Physicians Who Are Courageously

Expanding the Paradigm

By David Feinstein, Ph.D.

Despite the dark side of medicine -- where profit motives are the tail wagging the health care system -- growing numbers of physicians are taking heroic steps to maintain the integrity of their profession. Among the bravest are those pushing at the edges of the paradigms that dominate the field. They are, in both their work with patients and in their public statements, embracing the power of the mind/body connection, subtle energies, and energy resonance.

This requires enormous courage because of the entrenched interests within their profession and because those with the highest status and visibility in a field are also the first targets when they stray outside the lines of conventional thinking. We remember one doctor in our Certification Program telling us that her license would be in jeopardy if she postponed an invasive established "best practices" procedure to give Energy Medicine a chance. Nonetheless, more than a dozen medical doctors have graduated from our Certification Program and are incorporating Energy Medicine into their practices.

Among the bravest (or most foolhardy?) are those who make public statements promoting ideas that threaten entrenched interests. We are aware that every doctor who has endorsed one of our books, or written a foreword, or published a positive review, is taking a risk. This article gives us a chance to thank them. They include Christiane Northrup, MD; Larry Dossey, MD; Norm Shealy, MD; Bessel van der Kolk, MD; Elizabeth K�bler-Ross, MD; Stanislav Grof, MD; Joel Elkes, MD; Eric Leskowitz, MD; Daniel Benor, MD; David Kelly, MD: and Richard Gerber, MD. We are and have long been enormously grateful for their support.

Most recently, we were honored to be asked by Dr. van der Kolk to give a keynote address at his renowned International Trauma Conference on "The Contributions of Energy Medicine to the Treatment of Traumatic Stress" (see next article). Another medical pioneer is Eva Selhub, MD, who has pulled together many of the cutting-edge ideas in health care and integrated them beautifully with established medical practices, producing an extremely personal and user-friendly book. We met Dr. Selhub, who teaches at Harvard Medical School, years ago at a conference of the National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicine (NICABM) and were impressed by her big heart and engaging personality. David recently reviewed her important new book, Your Health Destiny. You may want to know about it. You can read David's review here.  

26th Annual International Trauma Conference 

We could not help but be moved and impressed with this gathering of more than 500 psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, and other mental health professionals. Their shared purpose in attending was a passionate desire to help relieve the profound suffering and lifestyle disruption that are the aftermaths of severe trauma.

We were at the 26th annual International Trauma Conference in Boston, the most prestigious in the world. It was founded and is still run by Bessel van der Kolk, MD. Dr. van der Kolk has served as a professor of psychiatry at both the Harvard and Boston University medical schools, and his recent book, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, is a New York Times science best-seller. He has brought not only innovative clinical techniques but also yoga and Shakespeare into the treatment of trauma. In short, he is a colorful and a most impressive personality.

In introducing us, he said that he has wanted to invite us to be keynote speakers at this conference for the eight years since first being dragged to one of our presentations, but it was only when his book received such international acclaim that he felt he could afford to take that risk. We thought he was being overly dramatic, but as it turned out, a number of the colleagues he most wanted to have see us silently boycotted our session. A few others who attended equated our Energy Medicine demonstrations with snake oil. But the vast majority were spellbound.

Among the features of our presentation that were most appealing to them were the speed with which simple techniques had people feeling better and the fact that the methods could be easily taught to anyone to use on an as-needed basis. Many of the therapists in the audience are working with impoverished and under-served populations. Others are already interested and expert in body-mind therapies but had never seen Donna's approach. The conference bookstore was unprepared for her impact and could have sold a dozen times the number of copies of Energy Medicine they had ordered (despite our warehouse having warned them). The questions we heard the most following our presentation were about our Certification Program. PTSD being endemic, and that tools that are effective and easily administered are precious.