any of these resources at Mindshift Care have helped you out and you’d like to advertise your new skill set, reach out for an interview request and I’ll try to squeeze you into the schedule on the Gluten-Free Psychiatry Podcast.
1Bland JS. Functional Medicine Past, Present, and Future. Integr Med (Encinitas). 2022 May;21(2):22-26. PMID: 35698609; PMCID: PMC9173848.
2Lilienfeld SO, Treadway MT. Clashing Diagnostic Approaches: DSM-ICD Versus RDoC. Annu Rev Clin Psychol. 2016;12:435-63. doi: 10.1146/annurev-clinpsy-021815-093122. Epub 2016 Feb 3. PMID: 26845519; PMCID: PMC5154554.
3 Reardon, S. NIH rethinks psychiatry trials: mental-health division will no longer fund research aiming to relieve symptoms without probing underlying causes. Nature 2014, Vol. 507, Issue, 7492. Pages 288-289.