Introductionto Mind-Body Interactions - 1-hmh-courses.s3 ...€¦ · Clifton Meador: 02:54 Alright, thanks Dave. I'm going to go back to my training in the early mid-1950s I was trained

© 2020 Clifton K. Meador & David Hompes - Health For The People Ltd. All Rights Reserved E: [email protected]; W: www.davehompes.com

1. Introduction to Mind-Body Interactions

Dave Hompes: 00:01 Hey Clifton, how are you doing today?

Clifton Meador: 00:04 Good, Dave. Good to see you again.

Dave Hompes: 00:06 Yeah. Happy new year and all of that. It's been a while since we last recorded. I think for everybody watching this first introductory session, Clifton and I have already worked together on a training course, but we geared the first set of recordings we did to specifically address mind-body connection to a slightly different audience - to healthcare practitioners. So nutritionists, chiropractors, medical doctors and whomever else might be interested. This particular course is going to be trimmed down a little bit and won't lose any of its effectiveness, but we're gonna make the sessions a little bit shorter. And this one's designed for the general public who may have a real interest in this whole mind-body thing, but not really understand or grasp how powerful it can be, or who may be sort of under the veil of sort of an illusion that the medical system seems to push, which is that you either have a problem with your mind and you need to see a psychologist or a psychiatrist, or you have a problem in your body and you need to see a doctor and take drugs and have surgery.

Dave Hompes: 01:12 We're saying that the two are connected in a very subtle and specific way and that's something that we're going to go through in detail in the forthcoming 12 sessions. But by means of introduction, really gentle introduction and a little bit of storytelling, what we're going to do in this lesson is talk about how both Clifton and I got into the idea that the mind affects the body and the body affects the mind, that they're completely intertwined, and you can't really separate them when it comes to health/disease or wellness/illness. Clifton is very unique because he's been practicing and teaching medicine, retired now, but practiced and taught medicine for nearly 60 years, wasn't it Clifton, altogether? And that's a tremendous amount of time; and very early on Clifton was kind of a renegade within the medical world 'cause he realized that biomedical medicine and just giving drugs and things wasn't necessarily helping everybody.


Dave Hompes: 02:14 He stumbled across some accidental cases where the mind seemed to have a tremendous impact on healing the body. And what I want to do in this session is allow Clifton to tell his story, with no limitations, no restrictions, just go for it. And then once Clifton's told his story, then I will tell mine and we’ll explain how we both came to understand that there's a really solid connection between mind and body and it can be really powerful in transforming people's lives. So Clifton, it’s over to you. The floor is yours. Dance away!

Clifton Meador: 02:54 Alright, thanks Dave. I'm going to go back to my training in the early mid-1950s I was trained in New York at Columbia under Dr. Robert Loeb who was the most scientific doctor ever. If science had not approved it, he did not accept it. He had no psychological approach of any sort, and those of us who were trained under him had a screening process that they'd only let the very sick and the very rare diseases into the hospital. So I was trained on very sick, ‘top of the pyramid’ sick patients, who had defined medical diseases, and nothing else existed. So here I was in that background and I go into the US Army Medical Corps in 1957 and my job was to take care of the dependents - the wives and children and spouses of the soldiers at Fort Hood. And I'm taking care of this young lady named Amy (I'll call her Amy, but that wasn't her real name). She had diabetes, which was the kind of disease I was trained to see. I was super-trained in diabetes. She would not get under good control. Her blood sugars could go high, and 12 hours later they’d go very low, and back and forth, up and down, up and down. She'd go from coma from low blood sugar to coma from not enough insulin.

Clifton Meador: 04:10 I did everything I could: changed the insulin, and changed diets, changed feeding periods, all kinds of changes. No effect on this sugar curve or her clinical condition. She stayed very sick. I called back to New York and talked to people, and nobody could help me. Then they disappeared. I didn't see Amy for several months. I assumed she'd either died or gone to another doctor or something. Then her mother and Amy showed up one day and they were smiling ear to ear, happy, happy, happy, and said, "We got everything thing under control. Everything is fine. We want to thank you but we don't need to see you very often now because we got everything figured out." I said, "What did you figure it out?" They said, "Well, Amy was going along and a neighbor moved in with a little girl, three-year-old girl, and Amy had taken care of her - bathed her, taken care of her, changed her clothes. She became her babysitter.”


Clifton Meador: 05:01 And in addition, her mother gave her a little kitten. So between a kitten and a young girl to take care of, her diabetes smoothed out. That was completely foreign language to me. Here was something outside of medicine, outside of surgery, outside of what I'd been trained to do that cured this little girl, or at least got her under good control. That opened my mind to something going on here other than drugs and medicines and tests. Something else is going on. It has to do with that person's life. Something in that person's life is contributing to the control of their disease. So that was my background and introduction into what we're talking about today.

Dave Hompes: 05:44 Thanks, Clifton. That's a lovely little introduction. I should add that we'll talk about your books as we go along on the course, but you've written several books that I think are going to be helpful for everybody and we've obviously included one of those books with this course, which is the Puzzling Symptoms book, which you wrote specifically for the public. So I just wanted to throw that one out there as well. So after you'd had that situation with Amy who had a recognized and fully diagnosed medical disease in type one diabetes (juvenile onset diabetes), which seemed to resolve out of the blue through something changing in her life, where does the story go from there? Did you suddenly switch over to a different modus operandi with your work at that point? Or did you carry on with your standard medical work and only move into the sort of mind-body coaching and consulting later?

