Episode #160: Energetic Diagnosis with Dr. Neil Nathan, MD

Why You Should Listen

In this episode, you will learn about the evaluation of personal energies using intuition and medical devices to diagnose and treat complex medical illnesses.

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About My Guest

My guest for this episode is Dr. Neil Nathan.  Neil Nathan, MD has been a Board-Certified Family Physician and is a Founding Diplomate of the American Board of Holistic Medicine.  He recently retired from clinical practice after nearly 5 decades of patient care.  From the time that he began medical school at the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Medicine, it has always been his passion to try to help as many of his patients as possible.  He was never satisfied with sending patients home with the cliché: “Sorry, we just don’t have any answers for you.” For him, and for his patients, conventional medicine had many answers, but sometimes they weren’t enough.  Starting his 50-year medical career as a family physician, he delivered babies, did some minor surgery and worked in the emergency room, providing the most comprehensive care that he could.  Over the years, he found that other disciplines held the promise of providing useful answers for those patients who did not respond adequately to conventional medical care.  Slowly his practice evolved into something new, that did not really have a name, and he called it Complex Medical Problem Solving.  Over time, he found himself working mostly with those unfortunate patients who had not received a clear diagnosis from conventional medicine and were suffering with persistent and debilitating illnesses including Fibromyalgia, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Chronic Lyme disease with its coinfections, Autism, and all varieties of Chronic Pain, amongst others.  He is the author of several popular books including his 2018 book "Toxic: Heal Your Body from Mold Toxicity, Lyme Disease, Multiple Chemical Sensitivities, and Chronic Environmental Illness" and his 2021 book "Energetic Diagnosis" and 2022 update “Mold and Mycotoxins: Current Evaluation and Treatment 2022”.

Key Takeaways

• Why is conventional medicine not open to many tools in the energy realm?
• What is the ideal balance of biochemistry vs. physics in a treatment protocol?
• Is intuition a form of energetic diagnosis?
• Are empaths more likely to develop physical illnesses?
• What are energetic cords?
• What is an energy vampire?
• Are energy medicine tools necessary as a counterbalance to the increasing levels of EMFs in our environment?
• What are tools like FSM and LENS?
• How does one become a healer?
• What is the piezoelectric effect?
• Can energetic stagnation be felt using palpation?
• What can be learned about healing from interactions with plants?
• Can physical illnesses originate in the spiritual realm?

Connect With My Guest

http://NeilNathanMD.com

Related Resources

Book: Energetic Diagnosis
Book: Mold and Mycotoxins: Current Evaluation and Treatment 2022

Interview Date

January 21, 2022

Transcript

Transcript Disclaimer: Transcripts are intended to provide optimized access to information contained in the podcast.  They are not a full replacement for the discussion.  Timestamps are provided to facilitate finding portions of the conversation.  Errors and omissions may be present as the transcript is not created by someone familiar with the topics being discussed.  Please Contact Me with any corrections.  

[00:00:00.29] Welcome to BetterHealthGuy Blogcasts, empowering your better health. And now, here's Scott, your Better Health Guy.

[00:00:14.02] The content of this show is for informational purposes only and is not intended to diagnose, treat, or cure any illness or medical condition. Nothing in today's discussion is meant to serve as medical advice or as information to facilitate self-treatment. As always, please discuss any potential health-related decisions with your own personal medical authority.

[00:00:34.04] Scott: Hello everyone, and welcome to episode number 160 of the BetterHealthGuy Blogcasts series. Today's guest is Dr. Neil Nathan, and the topic of the show is Energetic Diagnosis. Dr. Neil Nathan has been a board-certified family physician and is a founding diplomate of the American Board of Holistic Medicine.

He recently retired from clinical practice after nearly five decades of patient care. From the time that he began medical school at the University of Chicago's Pritzker School of Medicine, it has always been his passion to try to help as many of his patients as possible. He was never satisfied with sending patients home with the cliché “Sorry; we just don't have any answers for you”.

For him and for his patients, conventional medicine had many answers, but sometimes, they weren't enough. Starting his 50-year medical career as a family physician, he delivered babies, did some minor surgery, and worked in the emergency room, providing the most comprehensive care that he could.

Over the years, he found that other disciplines held the promise of providing useful answers for those patients who did not respond adequately to conventional medical care; slowly, his practice evolved into something new that did not really have a name, and he called it complex medical problem-solving.

Over time, he found himself working mostly with those unfortunate patients who had not received a clear diagnosis from conventional medicine and were suffering with persistent and debilitating illnesses including fibromyalgia, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, chronic Lyme disease with its coinfections, autism and all varieties of chronic pain; amongst others.

He is the author of several popular books, including his 2018 book  “Toxic: Heal Your Body From Mold Toxicity, Lyme Disease, Multiple Chemical Sensitivities, and Chronic Environmental Illness. His 2021 book “Energetic Diagnosis” and 2022 update “Mold and Mycotoxins: Current Evaluation and Treatment 2022”. And now, my interview with Dr. Neil Nathan.

This is Dr. Nathan's fifth time being guest on the podcast, and it is such an honor. Years ago, I remember listening to his podcast and learning from top experts in the field, and now I am blessed to follow in his footsteps and have the opportunity to talk with some amazing guests. Thanks so much for being here today, Dr. Nathan.

[00:03:04.27] Dr. Nathan: My pleasure. This is your 160th? Yes, amazing. I want to return the compliment to just an amazing job you have of bringing forth some of the most interesting people in the integrative field all in one place, where people can listen to your podcast.

For those of you who have not had the privilege of working with Scott, he is the most organized host ever, that when I do a podcast with him, I receive a four- or five-page outline of the questions that he's thinking about asking before we go on. So your organization skills are fabulous, Scott. Thank you.

[00:03:53.12] Scott: Thank you. For some, the fact that you authored a book on energy medicine and intuition might be a bit of a surprise. So what was it about your path as a doctor that led you to finding the value of intuition, of frequency, of energy and working with your patients. What led you to making that decision to write a book on a topic that in many ways may seem like a departure from some of your prior books.

[00:04:20.22] Dr. Nathan: It very definitely is a departure from my prior books, in the sense that it is not strictly medical in its orientation. It's intended for both healthcare professionals and consumer-based audience because the focus is something I think that all groups can relate to. It's about the importance of honoring intuition. Not only in the field of medicine, I know I titled it Energetic Diagnosis, but it's really about energetic perception and how helpful and important it is in all communication.

That when I'm communicating with you at this moment, and I have the privilege of seeing your face, so that I can watch your reactions to what I say, I'm not just reading gestures or movements or eye-rolling or whatever you happen to be doing. But to some extent, I'm reading your energy field. I have long believed that physicians do this routinely, but often without awareness and, most important, without being willing to really talk about it.

So the key issue was I wanted to open a dialogue in healthcare practitioners, and anybody about how do I know what I know about another human being? I'll start with a little story that was formative for me; when I was in medical school, as you might imagine, I was one of those really annoying medical students who kept asking, why do we do that and how do that's true? Attendings are not famous for being open to those questions; the answer is I know what I know, and your job is to sit and soak it up.

I went well, no, I'm paying a lot of money to go to this medical school, and I just want to know why you do what you do. How is it that we learned how to treat this? I learned early on that a lot of that is simply passed on, and not really based on science; we think it is. But if you really delve into the science behind almost anything, it's not solid. Fast forward, I'm in my ear, nose, and throat rotation and I'm looking at ears. I'm being taught as a medical student to look at ears.

Typically, that means we're looking at children with ear infections, or people with that kind of an issue. I realized very quickly that what I was seeing in an ear wasn't always what they were seeing in an ear, and the reason I know that is that they would be making a diagnosis that didn't jive with what I was visually seeing. Seeing, you would think, is straightforward. The color purple is the color purple to all people, unless maybe you're colorblind.

But we all agree that's purple, maybe a shade of purple, but why quibble? So I started to ask all of the people who would be looking at that eardrum with me, which included interns, residents and attendings, to draw what they saw in the eardrum that they were looking at, and I made my own drawing, and I compared those drawings, they didn't always stack up. For some people, the ear looked very red.

To some people, that same ear didn't look red, but it looked what we call retracted. It was amazing discrepancy in terms of simply visual perception, what made one person see this, and I realized that it synced with their diagnosis. If you thought that someone didn't have an ear infection, you didn't see red. You saw a retraction or some other quality of the eardrum that would make you give a decongestant rather than an antibiotic. If you thought it was an infection and you wanted to prescribe antibiotics, because that's what you thought the patient needed, it looked red to you.

Now, to me, this was an amazing learning experience and perception, which is physicians were shifting their perception based on what they thought the patient needed, and that had to be intuitive, not physically diagnosed, because they weren't actually seeing red necessarily unless they wanted to see red, to me that's fascinating. Like something, that should be as simple as it's just this what does that mean was actually the question being asked by all of those people was, what do I need to do?

Not what am I looking at? So that was an introduction to me and recognizing that the left-brain perceptions and information that we process weren't exactly what anybody was doing, almost everyone was adding to that a level of their own brand of intuition and that has carried through, my 50 plus years of medical practice, to teaching medical students and residents which I did for 11 years at the University of Minnesota at the medical school.

