Automatic Pattern Interruption with Dr. Bob Levine

Most physicians go into the right orientation wanting to help people and make contribution to the world and just make a decent living. However, it’s hard for them to do that because their main tool is pharmacology. When Dr. Bob Levine had back and hip pain back in 1994, he started exploring alternative therapies. He got into holistic health because conventional care couldn’t help him with his back and hip problems. Dr. Levine shares how he got his first glimpse of automatic pattern interruption back in the 1980s during a fellowship at the Children’s Hospital of Zurich. He’s been doing a lot of work with it ever since. Dr. Levine explains that with automatic pattern interruption, they’re trying to interrupt people’s automatic patterns that are driven by the subconscious to keep them locked into a result that they don’t want, like chronic pain, sleep disturbance, anxiety, fatigue, and depression. Dr. Levine goes in-depth about the topic and shares that it’s all about mind-brain connection reeducation because it takes the conscious mind to direct the brain.

We have Dr. Bob Levine. Dr. Bob is one of the most fascinating people I have ever had the pleasure of sitting down and speaking with. He is full of wisdom. He is extremely passionate about what he does and he is a natural healer. Dr. Bob has spent the last 30 years researching the root cause of neurological and psychiatric illnesses. He uses mind-body therapies, guided meditations, acupuncture, Soft Tissue Therapy, movement education and holistic nutrition to do so. What makes this all very interesting is that Dr. Bob got his PhD in Pharmacology from George Washington University. He speaks about why he switched over to holistic medicine and how he developed the automatic pattern interruption method to help heal major chronic illnesses. Please welcome, Dr. Bob Levine.

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Automatic Pattern Interruption with Dr. Bob Levine

Dr. Bob, how are you?

I am wonderful. Thanks a lot. I appreciate it, Kevin.

I’m very excited to have you on the podcast. You’re doing a lot of great work over there. Where are you from originally?

I grew up in the Washington DC area. I’ve got My PhD from George Washington University. Before that, I got a football scholarship at the University of Massachusetts. I played college football and that was a mess. Back then, we didn’t know about concussion. It was a different game back then. I’ve had my share of injuries. I’ve had three ACL reconstructions. I’ve had hip replacements because football and skiing just destroyed my hip joints. That’s a miraculous conventional medical surgery, the hip replacements. Alternative medicine or holistic medicine can’t solve everything, I could tell you that.

EM 70 | Automatic Pattern Interruption Automatic Pattern Interruption: Alternative medicine or holistic medicine can’t solve everything.

There’s definitely a time and place for surgery.

I went out to the Detroit, Michigan area and ended up at the Henry Ford Health System directing a neurology research lab. I did brain research for a little over 30 years.

You have your MD at this point?

I’ve got my PhD in Pharmacology. I took all the medical school classes with the medical students at George Washington and I feel badly for the physicians. You’re a chiropractor, you’ve got tools to work with that work. Unfortunately, a lot of the physicians in general practice, the ones who are relying on pharmaceuticals, they don’t have a lot of great tools to work in their trade and they want to help people. Most pharmaceutical physicians go into the right orientation wanting to help people and just making a decent living, help people and make a contribution to the world. It’s hard for them to do that because their main tool is pharmacology.

The surgeons are a different story. They’re doing something different. Emergency Room physicians help people put back together. That’s gratifying for them I’m sure. I’ve found a lot of compassion for physicians and I didn’t realize that until I got training in all these alternative modalities that I started. Ironically enough, I had back and hip pain back in 1994 and I started exploring alternative therapies as I was in Michigan directing the Gazza Neurology Labs. They had a big lab there. They did a lot of interesting work.

I traveled all over the world internationally presenting my research results in neurology and psychiatry. I got into holistic health because conventional care couldn’t help me with my back and hip problems.

What kind of research were you finding with the brain research? Anything interesting there?

I’ve got the first clue. I was working in the biogenic amine neurotransmitter areas, so dopamine. A lot of people know dopamine because of Parkinson’s disease. People associate serotonin with sleep. Norepinephrine, epinephrine or adrenaline for the fight or flight response and the adrenal. The biogenic amine neurotransmitters are very interesting if only because they were the first major group of neurotransmitters discovered after acetylcholine in the brain.