Clifton Meador: 06:45 That's an interesting part of my life. I entered practice in 1957, no 1959, and I practiced with this old doctor who was 30 years older than me. He was out of date, completely out of date, and he got sick and I took over his practice to cover his patients for him for about three months. Well about a third or more of his patients did not have the disease he had made the diagnosis of. They had a diagnosis of a non-existent disease. In fact, when I explored further, they didn't have any disease. They had symptoms but no disease. So here were patients who had been misdiagnosed and I asked myself, “If they don't have a medical disease and they have symptoms, then what do they have? What's the cause of those symptoms?” So the next 50 years I devoted myself to collecting and accumulating patients who had diagnoses, false diagnoses of disease, asking myself, "What do they have?" which led to several books and publications of my experience with these patients.

Clifton Meador: 07:48 What I found out was they'd have specific causes if you listened to the patient's carefully, and particularly if you listened to their


life story. Out of the "life narrative" comes a lot of disease. It's not diagnosable, but it's identifiable as to the cause. It can be a foreign substance - eating, drinking, inhaling, rubbing something on their skin that is causing the symptoms. They can be in a bad relationship, and we'll talk about that a lot in the sessions to come: a bad spouse, or boss, or daughter-in-law. Daughter-in-laws were notorious for causing troubles with that! And the stressful relationships can generate severe symptoms, which are not diseases, but there are symptoms. And then there are people who inflict harm on themselves. And then there are people who are just bound into being just sick no matter what. They have sickness as a way of life. They're very difficult to deal with. So a lot of different causes if you engage the patient in listening, recording, keeping a diary and whatever it takes to trace correlates between their symptoms and what's going on in their life. That opened my mind to the mind-body thing and psychological factors, social factors, physical factors, spiritual factors. All of these are equivalent in my mind. They are factors impinging on the life of a person, at least the dysfunction and illness.

Dave Hompes: 09:24 Absolutely. Thanks for that. That's a another very useful explanation and description. You touched on something there that is of paramount importance that again we're going to expand upon during the sessions, which was the idea that sometimes the diagnosis needs to be heard by the doctor or practitioner not seen by the doctor or practitioner. You mentioned in a couple of your books the idea that the medical tests - and I might even interject there the functional medicine tests that I've been familiar with using for the last 10 to 12 years - they're all visual. We're looking for data on a PDF or a piece of paper to try and figure out what is wrong with the patient.

Dave Hompes: 10:09 Is there something in the body that shouldn't be there? Is there something missing or inadequate that really needs to be there for the body to work properly? Or, you know, is the blood work out of balance? We're constantly looking for the answer. Your ethos, and you talk about this very eloquently in your little video series on YouTube, which we'll include in the resources, with Dr. William Mundy or Bill Mundy, who again, we'll discuss in a couple of the sessions. You eloquently talk about the idea that you are "doctors who listen". Do you want to just expand on that a little bit with your views as to how diagnosis takes place at the moment in the medical system?

Clifton Meador: 10:53 The new technologies, and there are many of them, have great advances. They're very powerful. The MRI, the CT scan, the


arteriogram, all of these, as you say, are visual. You see the results on a piece of paper, or on a video screen. So the specialists jump to these prematurely before listening to the patient. They start doing these tests and when that happens, you get a lot of false positives. You get positives that are not true, that mislead the specialist to do more tests or give it to the patient as a diagnosis, and falsely so. They don't go here to penetrate to the causes. They're not listening to them. The #1 complaint I hear from patients is that the “doctors don't listen to me like they used to”. They're not listening because they've got these powerful visual tests that are applied prematurely. The tests are done before the patients are listened to.

Clifton Meador: 11:47 So I would say about half of patients coming into primary care, first contact care, about half do NOT have a medical disease. Half of those, or 25%, will have an identifiable cause. The other half fall in for you and your functional medicine to identify causes by listening and doing studies to find out what's causing it. So the cause is hidden for almost half of the patients coming in. Then about half of those, in addition, do not have the disease they've been diagnosed with. They've been given a false diagnosis. Patients don't know that. They can't know that. How can they know it's false? The doctors is happy to have a diagnosis. The patient is not going to get worse because he/she doesn't have a disease! So the whole error of false diagnosis is hidden and it takes listening to get to the bottom of it. Part of that not listening is because the tests are so visual.

Dave Hompes: 12:42 And we're going to talk about that in, I think it's either the next lesson, lesson two or lesson three. We're going to go into that idea of false diagnosis, misdiagnosis and things in a wee bit more detail. But also, I remember when I was going to the doctor as a kid, you know, I'd get the typical things that a kid gets earache and sore throats and things like that. Our family doctors would not only listen, but they'd actually have a look as a human being rather than just relying on a lab test or the technology. So they'd actually open my mouth and have a look down and see what was going on in my throat; try to see what was going on in my ear. In certain, some instances, depending on the condition. You know, they'd palpate my face, throat, neck, shoulders, body with touch, which is another sensory input that can give us dramatic information about the body.

Dave Hompes: 13:33 We have practitioners who work purely with the hands: chiropractors, osteopaths, massage therapists, people like that. They're extremely skilled at finding things with their hands and the old experienced Chinese medical doctors can identify


dozens if not hundreds of different patterns in the pulse, which they use as diagnostic tools as well. So this idea that we're just using visual strategies and visual tests to identify problems really takes a lot of humanity out of medicine. It sort of takes the art out of medicine, you know. The science is left in, but the art is left aside. The art comes in the relationship between human beings, between listening, communicating, and doing what we're designed to do as human beings living in social groups. And so that's fascinating. At what point in your career after you'd gone away and thought about Amy and you'd looked at all of these records of Dr. Doherty's patients and found that didn't have diseases, at what point did you then have another experience of mind and body with perhaps a couple of case studies that got your head spinning and thinking, “Wow, this stuff is this really far out”?

