SPEAKER_00 0:00

Your body is smarter than your doctor anyway. Most doctors won't admit to that, but it's a fact. Your body does a way better job of taking care of you than I can.

SPEAKER_07 0:11

You are listening to an NLP podcast brought to you by Next Level Pro Institute. I am Pollyanna Chavez. Dr. Lawrence Barnard, thank you for being here with me. You are an osteopathic physician. Is that correct? Yes. Thank you. You're the right person to be here. Okay, good. And Lawrence, I heard that your patients call you a wizard. And you would have never used that word. A magician, yeah. But so let's start with that. What is actually happening? Why are people calling you a magician, a wizard? What's that about?

SPEAKER_00 0:52

Yeah, that's in that's a great question. First of all, thanks for having me on, Pollyanna. We've known each other for a while, and we got on a kind of a tangent and a conversation, and it led to this. So I'm happy to be here with you. And uh you've always supported me, and I'm happy to support you in your endeavors. So, all right, so in the United States, uh, which is different from other countries, there are two schools of medicine that license physicians that are fully capable to go into any medical specialty. There are allopathic schools, which confer a degree, like the MD degree, which most people are used to. And osteopathic schools have been around also since the mid-1800s or late 1800s. Uh, they confer a DO degree. And um in the early history, I'd say it took a while for all the states to adopt it and the military to adopt it, but you know, we've had an even, an even, I don't know, like, you know, we're on level playing ground. You know, okay, so within osteopathic medicine, you know, it started as a Midwestern, started in Kirksville, Missouri. Uh, Andrew Taylor still is the founder. He was a minister and a physician, learned from his dad. His family was basically like his three kids and his wife were killed by meningitis. And it was devastating for him. So he kind of went inside, like we tend to do when we face tragedy. And, you know, the the idea he came up with was that if God created our bodies, it should have everything inside of it to take care of it. You shouldn't need anything from the outside. So he spent about 10 years trying to investigate that and figure out how to make that work. The basic idea is if a tissue or an organ or any part of you is getting nourished properly with good arterial blood and being drained properly through the venous and lymphatic system, then there is no environment for disease. Okay? Now, he wasn't a very popular guy in a lot of ways. He was a because he was an abolitionist in the South. He wasn't, you know, he wasn't into slavery. He worked with uh Shawnee Indians, the same Indian tribe that killed his family years before. Grandmother, you know, just slaughtered them. So I find all of that so interesting. Like, how do you get beyond that and minister to people and be their doctors? Um, the other thing about him was, like many of us, you know, he was a lifelong learner. So he learned from the Native Americans, he learned from the British, uh, he learned from, you know, from the Chinese who were coming through. Right. So that was a time when everybody was moving west. Kirksville, Missouri is nowhere, right? Um, once in a while you'll see it on a weather map because they get severe weather. But back in the 1800s, there were two train stations that went to that town because so many people came to see him to treat them. For the first 10 years of practice, he didn't charge anybody. He just wanted to see if it worked. And you know, basic the basic idea behind it and what what we still do today, those of us who specialize in this work, is we use your anatomy, right? We we work with your body um to change your physiology. Right? Your your anatomy is just the handle. What I really want to get at is your autonomic nervous system, how your organs function, how your lymphatic system is functioning, um, drainage, nourishment, that that's really you know what we what we focus on. Now, within osteopathic medicine, at any DO school, and there are many of them, and there are more and more opening, everybody's taught in the first two years a set curriculum kind of of osteopathic manipulation. But most people just pass right through that and over that just to get to whatever medical specialty that interests them.

unknown 4:59

Right?

SPEAKER_00 4:59

Whether it's family medicine, pediatrics, OBGYN, surgery, you know, neurosurgery, whatever specialty you want to go into, you know, they just they they dismiss the part that I I love most. Uh so when people get to me, typically they've they've seen a bunch of other doctors, uh, nobody's helped them, and we think outside the box a little bit. And so often I can find that little thing that other people didn't think of or weren't able to correct and and fix it.

SPEAKER_07 5:32

And that's why they call you the wizard or the magician.

SPEAKER_00 5:36

Yeah, it's it's pretty common. There's a a little like meme, I guess. I don't know, it probably might come from England. They have a lot of stuff like that. I've seen on like British DOs. It says osteopath. Um, someone who fixes something you didn't know was wrong with you. See also magician and wizard. Uh, but obviously patients haven't seen that. You know, that's that's just a term they use because they're surprised by what I do. I'm not surprised by what I'm able to accomplish, you know, when it when it works well. I expect it, but it is what I love about what I do. Because every day is new. So it's fun.

SPEAKER_07 6:19

And then so so you've you've seen a lot of um changes, powerful changes in your patients, but you've also you mentioned you are also embodying that spirit of learner because you want to learn, you you did osteopathic, but you went beyond and learned other skills, right? And so uh tell us a little bit more of how you are combining all those things that you're learning because you did learn hypnosis, is that right? And yeah, hypnosis and LP. When was the first time that you did you encounter hypnosis, for example? Was it like long time ago, recently?

SPEAKER_00 6:57

Oh, yeah, yeah. Um we we talked about it briefly. So friends won a contest. Howard Stern was going to be doing their show, his show from their living room. They put together what you know was like an eclectic bunch of friends. I was one of those people, and there was a hypnotist there. So he was going to hypnotize me and I think and my girlfriend. I'm not sure, but definitely me. So we did this thing where you put your hands together and they're supposed to turn into rocks. And all of a sudden, you know, my hands felt like rocks, and I thought it was the coolest thing. And then, you know, that little voice in my head said, You can't go on Howard Stern with your girlfriend and be hypnotized. So my hands came apart. But I knew I was suggestible and it interested me. Now, most of what I do, although in the hospital it's less pain and it's more organ sort of stuff, COPD, belly surgeries, things like that. Uh, but in the office, a lot of it's pain. And you can't fix everybody, and a lot of people are very stuck in their mindset. And I just thought it would be a nice way to add to what I do and help. So that's when I started to pursue it. I know that a lot of people who've come through those trainings and the NLP trainings have a lot of time, right? They're working as coaches or hypnotherapists, and they take an hour or two with somebody to really go deep. I don't really have that luxury. So I've had to find ways to make that work for me. Sometimes it's just about reframing what they call pain or you know, asking them at the beginning, you know, what are their goals, right? What do you want? A very famous kind of NLP and hypnosis question. Because if they can describe where they want their life to wind up, they're already kind of living it instead of focusing on everything that hurts.

SPEAKER_07 8:54

So when people come to you, you say they come with pain, right? And then sometimes what I've seen is sometimes the acute injuries, they heal and the brain keeps the signal on. Like, yeah, because they're sensitized.