I was in Zurich working in Switzerland. I had a fellowship over there to run a research lab. I worked at the Children’s Hospital of Zurich. We did some clinical work with depression. The compound I was working with was a naturally occurring compound that could elevate dopamine levels, serotonin levels, norepinephrine levels in the brain. There was this woman who had been a depressed patient for many decades. She was in a fulltime psychiatric hospital and we wanted to try this N=1 Experiment with her. We tried giving her this naturally occurring compound that’s made in the brain normally. We would give her the compound and see if they could raise the levels and help her depression. We were working with these psychiatrists. We started giving her the compound and it was like a miracle.

What was in the compound?

It’s called a tetrahydrobiopterin. Technically, it’s the cofactor for tyrosine hydroxylase. That’s the first enzyme in catecholamine and serotonin synthesis. It’s the rate limiting enzyme, meaning however fast that enzyme goes, that’s how much product is made in general. When you give the cofactor, it speeds up the enzyme, it makes more neurotransmitter.

You were giving this to this woman and she was getting amazing results?

Yes. She left the hospital. She’s a Holocaust survivor. She came and spoke to the whole children’s hospital and all the clinical researchers, doctors. She was getting an apartment in Zurich, everything was on schedule for her to leave. Then what the psychiatrists did was in a sense, what I almost consider, not really criminal, but it’s just sad. They started experimenting with her not knowing how to do anything clinically. When people take antidepressants it usually takes several weeks for the effect to kick in.

It’s like three weeks.

It could take longer too. The whole system has to correlate with the drugs on board and it has to reach appropriate equilibrium. They started to take her off the compound for four days and then put her back on the compound for four days, took her off for four days, put her on for four days. What happened was she showed no change in her symptoms, which was great. The thing was whatever happened, the change occurred, and she got the change and she’s ready to roll. That design is crazy. If you know compounds that are psychoactive, the brain takes three to five weeks to take their effect, there is also a washout period. If you want to do a test like that, you’d have to take her up for a month or so, even two months and see what happens. She went back down and put her back on. They’re doing four days on and off, which is a ridiculous clinical experimental design.

It was nothing. It was like no washout, no change. Her mood was good. She was ready to go. They told her, “We’ve done this further experimentation with you on drug, off drug and there’s no effect of the drug, what you’re experiencing is a placebo.” She went back down and stayed in the hospital. I talked to her afterwards. I never met a woman who was so depressed before, so wonderful for quite a long period of time while she was making arrangements to move into the apartment in Zurich and afterwards being so depressed again.

Did you know they were doing this at that time?

They didn’t tell us.

You were probably like, “What is going on? This woman was doing so well?”

Why would you even do that and why would you tell her? Anybody who is into holistic health now, I’m hoping that physicians will start to learn this more than they already know it. The language that people use is so important because it’s predictive of the future. We call it the future vision. You’ve got to speak in a way that’s respectful of the fact that everything that’s said is being incorporated into a person’s subconscious. The subconscious mind is the controller of everything. If the subconscious mind is in alignment with your conscious mind, you can do whatever you want, but if it’s not, you won’t do what you consciously want to do. It’s just the rule of the subconscious. It’s a universal law basically.

This one poor woman was depressed. There was no pulling her out of it and she just stayed in the hospital. I’m sure she was there until the end of her days. I didn’t associate it at the time. That was back in the ‘80s, our first glimpse of automatic pattern interruption. The compound interrupted her pattern and gave her freedom from the pattern. That’s exactly what all practitioners, every one of us, you, me, everybody else, that’s what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to interrupt people’s automatic patterns that are driven by the subconscious to keep them locked into a result that they don’t want, like chronic pain, sleep disturbance, anxiety, fatigue, and depression. We want to help them by replacing the dysfunctional aspects of what they were doing, thinking, saying and feeling to the functional aspects.