Clifton Meador: 15:04 Right. There's so many. I'd have to think a minute to get a good one.

Dave Hompes: 15:08 Yeah. Well, we've got 12 lessons to get through them all, so it's no problem!

Clifton Meador: 15:13 One of my favorite patients was a secretary who had diarrhea for three years and she’d had her gallbladder removed, which was foolish, but it was done. It didn't slow down her diarrhea. She was having diarrhea. I was in the habit of having patients keep diaries. When did she have a loose bowel movement? What time of day was it? What had he eaten? Who she been with? What was she doing? Where was she in her life before that symptom? So she kept this diary and what happened was the diarrhea declined toward the end of the week. And by Saturday and Sunday she had very little diarrhea. So this was a ‘weekday diarrhea’.

Dave Hompes: 15:54 A well-known disease!

Clifton Meador: 15:57 A ‘week-day diarrhea’. So I tried to explore what was going on during the week and she said, well, she had a boss and he was mean and he was stealing from the company and he threatened to involve her in his crime if she reported him. So she was caught needing her job, and at the same time feeling bad about being a part being part of this crime. So she goes on and she disappeared for several months, which is very frequent. She reappeared all dressed up, looking really fine. Hair combed, different person. And I said, "What happened?" She said, "Well, you said something about my boss and I got to thinking about it and I don't really believe he caused the diarrhea, but I resigned


from the job and reported him to the police and my diarrhea has gone away." She never accepted the fact that changing jobs and changing that job and the boss, she did not accept that as a cause, although it clearly was the cause, because it went away when she left him and that stressful situation. So that was a situation of kind of hidden (in her perception), but not hidden, stress producing a very physical symptom.

Dave Hompes: 17:03 Yeah. Thanks. And that's a really interesting one as well, because we've spoken about that case study two or three times in our chats and recording sessions together. Something sprung to mind for me that didn't spring to mind previously, which was the first mode of treatment was to have the gallbladder removed. Now that's a pretty significant treatment. It's pretty invasive. You know, you don't put the gallbladder back once it has been removed. Once it's gone, it's gone. While it may appear to be a vestigial organ to some mechanistic doctors, it's a very important organ (gland rather than organ, I guess). But it holds onto bile, which is synthesized in the liver. And that bile is squirted out to aid digestion when you eat meals. So not having a gallbladder, you're possibly setting somebody up for something like diarrhea or similar in the first place.

Dave Hompes: 17:58 So she has the gallbladder removed. The symptoms don't change at all. At that point in my work, before I realized that the mind has such a profound influence on the body, I would have been very, very keen to work with her in a functional medicine protocol to try and stem the diarrhea using supplements and probiotics. And we might do some stool testing, we might look at what's going on. For some people that's absolute gold, you know, that really works a treat for them. But in this case, none of that was the answer. The answer was purely a subtle inner conflict that was going on probably between "right and wrong" in her mind: not liking her boss, disrespecting him for stealing, having some sort of emotional charge about that, which was impacting on the body. Remarkably, without any treatment whatsoever, it spontaneously regressed and disappeared when she changed her life circumstances - when she'd made that decision to actually tell somebody that he was embezzling. Very, very, very interesting case study.

Clifton Meador: 19:04 These mind-body connections that we talk about are so hidden that even when it's proven that it was the cause, she couldn't accept it. It's so deep in her unconscious, she did not realize that was the cause of her diarrhea even though it cured her diarrhea when she left him. So this reminds me of our friend ‘Dr. Bundy’ - Bill Mundy - who statement was, "What the mind


cannot solve is relegated to the body". What the mind can't process and deal with, like this woman. But what it can't work out goes into a physical body symptom. I think that's a very powerful concept.

Dave Hompes: 19:40 I think that one sentence that he came out with, Dr Mundy there, is one of the most powerful sentences. I think as we go through the course, that sentence can be unpacked in various different ways. We're going to talk about it in terms of the company conscious and the unconscious mind, which has its roots in psychoanalysis with Sigmund Freud and what have you. But there are other things that we can unpack from that as well. But yeah, I would like everybody watching or listening to really remember that: "what the mind cannot accept, absorb, process is relegated to the body". That's quite well known now in trauma research, you know, when you have post traumatic stress disorder - early childhood issues, rape, incest, loss of parents when you were very young, war veterans, things like that. This concept of, of trauma and the fact that it's stored in the body is very, very prominent.

Dave Hompes: 20:33 And sometimes when people have things like massage therapy or skilled osteopathic, chiropractic manipulation of the spine, sometimes trapped or repressed memories of early childhood issues or, or even adult traumatic issues, are actually leased into the conscious mind through manipulation of the body. And that's well known. You can ask any really good bodyworker. They'll have lots of patient case studies where they've observed that happening. And the trauma psychotherapists will also tell you that sometimes you've got to work on the body to free up the mind. And so this idea that that thoughts and emotions don't just disappear once you've had them, they have to go somewhere. You know, in physicsthere are different laws of conservation, they're called the conservation laws. And they say that energy can neither be created nor destroyed.