SPEAKER_00 9:13

Oh, yeah, that's a ton of what I see. So, yeah, so I'll I can go through a little bit of that. You know, there are pain fibers in your body we call nociceptors. It doesn't matter what you do to them, they'll never fire. So you'll never get a pain signal unless there are inflammatory products around. And then they fire exponentially. So, a quick simple example that is kind of uh a part of probably everybody's life, uh osteoarthritis and rheumatoid arthritis. So, osteoarthritis is typically kind of an overgrowth of bone. You get little spicules of bone. Um, you wake up in the morning, you have some pain, you move around a little bit, joints get lubricated, you feel better, and you go through your day. And then you do it again tomorrow morning. Rheumatoid arthritis is a problem more with the synovium, which is the fluid-producing tissue in your joints that help to lubricate it. And because it's in an inflammatory process, normal movements seem like an assault. So just a regular normal range of motion of your shoulder would fire off a crazy amount of pain fibers, and your pain is astronomical, and you know, often other people, like physical therapists, whoever, don't really get that. So uh I can give you an example of that. There was a guy at a hospital where I worked on Long Island that part it's part of a huge system. There's like 25 hospitals in that system. He had rheumatoid arthritis, got around in a wheelchair. He was probably in his 40s, had a bunch of kids, a happy marriage, and um, he had a flare-up, wound up in the hospital. So he had been in the ICU for two weeks. Nothing they did really helped him much. So as a last resort, they asked us, right? We had a consult service there because we had a residency program there. So if a person like that comes to see me as an outpatient on their initial visit, insurance companies, which rule the world along with drug companies, um, don't allow us to really treat the patient on a first visit. So now I'm supposed to touch every place that hurts, move everything that hurts, and then say, you know, see in six weeks when you can get back in here, because the schedule's too full to get you back in quickly. You know, good luck, and then I'll treat you next time. So typically what I do is I start a process, right? So if I think it's something rheumatologic, inflammatory, I know your problem is with lymphatic drainage. That's where it starts. They're the easiest channels in your body to impact and impede the flow through because they're like a single cell wall thick, right? And they don't really have a proper pumping mechanism. And the pathway to drain is usually where we have our most trouble, kind of in this area, head and neck and upper back. So that's where I start, right? And um, after working with his lymphatic system and leaving him alone because too much is no good, the next day he was back to being able to transfer from his bed to his wheelchair. And then one more day, and he was home with his family again. So those are the types of things that happen. You know, in an outpatient setting, there was a woman, Lee, who came to see me at the request of her friend. So she had no idea what I did. Her friend Abe said, You gotta go see this guy. She didn't really listen for years, right? And when she showed up, she was one of those people, like you were mentioning before, kind of chronically sensitized. So being in pain, where the soft tissue, whatever the damage was, has healed, but you have that pathway carved, which is really how NLP and hypnosis works, right? That's what we're trying to change, right? We reframe it, we put it in a different area of the body, I mean of the brain, and then we give them a new pathway. So that's the same thing with chronic sensitization. It changes cellular uh markers and receptors on the cell wall, which of course come into the nucleus of the cell and tell it what to do, right? So the same thing with opiate receptors, right? If you're given opiates for pain, you're going to get sensitized. First of all, you you're going to get used to the opiates, so you're going to need more. But you're going to become more sensitive to any pain that you get. And they're not the greatest medicine, but that's typically what happened, and then you're just stuck. And it's a very hard thing to get out of. Okay, so that's chronic sensitization. So she was like that, and I joke. You know, so people come in and they say their hair hurts and their eyelashes hurt and their fingernails hurt, along with every other kind of joint in their body. So on her initial visit, I did what I mentioned before. I worked with her lymphatic system. And the next time she came back, she called me a wizard. And part of that was she mentioned all her other pains, but she never mentioned that for 10 years she had chronic daily headaches. And she said since her first visit when I pseudo-treated her, um, she hadn't had a headache since. And she never even mentioned that she had headaches. So, by, you know, if you were the patient and you came in and you had an issue, um I check your whole body from your feet to your head. And often there are things you ignore or or don't notice anymore. They're just a part of who you are. And I, you know, often by feeling your body and checking you, the way I check people, I can kind of tell you your story, even though you haven't mentioned it to me. And if I can find it, I can impact it.

SPEAKER_07 14:54

So wow, so you you already have this uh knowledge, this practice where you're using your hands to to help uh people, you know. And can you go back and let me know what makes you look into using hypnosis and NLP? And how do you actually use them or do you use them in your practice? Because you say you don't have, you know, for me, you know, I I I have my sessions and it's very in-depth. And definitely one hour, two hour sessions, uh, it's okay, but you only see clients for how long? Um 30 minutes or less?

SPEAKER_00 15:29

Yeah, um, on Mondays, I'm in the Bronx, and um, I'm just in a pain clinic where all I do are injections. So that visit, you know, can be 10 minutes because many of the patients I've known for almost 20 years. You know, I grew up in the Bronx. I didn't get to medical school until I was 33, uh, which is a whole other story. But I trained in the Bronx because for what I do at the time, that was the best place to train. And I've I've pretty much worked there ever since. Um, I've just shortened my work week to one day a week there because the commute's terrible. And so I'm there one day a week doing pain. So I have this woman just last week, it was last Monday, just freaking out about getting an injection. I didn't even have a needle out, so I played with her a little bit, right? We used to talk about chiding patients. Like, you're not afraid of an injection, you're afraid of the thought of the injection. You haven't even seen a needle yet, and I'm behind you, and you'll never even see it, but you're freaking out and sweating. Like, calm down, right? And and she did, and and then, you know, often the injections will work pretty quickly, um, and they just feel different. And I get a lot of hugs and I get a lot of like interesting reactions to what I do. So that's that's one example. Another way that I use it, all right. So when I worked in the pain practice, that was the my first year out of my residency. All I did really was injections. There wasn't a lot of time. It was a 20-minute visit, so I didn't get to use my hands all that much. But when I did, I learned how to be really effective in a really short amount of time because I had to stay on schedule, right, for my boss. And that really helped me to grow. So I lost my train of thought.

SPEAKER_07 17:16

Oh, you're talking about 20 minutes.

SPEAKER_00 17:20

So I've learned that if I can, you know, really like look you in the face in the eyes and nurture you and love you a little bit, you know, while I'm seeing you, you have no idea how much time has passed. Oh some people think they're at a parking meter and they've put their quarter in and they want a whole hour or whatever. It's just a waste. And all I'm going to do is irritate your nervous system. I have to get my work done and then kind of get out because your body is smarter than your doctor anyway. Most doctors won't admit to that, but it's a fact. Your body does a way better job of taking care of you than I can. Sometimes I'm I'm blessed with an opportunity to create an environment where your body can get back on track and take care of itself, right? But if I treat you for 20 minutes, you're treating yourself till your next visit. Right? That's the stage that I have to set. So I have to let people know when I'm nearing the end of a visit without telling them your time's up and annoying them and right getting them angry. So so I start to tell them, look, I'm going to do one more thing after this, after that, I'm going to have you sit up, I'm going to have you walk around a little bit, we'll see how you feel, and then you know, we'll get you out of here so you can get on with your day. So simple things like that, you know, really help me in the short amount of time that I have with people. And I I I don't know, it just helps my rapport with them.

SPEAKER_05 18:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 18:52

You know, yesterday you know that my son's band played at a big music festival here on Long Island. So four of the people who showed up there were patients. And one of those patients was actually kind of my boss. She ran the clinic, but she was also a patient. So, you know, I have I have nice relationships with the people that I work with.

SPEAKER_07 19:14

That's beautiful. And uh and I I do believe that you can create good rapport. I mean, when that's one of the skills that you learn from NLP as well, right? But that was uh in addition to what you're naturally are as a human being, because you do portray that that sense of that people can trust you. And so something that you were saying, uh very beautiful about how you create this environment so that the body can do the rest of the work. You know, I I think that's beautiful that you see uh your patients in that way, right? And so it's and then the use that you're doing of NLP and the presuppositions on how to set them up for success, that is something that is giving them also uh this preparation for later, no? So when you how else do you prepare that environment for success later when you're not there? Is there anything else that you do?