That whole chain of interrupting automatic pattern, replacing it, that’s what we do now. It’s challenging. That is why a lot of practitioners of any modality can be ineffective because we see somebody once every two days, once a week, once every two weeks, they go in for help, they feel better. I’ve had this happen to me. I’ll work on somebody, they’ll feel better then they go out. This was my early days of treating people after I was able to heal myself from the hip and back problem. I started to get a training in all kinds of therapies, deep tissue manipulation for postural balancing. That was developed by Paul St. John, a brilliant practitioner. He calls it the Neurosomatic Education. That’s how he teaches it. It’s working on the soft tissues of the body to create postural alignment. The shoulders high and the shoulders low. You’re going to work on the muscles that are too tight in contraction, leaving this shoulder high and then the muscle that’s compensating, pulling the shoulder, you’ve got to rework on these to release it. You can do that throughout the body and the three-dimensional plane of the body.

I’ve got a lot of training back in the mid-‘90s and I started acupuncture, mind-body therapies, hypnosis, and nutrition. Movement education is one of those vital modalities because the average person takes 30,000 and 50,000 repetitive movements a day. That’s a lot. Most people are doing them incorrectly and also doing it in a patterned way. You can think of those movements as Repetitive Motion Syndrome, a fancy name for somebody who’s on the assembly line. They do this all the time, all day long and people wonder why they’re in pain. Movement education is critical. My wife, Charlene and I, developed a technique called the Effective Muscle Release. She’s trained like I am only without the PhD.

What’s Effective Muscle Release? There’s myofascial release, active release, how is that different than this?

When I was doing soft tissue work and I was working on this muscle to release it, I worked it, I’ve got the release temporarily because I could work it, massage it, creating the brain connection with the muscle but I didn’t address the fundamental reflex pattern. We keep the shoulder high. The effective muscle release is we retrain the brain to recognize that this muscle, which is in reflex contraction needs to let go. The brain thinks this is the normal position. It is just out of the loop, normal position, release it down, eventually back in the pattern of life, pull it back up. Effective muscle release actually retrains the brain muscle connection, brain soft tissue connection.

How do you get into that actual connection?

If I just put my thing around here, I’m making a connection.

Right now Dr. Bob has his finger on his left shoulder and it’s up to his head.

Then with shoulders high. Anytime we put our finger somewhere, we create awareness of the conscious brain to that area where the finger is or wherever we’re touching. We then have the muscle contract. We create a slow movement, a slow contraction, a slow relaxation and then a release. You can do that. We contract, raise the shoulder even higher towards the ear, coordinate it with breath, nice and easy. We inhale, contract the muscle, exhale, relax and then at the end we let it release. We relax, take a breath. We can touch that muscle and make sure it’s loosening up, releasing and then we’ll do the motion again. We only have people do two motions, maybe three at the most.

It’s not about speed, it’s not about endurance, it’s not about exercise, it’s nothing. It’s all about mind-brain connection reeducation because it takes a conscious mind to direct the brain. The conscious mind is what directs the brain. Everybody talks about, “Your brain is doing this.” No, the brain is just doing what the mind is telling you to do. Everybody wants to know that. If we focus on life is terrible, we’re down, tried, it’s unfair and we’re victims of life, that is going to have the brain working throughout our body to bring all that scenario to our life. That’s what leads to ill health down the road in the future. That’s why we use a guided meditation.

EM 70 | Automatic Pattern Interruption Automatic Pattern Interruption: It’s not about speed, endurance, or exercise. It’s all about mind-brain connection re-education because it takes the conscious mind to direct the brain.

What kind of meditation do you use for your patients and what benefits do you see from that?

My philosophy is meditation is great, unguided. Self-meditation is phenomenal. It’s way inferior to guided meditation where there’s a language, there’s a voice, there’s a trained individual like a hypnotherapist or a guided imagery person who’s developed the guided meditation, the relaxation audio track that the person can use over and over again. We provide audio tracks so the person can harness the power of their mind and get the alignment of their conscious mind or their subconscious mind. The subconscious mind gets on board with what they want. That’s a very simple explanation of how we use that. We’ve got guided meditation, effective muscle release, the physical activities of daily living like teaching people how to do these 30,000 to 50,000 repetitive motions a day. That would be teaching proper walking, sitting and standing, bending and reaching, and everything that they do that’s repetitive. They start to have the conscious mind awareness of, “I’m doing this repetitive motion.”