Dave Hompes: 21:28 So if you have an emotion it has to go somewhere. You might shout it out and get angry and express it. But if you repress it, especially as a child, if you don't know what to do when these emotions come up, they can get trapped inside the body and go to various tissues, organs and glands. Then the body tries to wake you up to get you to go back and process those memories, those painful memories and things. So it's quite profound. And you know, that's probably even deeper than I wanted to go in this first session already. But going back to what you said about sometimes people are not able to process the idea that something in their mind has healed their body. They won't they


just can't accept that. You also mentioned in some of our other talks that when you were assessing Dr Doherty's patients, when you took over his practice and you found that a large percentage of those individuals did not have the disease that they had been diagnosed with. You also said that when you try to tell them they did not have the disease, they wouldn't believe you again! Tell me about that a little bit more details.

Clifton Meador: 22:44 Not a single one thanked me for telling him that I didn't have that disease. I said, "You know, I'm happy to tell you that the tests are now normal and you don't have X, Y, and Z disease. You don't have that disease." Isaid, "So you don't need to, you can stop taking the medicine". B12 injections was the big one, "You can stop those B12 injections that you get every month." "No, no, let's wait until Dr. Doherty comes back. I'll listen to him. He'll tell me what to do. I need those B12 injections." So I never stopped one patient from the diagnosis. They hung on to it. So I'm thinking, "Why did they hang on? It gives them a name of what the have, and they can tell the neighbors what they have, they can tell the husband or wife what they have. It is somehow reassuring that their symptoms, which are not a disease, and are due to some other situation. Kind of held in abeyance: maybe it was a spouse, maybe it was the boss, maybe it was the child, maybe it was daughter-in-law, that was the real cause. But now it's buried under this diagnosis, and they don't have to deal with it in the open.

Dave Hompes: 23:45 Yeah. Very, very important point. I've had that with some of my clients. We'll talk about case studies, specific case studies again, where that's happened. I thought I'd just tell my story now of how I stumbled across the idea that the mind can be very powerful in affecting the body and vice versa. My background initially was in sports science. So at university between 1993 and 1996 I studied sports science and I also studied geography, 'cause my idea was that I'd go and be a teacher. I'd major in teaching physical education and sport and then my secondary subject would be geography. So that degree was set up for people who wanted to go away and be teachers. But somewhere on the line I decided not to pursue that career.

Dave Hompes: 24:39 But most of my education - sorry, I did a Master's degree in sports science once I graduated - most of my choices for what I wanted to study back then when I was in my late teens and early twenties, was all about the body. It was all about physical training, physiology, anatomy, stretching, strengthening and those kinds of things. And I dropped all the sort of soft sciences. So I dropped philosophy, I dropped sociology, I dropped


psychology and I, so I dropped all the mind related stuff from the social related stuff and just so happens that that's what interests me probably the most now. So I've gone 180 degrees around. But in my geography degree, a lot of it was physical geography. I did a lot of geology and meteorology and ecology and I was doing a lot of assessments of environments and ecosystems, but more in the natural world, not in the built (environment) and social world where human beings tend to interact.

Dave Hompes: 25:40 So I came from a very scientific background in that regard as well. We had to put lots of scientific references in our essays and in our projects and it was all from the the scientific literature. And we had to do that as part and parcel of everything. Somewhere in the early two thousands, I came across a gentleman who changed my paradigm of life. His approach to health, once I decided I wanted to be a personal trainer back then, was that we need to consider the mind, we need to consider people's biochemistry, their nutrition, and we need to consider their physical body - the structure and the mechanics, positions of the joints, the spine and things like that, and look at the whole thing. They're like a triangle, with the mind, the physiology and the anatomy all interacting and affecting one another.

Dave Hompes: 26:30 I didn't really understand. I wasn't ready for the idea of the mind affecting everything at that point. And so had to fast forward a good sort of 10 or 12 years from there to about 2012 - 2013. In 2012 I worked with two clients who completely woke me up accidentally, a little bit like you, to this idea of the mind body phenomenon. And the first one was a lady who was unhappy in her marriage. So I won't give her proper name, but her name was Linda, and she was living down on the South coast of England and we did some functional medicine and nutrition work together for about three months. She had some digestive infections and she wasn't digesting her food very well and she wasn't fully nutritionally replete. There were certain nutritional deficiencies and things like that.

Dave Hompes: 27:28 And she made steady progress - about 20 to 30% improvement in about 90 days. Usually people respond faster than that and they get better results in a shorter space of time. So that was concerning. And a little bit like Amy, she disappeared, just disappeared. I never heard from him. And a few months later I had an email from a lady named Veronica. That's again, it's not the real, the real name. But the title of the email inferred that, I knew her and I'm thinking, "I don't know any Veronica!" It's like


I can't put two and two together here. So I opened the email and it said, "Hi, Dave, this is Veronica in brackets (used to be Linda)". And I said, "Oh, I know who it is now."

Dave Hompes: 28:20 And she said, "Anyway, you'll be glad to know that all my symptoms have gone away. I feel absolutely fantastic. My husband and I have decided to break up amicably after 20 something years of marriage. Now the stress has gone and I've moved closer back home to my family and I've settled again and started a new life. All my symptoms have gone away and I feel absolutely fine. And I thought, "Oh wow, that's interesting." So again, something in the environment, some change in lifestyle - this one particularly with a relationship - was or seemed to be the transformative element in this lady's body, and all the symptoms disappeared. That got me curious. Then I somehow, I went in and I started researching the mind-body connection and I came across a lot of material online. I was working through some audio recordings about mind and body from a guy who became a mentor of mine and he had certain ideas and things that really resonated with me.

