One sees what one looks for. One looks for what one knows. ~ Goethe

I’m in Chicago at the moment as my company just finished hosting its 13th annual Bioenergetic Lyceum. The Lyceum, a two day training that serves as a culmination of our four part Bioenergetic College series and as a general educational event for the doctors we serve, gives stage to the finest minds in the field of complementary and alternative medicine.

On Friday we looked at themes like setting the foundation for individualized medicine, individualized hormonal approaches and methylation pathways and Saturday provided an opportunity to consider chronic emotional imbalances and chronic disease, ways to implement traditional Chinese medicine in a Western medical practice, new insights from an autism pioneer and bio-films, the new super microbes. My brain needs a rest just recounting the topics!

Several themes weaved their way through the entire conference, but one in particular stands out to me this morning. Perhaps best described by the quote from Goethe above, we looked at how easy it is to become so encumbered by assumptions that limit true creative thought in the field of medicine.

Medical education in the United States as we know it today traces its roots to a report funded by the Carnegie Institute and produced in 1910 by a professor named Abraham Flexner. The report called for standardization of medical training across the country and it virtually wiped out modalities such as homeopathy, nutritional therapy and other forms of what we now call complementary and alternative medicine. What was left was the allopathic approach, a new system of medicine that was well-suited to caring for acute conditions.

Time marched on and the allopathic approach grew considerably, while advances in sanitation and in nutrition changed the landscape of the population. Less babies died and the incidence of infectious disease dropped precipitously. While it is arguable that people lived longer (if the number of children who died in infancy are removed from the dataset), patients’ needs shifted dramatically over the next 100 years.

In 2010 we find that the overwhelming majority of money spent on health care in the United States relates to the care and treatment of chronic diseases. Now remember the system was designed – purpose-built – to handle acute conditions and what we have now is an educational system that pumps out doctors who are incredibly well-prepared to treat a world that no longer exists. Things have changed, but the basic approach we take in medical education has not.

The world has become a much more toxic place. There is toxic buildup in virtually every living creature on the planet. Our present system focuses, as a physicist I spoke with this weekend called it, on impairment medicine and not on empowerment medicine. It is designed largely to remove symptoms through pharmaceutical drug interventions, rather than addressing the underlying causes.

In traditional Chinese medicine, for instance, your doctor would not diagnose you with a migraine. They would have ten different ways to explain the headache based on its underlying cause. Do you see the difference? In the Western model, you would generally speaking be diagnosed as having a migraine, given pain meds, say aspirin, to alleviate the symptoms. But I ask has anyone ever suffered a migraine as a result of a deficiency of aspirin in the body?

We are laboring under a model that no longer meets the present need. The assumptions that line that model have trapped those who operate inside of it. Being trapped in the knowledge base they’re in, they don’t know what to look for and not knowing what to look for they don’t see the problem as clearly as they could.

Our Lyceum provides a remarkable setting in which doctors of all stripes can collaborate in an atmosphere largely free of competition, egotism and fear. It is wonderful to watch as they share stories and experiences with one another as you can see their perspectives shifting moment by moment.

These are the best kind of doctors. They are courageous, willing to stick their necks out and care in an environment that largely discourages personalized attention, eager to learn and grow at peace with the understanding that growth requires an unwavering willingness to discard old assumptions that no longer fit. I am proud to be associated with them and I know that their patients thank their lucky stars to have found them.

If you ever need a referral, just let me know!