It's an unrecognized component of observation perception, and, ultimately diagnosis and treatment. It's about what that person thinks is going on or intuits, and most of us are pretty good at that. But we don't talk about it; it's kind of a no-no.

Over the years, I've talked about this subject obliquely, and some of the many lectures that I've given over the years, and it's been fascinating to me that the end of those lectures almost invariably a group, not one, but a group of healthcare providers will come up to me and go I've never shared this with anyone but, and they will tell me amazing stories of intuitions that they've had about certain people's illness or health that could not be validated by objective science. But that they could sense or feel, and it led to a good outcome.

So in terms of the genesis of this book for a long time, I've been wanting to write something to talk about this whole subject, because it fascinates me. The concept of consciousness and perception is so important in every aspect of how we work in this world, and how we communicate. So how does that apply to, and I call that energetic diagnostics which is just a way of introducing the subject.

[00:12:01.00] Scott: Why do you think that conventional medicine is not open to many of the tools in the energetic realm? When tools like EKG and EEG are also measuring energy or electrical activity?

[00:12:15.16] Dr. Nathan: Absolutely. We use our knowledge that the body is an energetic all the time as you're saying, basic tools of medicine around forever. I think it has to do with an image of who we are and what we're supposed to be, and honestly, that's kind of what I'm hoping we can shift and change. That image are we are scientists, and scientists only work left brand with data, evidence-based medicine has become the buzzword of the last 10 or 15 years in which you can take a large number of poorly done medical studies and bring them all together and somehow that data will be meaningful, even if you acknowledge that every single paper had flaws.

But we'll amass this evidence, and that will be how we practice because we want the public to know that, we are scientists, we are not just making it up as we go along, which heaven forfend, we actually do. It's our unwillingness to acknowledge how little we know. It's our unwillingness to acknowledge the complexity of the beings that we are working with, and in all ways: spiritual, energetic, physical, biochemical, genetic, we're all unique beings, and medicine is never really like that.

It always wanted to be able to put forth a diagnosis, be based on very specific criteria and a treatment very algorithmic, so that you have a sore throat; I do a strep culture for it; it shows the strep bacteria, I give you penicillin, nice, clean. Honestly, if medicine was that simple, that would be great. But for a few things, it is. But increasingly, and the vast majority of patients who come into a healthcare practitioner's office are complicated. Yes, sometimes they just have a cold or a sore throat, but the vast majority of physician’s time statistically is taking care of chronic illness for which this model does not hold.

When we get into evaluating chronic illness, so many other variables come into play, that how do you sort through that? My suggestion is that we honor our intuition to cut through the massive data that we're accumulating as we work with a patient, to cut to the chase. What is really causing this at its deepest level? So we can address that as accurately and effectively as possible.

[00:15:09.16] Scott: I want to talk a little bit about chemistry versus physics, energy. In terms of people that are dealing with chronic conditions, what are your thoughts on the application of subtle fields and frequency and light and other physics-based interventions?

Meaning, what should the focus or balance be in a treatment protocol health optimization protocol in terms of things that we're taking from a biochemical perspective, versus things that we're doing working with the energy body? Where is that balance? Where should that balance be?

[00:15:46.22] Dr. Nathan: Well, as usual, there are five questions embedded in that question. So first of all, even in physics, especially in physics, we are learning about the imprecision of measurement and observation. We know that the observer affects what is being seen, that's been shown for many years in physics. We don't know if light is a wave or a particle, because it behaves at times like both.

So physicists are more in tune with what we're going to talk about energy than other scientific disciplines, because they've been recognizing for the last 25 - 30 years that an atom isn't a discrete thing that sits in a particular location by quantum physics; it's a field, a cloud of possibility or probability of where an electron might be in that atom at any given moment of time. At times, that electron might be not even near that atom purely by probability statistics measurement by physics.

So physicists are in tune with the understanding of the universe being very complicated, and is both physical and energetic at the same time. Again, I don't think that physicians like that idea; I think they want it to be more straightforward. So is this illness biochemical, or is it genetic, or is it structural? Then, it's not really inclined to add emotional or energetic or spiritual pieces to that puzzle, which are the fully integrated human experience.

So to answer your question more specifically, I think it has to start with coming to it from the patient's consciousness and awareness, not mine. Meaning, the vast majority of the time, when I interact with anybody, what I'm trying to do is get a feel for what is their way of experience the world? How do they see it? Doesn't matter how I see it. Because if I try to impose on them my worldview, then it's not likely to go anywhere, especially if it's not jiving with theirs.

So initially, in working with most people, most people want to understand their illness as in the physical realm. What's wrong with me biochemically and structurally? So unless a patient lets me know, and they usually will, both subtly and by their, they're radiating to me, by the language that they use, by the stories that they bring up, they're usually going to tell me non-verbally or in subtext, this is where I'm coming from, so that it tells me how open they are to talking about the spiritual or the energetic or other realms.

Most of the time, at a first interview, people are hopeful that I will be helpful to them, but they don't trust me enough to go let me tell you about my deepest feelings and beliefs. They've been hurt by many physicians before they've got to me; they've been disrespected.

If they really express what they're thinking way too often, especially the patients I treat. The patients that I've been treating for years are people who have seen countless other health care providers, and not had their needs met. So they come to me hopeful, skeptical, I'll try this guy out. I've heard he does things a little differently, but he's going to have to prove it to me.

So usually, given that is the usual energetic of my interaction, my first interaction with the patient is okay; let me see if I can bond with you, to meet your first need, which is by helping you to understand what you have and how we're going to approach it.

So over 50 years of medical practice, I think I've gotten fairly good at helping most people to go okay, from everything you've given me, all this lab work and all of this information and all these symptoms which we've gone into in great detail, I think you have this and I think it's triggered these other conditions, this is what we want to treat in this order.

I usually find most patients very happy to receive it in that form, and go okay, great; we have a plan. With many people I'm working with, haven't really had a plan. We're going to treat this, maybe we'll treat that, that didn't work and then I'll try this and I typically go no, we've got a very clear plan of what we're going to do in what order.

As the majority of them improve and they start feeling more comfortable, pleased with their progress and more open, then they begin to share with me more about what's going on for them until for some, they get to the point that they're really willing to share, you know, I was sexually, emotionally, and verbally abused through much of my childhood, they don't come at their first visit telling me that. A few do, who are very aware of that, but most that's not something they're going to share.

In fact, many of them have repressed that memory and don't even remember that they have. As we work together, sometimes, they are shocked that oh my god, I think I'm remembering something pretty awful, is that possible? And then we have an opening to explore that, and to validate their perceptions, which is key throughout my whole book.

Which is that you've got to honor your perceptions, regardless of what it sounds like to others, and you may not share with others what you're perceiving or how, but I believe that all of us have many gifts which some people call psychic, I just call them gifts, and they're actually I think senses in the same way that we have sight, sound, touch, smell, hearing; we're all born into this universe with certain skills or gifts in certain areas.

In the same way that a wine sommelier can pick up sense of honeydew and watermelon and tannins and smoke in a burgundy, and I can't. I hear those words, and I go that's very nice, I just know whether I like the wine or not. But I've worked with enough vintners, living in the, near the Anderson Valley and the Napa/Sonoma area, that I know that these people do have that gift, that they are able to pick up these nuances and blend wines to sew in such a way that we taste them and go wow, that's pretty good. But that's one of those gifts I think we have, similarly, many gifts that we don't talk about. Gifts of knowing where, and just being with you or patients, I know things without knowing how I know them.

People have clear audience; the ability to hear beneath the words, beneath the sounds, information that comes into them, people are able to see the future. People have the gift of telepathy, where they can literally, I don't want to say read minds, but know what's in someone else's mind at the same time and so on. I think that medicine has not entered this arena, because that's generally be considered woo-woo. I can't talk about that, I might do it, and I can assure you having talked to hundreds, maybe thousands of physicians, many do it routinely, and most are not willing to talk about it, so I'm sorry.

Far afield, but I think I'm answering your question about how to proceed with what you're looking at, and as you move along in your working with an individual, and they become more trusting, it becomes more and more evident that they have what I'm going to call blocks to their progress, that could be emotional or spiritual or energetic, because they kind of run into a brick wall in their physical treatments, that they're just, we know what they have, but for example, in the field I work in a lot in mold toxicity, they're taking their binders, they're taking their anti-fungal medication, they're taking their materials to detoxify.

They're doing everything I ask them to do, and they're spinning their wheels, just not going anywhere. So if we understand Cell Danger Response theory, when a being is on survival level, even doing the right thing may not be able to take hold until they feel safe and open enough, and some of that lack of being open are these energetic, emotional and spiritual blockages.

At that point, you can talk to a patient, and you can literally say, hey, we've got a relationship going here, you know that I like you and I really want to help you, but I'm stuck and you're stuck. So I think something else is going on here, and the vast majority of the time, patients will say yes, I feel stuck, okay. Let's explore, where is this stuck area? Then we can look at energetic arenas, which definitely play a role here.