Dave Hompes: 29:22 And I was working with another lady at the time and she was up in Edinburgh in Scotland and this lady had lots of symptoms. She was feeling tired and depressed. She had a lot of anxiety as well, you know, her moods would go up and down like a roller coaster. She had a lot of digestive problems, aches and pains in her body - a whole cluster of symptoms. You could have diagnosed her with fatigue, you could have diagnosed with arthritis, you could have probably diagnosed with fibromyalgia. You could have diagnosed it with IBS, all these syndromes you know, where they don't know what's going on really, but they try to hang a label to identify what's going on, to make some sense of it - make some order out of the chaos. And she just felt lousy, really.

Dave Hompes: 30:07 So we did the same thing. We looked at her hormones. We looked at her digestion. She had a classical pattern of some digestive infections, she wasn't eating very well. So we worked on a diet. We worked on cleaning out her digestive system, getting rid of some of these bad bugs that were hanging around inside there. With the hormone test in particular, we were using saliva testing to check for the stress hormones, cortisol, DHEA, and also the sex hormones, estrogens, progesterone, testosterone as well. And I'll never forget this, to try and combat the situation, this lady had been using progesterone cream that she'd found on the internet and she was rubbing it into a wrists, but she'd completely overdosed with that. And the


number was about 15,000 when it shouldn't be higher than 500 on the test. So that was a real "super saturation" with this hormone. I didn't think that was going to be doing her any good.

Dave Hompes: 30:57 But the real thing that was interesting is that she had extremely low levels of the adrenal stress hormones, cortisol and DHEA. Still to this day, the lowest I've ever seen. And I thought, "Wow, that's interesting". Her cortisol levels for the whole day when you added up the different values were something like seven. Now the morning value alone should be 20. I won't go into the ins and outs of the testing, but it was so low that I kind of was really stunned by it. So anyway, three months later we've done a lot of work together. She's definitely feeling a little bit better. I'm very encouraged by the progress because she's not felt better for for 20 years or more. And she's in her mid-fifties and we decided to do another lab test. This is called an organic acids test. Very cool test. It tells you a lot about physiology.

Dave Hompes: 31:47 Nearly every marker, 46 different markers on that test, that visual test, nearly all of them were out of balance. Either way too high or way too low. And I'd never seen that in anybody. By this time I'd been using that test for a good five years and this was just mind-blowing. How on earth am I going to help this lady who has all of these imbalances that need different nutrients and different vitamins and minerals and this, that and the other. She would have ended up walking around, you know, shaking like some kind of rattling pill box, she'd have had to take so many different supplements for this. So I wondered could we take another route? And so on the next consultation, rather than explain the results of the test, I said, you haven't spoken to me at all about your about your life. I don't know anything about you, apart from what you filled in on your initial forms and the work that we've done together so far.

Dave Hompes: 32:42 And then this, as you said you know, 15 minutes ago, this whole narrative about her life started to emerge and it was triggered by, she said she'd been upset at the weekend because she'd been down to see her parents, elderly parents, and her sister was that. And she said something that triggered some emotion. I could tell by her voice, her relationship with the parents and her sister. There was something there that that was interesting to me. So I asked her to expand on that and she said, "Well, I think my parents favor my sister over me. They always seem to favor her over me. And it's always been that way. Since I was a little girl growing up all the little girls and boys in our neighborhood where my sister's age and not me. And I always


felt a little bit ostracized, a little bit left out and not quite with it."

Dave Hompes: 33:37 And I, and I said, "Well, yeah, you've never mentioned being in a relationship either." And she said, "Yeah, I haven't had a significant other since I was 30". So nearly 25 years she'd been on her own. And so this whole narrative came out and the pattern was feeling left out, and being on her own. And she also said she didn't feel worthy of having a partner because she was tired and anxious, and why would anybody want to be with her when she wasn't feeling very well. And so we have this whole thing, these little snippets of narrative of her biography, if you like, just started to emerge from different times in her life in a timeline. And then she said, I don't know if this is of any consequence and whether this is relevant, but when I was born, my mum wasn't very well and I had to be separated from my mum at birth for a few days while she recovered.

Dave Hompes: 34:37 And I'm kind of sat here going, this is too good to be true. You know, I didn't really know what, I wasn't qualified to have this sort of constant consultation with her, but it seemed to flow and it worked somehow. And to cut a long story short, what had happened is - and this goes into very deep unconscious mind stuff that we'll talk about later - in her unconscious mind, right from the moment of birth, she had decided that she wasn't loved, that she didn't fit in because she'd been separated from mum. And there's quite a lot of literature on this now, right? Even things that happened to us before we're born, they've shown can create problems. So this was like, wow to me. I didn't know what the heck to do really about it.

Dave Hompes: 35:38 But on the next consultation.. well, let me rewind. I asked I had an an intuition just to ask her, "When was the last time somebody said they loved you?" And there was a silence on the end of the phone that you could see the tumbleweed sort of blowing cross in your mind as this silence came across. And she said, "I can't actually remember." And so I said - as I started to say it, I started crying - I said, "Well, I said (her name's Margaret), I said, "Margaret, I love you". And I started crying and she started crying. And we had this moment where we built rapport and we're going to talk about rapport later in the program because that's something that you are very big on - how how we build rapport with our clients. It's something that I've not always been very good at. You know, hand on heart, I'm willing to admit that. But on this particular occasion it worked. So anyway, I then asked her before our next session to write down all the different things that she was doing in her life


because she'd been complaining that she didn't have time for herself.