SPEAKER_00 20:16

Yeah, one of the things is like you can make another appointment if you think you might need it, right? Just you know, you might not even need to come back. That's you know, saying something like that is helpful. Early on when I was in the Bronx, you know, every patient room in the hospital would have Jerry Springer on. Everybody was fighting and arguing. There aren't a lot of happy-go-lucky people in that patient population. So when they're sitting and waiting for clinic, they're always eyeballing who got there after them and who's being called before them. And they're sitting there and watching Jerry Springer on televisions. So I went to the registration desk and I said, Jay, you know, can we get our hands on like a DVD player or something? Like, these guys can't be watching Jerry Springer. So he would put on a yoga video or a chi-walking video or a stretching video, right? And, you know, our sense of smell is so strong and we don't really use it. So I thought, you know what, I'm gonna use lavender. It's kind of like medically safe. Not too many people have an allergy to it. And I'll use some essential oil, and when they walk into the hallway where they're going to see me, where I'm training these like four or five residents, that's going to tell them it's time to heal. Right? Because they've done studies like that with people for chemotherapy. Right? They'd give them a scent, give them chemotherapeutic agent, their body would respond in the way it should with a chemotherapeutic agent. Then they'd stop giving them the agent, just give them the smell, and the body would fight for them.

SPEAKER_05 21:50

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 21:51

Right? But then somebody broke my thing of lavender in the desk, and the whole place stunk, and you know, it became a problem. But you know, little things. Things like that. You have to create that environment. You know, it's almost like doing a kind of a shamanic um smudging of the place without burning sage or you know, you you have to create your your environment and your intention. And people feel that. You know, you know, the other reason I got into hypnosis now that I'm thinking about it is there were times I try to talk slowly and calmly to people. I think that one of my sort of superpowers is explaining things to patients in English so they understand, especially medical things, um, so they're less frightening. And people would say, Oh, yeah, I'm such a calming voice. So I thought hypnosis was a good way to invest in that. You know, I don't particularly like hearing my own voice, like when you listen to recordings, but but other people seem to think it's calming. So I'll take their word for it because they're smarter than me anyway.

SPEAKER_07 22:58

That's very cool. I I like that you are um using all the senses to create an environment of healing. And and that is very similar to what we do in NLP, right? Like uh moving towards something, right? Instead of, you know, you're moving away from pain and towards health, towards healing. And so being able to support that journey, I love that you were talking about the essences, the lavender, the sounds, you know, the visuals that they have. Like it's always like giving them something to aim for, like that shiny bright image, you know. So that's yeah.

SPEAKER_00 23:37

As a resident, when I was doing my training, one of the years priors, residents kind of, you know, those old cassette things, like little boom boxes with cassette tapes. So there was one cassette tape that had some kind of jazz fusion. It was 20 minutes long. And I used to take that tape and that recorder and I would play it. And if I felt like I was done, I would finish my visit because I didn't have to look at a watch. If I felt like that patient needed more help, I'd flip over the cassette and I'd know I had another 20 minutes. Now, you know, it's all about listening to the body. And another way that I use language or, you know, is you know, I have medical students who rotate with me from, I don't know, five or six different osteopathic schools. Uh, there are interns that rotate, there are MDs who have had no exposure to osteopathy that are interested, and there are residents that are interested in the work that come to rotate. Then there are the residents who are actually physically there to train with me and the team. And so, in talking to them on their level, I'm explaining things to the patient in ways they can understand.

SPEAKER_02 24:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 24:49

Right? So, you know, one prime example is you could come to me with low back pain, and you could have a really ugly MRI. But it really doesn't mean anything because that developed over decades. Something happened, you know, five, six months ago, and all of a sudden, your back's killing you. Because something acutely changed, and all of a sudden, something's getting squashed that used to have just enough room, right? So uh I had a boss uh at the pain practice who was explaining something to me once. I had a patient, he was a commercial fisherman, worked by himself on a boat. He had an MRI that had a really weird thing happening to his nerve roots, but I couldn't find anything on neuroexam. So I said, Norman, I know that neuro exams are really subtle and very subjective, but yeah, I must be missing something. Please come and teach me, show me what I'm missing. Because look at this guy's MRI. And Norman said, Yeah, well, you know, what you have to consider is that, you know, the lower lumbar segments, right, L4, L5, S1, it's the most commonplace for a congenital anomaly. So if you have something weird about your anatomy, but you grew up around it, you'll be fine. But somebody else might not be. So he explained if your spinal cord is supposed to be about the size of your pinky, and something happens to you slowly over time, it could be the size of a pencil lid, and you'll be fine because you grew up around it. And that was the case with this fisherman. But if that happened too acutely, you'd be paralyzed.

SPEAKER_05 26:27

Oh wow. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 26:29

So I've always remembered that lesson. And um, if I can just get you, because you're sitting all day long, to stretch a little bit in the right way with the right things, that will give you back that little bit of room. Right? They say if you if you take a hundred people that have no low back pain and you give them MRIs, depending on the study, about 50% of them will have issues in their low back on MRI, but they have no pain. And the same in the reverse is true. People with a lot of pain, their MRIs are fine, 50 of them. So, how do you explain that? And some of that is in their head, right? So if you have a patient with uh secondary gain, a guy who wants to sit on the couch and watch TV, and if he's having trouble, his wife's gonna do everything for him, or vice versa. She doesn't want to do laundry, doesn't want to do dishes, doesn't want to cook. She sits on the couch complaining, he takes care of her, right? So there's a secondary gain issue. Or you've had a car accident, and while it wasn't a terrible car accident, you're thinking that the lawyers are gonna get you a ton of money, right? Or the same with a work injury. All of a sudden, you're wearing that cape of illness and pain, and talking about that for two years is gonna create it in your body. How do you want to do that?

SPEAKER_06 27:50

Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_00 27:51

So, as an example, a guy came in, had a car accident, it's a no-fault case in New York. He was getting better until he hired a lawyer. And once he hired a lawyer, everything was going down the tubes. So my boss said, Send him for an EMG, which is kind of a barbaric for most people. They put needles in your muscles, they want to see how your nerve conducts, how your muscles twitch. So they're putting in a little electric shocks. And they, you know, if they're doing upper and lower extremity, it's all over your body. And and it's hard to get through. So if you're not really motivated, you'll never get through it. You'll quit and never come back to us. And he used to count on that, right? So it weeds out, it's like organic chemistry. They say the hardest part about medical school is getting in. Once you're in, you just kind of get moved through. If you're having some issues, they'll help you. It's really a language thing. You learn 30 to 60,000 new words in your first and second year of medical school. But it's, you know, the hardest part's just getting in. And um, again, I lost my train of thought.

SPEAKER_07 28:59

So you were talking about this uh patient who who the lawyer, he got his lawyer and then he was going downhill, but then you got sent him to the EMG? EMD?

SPEAKER_00 29:13

EMG, yeah. Electromyography. Yeah, electromyography.

SPEAKER_07 29:16

Electromyography, yeah. And then he just did he quit.

SPEAKER_00 29:19

Yeah, he stopped, he stopped coming in. So, anyway, getting back to secondary gain, you have to figure that kind of thing out, right? It's very hard. Like patients do a lot of weird things when you're trying to do a neuro exam. And um it's hard to know what's real. So, so um, it's nice to give them the benefit of the doubt, but sometimes you're not gonna get people like that better. So for people who are just wearing that persona for for so long, you have to find other ways. And, you know, I I thought hypnosis and NLP might might help that.

SPEAKER_07 29:56

Did it help? Were you able to help them with hypnosis and NLP? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 30:02

You know, as an example, there was a woman who came to me. She was a nurse at one of the hospitals. Not at the hospital where I work, but part of the system. She was a soccer player and a runner when she was younger, developed a really bad scoliosis really quickly, and they needed to put in Harrington rods. You should look up what an x-ray of someone with a Harrington rod is. It's it's a metal rod that runs the length of whatever area they're trying to fuse. So for her, that was from her sacrum to T2, which is about near your shoulders.

SPEAKER_05 30:35

Oh wow.

SPEAKER_00 30:36

Every vertebral level has screws put in it. So when you look at it, it looks like train tracks. What you have to know is that each dot that you see is a screw going into your vertebra. And, you know, so when she came to me, obviously there's a lot to be uncomfortable about.