[00:26:33.15] Scott: Talk to us about the role of intuition in medicine, and how you use intuition as an evaluative tool in working with your complex patients. Do you think of intuition as a form of energy medicine? Then, how might one learn to develop intuition or maybe better said to listen to it?

[00:26:53.22] Dr. Nathan: I'm going to start with a story, which is how I recognized my primary gift is that of knowing, and it simply means I don't know how I know certain things, and lord knows I've tried to figure it out, but I don't know. Ultimately, the paradox of the gift is you can't try, you simply get into a receptive place, and you allow it. If you try, you shut it down, because you're picking up subtle energies, and if you try, you're literally shutting down your perceptual systems that bring this energy, this information to it. So yes, intuition, it's two things, it's pattern recognition.

Meaning if you treat certain illnesses like I have like Lyme disease and mold toxicity and chronic fatigue, there's a certain pattern of symptom progression, language and verbiage and the way people say things that let you be able to go very comfortably. I've seen these three thousand times before; this is going to be mold toxicity; I can feel it; there's literally an energy of it. But it is partly pattern recognition, and partly an energetic perception.

So like, is light a waveform, or is it a particle? It's both. My own awareness of this gift came in a rather dramatic way. I had finished working in the Indian health service, I completed my basic training and I was working in a small town in Northern California, where actually I am back at this particular point, and it became known in those days that I was interested in working with the patients that no one else could help, don't know why, but it's always fascinated me.

Back then, I only had a couple of tools, one of them was hypnosis and the other one was Reichian therapy, named after Wilhelm Reich, not Reiki, and it's a type of process of doing physical bodywork to allow people to release emotionally repressed events or experiences. Those are the tools I had back then, my early formative years. One of my colleagues referred a patient to me who had had severe recurrent ovarian cysts, he was in OB-GYN, and he was operating on every other month, and it was just, didn't know what to do with her.

Now here's where intuition comes in and we never talked about it, intuitively, he thought I could help her. He referred this patient to me, and she's sitting in explaining her medical stories about these current ovarian cysts, and I'm just sitting and I'm listening and a typed message comes across my visual field. Ask her about the time she was raped? And my first reaction is, what? I can't do that; that is unbelievably, unprofessional and rude.

I can't do that. What is that? But a few minutes later, it comes through in bold print, ask her about the time she was raped. I'm still going; I can't do that. Finally, another one comes across; now this is in capital letters, bold typed, ask her about the time she was raped, I go oh my god. I think maybe in that area; I have some courage in that I said okay, at the risk of getting slapped, appropriately slapped, okay. So I simply asked her, tell me about the time you were raped, and she dissolves into a puddle of sobbing and tears and relates this horrific story about she was 13 years old, she was babysitting for her sister and her sister's husband came in and raped her.

Not only couldn't she tell her family about it, because she didn't think anyone would believe her, but she got pregnant. And then the family shunned her; at a very tender age, she left the family with a child alone, unsupported with this horrific experience. At that moment in time, I used the two tools I had to try to help her release whatever she was holding about that horrific experience. I had already learned from my work in hypnosis that simply remembering this was not sufficient to release it. Sometimes it is, often it's not.

So I literally, with her permission, regressed her back to the time that this occurred and used Reichian therapy to have her breathe her way through the experience, to release the emotion that she'd been carrying in her tissues all this period of time. This didn't take that long; it took about three sessions. At the end of that time, her ovarian cysts went away, to the best of my knowledge, having followed her for 10 years. Afterwards, never recurred, never had that pain, and it markedly improved her relationship with her husband, because what I was seeing she was married and moved on with her life, but was still stuck in that old experience.

So I continued after that randomly, not with every patient, to get these messages correct, okay. At this point, my subconscious, if we can get far afield spirit guides, the divine, I have no idea what you want to call it, because I really don't know. But something communicated to me information. I remember going in to see a patient in the hospital who'd been admitted from the emergency room, who did not have a headache or a stiff neck, and it said check him for meningitis, and I'm going, he doesn't have symptoms of meningitis, check him for meningitis.

Well, having had a couple of experiences with the accuracy of this information, I went okay; I'm going to do a spinal tap and check him for meningitis. The ER doc came in afterwards and said, what are you doing? There were no indications whatsoever that he needed a spinal tap.

This is before the results of the spinal tap came in, and I said, well, you didn't get the full history; he did talk about a stiff neck and some headaches to me. I literally lied to go, because gosh, if this turns out to be nothing, I could get hauled up before the hospital board, I don't know. I think the key is I trusted this information, can't tell you why I trusted the information. Lo and behold, came back, he had a viral meningitis, and we were able to treat him, and he did well.

So after a couple of dozen of these type messages, as time went on, I just didn't need the messages anymore, like I don't understand the workings of my subconscious mind with how this information comes through, but I simply knew things. I'd simply literally within seconds of someone walking into my office I knew what they had, or I knew what they were wrestling with, and that might not be as useful if you don't use that gift properly.

So I found that it was vital that I not share what I knew until that person was ready for me to know that. So the fact that I knew it, if related to them prematurely, they would go defensively, and it would shut down, and it would actually backfire. It happened to me with one of my best friends, where I shared with him information that I should not have had, and he literally didn't speak to me for months because he was not ready to hear that information, and that woke me up to oh okay, yes, this is a gift, but there's a liability this gift.

You have to wait, and people are open to hearing what you have to say. In Buddhism, we would call that right speech or right action, which is yes, it might be the right thing to say or do, but is it the right thing to say or do now. That's very important. But that gift had, because I honored it and listened to it, it was never wrong. Neil is wrong; the knowing sense which comes, it comes to me in a palpable feeling way that's very different from the way my brain works.

So the source of the information, I do not know, and I've talked to many people who've studied this and many people have their pet theories about it, and I don't even have a pet theory about it. Honestly, I'd like to know, but I don't care, because the information is valuable and useful and allows me to respectfully proceed with the patient sometimes leading them to share the information that I already know exists. It shortens the therapeutic process by allowing me to ask open-ended leading questions, and if someone is open, it shows, and if they're not open, okay, we're not ready to do that yet.

[00:36:51.14] Scott: Many people with complex chronic health conditions and oftentimes practitioners that are working with these people, tend to be either clairsentient or empathic. Wondering your thoughts on whether or not empaths might be more likely to develop a chronic illness themselves if they're taking on the energy, the feelings, the emotions of other peoples, and maybe a little bit about some of the strategies that empaths can employ to prevent themselves from taking these things on and negatively impacting their own health?

[00:37:25.14] Dr. Nathan: So the answer to that question is a resounding yes. Empaths are very much at risk for picking up other people's energy, if they're not aware of the extent of their gift. In the gift of being an empath, which I call the gift of feeling, you can literally feel what other people are feeling. And if you're not careful, you can feel it to the depth that they feel it. And if you're not careful, you may assume that it's your feeling and not theirs, and get confused.

So an empath, for example, can walk into a party and feel perfectly fine walking in the door and within seconds feels sad, morose, or depressed and going, what is that about? They're picking up the feelings of someone else in the room. The question that empaths need to ask themselves over and over again until it becomes ingrained as a habit is, whose feelings are these? The way out is through the gift. Which is when I feel sad or morose or anxious or whatever, there's a certain way that I feel it. If I'm feeling someone else's, doesn't feel the same, it's got a different quality to it.

So when you ask whose feelings are these, then when the answer is oh, those aren't mine, then you need to let it go as fast as possible. The empaths have to learn to ask that question until it becomes like breathing, which is with everything that you feel, is this mine or is this not mine? Because if it's not, do not take it in, because otherwise, you're going to leave the party depressed and sad and morose and go. I don't understand, okay. I'd like to flip this around for a second, because Scott, you've been in this field for a while; what are your gifts? What do you perceive? 

[00:39:34.09] Scott: I think a lot of my work is through Dr. Klinghardt's system of testing, and it is in this realm, but it's not always something that you automatically know. Though, I will say similar to the typed messages that you talked about, the longer that I've worked with those tools, the more something will pop into your mind for a specific person that you're working with that maybe you haven't thought about in two years, and then you go dig it out, and find that might be exactly the right thing for them.

So I think there is; some of these tools essentially are kind of a training ground like you talked about, where then certain things do come in. I haven't had the same experience as you've had, but I do notice the more that I've worked in this energy realm, the more that there are certain things that will just pop in, that where they come from to your earlier comment, I don't always know, but they're often very helpful.

[00:40:35.03] Dr. Nathan: Right. I love this word popping. So for example, over the years, one of the things I've studied is homeopathy, and I would find that working with certain patients, a remedy, maybe something that I hadn't thought about, staphysagria, that I hadn't thought about in years could pop into my head. It's the popping that it's almost always correct. I don't know where the popping comes from, but I think it's in the same line of knowing; it's a form of knowing in which if you're in a receptive place, some part of you puts two and two together and goes we have a match here, and I want you to be aware of that match, and then good things happen if we honor it.