That’s step one. Somebody that is on the assembly line picking up a box on the right, bring it across their body, putting it to the left. They do that hundred of times a day. That’s got to be a little tough to rework that pattern especially if that’s what they do Monday to Friday. How do you get them out of that pattern?

That person would teach us their own unique effective muscle release routine. They would have the regular ones we teach and there’ll be a separate one. They get breaks all the time on the line. It only takes five breaths and two motions. Breath at the beginning is motion number one, breath in the middle to make sure to check on release is motion number two, breath number three, which is the relaxation breath at the end. Just make sure that everything is loosened up. Every effective muscle release motion will take all of about 30 seconds.

Can they do that by themselves?

I healed myself in the mid-‘90s.

Using the effective release?

We recreated that ourselves.

You’re doing the manipulation you said?

I basically visited chiropractors, acupuncturists and stress management people.

You put it all together.

You’ll be thrilled about this because what solved my problem was an upper cervical release when nothing else would work. It wasn’t an upper cervical chiropractor.

It was an upper-cervical type manipulation.

It was a neuromuscular therapist. That’s what got me on to the Neuromuscular Therapy with Paul St. John. My hip was tilted, and it was locked in the tilted place and there was nobody that could release it. The general chiropractors, the acupuncturist, even the movement educators. I had a PhD Feldenkrais Movement Educator working with me. That guy was a brilliant movement educator. Thomas Hanna, another movement educator trained with him. Thomas Hanna has a great book called Somatics. That’s a worthwhile book for you or anybody to read. We have our patients read it too. Our whole effective muscle release method is based on what Moshe Feldenkrais and Thomas Hanna developed. We’ve streamlined it. We made it faster and more effective which we love. Like how they say, “You’re always building on the shoulders of great people.” Back in ‘95, I’d spent six months for $6,000, nothing except for a lot of feel good and a little bit of improvement, every little bit can help. It’s not like those therapies didn’t mean anything to me.

They were building off each other in some way.

People thought my one leg was longer than the other, I had a tilted hip. In one session, the St. John Neuromuscular, petite woman therapist, leveled my hip. This was back in 1994 and 1995 when this technique was new that Paul St. John developed. We had been developing it for a while but it hadn’t really gotten really super widespread. It would be an education to every practitioner of the healing arts together. The reason I knew my hip was level because I always knew my hip was tilted because my belt line was always tilted there. Everybody, the chiropractors and all of the alternative practitioners thought I had a leg length difference. I’ve watched all these people measure my leg length. I was thinking, “These people don’t know what they’re doing.” I don’t know what I’m doing yet but I’m a scientist. I evaluate. I watch. I visualize. I interpret. There’s no way they can measure my leg length trying to just measure it with however they were measuring, rulers, tape measures and whatever. I said, “This is a big hole in our holistic health and in our conventional medical system, leg length difference.”

That’s the first thing we look at upper cervical, leg length and hips.

I ask any practitioner, “How do you know a leg length is different? How do you measure it? It’s challenging. You have all things like soft tissue joint compression, compression of the joint space on one side more than the other, you’ve got hips that are in all kinds of weird positions, and you’ve got the rotation of the knee, the shin. It all can contribute to some apparent leg length difference that is not necessarily an anatomical leg length difference where one bone is physically shorter.

Most of the time that’s not the case.

If it is the case, that’s maybe the time when a lift might be needed. So many practitioners of all kinds are putting people in lifts when they have an apparent leg length difference because the hips or the knees is shifted pulling one foot higher than the other off the ground. You’re on a lift which is exacerbating or making worse whatever the physical pressures that are going on. If you have joint compression on your right side and a hip that’s higher on the right because there’s more compression, they’re going to put a lift on that right side. That’s just going to drive more pressure and deteriorate the right leg joints and hip joint faster. It’s absolutely insane to do that and that’s happening all the time.