SPEAKER_05 30:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 30:56

But, you know, from my perspective, it's just a challenge because I don't know what might help you. Maybe nothing I do will help you, but I'm not going to give up on you. Because there may be some little thing that I I might get lucky and and do. Right? Or people with headaches, especially, or sinus problems. Those kinds of things, having had an accident when they were you were younger, little things like that, you've gotten accustomed to maybe and ignore. And um, you know, when I find them, and if I can work with them slowly and gently, we can get you through it. Because if I do too much on the first visit, I you know, I can hurt you. Right. So, like they say in medicine, above all, do no harm. So those things happen. You know, people, even you know, when I do everything kind of right, can still get sore for a couple of days because your whole body has to shift.

SPEAKER_07 31:52

Yeah.

unknown 31:53

Right?

SPEAKER_07 31:53

So it's a new experience for the body.

SPEAKER_00 31:56

Yeah, and you know, your body is turning certain muscles off and other muscles on because of some strain in your body. So if I change that, all of a sudden things that have been off for a while are on again, they're going to get sore, but they have to.

SPEAKER_07 32:12

And two things that you've been talking about, you know, like going back to also even secondary gain or dealing with client uh patients who you are doing all you can and they there you don't see progress because of, you know, maybe a secondary gain, and and you don't have the benefit of having a longer session because that's where someone like me could come and like, okay, let's deal with your belief system or identity or values or things like that, and you don't have that chance, right? So you have to be able to work really fast with them and give them the expertise that you have. Um, so is it like um how do you actually deal with those situations with clients with secondary gain? You were mentioning how this client did that, you know, you send him to EMG and then he stopped coming, but that doesn't mean that he started feeling better, right? Uh or not or not. Right, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 33:09

Well, he was the guy with the lawyer. So he had he had, I think, an agenda. And that was my boss's way of teaching me like this is how you get rid of malingerers.

SPEAKER_07 33:20

Oh maling.

SPEAKER_00 33:21

You know, okay. Yeah.

SPEAKER_07 33:23

But what if you have someone who doesn't even know that unconsciously they are having this secondary gain, right? Because yeah, that one's pretty obvious, right? But there's many times that's a good idea.

SPEAKER_00 33:33

Well, sometimes it's not it's just an identity thing. So, as an example, um I think it was around when I was an intern. So that's like right after medical school, before you start your residency, you spend a year doing a little bit of everything. And mine was had an emphasis on emergency medicine. Uh, so I was visiting a friend in Houston. His friend Chris had what's called a clay shoveler's fracture. When people used to shovel clay, sometimes the shovel would hit their spine and break that little piece of spinous process that you feel when you touch the middle of your back. So for like 20 years, he woke up knowing who he was because of this pain in his upper back.

SPEAKER_05 34:17

Oh, okay.

SPEAKER_00 34:18

That kind of identified him.

SPEAKER_05 34:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 34:21

Right? We we all do that to some degree, whether it's uh limiting belief or a pain in our body or something, right? And sometimes we accumulate too many of those things, right? So we attack ourselves from many different directions. So anyway, uh I treated Chris. Uh, you know, I I didn't think there was necessarily much I could do for him. But the next morning he said, I woke up and I was so confused because I had no pain there. I didn't know who I was, sort of. Now he is a counselor, a therapist, psychologist. So he had some insight into that shift in who he was and his ideas of self. But another patient might not be able to explain that or even deal with it.

SPEAKER_02 35:10

Right.