So my main point is to honor every perception that we have, not necessarily act on it, but to honor it from the perspective of maybe what just popped into my head is going to be useful, rather than discard it as going well, that's weird, why was I thinking of that? It's like no, there's a reason for that. In terms of the question of how do we develop? It's honoring. I mean, there are books written about how to be more psychic, and that's not where I'm coming from.

My whole message is you already are psychic in various ways, now let's honor it, and the way to honor it is to be as receptive as possible, and listen to it, and then trust it and see what happens. I think that almost everyone has already found who does this, is that those popping, knowing messages that we get are invariably correct.

[00:42:28.23] Scott: I think another observation that I've had as well is that you really have to, or I have to be as unbiased or as disconnected from some idea of what the outcome should be, or what the thing should be. That if there's some investment in an outcome, then it may not be as correct as if you can just, one of my former teachers would say, it's almost like you're just, when you're doing some of the work in the Klinghardt realm, it's almost like you're just watching a movie and just keep watching and just keep observing, but don't try to direct what you're seeing.

[00:43:06.02] Dr. Nathan: A very important point for all of us is that we walk into every encounter with as open a mind as possible, so that we're not deciding beforehand what someone needs. Now, that's especially obvious in the ART realm. Where if you have an idea of what someone has, you're going to find it. But what you're really looking for is what do they have with no preconceived idea, so that you can be open to something that you might not have even thought about. In my experience, ART practitioners have varying degrees of what I'll call cleanness, where some of them, and you are, for example, you're able to enter without a preconceived idea.

I've worked with many others, who do have a preconceived idea. Many times, their practices are loaded with people with Lyme, for example, and so if you think someone's got Lyme, they have Lyme, and you're going to show it every single time with ART testing. So it's that openness that's critical, that's coming in. For example, in my medical practice, I would always enter the room with no idea of what I'm going to do today.

I might have already looked at the chart, and looked at what we did before, but my first few minutes with the patient are spent in just how are you? How are things? What's going on? In which I'm essentially doing nothing, but trying to be as receptive as I can. I don't even want to talk; I want to listen to them. And in their movements and gestures and language, they will show me what it is we're going to do that day. It could be that we're going to talk biochemistry; we could talk genetics. I might work on them osteopathically, or we might talk about spiritual or emotional or energetic things.

But I never know on any given visit what I'm going to talk about, because I'm waiting for that being to tell me okay, what do I need today? It's a little bit, and I've described it this way; it's a little bit like praying to God for guidance. Which is okay, boss; what am I supposed to do here today to help this being? I'm just sitting back, and I'm listening. So the better I can listen, and listening and quiet, the more effective I am at what I do. I think that applies to all communication; we're not just talking about the physician-patient relationship.

[00:46:02.29] Scott: You in the book talk about patients with an inner light that you can often perceive. So I'm wondering if a level of a patient's inner light is predetermined, can it be changed? Does it change over time? Are there maybe certain factors that are impacting their inner light that can be removed? So how do we enhance this concept of our inner light or our spark or our vitality?

[00:46:30.21] Dr. Nathan: So the answer is yes and no in terms of can it be improved. When I talk about inner light, I don't see auras by the way. I know that there are people who do, and I've always wanted to; I've always thought that would be so cool., but it's not my gift. So when I say inner light, what I'm really talking about is I can feel a person's inner vitality; I think that's more correct. In the osteopathic profession, we call that ignition.

There's literally a point in the third ventricle, which is the ignition point for energy in the body. Some people simply aren't ignited, it's like their car isn't started yet, you got to get it going. In Osteopathy, in the biodynamic aspect of Osteopathy, there's actually a teaching program in which you can learn to feel for ignition and actually provide it if the patient is ready, and if they can use it, because sometimes, you can get the ignition going and it goes, and goes out.

Because they're not ready to sustain it. They, for whatever reason, be a physical, emotional, mental and all of these come into play; they may not be able to sustain that spark. So for some people, you can enhance it. For most people, you can feel their vitality, and you can even feel their vitality in people who are brought into the office in a wheelchair, where they're so weak and so fragile that physically speaking, they can barely get out of bed, and they are bedridden literally in their life. Yet, when you look at them, there is some vitality inside them.

When I see that, or feel that is actually more correct, then I know at some point here, this person can heal. They have the capacity to take that inner vitality, and turn it into healing energy if we can figure out the recipe for doing it. It might take a while, but when I can feel that, then I know this is someone I'll work with for as long as it takes until they get there. Some of these patients have taken five, ten years for that to manifest into health, but it's really fabulous when they do, and you go, yes, I always knew they had that capacity.

Other people, you feel for that vitality, and it's not there. In the younger days of my practice, I worked endlessly with many of these patients to try to somehow generate that spark. When I didn't perceive it? They didn't get there. No field that I worked, and nothing that I had to offer. Now that might have been my failure, meaning I might not have been the right person to engage that spark.

But what I realized is working with these people for five or ten years was wasting their time, energy and money and mine, that I'm not helping you. I don't think that I have the ability to influence that. For some of these people, and I know it's awful to talk about it, I think they're broken. In other words, they've been too damaged or injured to generate that spark.

Again, all I can say is that I can't work with them, because I've always encouraged them to please find someone else, because maybe someone else has the skills and ability to help you, but I don't. So I think that a lot of physicians work with some of these patients for years frustrated with God; that person is coming in today, I have no idea what I'm going to do for them. I haven't helped them in five years, and they like me, and I like them, but. My advice is help them find someone else. If you're not the vehicle for healing, then let it go.

[00:50:48.20] Scott: All right. So here comes the next five questions, and then I'll let you run with this concept. So I want to talk a little bit about the concept of energetic cords, and how cords or connections to people that may have hurt us, can continue to hurt us; how it may require some action to disconnect.

Can cords be from people that are living or dead? Are we talking about things that are getting into the realm of entities? Are they all negative? Can they be positive? And then what do you as a practitioner do you find that patients can cord themselves to you, because they've placed their hope on you as the practitioner, and that maybe you need to actively do something to not be impacted by those courts. That was more than five questions, I'm sorry.

[00:51:38.03] Dr. Nathan: I was about to say. Those are really good questions. In fact, I think that perhaps the most important chapter in my book is the one on energy vampires, which connects to what you're talking about here. I'm really honored to have Judy Tsafrir, an integrative psychiatrist, writes part of that chapter for me, to not only validate what I was writing, but to provide that information from yet another perspective.

So energy courts, in a simplistic way, are simply how we are actually connected to everything, both animate and inanimate objects. We have energy cords that tie us not just the people living and dead, but also to the things we treasure, things that we have sentimental value for, objects or photographs or things we bought that we just love or give us memories. So, although we're all aware that we can be attached to lots of stuff, there's actually a physical attachment in the form of an energy cord. Some people call it an energy strand.

An excellent book, a little bit too new agey for my taste, but with really good information, is by Denise Linn and simply called Energy Strands. She catalogs all of the different types of energy strands that currently exist; how you develop them? And also talks about how to know whether you have them and how to get rid of them. So it's a very nice book that kind of does justice to the whole subject. Cords are neither good nor bad; it's just an energetic connection. So with the people we love and have a nourishing relationship with, those cords are nourishing; they feed us. I would say I have cords galore with my fabulous wife, Cheryl. I think we're totally corded.

It nourishes both of us in innumerable ways. In fact, we're pretty telepathic, which I think maybe a component of that, hadn't even had that thought before, which is all part of that connection. That if we have a thought, it's always fascinating that neither of us knows who had the thought first, but both of us were thinking it.

Cords can be good, it's not that if you have a cord, you've got to yank it out or get rid of it because they're all bad, but the cords that get us in trouble and here we're talking energy blockages, are the cords that we have developed to people who mean us harm or even what we call energy vampires, people who suck us dry. We've all had the experience of having a five-minute conversation with someone we meet on the street, and being wasted afterwards.

Like, what was that about? I just didn't even talk about anything meaningful. But because it wasn't about anything meaningful, and you were vulnerable, an energy vampire will suck you dry in minutes. Unfortunately, if that was beneficial to them, okay, great. I'm doing my paying forward, but energy vampires are an endless pit of can't be filled. So in attempting to give energy to an energy vampire, you are not really helping them, because they can't be helped.

Their need is insatiable, and they'll just go on to the next person and drain them dry. So we need to be aware that these people exist; they're very much out there. Many of the medical practices, these are the people that drive not just you, but your whole staff crazy. These are the people who drain you, and then they drive everyone on their way to the front desk and then on the way out. These are the people who are often psychologically, as Judy Tsafrir talks about, psychologically diagnosed as borderline personalities or narcissists or even sociopaths. People who are chaotic in their essential nature, they love chaos, and they love leaving chaos in its wake.

So your staff can tell you who they are, because those are the people who make their life miserable. That constantly changing appointments, and no, that won't work. No, I'm sick today, I can't make it today, but I can another day. That's not working; there's always something that comes up; they're always sabotaging their health care. There's always some reason they didn't do what you asked them to do. So knowing this is a reality is important, and then doing something about it is even more important. Which is you've got to protect yourself from people like that, you've got to be aware that they are literally putting energy cords into you, and you've got to remove those cords in order for them to be gone, and that can even be people who did you harm who are now dead, because we maintain those cords. We keep them going by the memory of what people did to us.