Dave Hompes: 36:37 And it transpired that everything she was doing during the day, she was trying to cram everything in that she wanted to do around meeting other people, running errands, and doing all the things that she thought she NEEDED to do or that she SHOULD be doing or OUGHT to be doing, or HAVE to be doing. And most of those were to please other people. So what we did over the next four weeks is we gradually changed her diary. It was uncomfortable for her to do it because she felt guilty. But we changed her diary to get her to do more of the things that she wanted to do. And I asked her, what are the things that you haven't done in your life that you really would love to do? And she said, I want to go around Scotland and explore all the stately homes. She has an interest in history - Scottish history.

Dave Hompes: 37:16 She said, I'd love to go to Mallorca and have a holiday in Mallorca, which is one of the Balearic Islands. You may have even been there on your cruise last year that we talked about. Near Barcelona, these islands, or not too far away anyway. And she wanted to go to the Norwegian Fjords and have a cruise. And I said, well, why haven't you done those things yet? And she listed off a bunch of excuses and I ultimately got pinned her down and I said, I want you to book and start doing those things. Plan for them. Well, what happened is we changed the diary, got her doing the things that she really wanted to do, got her thinking about ticking off this sort of bucket list that she'd written out - all the things that she'd love to do but hadn't done...

Dave Hompes: 38:01 All the symptoms went away. They just went. They just disappeared without any additional supplements or medications or anything else. The symptoms just just melted away. I wouldn't say they were 100% improved, but her life became livable again. She went off and started doing all these things. She went to Mallorca, she went to the Norwegian Fjords. She started meeting people, got over fears of people not liking her and all of that. And her life just went like that (onwards and upwards!) just from one or two simple consultations. And then the kicker behind all of this was, I wondered if the hormones have changed. Cause when we retested her hormones, the cortisol and DHEA had doubled and tripled, respectively, which was a great result. But they were still miles too low. Now, without doing any more work on her hormonal levels, they'd completely normalized after that work just on her life, and her


perceptions of herself, and her family and all of these different things.

Dave Hompes: 39:06 And that really drove home to me that even the model of functional medicine is incorrect in many cases and we need to really consider both the body and the mind in everybody we work with. But the trouble is, and this is where I'd love to get your input again, the trouble is one of the challenges I've found and I openly share this with everybody watching, is because I'm not a psychologist, if I mention to a client that perhaps they have an issue with their mind that's causing the problems, sometimes they get offended. I don't do that anymore. I'm much more subtle with the way that I do that work. But when I started with it, I jumped into the deep end with both feet and got into all sorts of trouble with that back in 2013 or so. But ease people's minds for them, Clifton. We're not saying that when we talk about mind and body, we're not saying they're "making it up" or that "it's all in their head" or anything like that. What are we actually saying? I'll let you explain it in your words,

Clifton Meador: 40:10 Let me digress a little bit into two techniques that I found helpful. If I ask you a specific question, you can only answer yes or no. Do you have pain in your upper lip? Yes/no. Do you have pain anywhere in your body? Your mind has to trace out your entire body before they can answer that question. So using very unspecified language puts the onus on the patient to do the searching. I don't have to search anymore for specific symptoms. I throw out a general general description and the patient then searches for that. For example, I say, "What are you doing in your life that you could stop doing?" Anything in your life is anything your life, right? It's the whole life. "What are you doing in your life that you could stop doing?" "What are you not doing in your life that you should be doing?"

Dave Hompes: 41:01 Those are two very unspecified statements. They're not heard as questions, they're heard as statements. If you don't ask a question and use it as a statement: "I'm wondering if you're drinking too much alcohol" instead of saying, "Are you drinking too much alcohol?" "I am wondering if you're having trouble with your husband?" "I'm wondering if this or that." It's a much more general statement and less intrusive than a direct question. So those get at those sources they have. The idea that you can tell it's "all in their head", I've never heard that work, ever. I've heard a lot of patients say, the doctor told me that, but I've never heard it have any (beneficial effect). It only creates hostility and embarrassment and pain. "He accused me


of being crazy", which is not what we're saying. We're saying that the mind is part of the body. The body is part of the mind. It's all one entity and your spiritual side, your psychological side physical side, your hormonal side is all interconnected. You do a better job of connecting all of those things than I do. I try to get one or two simple causes out of the current situation. You penetrate a lot deeper than I do and I think that's a good added feature to what you do.

Dave Hompes: 42:18 Yeah. Thank you. I agree. I think the challenge that we have, and from a historical perspective we'll maybe expand on this later, for everybody watching is the idea that "it's all in your head" where a doctor just says you're imagining things, or it's all in your head, or need to go and see a shrink ,or you need to go on a holiday, And it's just stress. I think most doctors would actually really like to learn more about the mind and the body, but they're entrenched in a model that doesn't allow them to really work in that way unless they move into private practice. And it's a challenge. I know many doctors who, who've had challenges with that, but to say it's all in your mind or it's all in your body is a kind of throwback, isn't it? All the way back to the 17th century with Rene Descartes, who is an amazing philosopher, French philosopher, mathematician polymathic thinker. Unbelievable guy.

Dave Hompes: 43:07 He had so much authority back in the 17th century that he created what we call the Cartesian split. Cartesian comes from his surname, Descartes, and the Cartesian split says that the body is a machine. It's basically like a mechanistic machine and the mind or the soul is a completely separate entity that belongs to God. So you know, in his philosophy he had to try - cause he didn't want to upset the church back then, the Catholic church and in France - he had to somehow involve God. So he said the mind and the body are separate. So you can either have a problem in your mind, which is a psychological issue, you know, neurosis, depression, et cetera, or you can have a physical issue in your body, which is purely a mechanical issue.