You can go to CVS and get them if you want them.

People do that, but they do it on the advice of whatever practitioner is telling, whether it’s a podiatrist, a chiropractor, a massage therapist or a Feldenkrais movement educator. With me, they were telling me that they thought I might need a lift. In the end, everybody’s saying, “You may need a lift. There’s nothing that we can do.” I came in for my first treatment with Elizabeth and she said, “I’m going to try a new technique that I’ve been learning on you and it’s called St. John Neuromuscular Therapy developed by Paul St. John. If it’s okay with you, there’s another woman in the office here that wants to learn the technique. I’d like her to help me and she could make this go better.” I said, “As long as I don’t have to take all my clothes off, I don’t care what you do. That won’t even bother me if it will get me better. Do whatever you need to do, it is fine.”

She brought this other woman in and they worked for the majority of this session on my head which is above the cervical vertebrae. They worked on my cranium, the soft tissues on my cranium and the tissue around my cervical area. Sometimes you need to get above the cervical area to release the problem. The soft tissue around the cranium is like the skin of an onion. If the skin of the onion is distorted, it’ll distort the onion. If you start peeling back the outer layers of the onion, which they didn’t do on me, but this is an analogy, the onion could reform and take the proper shape. They were basically grabbing my hair and pulling my hair when I had more hair than I have now and they’re pulling on my ears. They are asking me to help. I’m working on pulling my nose. They’re pulling all the tissue to try and release the glue-like hold of the soft tissue, the fascia. I run into this all the time on people. I do two things to start out a treatment. I check the abdominal compartment. I do soft tissue manipulation on the abdomen because almost nobody gets their abdominal compartment, their stomach area massaged. There are all kinds of things that I learned about reflexes that originated in the stomach area that throw nerve activity to skeletal muscles. That reflex can hold a skeletal muscle in contraction. If you don’t get the stomach to a deprived area of the origination of that reflex, the shoulder could be high, you could work on and get it down, but the viscerosomatic reflex, the stomach muscle reflex, will pull the muscle back up.

Doing about ten minutes of work in the abdominal area, just really quick and checking out the cranium is important when I do one-on-one care. I’ll tell you about my internet-based practice and about the large group programs I ran, hands-off approaches, teaching people how to get out of chronic pain. They did all this stuff. The first thing she did was analyze my leg length difference and she did it anatomically. She laid me down on the table, checked bony landmarks in the ankle area, the knee area and the hip area. As I was laying down, she could assess the tilt of the pelvis on either side. It was a nice easy way to get a handle on leg length difference. She said, “Bob, I don’t think you have a leg length difference. If you do, it’s a quarter of an inch and that’s nothing. It’s just nothing. It is not a factor. You’ve got to get to an inch to an inch and a half to start having a problem.” They started working on me. I was laughing my tail off during that because as a trained scientist for about 27 years at that point, I was in the conventional research and medical paradigm of showing me the data. If there’s no data for it, it’s not real. I called everything they were doing Voodoo care.

EM 70 | Automatic Pattern Interruption Automatic Pattern Interruption: Doing work in the abdominal area just real quick and checking out the cranium is really important when I do one on one care.

You must have been in a lot of pain. You’re very scientific and someone’s doing all this stuff on you. This was probably your last resort like, “Whatever you got, I’m in.”

I said, “I don’t care what I had to do. If I’ve got to go to India and sit in a dark cave, I’ll do it.” Nobody’s going to operate on my hips. My conventional medical doc friend said, “You’ve got to wait as long as possible to get a hip joint.” “Why is that?” “They tell you to wait as long as possible because the hip joints have a certain lifespan. They want you to outlive the joint.” At that time, I was about 40 years old roughly and I’m thinking, “Great future, I’ll suffer in pain, limping around, gaining weight because I can’t do sports for 25 years, 65 years old and get the hips replaced so it can carry me to 90. What a future is that?” That’s when I said, “I don’t care what my default thinking is about this stuff, which I call Voodoo care. I’m just going around and doing it. I did a lot of strange stuff. I’ve got to thank Landmark Education. It’s a beautiful program. The Landmark Forum, it’s by Landmark Education. I recommend that to a lot of my patients because I can save them money.