It's one of the reasons that forgiveness is so misunderstood, that often people have done horrible things to us, and we often say, I can't forgive them for that ever. That means that when you are saying that, that you are going to hold on to bitterness and anger and rage and sadness forever, now they're never going to feel that, but you are and so literally holding on to those feelings, which may be justified, and that's where people get into trouble.

Those feelings may be absolutely justified that people have done you wrong; they have harmed you. But if you hold on to those feelings, you're holding on to those feelings, and those feelings are going to block up these energy channels that we're talking about. Those feelings get into the tissues of the body structurally, they stay in the fascia and the muscles creating physical blockages, they stay in emotional blockages, they cause energetic blockages. So we need to use forgiveness, not for them, but for ourselves. So that we are not held prisoner by our experiences, and that we can allow our own energies to flow without being impinged upon by those.

Now, there are very specific ways of removing energy cords, that might be beyond the scope of what we're talking about today, but the key is to be aware of them. Especially energy cords, we always think of ourselves as being vulnerable here, but a lot of sneaky people put energy cords into our back, usually in the chakra areas. So the crown, the third eye chakra, the throat, the heart, the solar plexus and below, those are the places we tend to have the cords most, but they can't be anywhere.

[00:58:46.21] Scott: So just briefly extending on this concept of energy vampires, or what I've also heard termed chi suckers. You do a lot of mentoring with practitioners, and so I'm wondering, would you advise practitioners to avoid working with energy vampires? And as you say in the book, how do you know when to hold them, know when to fold them, know when to walk away and know when to run?

[00:59:09.25] Dr. Nathan: Thank you, Kenny Rogers. I've been doing this for a very long time, and I think I'm fairly good at what I do. Although, I know people who have psychic gifts that are far better than mine in every single category that I have it.

So I would think of myself as fairly average. I can see your eye-rolling there, Scott. But what I mean by that is I've nurtured what I have, to maximize or optimize what I can do. Having said that, I do not have the prosthetic ability to take that negative energy and transform it or transmute it or remove it from my body; I don't have that ability. I know people who do, and they are few and far between.

So the vast majority of human beings, unless they are amazingly energetically skilled or trained are going to get hurt by energy vampires in whatever form we have. So my advice, and it sounds like I'm being mean and cruel and insensitive, is that if you have such a being in your life, whether it is in your medical practice or in your family, which is where it is very common, the only way to deal with it is to excise them from your life and have as little to do with them as possible, because you will only get hurt.

I know that that sounds insensitive and cruel, but I can't count the number of people I counsel, who I'll give it in two categories families and health care providers. In families, it's often a mother, a father, a brother or sister, an uncle, someone you go to a family get together, and you dread it. Thanksgiving, oh, Christmas, oh, because I'm going to see so and so and they drain me, it takes me weeks to get over it when I get home that I literally have to recover, and I literally call that toxic.

So these people are literally toxic to us, their toxins have permeated our tissues, and we literally have to detoxify from them physically, emotionally, energetically and spiritually in order to get that. But we're going to be seeing them every holiday, unless we don't.

So my comment is, I have seen countless patients made sick and worse every family get together, and because oh, I can't not go to that family get together, and my comment is yes, you can. In fact, unless you do, you're guaranteed to be sick and stay sick, because you're going to be constantly, it's just as toxic as the toxicity I write about in mold toxicity or you name it, it's equally toxic, and the only treatment is avoidance.

Or if you can't completely avoid it, learn how to create energy shields, surround yourself with light, white or purple light or gold light or whatever imagery appeals to you, surround yourself with it. Above on in a bubble, and hold that throughout the entire interaction. You've got to be relentless and disciplined about doing that if you're not going to get hurt.

In the medical field, these are the people that you should fire. These are the people that you're not helping; you're not going to help; they're simply going to make you and your staff toxic. As you suggest, I am a mentor to well over 150 physicians at this point. I've been advising them to do this for a while, and a recent story from a Canadian physician who I've been working with for a long time, who we did a consultation together, and I told her at the onset, this person's toxic, you're just not going to get anywhere with her. But we all have to learn that for ourselves. Hit our head against the wall, enough.

And I have; I have been made toxic for years until I learned I've got to take care of myself. So she told me just recently, she said you told me five years ago that I needed to fire that patient, and I did, and I can't tell you how much better I feel, and how much better my staff feels. I am lighter, I am happier, I should have done this years ago, and that's the general feedback that I get working with health care providers about protecting themselves.

[01:04:05.28] Scott: There are health-promoting and health negating energies or frequencies, and I'm wondering if our need for some of these health-promoting, physics-based interventions, devices, frequency-specific microcurrent, those types of things. Could our need for those tools be increasing as a counterbalance to the health negating ones that are exponentially increasing in our environment? EMFs, EMRs and things of that nature?

[01:04:36.05] Dr. Nathan: Fabulous question. Yes, our need to do a lot is increasing. We've talked before about the toxicity of the planet that we're living on, the increasing chemical toxicity, both environmental chemicals, heavy metals, EMF toxicity is increasingly becoming aware, not by most people in the medical profession, but we're seeing more and more sensitive patients to EMF. I'm seeing more medical meetings where that is the entire subject of the medical meeting with science behind it, and observations being made about that occurring, so yes.

Now, COVID has added an enormous level of fear and panic, anxiety globally in a way completely disproportionate to what it actually is. It's taken over the consciousness of the planet, that adds to all of these other things. So it behooves a human being to make every effort to take care of themselves in all of these arenas. So, for example, I strongly encouraged people to not listen to the news. If you really want to get you revved up, listen to any newscast you want; it is bad news, intentionally. It's not about firefighters saving someone, maybe a 20-second segment; it's more about murders or rapes or explosions, or something is the lead story and it goes on from there.

So the people who expose themselves to that are setting themselves up, being obsessed with COVID, which is unfortunately extremely common even in the medical profession; I think it's extremely deleterious to people's health. It's like rubbing your nose in this epidemic of anxiety and panic. We have literally a global PTSD happening here that we need to honor. So whatever you need to do to be at peace, to keep out the outside world.

My wife and I have made our home, to the best of our ability, a sanctuary. We literally try to keep out all negativity that we're able to find, and that includes people. It'll find me, you can't escape it, but I don't have to invite it into my world. I have the right to hold that at bay. To be in touch with the natural world, which is a large segment of my book.

I believe that the natural world is healing, that literally lying on the sand on the beach or in your front yard or simply partaking of the beauty on a walk, without earplugs and music playing, with just watching, I mean, I live right by the ocean and my puppies and my wife, and I take walks there almost every day just taking it in, just taking in the beauty of the ocean and the beauty of the world that we have as a counterpoint to the negativity that's coming at us constantly, I think that that's super important as a strategy for living in this planet.

In terms of these devices that many of them, if they resonate with us, are helpful, and that's the big deal. The person who is administering it, or the person using it has to be in tune with their body that those energies or frequencies are resonant sympathetically with them that are synergistic with their being and their spirit, because I've seen some of these energetic device's backfire, like rife machines particularly.

If you're using a set frequency for something, and then you're exposing a human being to that, how do you know if that frequency is fits for that being energetically, structurally, genetically the whole nine yards. You don't, unless you take it in, I've had countless patients get bad results from a rife machine keep saying well, but my therapist keeps saying this is good, it's going to work for me eventually, I'm thinking, not really.

So I mean, a Frequency-Specific Microcurrent is one of my favorites; it has a chapter by Carolyn McMakin in the book who developed it. It's a wonderful device, and practitioners of FSM, choose frequencies that they feel how they affect the patient before they actually use them full bore. In other words, a practitioner is trained in the use of the machine that when you use a certain frequency, your hand is resting on the patient and you have to feel the tissues relax, which Carolyn calls a smoosh. It's a great word for it. You can feel it when you're using that machine, which I've had the privilege of using for years.

When you're using the right frequency, you can literally feel the patient's tissues go ah, that feels good, then you know that those frequencies will be nourishing. But that's key amongst all of these devices, or any of the energetic techniques that we're talking about. Is that you have to notice whether the patient is responding to that in a positive way. Alternatively, the patient has to notice.

So if someone is treating you physically or in any way, and you come off of a session feeling worse, although, that could be a reasonable shift, more often than not, they didn't do the right thing and they weren't in tune with what you needed. So really, I know it's hard to turn to health professionals and say sorry, but the last treatment didn't really work for me.

But if you brought your car to the garage, and they worked on it three times and they still didn't fix it, you wouldn't keep going back to that garage, I don't think. We have the right and need to trust and honor ourselves and our perceptions in order to have the right things happen for us.

[01:11:10.12] Scott: To your comments on rife machines, I think probably based on my own journey many years ago with them and how my perception of chronic illness has changed. One of the other observations that I've had is many people that are drawn to them have the concept that if they can just battle a bug and kill a microbe, that health will be restored.