SPEAKER_00 35:10

So little things like that accumulate over the years, and so you learn to trust those things, right? So, you know, a lot of times students or residents will ask me how I learned what I do. A big part of my education came kind of during medical school. Part of how I got into doing this work was my sister was a family medicine doctor who went to an osteopathic school. I was older, you know, she went kind of straight through. And, you know, I would do stupid things and injure myself, like mountain biking or hiking. And one time, you know, I was riding a mountain bike, I hit like a tree, a tree, a fell tree, and I thought, oh, I'm just gonna go right over this thing, lift my front wheel, and right. Next thing I know, I'm literally on my back looking up in the sky, my bike is like above me, and I'm laying on the ground, kind of taking an inventory of what hurts, what doesn't hurt. You know, am I okay? Is it okay to move? Anyway, I wasn't able to really use my shoulder very well. And so over the course of like a week, she treated me a few times with some very basic but techniques like like I do, and and I got better, and I was kind of amazed by that. And at some point in my 30s, I decided to go and finish my bachelor's degree. I had a few false starts and I went into different directions with my schooling, but I was determined and I was doing really well, and I just thought, oh, just go to medical school. So that's how I got there. But I knew the hands-on work was something that completely interested me. Okay. So in my first year of medical school, one of my classmates is a priest. He ran a children's hospital and an orphanage in Haiti. My background is Jewish, so I don't really know much about it, but his order, like, was about teaching people to pray or something like that. It had nothing to do with what his mission was in his heart. And they said, look, you know, you're working too hard on this stuff. You need a sabbatical. So he used his sabbatical to go to medical school. Okay. So we meet and um and he offers for some of us, if we want, to come to Haiti between first and second year of medical school. He said, It's going to be like the worst camping trip you've ever been on. You know, there's really little run and water, there's hardly ever electricity. Um, most people live on dirt. So I I went there between first and second year of medical school. And, you know, I just kind of fell in love with the place and the people, and I used every spare like rotation and moment I had to go and work there. So cumulatively, I've probably spent, you know, around a year, maybe a little more down there, but it was always in small chunks of time as I could. And so the orphanage had 500 kids there, 550 kids. And one of the houses that housed those kids was a handicapped kid, like disabled children's house. And there were like 50 kids in that house. And I was close with the two women who were from Ireland who cared for them. And I would literally sit on a mountaintop in a cloud forest in Haiti with a little physical therapy table, like up to about my knees, and they would bring one child out at a time for me to take care of. And there was nobody else to bounce anything off of or to ask questions of. I was just on my own to learn. And that was in a, you know, I think of it as my playground. You know, I wasn't, you know, some crazy cowboy just trying things. I was really trying to learn and do the best I could for them. And um that that was an enormous learning experience for me. And then, you know, there was one time in the hospital, when newborns are born, there's very little of them that's bone, right? The vault of the head from the base of the skull up is formed in a membrane, and then the base uh is formed in cartilage that gets replaced by bone. So often you can get what's called an overriding suture. So just to take one example that's really simple, the sagittal suture right here on the head, they override kind of like tectonic plates. Okay. And there's a very common osteopathic approach to newborns that, or you know, young ones, because most newborns don't get treated, that can't feed well. Often it's a sucking and swallowing problem related to the 12th cranial nerve and where it comes out because it's very susceptible to birth trauma during delivery. All right. So this kid comes in. Um, the mom has other kids at home. They live on a dirt floor in a shack, and she has spent weeks in this kid's hospital room. Somebody else is caring for her own kids. She's hardly going home. This kid has what's called failure to thrive, can't eat. It's not the mom's issue, right? Often it's parenting. They don't know how to, you know, care for kids. So, anyway, I go to treat this kid, and I've only heard about how to treat the 12th cranial nerve problem because I I haven't even been out really on rotations yet in hospitals. So I've only, it's only theoretical to me. But in theory, I know what to do. So, 11 o'clock at night, I go to this kid's room. And let me just describe the room to you, right? This is not like some fancy hospital, it's an old motel. You know those like glass slat windows? Okay. So that's what they bought to create this hospital for kids. The cribs are made out of welded steel, they look like jail cells. There's a little tile, like a bathroom tile on the wall, that has their name on it, on in with dry erase marker. So I go to see this kid and I do everything I can think of, right? And I spend about 10 minutes, 15 minutes. And, you know, as I'm trying to fix this overriding suture by almost like gently pushing them apart, I'm almost hearing like, I'm hearing like tearing sounds. Like the fibers that are forming, because it's out of position, are ripping. So that's scary. And then, you know, I think I've done enough, but I don't really know. So I leave, and then I think, you know, what if I didn't do enough? Like maybe I need to go back and just recheck and do more. So I go back for a few more minutes, and then I just don't know what to do, and I'm exhausted, right? Because we start working in the clinics in Port-au-Prince really early in the morning. I go and I get some sleep. First thing in the morning, I wake up and I run to that kid's room. The crib's empty, the name is off the wall. And I'm just thinking to myself, like the people out front, because everybody gathers out front because it's a free hospital, they're gonna hang me from the tree out front because I must have killed this kid. And you know, I'm just sad. Anyway, I go and I find Dr. RT, who is um the doctor in charge of the hospital. I'm like, what happened to that kid? You know, where where is he? She said, Oh, nobody told you. So now my heart sinks even further. And um, she said, No, that kid ate like crazy 40 minutes after you left. He ate for like 40 minutes straight. We just sent the mom home last night because she's been here for weeks. Things like that kind of tell you that you're on the right path and this is the right work for you. And um you can learn to trust yourself uh if you listen. Now, outside of my work, it's a little harder to listen and trust myself. But when I'm working, I've spent time chasing after you know, teachers to get to the next level and learning experience to get to the next level. And you know, I'm always a beginner. You know, so they used to call me Casper in the hospital because I was the white friendly ghost. Uh that was another nickname I had. And you know, I can tell you one other story in the hospital. Dr. Gautier, um, she was a Haitian now in Haiti. The general hospital used to be a great place for people to train in medicine. It's changed over the years. But she then was an Albert Schweitzer fellow at Duke University and studied uh infectious disease, and she she ran the children's hospital. Uh, but she wasn't always there, so Dr. R. T. took over. So she had this asthmatic kid. And she came to me to say, Look, this kid, no matter what we do, he seems fine, but he's not saturating well, right? Like pulse ops. Is there something you can do? That might change so we can send this kid home. So, you know, sometimes when the fingernails are dirty, the pulse socks doesn't read right. Like you might come to the emergency room with nail polish on, they have to take it off. Like you have to think about things like that because the machines typically work pretty well. So she was holding this child, right? Um, kids in Haiti never want to let you go when you're holding them. And I said, Well, look, this is I'll explain to you what I'm doing. I I I don't know whether it will help or not, but that's the typical position, right? The child, all I have is their back. They're kind of a little scared of me, so they're clinging on whoever they're holding on to. This kid happened to love her, and you know, and I understand why. She was just a wonderful doctor and person. And so I said, all right, well, you know, the thing that you guys can't do with medicines is change this kid's diaphragm. And you might look at how they're breathing and their chest and their belly, but most of the work of the diaphragm is done from the back. And the back of the diaphragm attaches to the 11th and 12th rib and the upper lumbar spine. So while you hold him, I'm going to work with his 11th and 12th ribs and his crura of the diaphragm. And, you know, and when I'm done, we'll see what happens and I'll see if there's anything else I can do. So it took about 30 seconds, and I felt like the diaphragm had changed. You know, and she had heard stories about things that, you know, I was able to do in the hospital, but had never seen me work and didn't believe any of the stories, right? Unless you see it for yourself, you just don't believe stuff like that. Uh, because, you know, they're, you know, allopathic physicians are very focused on what they think of as medicine. And that's a whole other discussion. But anyway, I said, listen, just check this kid's pulse ox because he's breathing entirely different, and this is where I would end my treatment. And, you know, she kind of eye rolled a little bit. And then she checked his pulse ox, and he was sadding at 98. And she said, like, if I hadn't seen that myself, I wouldn't have believed it. Wow. So things like, you know, there, you know, there's a lot of little stories like that that are really fun and cool. And a lot of people are very skeptical about the work, including osteopathic students. So, you know, I don't know if you want me to continue or not, but okay. Of course. So initially, my job at this hospital with a friend of mine who I started a residency training program with, we were teaching the family medicine residents to prepare for their national boards. As osteopathic residents, they needed to understand the work that we do to some degree, right? Whatever they learned in their first and second year. But many are skeptics, many, you know, didn't get into the medical school they wanted to go to, so they went anywhere. And they just want to diminish the work, you know, because they're not taught well in schools. You know, that's the sad part. If you were to come to me to get treated, I'm, you know, I'm all over your body, touching your hands, your arms, your shoulders, all the, you know, your feet, your knees, you know, all the different places that to me are important to unblock energy channels and flow of blood to or from. So the only way to learn it is with your hands on the same patient at the same time. I can't teach 150 students from the front of a room because they can't feel what I feel. Right? There's an encyclopedia of kinesthetic experience that occurs when my hands are on the patient with your hands on my hands, or your hands and my hands on your hands. And some patients are very body aware and can experience this as things change, and others are not. But that's that's how you learn. That's how the patient learns, and that's how the person I'm teaching learns, and that's how I learn every day. Okay, so it's not taught that way at schools. And they're not working on people who are sick, right? Because they're young students and they don't really have problems. So I I asked for a volunteer to come up, and I'm going to teach something called a mesenteric lift. It's how the colon, small and large, kind of hangs from your spine, because these simple things can obstruct outflow for people who are constipated. Um, so that could be constipation in the hospital, it could be post-op ilius where someone's had surgery, and because there's an autonomic imbalance, sympathetic, parasympathetic, their gut hasn't woken up yet, right? So you want to quiet that down, and then they're probably on pain medicines, which can cause constipation. So a mesenteric lift is a very simple and safe place to start. So he lays on the table, his knees are bent, he's on his back, right? So he's laying, you can imagine, in a position with his knees bent to soften his belly. And now I have to scoop into the lower part of his pelvis, like where you feel your hip bones, because that houses, let's say, the outlet, sigmoid colon terectum. And you have to scoop in there to add a little gentle lift, right, to teach the body or to remind the body that those connective tissues should be a little shorter, right? Because if everything falls into the pelvis, there's no room for anything to get out. So you lift, and then slowly the tissue creeps up, and then you work with the descending colon, the splenic flexure, which is where it becomes from goes from transverse to descending, then the hepatic flexure, then the ascending colon, ileiocecal valve, blah, blah, blah. So he lays down, and I start to show the students like what I'm doing with my hands, how to do it. Like, hey, dude, I like, are you constipated? It's like, uh, well, now now that you ask, yeah, it's been a couple of days. Like, okay, cool. So let's see what happens. So I start to treat him, and as I'm going through the process, and this is a skeptic, this guy doesn't believe in anything that we do, doesn't even want to learn it. He just says, uh, Doc, uh, I'll be right back. And he gets off the table, leaves for 20 minutes, and comes back. And again, he said, like, if it hadn't happened to me, I wouldn't even believe it. But it happened to him. So those are the kinds of things that occur during general treatments.

SPEAKER_07 50:32

There's so much here, Lawrence, because you're giving us um an inside a view of what is it that osteopathic medicine, osteopathic doctors like you do, like probably like me many times, many of us have only met with allopathic uh medicine. And so this is all new, right? Um I mean, and even if you if you go into massage or bodywork or fascia releases and stuff, right? That's that's one one kind, right? But what you're talking here, it's so amazing the knowledge that you have, because even and and what makes me laugh so much is the humbleness of how you're explaining this, because even when you say, Well, I was not even sure what I was doing, and yet you have you come there to the table to this uh patient with all the knowledge that you have, and you just are um I love when you say learn, when you're learning, because you come with this open mind, uh beginner's mind or learner's identity to each patient, while I know that you have all this knowledge already inside of you, and uh you're actually so willing to even go with what the body is also teaching you, right? Because I imagine every time you meet someone, it's different, right? Everybody's everybody's so here's the thing.

