Away we go!!

 After 19 years with various hospital groups in Occupational Medicine, I ended my contractual relationship with various medical groups and a host of Workers' Compensation payers in December 2021 to focus on a new direction in energy medicine.  Full disclosure, it's both exciting and terrifying to walk away from 'the money.'  But my experiences during the COVID pandemic shifted my own perspective so completely, that I no longer resonate with the standard medical model of "fix me."  Fans of Joe Dispenza's work in "Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself" will remember he describes a similar process after his own recovery from a broken spine, where he simply couldn't treat in the same way because he no longer believed in that model.  In my case, staying in Occupational Medicine after 2 years of COVID became life-threatening.

My goal has always been to empower patients to know they can heal and to facilitate that in whatever way that I can, whether through massage, energy work, acupuncture, intuitive counseling, or a referral to another provider.  Worker's Compensation, while designed with the best of intentions to protect injured workers, has become a medical system that keeps the patient powerless and begging for care.  They create victims rather than encourage a positive path to recovery. 

That is all about MONEY, power, and who is going to pay.  I no longer choose to frame my work in a western-based manner so that it is "medically compensable" and I am finished with restricting information to the patient which might facilitate their recovery.  In Occupational Medicine (aka Work Comp), as a "secondary physician" I am prohibited from direct referrals for modalities that would help facilitate full recovery, even when the patient expressly wants to pay out of pocket to "get it done."  If an MD or insurance adjuster lacks exposure to ancillary services, care is denied (even when federally mandated).  Claims for services ALREADY PROVIDED are repeatedly denied despite active referrals, calls are nto returned from recalcitrant adjusters, and payment times often exceed 1 year (if we are paid at all).  Often, the patient is also prohibited from treating themselves at the risk of "invalidating their claim."  They are damned if they do and damned if they don't.  

This perceived failure of choice contributes to what creates the victim mentality so prevalent in the Work Comp system today.  There is, in Occupational Medicine (Work Comp), a sense that once injured, they OWN the patient: they own the information, choice of treatment modalities, your time and your body.  They are treated like naughty children.   Again this is about PROFIT, ego, fear of professional liability, and trying to see if anyone else can pay for it by limiting care and access.  I have literally seen adjusters come back to me with comments like:  "Well if they can pay for the massage out of pocket, they can pay for all of it."  

What?  

What happened to "pull" yourself up by your own bootstraps?  Taking responsibility, a combo of self-effort and grace?  Ownership that perhaps the injury you have was reinforced by poor self-care?  In a litigious and for-profit medical system, patients are turned into helpless children begging for scraps of care from a recalcitrant payer or uneducated authority figures (adjusters) and physicians instead of feeling empowered to heal themselves in whatever manner they wish. 

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I developed Polyvagal Acupuncture™ over the last several years and finalized it out of necessity after receiving a catastrophic and a life-threatening diagnosis at the beginning of the COVID pandemic. With elective services unavailable, I faced paralysis, excruciating pain, and damage to my spinal cord, so I had to work on myself. As a self-employed individual, without the safety net of Work Comp or SSI, I continued seeing patients one-handed.

While treating injured medical providers and essential employees on the front lines of the COVID pandemic, I found a consistent pattern of disharmony in the muscle patterns of my patients that matched my own. The techniques that were effective for my own condition were immediately effective with my clients, with staggering, visible, and (for about three years) medically unexplainable results. Most of my patients at that time were trauma survivors—birth or perinatal trauma, an alcoholic parent, chronic emotional abuse, sexual abuse, or medical trauma. Like myself, many were suffering from some form of overwhelm or trauma, including PTSD from COVID, albeit undiagnosed.

My nervous system became the canvas for this work, later verified by my clients' experiences. We were developing an understanding for the pathomechanism of clinical trauma while creating effective treatment. I found that the answers lay in the most primitive regions of the brain and spinal cord, prompting a deep dive into neuroscience and the osteopathic physiology of the fascia.

By integrating modern principles of neuroscience into TCM, we can, for the first time, create a supportive environment to heal the effects of trauma. Our fascia, the connective tissue network that permeates the entire body, plays a crucial role in this process. When the body is not in a state of sympathetic dominance (prolonged fight-flight-freeze), the body naturally begins to lay down new neural pathways to restore motor function, called neuroplasticity.  

Polyvagal Acupuncture™ targets the myofascial pathways influenced by the cranial nerves to restore the proper vagal tone through retained spasticity patterns.  PVA helps restore both the local cellular environment and the vagal tone of entire body so that neuroplasticity can thrive.  Primitive reflex integration and mindful exercise provide the supportive movement for the brain to develop new pathways and heal. As long as the body is not in a state of sympathetic dominance, time is much less a factor for recovery from nerve damage.  

For chronic pain issues, the symptom relief is often immediate: acute 10/10 pain may drop to 3/10 by the end of the session, and severe motor dysfunction, including essential tremors or frozen joint movements often resolve on the table.

I am deeply grateful to my injured medical providers, first responders, and other “essential employees” in San Diego who generously worked on the front lines to keep us safe, educate our kids, pack our groceries, and made themselves available to develop this together over the last several years. None of these people signed up for a MASH unit, folks. None of them asked to be on the front lines of a pandemic when there was no information, and when no one understood how dangerous it could be. 

In treating both my patients and myself, I have enjoyed the fruits of this new work and look forward to a full recovery from my injuries. Please stay tuned as we document the amazing developments over the last several years. Chronic sympathetic dominance is also linked to dementia, demyelinating disease, traumatic brain injury, and stroke sequela. With an integrative understanding of the nervous system, TCM practitioners, physical therapists, and massage therapists can, for the first time, use these principles to provide healing for the nervous system. I am excited to share it with you.