Dave Hompes: 44:01 Our entire medical model is based still on that Cartesian split rather than the idea that the mind is in the body and the body is in the mind, and you can't separate them. So when you and I talk about "psychosomatic", we're not saying it's all in your mind. What we're saying is what you think, feel, believe, your emotions, et cetera, your goals, fears, all of these things, they are all in some way going to express in your body. Not that they're separate; they're the same. And also if you have problems in your body, nutritional deficiencies, inflammation,


chronic infections, toxins, they can affect the function of your brain, which then changes your thoughts, feelings, emotions as well. So it's a two way street. It's like a super highway of information. But actually there's no separation between them. Mind and the body are actually one rather than being seen as separate. And we'll go into that in a little bit more detail later. Clifton, another amazing mind body case. The lizards. Tell us about the lizards.

Clifton Meador: 45:17 That's my favorite story. This goes back to the old doctor whose practice I covered. He told me this story. He said, "Clifton, you're too scientific. I'm tired of your science. I'llwant to tell you what doctoring is all about." This is the guy who made wrong diagnosis in 30% of his patients. He's telling me this, but he was a great guy. He said, I had this patient back in the late 1930s, about 1938. I'll call him Vance. And Vance came in with his wife and he'd lost about 50 pounds. He looked like death, and his wife said, "Vance is going to die if you don't help me. You got to help. You've got to save his life." So Dr. Doherty, that was the name, Dr Doherty thought, "I don't know what to do. There were meagre test, chest X-rays - there wasn't much to test with - and they couldn't find anything with the simple tests.

Clifton Meador: 46:06 So the next day, the wife comes forward and says, "Dr. Doherty, I got to tell you this, I don't want to tell you, but I gotta tell you. The Voodoo doctor got Lance over in the cemetery, about three months ago, and put a hex on him. He said, "You're going die and nothing you can do about it. Medicine can't save you. And if you tell anybody I'll hex your wife and all your children. So you're going to die and nothing you knew about it. Medicine can't save you, you're dead." So he started to lose weight. He couldn't, he couldn't eat, couuldn't eat, couldn't eat, and is heading down the path to death. So the woman says to Dr. Doherty, "You've got to do something." So Dr. Doherty thought all night long, what he could do. The next morning - and a nurse told me that she witnessed it, so it's gotta be true - Dr Doherty calls the family around the bedside. Vance is lying there barely able to speak.

Clifton Meador: 46:57 Dr Doherty has trapped a lizard overnight and put it in his little black bag, and had the nurse give Vance an injection of apomorphinehave, which is a powerful emetic - it makes you vomit. So the nurse brought a syringe out, Dr.Doherty squirts a little into the air, gives the injection to Vance and leaves the room. He says to the nurse, "Call me when Vance is vomiting." So as about five minutes, Vance is starting to vomit. He's vomiting into this metal basin, vomit, vomit, vomit, and just as


Dr. Doherty approaches the bed, he says to Vance, "I got the voodoo doctor last night in the cemetery. I made him tell me what he did to you. He put some foul stuff under your nose and one of those was lizard eggs. All those lizard eggs went down into your stomach. All of those have die except one. There's one lizard down there, and I'm gonna get him out. He slides the little lizard into the basin. Vance looks at the lizard, falls back into a swoon and is unconscious for 12 hours. He wakes up, he's ravenous for food, can't get enough food. He's cured and goes home. That's the power of words. Words alone converted this dying man into health. Huge impression. And to me as a young man. He can talk him back into health. That's got to be, that's got to be given tool if we know how to use it.

Dave Hompes: 48:21 Yeah, absolutely. And I should imagine back then when you,'d had the case of Amy - the little girl who was cured of diabetes, so-called incurable disease, really, from something changing in a life like having a pet dog and a little girl to look after; and then the idea of this the power of suggestion and the power of verbal influence can cure this guy - you must be thinking, 'Wow, this is crazy!"

Clifton Meador: 48:46 Yeah. It woke me up. A totally different approach to medicine after that.

Dave Hompes: 48:50 Where did you go thereafter? What was the the situation after that point? Where did you end up? At what point did you get into the process of helping people in that area rather than being a regular doctor?

Clifton Meador: 49:08 'Cause I kept asking the question, "If they don't have a medical disease and they have symptoms, what do they have?" What are those causes that I might uncover?" I studied under Carl Rogers about that time, who was a great listener, who taught me how to listen. And there's a technique that I recorded of watching the patient's face, watching their breathing, watching their expressions? "Am I connecting with that patient in a real way? Am I really entering into the world of that patient?" And if I had described the symptoms that I've heard them tell me, and they know them like this, then I know I've gotten the symptom accurately, or the life situation. Whatever they tell me, I repeat back to them in a different way and look for the expressions until I've got them, "Yes. That's what I said. You understand." They're acknoeldging to me that I understand them. That's very powerful.


Clifton Meador: 50:02 So I started collecting these patients. I put the word out to my friends. If you've got any patients that have a wrong diagnosis, let me see 'em with you. If you've got patients that don't have a diagnosis but they have symptoms, let me see them. So accumulated several hundred patients and reported those in a book called "Symptoms of Unknown Origin" and the other book was for laypeople and their family, is called "Puzzling Symptoms: How to Listen and Uncover the Cause", without getting a false diagnosis.

Dave Hompes: 50:29 Fascinating stuff. And I do believe the the Vance case study with the lizards, the hex voodoo scenario was published in, was that one published in the New England Journal of Medicine?