SPEAKER_00 51:56

Yeah, there was a teacher uh up in the New England area, and she used to say, no, no two patients are ever the same, and no patient is the same on two different visits. So you're always meeting an entirely different patient.

SPEAKER_05 52:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 52:13

I don't know what your body will have been able to hold on to and what might come back, or what new things may have occurred, right? So you you know, you may come to me even in the injection clinic, and I may do something, and you come back a month later and say, Oh, it's the same. I have the same pain. All right, well, show me where it is, and then you point to a different spot. So you perceive it as the same, but it's different. Or people will come to me and say, Oh, that what you did didn't work. I was only better for two weeks. Well, you're taking medicine four times a day. So if I helped you for two weeks and you took less medicine, which means less side effects, right? Less adverse outcomes, um, less danger to your body, well, that's an enormous help, but people don't necessarily appreciate that. And I think, you know, whoever hears this, and even you, might be very surprised when you go to your doctor and see that they are a DO, but they just don't have this mindset.

SPEAKER_04 53:12

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_00 53:13

Right? So they are treating allopathically, which is, you know, drugs and prescriptions and procedures, and there's never any insight into the fact that your body has a self-healing, self-regulating mechanism. And it just you you just have to be shown how to get back to that. Right? And uh so William Garner Sutherland was uh the discoverer of what's called osteopathic cranial treatment, right? Uh osteopathic cranial medicine. So there's the osteopathic cranial academy, and then you know, one of his like he was a student of A.T. Stills, and he realized that there are some sutures in your head that just look like the gills of a fish, which meant to him that they were designed for movement. Now, when you consider the fact that your whole body develops around this fluid that's flowing before it's ever solid, the nerves and your blood vessels exist long before the bones, right? The bones and nerves don't create holes through your skull or other parts of your body, they've formed first. So your bones formed around them. So the whole blueprint of who you are that formed you is in the fluid. Yeah, that's the piece of you that can never get sick and is perfect. And that's what we strive to find and work with. Right? So getting back to Sutherland, he started to do experiments on himself and um realized that when he jams up his own head, you know, he faints or he gets seizures. His wife found him like having seizures. And then one of his, you know, strongest supporters and students was this guy, Upledger. And he's kind of like almost the Voldemort in the osteopathic community for a lot of people, because basically he changed the name, patented it, and sold it. But there are people in the profession who knew him well and knew he was a pretty remarkable osteopath, and understood that he kind of felt like the profession didn't care about Sutherland's work. So he wanted to give it to people who might care. They don't have the same background in anatomy and physiology and pathophysiology and you know, all of that, but you know, look, they still help people. And outside of the United States, most osteopaths are not physicians, so it's a very different skill set. But, you know, they have their own talents and skills and abilities and ways of thinking that are just so different and need to be incorporated here.

unknown 55:54

Right?

SPEAKER_00 55:54

So I'll give you an example. There's a whole group in Australia. They teach a course called The Rule of the Artery. There was an osteopath from the States who came from a, I think, a line of osteopaths dating back to AT Still. She retired to Australia. She was, I think, in her 80s. And this guy, Matthew, a Maxwell, Frival, heard that she was in Australia. And he was a British DO working in Australia. So he went to her to say, hey, why don't you teach me? And there were a lot of like women were a big thing in osteopathy from the beginning. Right? He was always like an equal opportunity guy, A.T. Still. There were always women in the class. Uh, when other schools wouldn't take women. And so like the older women, like, they were crotchety. Like they were, you know, they weren't nice. In my experience, like some of the older women that even when I was training years later, right? Like, I don't want to mention names, but um, students of Sutherlands, right? They just had an attitude. And I guess they needed that, no, or they wouldn't have gotten through it. So she kicked him out and said, No, I'm not teaching you. And he was in his 30s at the time, I think, mid-30s. And so he left. But then he, you know, like, you know, he went back to her and said, Come on, why don't you teach me? Like she kicked him out again. And then the story goes, somehow, you know, he came up with the courage and he said, Look, you know, you have like gold that's gonna die with you. Don't you want that to continue? Like, don't you want to teach somebody what you learned so that your work can continue? You don't want it to die with you. And she just said, Come back next Wednesday at one o'clock. And she started to teach him. And he formed a study group that continues, and now he's in his 80s. Right? So there's books, and you know, I brought those guys to the medical school where I teach on Thursdays, where I did my training, to teach that work. They've never been to the East Coast before. Right. So so here's the th here's a question I'll pose to you as a biology person and a scientist. If I told you to create a pump that was going to pump a thick viscous fluid with cells in it, and the cells are bigger than the capillaries, and it has to go three times around the earth to get from where it begins in the arteries through the capillaries back to the venous system, what do you think that pump would have to look like? So the heart's not a pump. There's more to it. Right? And if I told you that the fluid leaving the capillary is almost has no motion, because in order for it to transfer nutrients and and pick up molecules of CO2 and feed back oxygen, and then it has no velocity. How does it get back from your feet to the right side of your heart at almost the same speed and pressure as the left side with no pump? There have to be other mechanisms, and that creates a discussion, you know, into other things. Right? Like, how does your body do that? So there's an experiment. We can get into the details maybe in another podcast, but um I'll just mention this. They're studying blood flow through a chick embryo. Set days old, they cut a window, they have a micro um a microscope looking in, they euthanize the chick embryo, and they study it for three month minutes. The blood continues to flow slower but never stops, and then accidentally somebody shines a light on it, and all of a sudden the flow starts crazy, almost the same as when that chick embryo was alive. So they start to study red light and really more infrared, which our body creates through cell metabolism. It's right, so there's also the idea that for let's say a river to be alive, to really be vibrant and alive, it can have laminar flow, like straight through a pipe. The flow through it has to spiral.

unknown 1:00:33

Right?

SPEAKER_00 1:00:34

That's the work of a German guy, Schomberg or Schomberger. And so they bring rivers back to life by doing that, putting rocks in certain places to allow for spiral flow. And there's a whole idea that when the blood leaves your heart from the left ventricle into your aorta, there's a spiral flow through the aorta. And pretty much wherever that red blood cell leaves from, it takes where it's going to wind up in your body. And what it's really transferring isn't oxygen, it's information. And so that's what I look forward to hopefully being around for, as that gets illuminated a little bit more by people who are in their lifetime thought of as crazy. Right? Still in the 1870s, was talking about neurolymphatic channels and drainage of CSF from the brain and spinal cord into the regular circulation to water the withering fields. Without that, there's sickness. They're just finding out about that system now. Somehow he felt that with his hands. Or he intuited it, right? Through the universe. I don't know. I don't know how he did it. He's not around to ask. You know, people like that are on a different plane. You know, when you think about what Tesla, not like Tesla the Carmaker, was able to accomplish. The guy never made a prototype. He worked everything out in his brain and didn't create anything until he had it perfect. Right? So he wants to bring free energy to the world. But Edison was his benefactor, and he couldn't put a meter on it. So he got rid of him, and he got rid of it, and they got rid of the paperwork that described it, right? Like that's that's historically that's what happens in our world. That's what allopathic medicine was based on. It was set up by Rockefeller. He wanted to create molecules he could patent and sell through pharmaceutical companies because he owned oil, and the pharmaceutical companies kind of run on oil, right? Seed oil that we use that we know creates inflammation in people's bodies was a byproduct of his work. But he couldn't sell it. So he they lobbied the government to say it was a food source. So all of a sudden, seed oil became okay. And now we know all it does really in the body is create inflammation. But it's a food because it's something that happened in the 1800s. So the richest person who ever walked the planet and his people could get even richer, right? And we see we see the same things happening today. But you know, that's that's allopathic medicine.