What’s Landmark Education?

It’s a transformational seminar which is designed to help people understand how they’re in their own way of getting the results and people are always in their own way. There’s nothing else. Nobody’s in anybody’s way except for themselves but we want the results. LandmarkEducation.com will take you to LandmarkWorldwide.com. They have a whole lot of programs. I’ve done many of their programs. The first program is so significant because it’s the first step in being freed up from what I call in my language, the automatic patterns that keep us stuck. That’s just another way. That’s what everybody’s trying to do. Everybody wants to create change.

With any achieved change, either as a practitioner, seminar company or leadership training, it doesn’t matter, you have to help people identify and interrupt their automatic patterns that are driving them in a direction they want to be driven to get the result that they want. That’s just the way of doing it. It’s very inexpensive. It’s around $600 roughly for Friday, Saturday, Sunday seminar. By the end, you come out as like, “I’m free.” The freedom only lasts as long as you can sustain it. They have other programs and they encourage you to take them. If you’re a good student, you can learn how to be free and stay free for quite some time.

They have some inexpensive weekly seminars that help people stay engaged without having to take more expensive programs, but they’re not really. That is the least expensive highly effective transformational training that I know of. I’ve spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in growth and development seminar training with my wife, Charlene. We always go back to the fact that Landmark is the place to start before you do anything else. Everybody’s got to teach what Landmark teaches and they don’t do it as well. If somebody does Landmark then they get that great fundamental simple training about automatic patterns, that’s not what they call it or anything. Since we’re on the topic of what keeps people stuck, they need the best core training in helping people get released from me from that.

Then go out and train with Tony Robbins or whoever it happens to be, go out there and get that training. That fundamental core training, I’ve not seen it done with anybody else at a high level. We paid thousands of dollars for seminars. It’s a great seminar with leaders, transformational leaders, but that’s a specialty of Landmark Education. The reason I bring that up is that I had taken it in 1993 before I had to get into this whole train of therapies, these dozens of therapies I took before I ended up with St. John Neuromuscular Therapy. That helped me a lot. It helped me understand that I had lived my life in a paradigm with fixed views everywhere. I still had all my fixed views and all my wonderful opinions about stuff, but I developed the capacity after that weekend to broaden my view and take on new views and try them on, explore them. I started identifying how I handle these fixed views that I didn’t know were so fixed. I just thought it was the truth, but it’s really all about opinion and interpretation.

You were putting self-limitations on yourself that you didn’t even know were there.

I knew fundamentally that myself limitations would never allow me to explore those Voodoo-type therapies. They’re not voodoo.

That’s a good point but to somebody that has a closed mind, they’re not ready for it and they won’t have the beneficial effect that it should because of the closed-mindedness.

It’s not just me as a scientist. Almost everybody on the planet has a fixed mind, which means it’s closed to certain things. Everybody’s got a fixed mind. Mine is still fixed, but it’s just a matter of broadening the fixture, expanding it. If it gets fixed, I expand it, I take on new things. Everybody’s got a fixed mind that is closed off in certain areas.

Have you ever had Reiki done?

Yes.

That’s a pretty good example of this is either going to work or it’s not going to work based on mindset. A lot of people who go in there who are closed they’re like, “This is crap.”

“How could it possibly work.”

They come out and don’t feel that different. Then you have someone who goes in there with an open mind saying, “Do whatever you have to do. I trust you.” They get really good results. That’s a good example of the mindset right there.

Unfortunately, that’s a problem for a Reiki practitioner because they can do great work but any human being can block any input.

It goes for anything.

Any input can be blocked. Hypnosis can be blocked completely, Reiki can be blocked. If a person comes in and says, “This massage felt good but it can’t possibly last.” They’re speaking can’t possibly last into their future and it will last then they go back into their other patterns and nobody teaches them about the patterns or how to interrupt those. They’re stuck. Then they malign or speak poorly of the massage therapist, the Reiki practitioner, acupuncturists or whoever. Unfortunately, I would classify nine out of ten people in that category. That’s why when we do a clinical trial on something that seemingly works, and we do it rigorously like I did for many years when I worked at Henry Ford Health System in Detroit as the director of the Center for Integrative Wellness, a lot of the therapies don’t work. You’ve got great anecdotes of people that did it work for.