Clifton Meador: 50:48 Yes. Yeah, yeah. No, the Southern Medical Journal.

Dave Hompes: 50:53 So it was a published case study. It's not like somebody pulled it out of their backside and, and made it up. It was actually published in the literature. And I also know that one of the contemporary guys who's very, very popular in the mind-body circuit at the moment is a Dr Joe Dispenza with his meditations and what have you. He cites your work andhis book as well. In fact, that's how I came across you reading one of his books.

Dave Hompes: 51:25 His book is called "You Are The Placebo".

Dave Hompes: 51:25 Well, we're going to be talking about, if we run down all the different topics that we're gonna talk about in this course. This has just been a brief introduction with just a small smattering of case studies. We have dozens and dozens of case studies. By the end of the course, people are going to be, you know, it's irrefutable that the mind affects the body, and the body affects the mind. I'm going to share some things from my own life and how symptoms and issues clear up in my life just from using certain techniques as well. But we're going to talk about lots of different things, a very broad range of different topics and also expand on the methods that you used in your clinical practice, the methods I use in my clinical practice and how everything fits together.

Dave Hompes: 52:15 We're going to talk about the doctor patient relationship. We're going to talk about NLP, neurolinguistic programming and how that came about with one of the geniuses of our time, Milton Erickson. We're going to talk about the conscious and the unconscious mind. We're going to talk about values. We're going to talk about how perception and stress influence the body, relaxation responses, meditation, all of these different


things under one umbrella. And again, just for everybody watching this is not necessarily going to help you resolve any of your specific symptoms, but sometimes it does. Sometimes having a new realization really helps you overcome something, which has just reminded me about something that I wanted to speak about in terms of how I got into this.

Dave Hompes: 53:15 After I'd had those two case studies with the two ladies who made dramatic recoveries with them, with changing their lives rather than any specific treatment per se, I started studying with Dr John Demartini, who is a very big exponent of human behavior, psychology, philosophy, et cetera, but in a very practical sense and how you can apply that to help people. And I was at one of his training courses and I met a gentleman named Carlos and Carlos sounds like he should be from Mexico or Spain or somewhere. Actually that's where his family originates, but he's actually Australian. And Carlos, it was a very interesting case, really scrambled my mind completely, because he had multiple sclerosis, which is supposedly an incurable autoimmune disease. Now I know of cases where people have overcome multiple sclerosis through nutrition and functional medicine.

Dave Hompes: 54:09 And so I asked Carlos, "Carlos, you must have done some detoxification. You must've had heavy metals, mercury, you must've, you know, did you go on a gluten free diet?" All the things that spring to mind in terms of creating auto immunity and neurological problems in the body that I knew about wearing my functional medicine and nutritional hat. And Carlos just looked at me funny and he said, "No, I didn't do any of that." And I said, and I was taken aback, you know, my mind sort of scrambled - the wiring in my brain must have gone completely haywire at that point. And,I said, "Okay, tell me what happened." And he said, "Well, I went to one of Dr Demartini seminars and I had some realizations about my life. They were really profound realizations. So I went in there really in a lot of pain and really struggling with the multiple sclerosis on the Saturday morning. By the Sunday evening when the seminar finished, I was appreciably better. And then, you know, a week later, pretty much all the symptoms had gone. And then when they did the testing, there was no real evidence of the disease that anymore."

Dave Hompes: 54:58 And so between the two cases I'd worked on and then meeting Carlos, I stopped in my tracks and I thought to myself, well, you know, I don't want to go out there and express myself in this industry so much just with nutrition and functional medicine, I


really want to weave in this mind body component with it all as well. And that's where we are today. And so I've met many, many people along the journey now who have had phenomenal transformations using functional medicine and nutritional alone, using conventional medicine, using mind and psychology based techniques alone, or having some combination of those where each one played a really important role. And one of my jobs now is to try and be as anti-dogmatic as I can about helping people improve their health and improve their lives, because I don't believe there's any one solution out there anymore. I think there's a whole bunch of amazing solutions and that there's something out there for everybody.

Dave Hompes: 55:56 It might take a little bit of exploration to figure out what's going on, and finding out what that solution is for an individual, as we're going to talk about in great detail, involves listening to them, not just looking at pieces of paper with numbers and fancy names on which tell them about something you know that's going on in their body visually. So it's going to be exciting and we're looking forward to it. Have you got anything to add to this first session before we wrap up?

Clifton Meador: 56:28 I only the hope that we can be helpful to these people?

Dave Hompes: 56:31 Absolutely. As I said a couple of moments ago, people might not find the answer on this course, but they may find the answer to what they need to do in order to get the answer, if that makes sense. So that transformation from being ill to well or diseased to healthy is all about opening up the mind, the different vistas of what's available out there and showing that it's not voodoo. It's scientifically proven. There are thousands of people out there who have transformations from this kind of work. And that it may be of huge benefit for people who are feeling a little bit stuck or confused in any way. Or if the doctor's not listening.

Dave Hompes: 57:22 Clifton, as always, it's been a pleasure and an honor to speak with you. I'm gonna hit the end of the record session on here so that we can just catch up afterwards, but it's been wonderful speaking with you and I look forward to speaking with you again next time so we can start to expand on some of this stuff. Cheers. See you soon.

Documents

Introductionto Mind-Body Interactions - 1-hmh-courses.s3 ...€¦ · Clifton Meador: 02:54 Alright, thanks Dave. I'm going to go back to my training in the early mid-1950s I was trained