SPEAKER_07 1:03:28

And but it's so interesting everything you're sharing about how the the one that catches my attention, the the flow, you know, the and one thing that I was gonna ask you when you were talking about the river and you were talking about the flow moving the spiraling like that. A question that popped up in my mind was does it make a difference where the human is in Earth? Because we know that if people are in the northern hemisphere versus in the southern hemisphere, you know, when you look at at how water flows, right? It flows in the opposite direction, even if you're down a drain or a toilet or this direction in the in the northern hemisphere is the opposite. And I was just wondering, is like, huh, is that happening also in humans? I mean, do we know even if that if being you know in a hemisphere affects that?

SPEAKER_00 1:04:26

Yeah, I think that it's more the anatomy. Okay, right. So when you when you think about it, that would almost dictate that when somebody came from the southern hemisphere, they wouldn't be able to function here because it would have to reverse. My guess is it's anatomic mechanisms within you know the blood vessel wall that create that. It's how the heart, right? When you think about the muscles of the left ventricle, they're spiral. There's a whole video, a guy took the time to dissect the heart in a different way, right? Embryologically, we know it formed as a single tube. It never changed being a single tube, it just folded on itself. And when he unfolds it, it's a single tube, right? So there are characteristics within cell, you know, the cell walls, how the ventricle sets it into a spiral by the way it contracts, right? That happens in a lot of places through our body.

SPEAKER_07 1:05:35

That is so fascinating. Everything you've shared with us, Lawrence. This has been a masterclass on learning about flow. And I feel that there's so much more depth in everything you are. You're just showing us the surface of all the knowledge that you have. I know you mentioned how energy also flows with the lymphatic. And the fluids of the body. So I know there's more. And I am so happy that you came here to share with us a little bit of this. And so if someone wanted to get in touch with you to, you know, learn either more about osteopathic medicine or the work that you do, how can they reach you?

SPEAKER_00 1:06:21

Yeah, I guess probably because I'm not like like we talked about, I'm a bit of a dinosaur. I don't really pursue that avenue of things or have social media. I I can't even get on my son's band's Instagram page because they changed the password and I don't even have one. I guess email is good, or they, you know, I don't know how many people will see this or what we'll wind up, but you know, they can reach out to you. You you have more of a presence and you can get me the information. If they have questions, I'm happy to come back on and you know do a little question and answer thing for people in real time if if that makes sense. I don't know. You know, 20 something years later, love what I do every day. And um I love talking about it and learning about it. And um yeah, time flies when you're doing what I do.

SPEAKER_07 1:07:12

Yeah, because you love what you do. I can totally see that. And and I know it's been amazing how you've been incorporating, you know, everything you've learned. Because again, you are the sum of all your experiences and and and you bring them all to the table. And I love how much care you put when you are with your patients. And so, one final question. Okay, so if I were to go and have um a consultation or a visit with you, right? I'm one of your patients. Okay. So I'm one of your patients, and uh, you know, I I don't I don't know what's wrong with me at this point, but you know, what do you do in the okay? I'll make something up. But what do you do the first two minutes when you are with a new patient? Let's say I'm coming and I'm your new patient. How do you say that?

SPEAKER_00 1:07:59

Yeah, well, you know, since sadly medicine is based around a couple of things, right? One is the chief complaint, you know, what you think your problem is, and the other is sadly, um, you know, the whole opiate crisis was set up by a drug company who who lobbied and spent a lot of money to make pain the fifth vital sign. And while they have been shown uh to be criminals and have used a lot of really nasty tactics to create their empire, um pain is sort of still the fifth final sign. So we never talk about health, right? We don't have a healthcare system in the United States that would end as soon as health insurance companies stop being nonprofit. Once it's for profit, it's about shareholders, right? It's all about saving money and saying no to patients. So those are things almost that need to be addressed. Not like I can't just come out and tell you, like, oh, if your pain scale is a seven, then you got a three of health because you have no idea what I'm talking about. And I I haven't had a moment to really set up any kind of a rapport. But I'm lucky when people were told to come and see me because somebody else told them, because then there's maybe some level of mystery or buying into the whole idea. Right? A lot of teachers would say, you know, if I see the wife, I don't want to see the husband unless the husband wants to be there. If he doesn't want to come see me, then I don't want to treat him because I'm just gonna bang my head against the wall, which goes back to the whole idea of secondary gain. Right? They're not really a partner with me. And I can't partner with them. I think that for the most part, there are a few little things that are going on with most people that answer, you know, maybe I don't know, like the 80-20 rule, 80% of what's going on. They're the most common things. Most people sit too much, whether it's in the car or behind a desk, and you know, so so low back, upper back, headaches, a lot of that has to do with what's going on, like around the pelvis. Um, you know.

SPEAKER_07 1:10:17

So I that is so interesting that you say that. Okay, so I do have a chief complaint, given that you want me to have a chief complaint. So I have a pain here in this shoulder. Okay. You know, there's uh an issue with um range of motions. I mean, it's good, but I mean it could, but there is a feeling, right?

SPEAKER_00 1:10:38

I wouldn't I would something's off.

SPEAKER_07 1:10:40

Yes, something's off there, yes.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:42

Um, so where you're pointing, does it start here and go there?

SPEAKER_05 1:10:47

No, it's it's here, it's right there.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:49

It's right here. If you press here, does it hurt you when you press?

SPEAKER_05 1:10:55

No.

SPEAKER_07 1:10:57

No, so yeah, um it's kind of like here. It hurts when it hurts, so there's a feeling when I move it over my head.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:08

Yeah, yeah. So the most common rotator cuff muscle that people injure or strain is the superspinatus, right? 90% of the time. It has a particular pathway that attach it attaches here. Um but uh just to give you an example, um it has that doesn't mean anything about like your shoulder, right? Because there are so many other things that could change your shoulder, your posture while you work, right? If your shoulders are rounded, it changes the pathway. So of course that's gonna get irritated. But so I'll tell you a story. This woman, uh, she's one of the residents in a hospital. She comes to see me. Her main complaint is TMJ. But I know her because she's at that hospital. I know that her dad and her uncle are cardiologists that work together, you know, not far away. I know that she has seen like every osteopath in Nassau County, you know, that has any kind of a reputation, and none of them have been able to help her very much. Um so I'm thinking, like, what can I do that's different? And so I knew she was a runner, you know, very thin. And um, so I thought, all right, let me start at her feet and ankles because she's a runner. And so I found a sprain in her ankles and feet and kind of up the leg. Okay. And now I know that you had started running when I did my PRAC course. That was your like you were going to be disciplined, and that that was your thing, and you've enjoyed it kind of since. I I I haven't been involved in the group much lately. Um, so I started at her feet and her ankles, and I worked up her legs. And you know, one thing that people don't get is they're like, whatever, 23 bones in your foot, along with God knows how many ligaments. That's really how you meet your environment. Right? Because that tells you where you are in space, whether what you're walking on is sloped, what direction of the slope, is it icy? Your brain gets signals that tell your body how to respond to keep you safe. So if you have one of those or five of those bones out of place that aren't mobile, you're getting faulty information. So you're fighting some demon that doesn't really even exist. And who hasn't sprained their ankle at some point in their life or doesn't do it recurrently? Right? So that works its way up into your pelvis, and then you know, latissimus is a muscle that runs from your pelvis to your shoulder, and it's a very common place for people to have problems. So these are all little things I would check because I have to check the whole structure to get a sense of what the key area would be, right? Because I don't want to treat everything in your body, I want to treat that one key thing that's gonna unlock it. And if I'm right, that's what I do. Yeah, right. That's the priority. I have to figure it out. It's a puzzle, everybody's a puzzle.

SPEAKER_07 1:14:11

And when you are checking, you're actually putting your hands on, you know, you know, you you have to touch everything until you figure out, oh, this was off, right?