In my experience, battling with the bug is fairly low on the list of things that we probably need to do in order to restore health. So I think that's another, at least one of my observations with rife, is like is that battling with something really the way to restore health.

[01:11:49.09] Dr. Nathan: Keyword, battling.

[01:11:51.11] Scott: Yes.

[01:11:51.28] Dr. Nathan: We shouldn't be battling, that shouldn't be what health is about. The concept of killing microbes was the original concept, Lyme is a bacteria, what do we do with bacteria? We kill them. Well, this is not an ordinary bacteria, neither are the coinfections; we're dealing with a whole system that has been affected by this.

You have to pay attention to all of the aspects of that system to what needs nourishing? Are the hormones deficient or nutrients deficient? Are the mitochondria deficient? Or the chemical pathways not operating? You've got to look at the whole picture, it's not a simple matter of killing bugs and I'd like to think we've all learned that.

[01:12:33.03] Scott: You discuss biofeedback tools as a means of measuring and modifying a physiological process in the service of healing, tools have evolved into HRV or heart rate variability, tools like HeartMath. What role do you think these tools play in supporting the regulation of the autonomic nervous system, and those with complex chronic illnesses? How important is it to focus on calming or balancing autonomic nervous system dysfunction in your patient population?

[01:13:05.04] Dr. Nathan: So the answer is the vast majority of my patients have autonomic dysfunction through a certain degree, and addressing it becomes very important. For some people, it has to be the first thing they do, or they're not even moving forward. Because if the body doesn't feel safe via the Cell Danger Response model, it is in survival mode, and it can't respond to the treatments that would otherwise work until it feels safer.

So addressing the limbic system and the autonomic nervous system can be very necessary, and things that have to be done early on. Everything that a being does to feel safer and more comfortable and more relaxed, and more peaceful is worthwhile doing.

So HeartMath, meditation, tai chi, yoga, all wonderful for helping us to deal with the vast array of stimuli that are coming at us, that we've been talking about all day long, and helping us to take our nervous systems from over sympathetic drive that we've been in all day long with our interactions with other people, with protecting ourselves from whatever it is we do, interacting with other humans.

But to some extent, depending on how you structure your world, if you're working only with people who are safe, could be a good day, and you don't have to do that. Very few of us can create a world where you're not going to be interacting with people who may be problematic. If you're in the medical field, they will find you. To some extent, we have to protect ourselves. We also have to, as you are raising the question, take the time to unwind in whatever way resonates for us.

Those things that you mentioned, like HeartMath or I tossed out meditation or yoga or tai chi or deep breathing or sitting in a natural setting, very important for health, ongoing. And for chronic pain patients, even more important, because they have some rebooting to do to get their system to accept the treatments that will ultimately get them better.

[01:15:25.00] Scott: You then go on in the book to talk about neurofeedback and tools like LENS or low energy neurofeedback, which I did several years ago at your recommendation. Wondering how LENS facilitates rebooting of the nervous system? What types of patient presentations or patients might lead you to consider exploring it? And are tools like LENS essentially correcting bad habits of the brain or getting the patient out of a stuck pattern?

[01:15:53.23] Dr. Nathan: Yes, yes and yes. LENS is a medical device in which you attach electrodes to the earlobes and a little band around the head that attaches to a computer. There are no needles; there's no pain in it whatsoever. Essentially, the computer then measures the electrical activity of the brain in 21 different areas.

What the device is looking for are areas of the brain that are electrically under-perfused, where the brain wave activity is less than what it ought to be. Then, the feedback, as opposed to other kinds of feedback, which is voluntary, like muscle feedback or EMG feedback, this is involuntary. The computer does all the feedback. It puts a electrical signal into those areas, and literally, reboots the areas that are not being electrically perfused.

Which actually, literally re-creates circuits in the brain that have been shut down, and it's a beautiful tool for doing this process. It's great with children because there's no pain with it whatsoever, they don't have to cooperate with it. So it's great for kids with autism; it's great for people with traumatic brain injury, who've had injury to the nerves. It's great for people who have had some of the dyskinesias and pseudo-seizures or neurological things like tremors that are triggered by mold and Lyme and coinfections and things of that nature. It's great for literally, shifting neurological functioning when it's off, and as such, one of my favorite tools for doing so.

[01:17:45.29] Scott: The chapter on ART and the book that you wrote with Dr. Dave Ou I thought was fantastic. You also talk in the book about dowsing and the use of pendulums, for example. So different techniques to gather information that can lead to new insights when working with these complex chronic conditions. Are there any tools in that realm that you utilize as one of your many senses?

[01:18:10.27] Dr. Nathan: I don't. Although, I've studied them all very extensively. As I keep repeating, we just need to know ourselves and how we're wired. For whatever reason, I'm a purist, which is I like interacting with other beings just me, with no other thing between us. It might be me and my hands osteopathically, or just me in the room with another individual connecting on whatever way.

I think I didn't mention it, but you talked about energy cords before connecting to us as healthcare providers, we got a fancy name for that, we call that transference. Which is simply the feelings that people put on us as potentially helping them, and those feelings come with an energy cord. You're right, and I didn't mention that; I think it's important that I do. That the therapist particularly needs to know that those cords are poised to enter their body if you let them in.

So it's an interesting balance to treat someone with honor and respect and compassion and healing without letting the energy cords in. That requires a little bit of awareness that you're not doing that. When you find that you're caring about someone over and above what you think is reasonable, and you're going home, and you're thinking about someone unduly, now there's a possibly good thing about it, which is great.

You're processing it, figuring out, okay, what do I need to do for this person? What am I missing? What do I still need to do? There's a really good chance that person has got an energy cord in you, and that will inhibit your ability to function and give them their answer until you get clean.

So cleansing your aura, which people talk about, or keeping your energy field clean is important.

Shifting back to the original question here on, I can only talk about my process because I've studied it, example I have some of my osteopathic colleagues use magnets or crystals to enhance their perception. So that they can feel at a deeper level, and more clearly when they use those particular materials, I've tried that, and I don't. The way I'm wired is to just me and that other being, and I've studied kinesiology for many years, I can dowse, because I have done that over the years. Some of my colleague's love dowsing to find their answers. The bottom line is understanding how you are wired, use whatever tools available to augment or improve your abilities.

There's no right or wrong to it; there's no one good or better. Lind of like the old John Henry and the steam hammer song, if you ever remember that. Where John Henry is a steel-driving man, and he competes with a steel hammer as the who can drill down faster. And although John Henry wins, he dies because he over-exerted in the process. I always think of it would be a fun comparison; I don't know how to do it, to compare my abilities, for example with Dietrich and ART.

Having Dietrich and I together with the same patients in the same room, and just pick up whatever it is we pick up, and see, is one of us better at certain things than others? Or how do we compare these methods for picking up information? Because I often think that whatever it is, be it ART or be it a dowsing process, some people read tarot cards or some people use astrology.

I think they're in the same category, we're using a focal point to get information. I don't think it matters what focal point we use, provided the information we get is clean and helpful and accurate. So it would be fun to compare how different people are wired, and whether some people get better information in some areas than others, don't quite know how to do that study.

[01:22:45.10] Scott: Yes. I mean, for me, even the Autonomic Response Testing, one of my earlier teachers referred to work in that realm as having energy eyes, where it's another sense, a tool that provides me and many other people access to sensing information.

[01:23:03.27] Dr. Nathan: Exactly. 

[01:23:05.00] Scott: In the book, you talk about the fact that most intelligent people, at best from medical schools, may be able to diagnose correctly maybe 30% of the time, and so that shifted your goal from originally becoming a doctor, to becoming a healer. So what were some of the things that led you to becoming a healer? What are the more important contributors to your abilities as a healer? How much of a healer's abilities are inherent to who they are, as compared to things that can be learned?

[01:23:36.17] Dr. Nathan: That was Dr. D, who wrote that chapter; that was his experience and what he took out of the opening lines of medical school. What I took out, that is all in response to, on the first day of medical school, the dean of every school in the country gives a little lecture, and which basically says 50% of what you're learning today will be wrong in 20 years, problem is I can't tell you which 50%, so you're going to have to learn it all.

So that is what he took out of that. What I took out of that was, oh, so this is going to be a lifelong learning experience because, in 20 years, half of what I know will be wrong. So I better get on crack and keep learning throughout my whole life, if I'm going to stay current and be useful, which is not, what all physicians do.

Many of them leave their residency program thinking God; that was an ordeal. I try to learn as little as I can, and get by with what I know forever. I may be being a disservice to some people, but I have worked with so many physicians over the years, that I can assure you that is true for a lot of physicians.

So what made me different is I took it differently. It was like, oh goody, this is a chance to be a student for the rest of my life, which is, but as you know, I love that. I think they can be amplified, but I think we are who we are. I believe that I came out into this world to be a healer, and I think if I look back on my early years, I just knew it. I was one of those lucky people who went to college knowing what I was going to do.

