Physician Healer

Issue 2 Medicinal Lies

Today, I started thinking about all the drugs I had learned in med school, when it hit me that in the last 5 years, I came to realize that prescription drugs weren’t all they were hyped up to be. How things have changed over time or maybe it was just me amongst the other handful of doctors. My thoughts drifted to my medical school days. At the time I attended, they were just barely introducing the concept of adding vitamins to our diet. I was one of few who became fascinated by the relevance of non-prescribed products, while the majority of my fellow doctors-to-be snickered and smirked, “I don’t believe in vitamins. Vitamins are stupid. And, if the patient questions me, I am the doctor and there’s the door.”

I remember thinking how arrogant they were, but the truth was when I graduated, I practiced exactly the way we were taught, to treat each person as a sack of diseases with the proper drug or drugs. I truly believed that people, in general, didn’t know any better and it was my job to tell them how they were really feeling and what they needed to do with their bodies.

As the years passed, I noticed that an increasing number of patients were merely hanging in there, mentally and physically. I’d get these patients who’d come in for their annual exam and tell me they were doing “just ok” as usual, but had given up some important things in their lives because of chronic symptoms (pain, fatigue, anxiety, foggy brain, dizziness, insomnia), but that I was unlikely able to help them. I thought I had done everything right. I followed the book and applied everything I knew from my training. I just didn’t know what I was doing wrong and it was frustrating because all the tests were normal and they were all taking their medications.

It occurred to me one night that perhaps something else was going on, that there was a common thread to the majority of the patients. They all lived with some level of stress. It didn’t matter if the stress was an event from the past or a worry about the future. If the patient suffered from boredom that was a cause of stress. I started to skip my usual reading materials and did research on just that—stress and its effects on the body.

I discovered to my surprise that whenever the body felt stressed, cortisol levels from the adrenal glands would rise causing cascading chains of reactions throughout the body, mimicking those of your typical fight or flight situations. I call it the “Burning Car Syndrome.” Everything that happens in your body would be the same as if you were trapped inside a burning car.

You can’t think straight. You can’t remember anything. Your head feels heavy and stuffy. Your heart races and your blood pressure goes up. Your muscles tighten and tense up. You don’t feel hungry. You can’t sleep. When the ordeal is over, you are overwhelmed with exhaustion but the mind races and you still can’t sleep. Over time, all this leads to premature wear and tear on the body. What’s even more frightening is that if the source of stress persists whether it is in the mind or not, prescription medications are ineffective in the long haul, no matter what they promise to do, resulting in a life of just surviving not thriving.

Of course, the next question was how. How do I remove someone’s reason to stress especially when research indicates that our brains are wired for a propensity towards the negative? One evening after a few hours of searching and reading, I came upon the subject of energy medicine using psychosensorial techniques and an article on a relaxation technique based on repetitive light pressure applied on selected areas of the body that correspond to acupuncture endpoints. Stimulating these centers sends electrical impulses to the amygdala located in the midbrain which controls our traumatic memories and the emotions linked to these traumas. As a result, a negative thought or memory could be rendered neutral over time.

The significance of this discovery is that when the negative emotion is altered or released, the health issues which prompted the patient to seek medical attention are minimized and eventually resolved which begs the question, “Could our thoughts, emotions, and memories alone take up residence in our body and transform themselves, perhaps trigger or even originate diseases and their symptoms?” To the surprise of many, the answer is yes.

In the last 5 years, I developed and modified a psychosensorial method—Meridian Therapy—based on the EFT and tapping concepts to add to the traditional medicine protocol. The results were phenomenal. Every person who was able to successfully release his or her past traumas as far back as decades to as recent as several days ago reported having decreased symptoms to having no lingering symptoms at all.

After more than 15 years post residency, I finally felt I was genuinely doing what I was supposed to do—heal people. This was no fluke or something that happened by chance. In looking back, I think the calling was always there, but it was the frustration and dissatisfaction of applying everything I was taught in med school and not seeing any positive effect that pushed me to keep looking for that “something else.”

These days, patients who come for Meridian Therapy currently occupy most of my weeks’ office visits. It’s all from word of mouth, patient to patient. I have thus far not received any direct referrals from other physicians for this. I’ve talked about what I do to a few local colleagues, but inevitably receive weird expressions on their faces, a cross between fright and confusion with a sprinkle of indifference. Some of the patients who’ve been with me for years have even asked me if I am still a “real” doctor, as if somehow new learning made me forget how I was originally educated and trained.

Resilience isn’t all about surviving med school and the sleepless all-nighters, being on-call every third day. It’s about being knocked down and ridiculed because you strayed from the norm and then getting up straight-faced after being shamed and told you’re an embarrassment, a quack. Your mind begins to drift to the past when you were told that you were not enough by those closest to you. It’s about rising above that and realizing your purpose, wondering why you are alive, and waking up every morning to see how many lives you can transform for the better, with whatever skills you have. We are all different, and ironically, uniqueness is the one quality that unifies us all.

I’ve been asked many times how did this desire for transformation occur and where did I find the courage to step outside of conformity? Without trivializing the question, I believe that it started some years back, when I was given a popular book at the time, “The Secret” which many of you may know and began my journey into personal growth and conscious awareness. Or, perhaps it was even further back during my residency years when I studied Tony Robbins’ program. I’ve come to the conclusion that an invisible but palpable force pulled me. What I do know with certainty is that the origin of my evolution was gradual and deliberate. It was as if a voice inside awakened. Whatever the case may be, I’ve always felt that there was something more to this existence than what our senses tell us on the surface.

Slowly with time, I began to search for more meaning in my day-to-day experience and realized that our eyes and ears only allow us to see what is external to us. To truly “see” and “listen” is to access our heart inside. Therein lies the truth about who we are, our purpose, and what we really want, our true passion.

For your transformational task, my offer to you is this—go and get yourself a journal and write down 5 things you’re grateful for. For the next week, do this as soon as you get up in the morning, and right before bedtime, read your list and add 5 more. Read everything you wrote at the end of the week and write down what things you observed and learned about yourself. Do this for a month and read everything you’ve written. What have you now learned about yourself? Did you notice any changes?

Thank you for your interest. Let me know if you have questions or if you liked it, please subscribe, share and comment.

See you soon!

Celeste Amaya, MD