Those are probably the people who had the mindset you’re speaking about, had the orientation that they are going to get better. That’s why in our programs now we teach what we call true future visioning. If somebody says to themselves, “This can’t possibly work,” that’s their future. We call it a corrupt future vision. It’s like a computer file that got corrupted, it’s going to go, “It doesn’t work,” no matter what you do. I want to come back and talk about clinical trials and alternative therapies. That’s the compassion I feel for one-on-one holistic practitioners. They’re in the same boat as physicians. I believe they have maybe a slightly better tool because the chiropractors got the manipulation component, soft tissue component. The therapists got soft tissue component, acupuncturists got the meridians and energetic flow component, Reiki practitioners got energetic flow. Everybody’s got their thing.

Physicians have their drugs, which in the case of this woman in Switzerland, were great. I’ve got to digress a little bit or take a tangent to say that I believe that the drugs could be valuable. It’s very valuable without all the litany of side effects you see on TV, with all the ads where you could get all these disorders and side effects and die while all these people are having a great time showing you how great life is in their bathtub or with their family.

It’s comical. It’s like a heart attack, death, stroke.

It’s comical and it’s sad because they’re using the video of the people having a great time as a distraction while they tell you all this stuff it can do to you. However, I believe that drugs could be valuable as automatic pattern interrupters if we would use them that way. Placebo response into a clinical trial for let’s say migraine headaches could be 30%. Take nothing, get a 30% benefit. Take the drug, get a 40% benefit. It’s 10% better. The placebo response is 30% zero response, 40% drug response. I learned this from Dr. Wayne Jonas, a brilliant holistic health physician who’s the president and CEO of the Samueli Institute out West. He wrote a book called How Healing Works. Check out Wayne Jonas, brilliant book, fantastic. You’ve got to get that.

EM 70 | Automatic Pattern Interruption Automatic Pattern Interruption: Drugs could be valuable as automatic pattern interrupters if we would use them that way.

I always talked about how if the placebo is so high in terms of the response rate, why is that not offered to people as a possibility? Here’s one pill, it’s a placebo. It’s got nothing in it. It’s thought to help you but it helps 30% of people who take it. Here’s this other pill. It’s a really powerful chemical that’s 10% better. It’s 40% chance of getting better so you’ve got a 10% more chance and you get side effects and death. You can start whatever. It’s your choice. You come back, you start with one, it doesn’t work. You come back and get the other. They don’t treat it like that and the drug company knows it. The paradigm is tested placebo, you get X percent, test drug you get 1.2X%, meaning it’s a 20% better response. You’ll have a multibillion-dollar industry right there.

That’s the problem right there with money involved.

You create a diagnosis for something that may not need a diagnosis and you find a drug for that diagnosis, then you had another multi-billion industry.

That’s another thing, people become their diagnosis and that’s sad.

I talk about this all the time with my groups, the large groups that I treat and one-on-one patients that I treat over the internet or in person rarely. Diagnosis is simply a snapshot in time and everybody’s running around trying to get a diagnosis. It’s like, “If you can run around and see all the doctors you want and they do a great job of analyzing you, evaluating you and checking you out, and there are all kinds of imaging, chemical tests and blood tests and they can’t find a diagnosis, thank God that they can’t.” Those are the patients I love. It’s like, “Let me check you out thoroughly. I know you don’t have a tumor somewhere. Let’s get to work. What are your symptoms? Forget the diagnosis.” I always work on symptomology. When I was 40, I had the diagnosis of severe degenerative osteoarthritis in both hips and I was in pain. I got myself out of pain. I lived for 22 years without hip pain with my hips a mess.