Now, I was misinformed. I thought that going to medical school would make me a healer, and I discovered too soon that no, that was going to make me a medical technician. Being a healer is something else entirely, but I went to medical school with the hope of being a healer. It's been a driving force for me since I was little as I can remember. I do believe that many people have that intrinsic desire, and that can be amplified if nourished in the right way.

Unfortunately, in medical school, there are not that many sources for nourishment, there are many more sources for memorize these things and spit it out to us, and you get your degree and have a nice life. As opposed to gosh, if you want to be a healer, you're going to have to look at a whole lot of things that we're not going to teach you in medical school.

We're going to need to teach you about touch and energy and spirit and emotions, and although they're touched on in medical school, rarely does a medical student see that integrated, by actually watching someone do that.

I was fortunate in medical school that I had Elisabeth Kübler-Ross as one of my mentors. She had a class for an hour and a half, once a week, for the four years that I was in medical school. In which she would interview a patient, back then we didn't have video; we had a two-way mirror thing where you could have medical students behind what looked like a mirror to the patient that we could look into the room and observe Elisabeth Kübler-Ross doing her thing.

She was the only one who demonstrated to me listening. You could watch her listen to a patient, and really take in the totality of what they were saying, and you could watch her connect to them at a deeper level than any other person that I observed in medical school. For me, that was formative. It's like, oh, that's what I need to learn how to do. I need to learn how to listen; I need to learn how to be present with these people and connect to them on the deepest level.

She also demonstrated a vulnerability that no other physician would do in our presence, that she would cry with the patient when they would bring up sad things. She allowed herself to be vulnerable, and again, for me, this is my role model; I mean, this is what I want.

So I mean, I left medical school quite frustrated, that in no way taught me how to be a healer, but then the fun started. I just started learning from everyone who had anything even vaguely interesting to say like you; I just ate, drank and slept healing for the next 50 years of my life, and still doing it. Great journey; I've had the phenomenal opportunity to meet and study with giants in the field for a very long period of time. And to pick and choose what I learned from all those fabulous people.

So for a young person who wants to be a healer, the key is don't let the medical school curriculum drum the essence of who you are out of you. Find other things to do that nourish your spirit, so it is still alive when you leave medical school. What I saw in medical school are a phenomenally great, bright group of people who left medical school shells of who they were when they entered. In order to do what they thought they had to do to survive medical school, they suppressed that.

It's not that I was smart enough to do that; I couldn't do that. Forgive me, but my spirit wouldn't allow it. I would have died if I couldn't nourish those parts of myself. By the way, for me, that took the form of theater as a medical student. I did a ton of productions at the University of Chicago theater, where I acted in innumerable productions, because acting for me was a kind of a therapy. I could get out of Neil and become someone else. I had to get out of Neil and become someone else if I was going to be any good at it.

[01:29:59.01] Scott: In the book, there's conversation about collagen as a crystalline structure that creates and transduces electrical signals. I don't know if you can talk to us about this piezoelectric effect, and how it can lead to tissue regeneration and healing.

[01:30:16.19] Dr. Nathan: Okay, that's actually Emily Rose chapter. Emily is a fabulous physician and amazing acupuncturist. She can do things with needles that I've never heard of anyone doing before, and again, I know she's working energetically. That the needle is a conduit for her perception of energy and how she works with it. Fascinating chapter, by the way. The piezoelectric effect is simply a well-known energy generation system in our bodies.

Our bodies are filled with, all of our tissues have some degree of a piezoelectric effect; it's simply an energy field. And that's what we feel when we're looking at acupuncture meridians, which is why Emily is writing about it in that context. So in the study of physics, I know we started this discussion Scott with EEGs and EKGs as electrical manifestations. Well, the piezoelectric field is a more subtle electrical manifestation, it's operative all the time.

That is generating the electrical field that we are perceiving for those of us who can, and I know there will be skeptics; there will be people who go this is the biggest bunch of hogwash I've listened to in a very long time. For those of you who are under the impression that I went off the deep edge many years ago, this book will convince you that I have. So I have at it. I'm actually too old to care about that; I'm more wanting to share my personal stories and the personal stories of the authors who contributed to this book. What I asked them all to do, was to make it as personal as they could.

Meaning, I didn't want a dry dissertation of what FSM is, I wanted Carolyn's description of what she feels when she touches people and uses her energetic techniques, and I think she did a lovely job with that. As did all of the authors, because I was hoping that the reader would realize oh, there are a lot of really good physicians out there, who are tuning into energy in different ways, and this is very real, this is very accessible; maybe I should take this thing more seriously.

[01:32:33.13] Scott: In this same portion of the book, it talks about how collagen and bones and DNA and fascia and connective tissue are conduits for electromagnetic fields. So I'm wondering we touched on this a little bit earlier, but more specifically, is it possible that EMFs in our environment may be leading to an increase in hypermobility and Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome?

[01:32:58.20] Dr. Nathan: It's a very interesting question, and I don't know the answer to it. I know we're more aware of Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome than we were in the past. My understanding is that it was not uncommon whether the two are connected; to be honest, I don't know because it's an interesting hypothesis.

I recently talked to Marty Paul, who is a very well-known biochemist who's done a lot of work with understanding the chemistry of chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia and has most recently gotten involved with the biochemistry of EMF field and the people who've gotten sensitive to it. He's discovered that they have an increase in the voltage-gated channels of the body that are being triggered by EMF. Which both from a physics and a biochemical point of view, are contributing to making them more sensitive.

But he's also discovered that they affect plants. He has some evidence and believes that the increasing forest fires that we've been having in California are due to the fact that plants are becoming more dry and brittle by their exposure to 5G. I hadn't heard that before, and I thought I'd share that with you. Because again, it does seem strange to me, having lived in California much of my life, that we would see a bad forest fire every 10-15 years, never have we had it every single year before years in a row, nastier by the year, every year. So something has changed; I can't believe this is simply a fluctuation of the normal variance, because that's not what anybody has experienced for a long time.

[01:34:47.00] Scott: When you are palpating a patient as part of your assessment, are you able to sense with your physical body, your hands, your fingers, where there may be energetic perturbations or stagnations in that person's body?

[01:35:03.10] Dr. Nathan: Yes. I've had the privilege of studying osteopathic cranial work for over 40 years and was also privileged to be able to be trained by Jim Jealous, who developed the field of biodynamic osteopathy, which is an even more sophisticated form of cranial osteopathy. We're taught in that field, and in the field of osteopathy, to learn how to tune into the different tissues of the body, and the different energies of the body separately. So that literally, when we put our hands on a skull for example, the first thing you learn is that the skull bones actually move. It's minuscule, but there is actually a movement of the bones. If they're stuck, then they don't move anywhere near as well on one side as the other, where there's a certain pattern of stuckness that you learn to appreciate.

That's the beginning. Then you realize that oh no, that's just the outer layer, then you can begin to feel the membranes of the body, the dura and the falx, then you can begin to feel the fluid, the cerebral spinal fluid. You can actually feel the tiny oscillations of the nervous tissue of the brain. I talked earlier about being able to tune into the third ventricle, and feel whether there is a spark of ignition in that area.

Then, there's embryological energies, meaning you can feel what the embryo would be like in its perfect form, and compare that to what the body is, so you can see how it has gotten stuck in different areas. Those are only some of the energies that we're talking about. There are layers and layers of energetic perceptions that we're capable of learning, that allow us to tune into that.

As with chronic illness, I mean, you raise the question of okay, you've got a very complicated person, how do you approach teasing apart that complexity, to come down to an analysis, where do you start? What's really critical and important? The same process applies in osteopathy, in which there are so many things going on once you learn how to tune into all these different areas.

That what you learn to do is do nothing. You go into a state of quietude with your hands lightly resting, and you wait until the being tells you where to work. If you go in and try to fix things because oh, this is out of whack, I'll fix that, and that's out of whack, I'll fix that you may be fixing compensations, things that the body has structured in order to hold the fort down. So it's critical that you don't mess with a compensation, or you're going to actually do them harm.

So how do you do that? You go into a state of quietude and listen, and bodies will tell you where they want you to touch and how and where not confined to the head but anywhere on that entire body. That's a lot of what I'm talking about in terms of using energetic intuition on making a diagnosis simply coming into the room with the individual or could even do it with telemetry, it's not as much fun as far as I'm concerned, but that's telemedicine just how it is these days.

But again, to go in neutral, you use the word clean to describe our perceptions, and just wait until you feel, hear, see somehow get a sense of what is it that being needs today, and that guides us in our treatment.

[01:39:08.24] Scott: In your chapter on plants, Stephen Buhner says that a plant's power to heal is in the meaning, that the chemical constituents are secondary, and while they contain the meaning, they are not the meaning. That the meaning or spirit of the plant is what heals the disease, and the plant is merely a form in which to travel. What have you learned about healing from your own interactions with plants and the use of plant medicines? 

[01:39:36.15] Dr. Nathan: Well, Stephen is both a poet and a mystic, as well as very brilliant. So a lot of what you just described more mystical than not; what I do talk about in the book, including some of my own experiences, is that plants communicate with us.