SPEAKER_00 1:14:21

Well, yes and no, right? So part of what I used to have to do in Haiti, like you know, when we teach, we teach like do your whole structural exam. You have to check the whole body, write everything down, right? That and and you need that as a student, yeah. But for me, I can I'll start your visit with you laying on your back typically with my hands on your heels, and I'll look through your whole body from there. Oh and then I may go and look more closely. Um, but typically that I've learned to do that, right? Because when I was in Haiti, I would have to look at a kid's body, I would see something, maybe up in their mid-back from their feet. I would go and check it, and then I'd come back, and then I thought, why don't I just stay here to treat that? Why do I have to move up there?

unknown 1:15:12

Right?

SPEAKER_00 1:15:12

If I can find it from here, I can treat it from here. So you follow a pathway. And I I learned to do that, and I got feedback from patients, you know, who could feel things, and I learned to trust that. And now, um, you know, I do similar things with even the students. So there's a way to treat you sitting up where I have my hands on your shoulders, and I find things down into your pelvis or your hips from there. And so I'll have them, because they think I'm full of baloney, right? So I'll have them put their hand on on you know, on a joint or on like an SI joint, and I'll create vectors through the shoulders by pressing and moving you slightly to create um vectors right to that spot. And they they feel that getting stacked, yeah. Right, and if that's the key area, then I don't know what's going to change as a result. So once that changes and I can move you differently, then I look for the second spot and maybe a third spot, and you know, by then I'm done. So there's a you know, there's a thousand ways to skin a cat, right? And and Sutherland had a sign in his office, and you know, to paraphrase it said, I can't guarantee you anything except I'm gonna do my best, right? And and that's all I can do for you as well, right? So getting your foot working properly and your ankle working properly solves a lot of things. So that woman, um, the resident, her TMJ was better for like two weeks after that. Nobody had ever gotten two weeks better, like they got two days, and that's not to say, you know, that I'm more magical than the next guy, or my, you know, my magic wand is better, or any of that, or my sorcery. You know, you have to think about what other people would have done. And then you think, all right, I I have to try something different because I'm sure they've already done all of those things. And and that's true even of hospital work, you know. Like I, yeah, whatever, it's another story, but and I don't know how much time you have. Yeah, um, but it's a good story. I don't know, you want to spend a few more minutes?

SPEAKER_01 1:17:33

Yeah, go ahead, please. Okay, go ahead.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:36

So, this woman's admitted to the hospital for vertigo. Okay, okay, she's afraid to move. Her daughter is a nurse in the hospital on the floor, she's been in the hospital for two weeks, like everybody else, the million-dollar workup. And they didn't find anything. So that's when they ask us because they don't know what else to do, sadly, right? Because they should use us in the beginning. But even in this hospital where I've worked for, I don't know, maybe close to 15 years now, they they really still just don't get it, um, which is okay. It was very different in the Bronx. We had access to every area of the hospital, and you know, and that's part of also how I learned, right? I saw crazy, crazy things there. And I see some crazy things at the hospital where I am now, but there, you know, crazy things where a dinner doesn't. I'm sitting with my team, right? Students, residents, and I try to explain to them everything that's been done medically in terms of radiologic testing, blah, blah, blah, all of this different stuff. And um I tell them what I think would be the key areas, like the key findings, if we go in there thinking outside that medical box, what's she gonna look like laying in bed? And what I'm going to expect to see. All right, so your vestibular system is housed in your temporal bones. Some big culprits that twist your head on your neck into your upper body are the sternocleidomastoid and the trapezius muscle, right? They're innervated by the 11th cranial nerve. That nerve passes through a space created between your occiput and your temporal bone called the OM suture. And it's a very common place for there to be a twist or a problem, and that will tighten her sternocleidomastoid, which won't get better with any kind of medicine, uh like meclasine or any of that stuff. Um, and so you expect her to be laying in bed kind of like the letter Z. So that's what I tell these guys. This is what I expect to find. So we go in there, and I don't know if you're familiar with hospital beds, but you know, they fold and bend, and people don't usually stay up high enough to be in the right spot, like so that the bed folds at their low back or right, they're just they're just jammed. People slide down and they just get all crumpled up. And so there she is. She's laying not straight in her bed, but on a diagonal in her bed, like the letter Z. And that this is on a Wednesday afternoon, because that's when I was rounding then. And so I explain the OM suture, I treat the OM suture, I do a few things for the cranial base, right? Because if your body has all these zigzags, you your brain always wants to see your horizon level. So the last place you can adjust is at the OA, occiput on the Atlantal joint. So we do little things where our head meets our neck all the way up, which can put a lot of pressure into our brainstem and our upper spinal cord, you know, not like paralysis kind of pressure, but pressure, right? And that impacts our autonomic nervous system and how we can either get into a healing and resting place so we can get better. So I treat a few things, and all of a sudden she's kind of straight in bed and she feels better, and she can move her head a little bit where before she would vomit, because that's very common, right? She was afraid to move. And so, you know, they they were kind of amazed. Um, the you know, my team, and she felt a bit better. And they wanted to send her home Friday morning, but I couldn't get there until Friday afternoon, and she refused to leave till we saw her again. So those are the kind of things that happened. Or, you know, one more quick one a woman, a woman is at the old hospital uh a while ago. Again, vertigo, dizziness, right? There's a couple of maneuvers that neurologists don't do. Simple things, sort of. They're a little cumbersome, and once in a while the patient will vomit on you. So the neurologist is leaving the room as our team, there's like six of us, as entering. And we ask her, hey, what'd the neurologist say? Then I'm gonna be on medicine for the rest of my life. He was only in there for a couple of minutes. I said, Did he talk to you about this maneuver? She's like, No, he didn't say anything about any maneuver. So we explained, we'll take you through this whole thing. And you know, it might make you nauseous, but it might help you. Do you want to try it? She said yes. So we put three people on one side of the bed, three people on the other. We took her through this maneuver, it takes about a minute, and she was like 70% better. So we did it again, and then she was like 90% better. It's a neurology thing. Why didn't the neurologists do that? They just don't, you know.

SPEAKER_06 1:22:49

They don't know it, they're not trained that way.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:52

Oh, they know, they yeah, they know it. It's a basic medical school thing. Oh, just don't want to be bothered. That's my take on it. That's my humble opinion.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:04

Oh my gosh, yeah, Lauren.

SPEAKER_00 1:23:06

I mean you can do it to yourself, it's on you know, it's on YouTube.

SPEAKER_07 1:23:09

Oh, well, we'll be looking into that, into the maneuver. Well, thank you, Lauren, so much. This has been a pleasure. I appreciate you so much for being here. And you're welcome, and and we'll definitely put uh your information there in the notes for the show. And this has been great. I I have learned so much about something that I had no idea. And I feel that the osteopathic um medicine is very different, very new to some of us. Like we've been grown in regular allopathic medicine culture. This sounds really amazing, strange, and but it's not. It is, I mean, when you explain it with such detail, um, I can totally see how grounded it is in the experience that you have, and also in the knowledge and the medicine, the medical knowledge that you have. And and I think that you're so effective because you actually understand the body in a way that other people don't get it. Like even in medicine, right? They you think you learn it one way, but you learn it a different way. And also what I admire so much is how you're willing to learn every time you touch someone, you're willing to learn from that body, that person, that moment. So thank you again, Lawrence. Thank you so much for being here.

SPEAKER_00 1:24:32

You're welcome, I know this was a long, you know, but uh I'm glad you had the time because it was fun to be here with you.

SPEAKER_07 1:24:38

It was a lot of fun, thank you. Thank you for listening to an NLP podcast brought to you by Next Level Pro Institute. See you on the next one.