For some people, that will be out in left field. But having had the direct experience, I had always wondered, how did ancient people know which plants were good for what illnesses? I mean, did they try everything under the sun? How many people died with that trial and error, miss thing of taking something? After a number of my early life experiences with Stephen Buhner writes about beautifully. He has four books which talk about sequentially how to interface with plants and how to listen to them, and how to get the information that they're trying to tell us.

But having had that experience, I know with certainty, that if you're wired that way, and not everybody is, Shamans would be, because they were selected from the tribe to have that information, that literally, you can sit down with a plant, and it will, not talk to you, not a language, but in the same way that words came across my consciousness, information is being transmitted from the plant.

Now, basically, we'll say, this is how you can use me, you can use my roots, for this reason, you can use my leaves for that reason. So it wasn't trial and error that got people into using herbal materials; it was that experience. Buhner has long campaigned that people who are herbalists, need to have more of those interactive experiences rather than make it cookbook.

Like okay, I use cilantro to help detoxification, but rather, to really know the plant and really know the energetic, so that you're matching that up, in the same way, that a good homeopath would use, when you're matching up a homeopathic remedy to the energetic of what it does for that individual, by just sitting with them and being with them.

So my point in that chapter was that connecting with plants is no different essentially than connecting with people, and that again, it's a process of honoring the plant, being interested in it, not thinking that you are a lower life form and I am humankind, so tell me what it is I want to know, and then I'll get out of here. It's knowing, no, we're all on this planet together, which is kind of how Buhner views it. We're on this planet together, you need me, and I need you, and that's true for all of us, all humanity and let's share our information, and we can move forward together.

The reason is so important as we have lost our connection to the natural world to a great extent. That is one of the things that I belong in my book towards the end of my last couple of chapters, is that is the root of who we are. We are connected to this planet energetically; the planet will teach us. The plants will give us gifts. The wind, the earth will talk to us; I know I'm getting out there. But again, I believe to the depth of my being that this is true, and that virtual reality is not reality, even though it looks like it. In order to heal yourself from the toxic environment we're all exposed to, this is the place where the nurturance comes from.

[01:43:36.18] Scott: Is there a place for prayer and spiritual healing and recovering from chronic conditions? How often might you suggest that a manifestation of a physical illness originates in our connection to spirit or supreme being or universal consciousness or God? What are some of the tools that maybe are helpful in exploring this realm? And what if a patient has a condition that you perceive potentially originates in that realm, but the patient is agnostic or unwilling to go there?

[01:44:07.22] Dr. Nathan: So the answer is absolutely, that spirit, prayer are an amazingly important component to nourishing our lives and in healing. I don't have the slightest question about that. The energy that we manifest, our vital energy or our vital force, so however you want to look at it, is a sense a manifestation of our spirit. It has to do a lot with in a more simplistic way with what gives our life meaning and purpose.

So many people are out of touch with that, and so as an energy blockage or as a spiritual blockage, not having a focus. Like getting up in the morning, what am I getting up in the morning to do? Oh, I got to get cranking; I'm a little bit late here. I've got to get to work, I got to get my car, I've got to do this, and I don't think that's particularly spiritual unless going to work is meaningful for you. If it isn't, then you go through a fairly meaningless day, and then, you're wasted.

So you unwind by looking at television or playing video games or whatever it is you do. So what have you done in that day, that has nourished your spirit? That has allowed you to be part of a bigger picture, to appreciate the higher power if that's how you're wired, and I don't want to get into languaging here. From a physician perspective, I've always tried to honor the belief and languaging of the people I'm working with. So if someone tells me, and they'll often tell me right upfront, I'm a Christian, and I deeply believe in God in that particular context.

Then not only will I honor that, but I will try to use languaging like bring the word God or those related things into our conversation as often as I can, to help connect us, to help them understand I honor you, this is what you believe, and that's what we're going to work with. Many people who are Christian have lost their faith; their illness is such that God has abandoned me.

If there was a god, they would have helped me by now. And to help working with them within their own context of it's not for me to know god's intent, it’s the intent of the divine, I'm merely a mortal working here above my pay grade. But what I do know is that only by re-establishing some contact with the divine, maybe it wasn't the church you're in, maybe that church wasn't resonating with your own spiritual beliefs. Maybe you've got to find another one.

Maybe you not need to look elsewhere, or maybe not within a church context, but maybe go back and read the bible, and read the passages that speak to you, that connect you to your own sense of purpose. Because to me, that's critical in the healing process.

Now, for people who are agnostic, I still come to it from the place of meaning and purpose in their life. It may not connect to a divine spirit or God or whatever languaging we use, but everybody needs a meaning and purpose in their life. So again, I will use languaging that doesn't reflect a divine presence.

But rather, what are you doing to nurture your spirit? You used to love to fish, do you ever fish anymore? You used to play an instrument; do you play any instrument anymore? Used to love to sing, you do that anymore? And the answer is invariably no; I don't have time for it. No, I used to really like that. So I typically asked, what did you used to do that brought meaning and purpose into your life? So let's start there and work around it.

[01:48:24.20] Scott: You say that a spiritual life well live consists of being grateful, being present and being of service. Does a focus on gratitude, being present and being of service translate to an improved state of our experience in physical form?

[01:48:41.06] Dr. Nathan: I hope so. I've been trying to live that for a very long time now, and honestly, Scott, I think it does. I think that if we remove our ego from the equation, and we focus on being grateful for the gifts we've been given, being mindful so that we're aware as we can and trying to be of service at every opportunity, I think that's a life well-lived. I can't speak for others, that's my spiritual path, and that feeds me. Does it keep me completely well? No, and it hasn't.

So life is more complicated; as you well know, I got really sick last spring with severe form of colitis, and it really put me close to under. Living, I thought this way, and so there's no proof positive that we cannot die or live perfectly to whatever age we want to. There are other factors that work here, some of which I don't even know or understand.

We're all dealt certain cards, including genetically, and we just have to play the hand we're dealt the best we can. But by doing the things that we talked about, gratitude, mindfulness and being of service. What I can say is no matter how sick I was, I could always look back on the life I've lived and go; I'm really okay with that. Was it perfect? Nope.

But I've really lived a good life. So I'm not ready to leave, but if this is my time and I didn't know at the time when I was really sick. If this is my time, gosh, I hate to leave, but it's really been a good life, been a good run, that's the only answer I've got for you.

[01:50:41.16] Scott: My last question is the same for every guest, and that is what are some of the key things that you do on a daily basis in support of your own health?

[01:50:48.25] Dr. Nathan: Well, having done this with you a number of times, my answer really hasn't changed. A shift, though. Since my illness, what I've become aware of is an increased appreciation of this fabulous life that I've been given, and with it comes an increased perception of joy in my life. I've always had that, and I've been blessed for a very long time. But I feel more joy with the gifts than I ever did before I got sick. So I'll watch my puppies play; it's like, oh, that is so cool. Or just watch my wife walk across the room, and go; I am such a lucky guy.

But it's not just appreciation or gratitude; the added experience to that is now joy and love, which comes with that. I don't know how to legislate it; I do not recommend getting what I had in order to come out the other side and experience more joy. I do not recommend that for anyone. But I'll take the gifts with the negativity, and I'm just kind of astonished that I think that's a fabulous way to live, to have that perception available, and noticing it more and more and more.

[01:52:24.13] Scott: In my own experience with Lyme disease and mold illness, which now has been almost 25 years. I do look at those gifts, and there are so many wonderful things that came out of a very challenging situation. But I value those things. And having the opportunity to know you has been one of those tremendous gifts that has come out of my own personal journey and personal experience.

So I just so appreciate you, honor you for all that you do, for the amazing light that you are in the world. I encourage people to get your book, energetic diagnosis. We didn't really even begin to get into all of the content that is in here; it's just absolutely fantastic. So please, check it out. And thank you, Dr. Nathan, for the gift that you are. 

[01:53:16.25] Dr. Nathan: Thank you, Scott. And you are as well, in these podcasts, and you and your being is as well. I've updated the eBook that I wrote back in 2016, which is a short, readable book about mold toxicity that's called “Mold and Mycotoxins: Current Evaluation and Treatment”; now 2022.

So it just came out a couple of weeks ago; it's updated, which is what the whole point was. I think that for people who don't want to read toxic, should read toxic. But if you want a shorter version for families or patients who just want like a cliff notes version of mold toxicity and what it is, I think that will be a helpful guide to people, to help them in their journey.

[01:54:07.17] Scott: Totally agree. I read the original one in 2016, and I've read the updated one in 2022, and I will add the link to that to the show notes as well. But absolutely, I encourage people to check that as well. So thank you so much, Dr. Nathan.

[01:54:21.13] Scott: Thank you, Scott. Appreciate it, love talking to you.

[01:54:23.20] Scott: You as well.

[01:54:24.18] To learn more about today's guest, visit NeilNathanMD.com.

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Disclaimer

The content of this show is for informational purposes only and is not intended to diagnose, treat, or cure any illness or medical condition. Nothing in today's discussion is meant to serve as medical advice or as information to facilitate self-treatment. As always, please discuss any potential health-related decisions with your own personal medical authority.