Finally, about three and a half years ago it was over. The pain started coming on. The hip joints were so restricted. It was hard to walk. I couldn’t spread my legs to the side past my shoulders. It was a balance problem. I was used to playing sports biking, rollerblading, swimming, basketball, everything. I couldn’t do anything except be in pain all day long every day. There was nothing I could do. Knowing all that I know, I was done. I was at the end of the line. When my orthopedic surgeons did the hip replacement. They said, “I don’t know how you’re even walking around. I had people in wheelchairs where their images are ten times worse than yours.” That’s attributed to the work that we do as a holistically-oriented practitioner.

Dr. Bob, how do you feel about wrongful diagnoses? These are happening a lot. Let’s say somebody gets a misdiagnosis of multiple sclerosis and the doctor tells them, “You’re going to start losing function in your arms and legs. You’re going to be in a wheelchair in two years.” They don’t have that but that could definitely happen with what that’s engraved in their brain, do you think?

We’ve got to teach physicians how to communicate with their patients so they don’t drive them to a corrupt future vision of you are screwed. This is a big problem. The doctors have to reveal the side effects of a drug. Like a cancer doc will say, “We’re going to try this and this could work for you. I just have to tell you that the side effect is this.” The last thing you tell somebody what they’re going to walk away with.

You don’t have that power to tell anybody.

Let’s just switch the order around and say, “We’re going to try this chemotherapy. We’re going to try this medicine for your migraines. We’re going to try this for your gastroesophageal reflux, your heartburn.” Whatever the conditions are, it doesn’t matter. “This is a very potent compound and it can be very effective. It has some unwanted side effects with some people.” The side effects don’t happen with everybody so they should say that in a certain percentage of people there are side effects, other percentage people they’re either none or very minimal. You don’t even know that they’re there. Here are the ones that you could possibly have.

That’s only in a percentage of people, so you want to think of yourself as a person who’s free of all of that. You’re absolutely free of that going forward. You want to focus your mindset on that and you want to focus your mindset on this chemical which can help you this way, it can help you that way, it can remove symptomology this way, it can give you a four-hour erection. If you have a four-hour erection for erectile dysfunction, you’ve got to go to the hospital immediately. Talking about a way to pull people in it’s like, “If I had a four-hour erection, I am not going to the hospital.”

That’s on TV, everybody’s watching it anyway, a four-hour erection from a compound. That’s their subtle way of saying, “This is a benefit you can get from this pill.” We need to have all practitioners, every single kind, it’s not just physicians. It’s everybody in conventional care and almost everybody holistically-oriented care. We can’t leave anybody out in this, we can’t say one segment does more than the others. The only reason it’s important for physicians is because there are way more physicians around who are controlling the activity of way more patients. Holistic health is a tiny drop in the bucket compared to what’s going to conventional care.

We need to teach everybody. You change the way you speak, so the last thing you need the person with is what you want them to remember the most. You also want to help them shape. How long does it take to shape somebody’s future visions? It takes 30 seconds or less. You want to think of it because some people don’t have side effects. It would be valuable for you to think of yourself as a person who will be totally free of these side effects. That’s it and that’s all you’ve got to do. It’s your choice. You can think of yourself that way or you could think of yourself the other way.

Did you tell all your patients that?

Every word I say is affecting their future vision so that it’s true for them. If I say something, “This is what you don’t want This is what you want.” I’ll say what you don’t want first. If I ever say what you don’t want but to say that, you just focused them on, “This is what you want to be moving away from. This is what has not worked for you. Now, this is what works for you.” We always end with that and what you want. Many people are focused on what they don’t want. The classic is, “I don’t want to be like my father. I don’t want to be like my mother.” That’s called resistance, “I am resisting my parents.” Resistance causes persistence. All those people end up more or less just like their parents. They’re resisting anyway and that’s where their focus is on.

The high-level trainers around the world who lead big time seminars will say, “Whatever you focus on expands. If you’re focused on how you don’t want to be something, that will expand. It will take over your life.” That’s why we always want to be careful. Charlene has a degree in communications and we’ve taken a ton of seminars. We’ve developed our own communication. I’ve trained thousands of people in communication. We have our own communication system that we use now. It’s the same and it’s different from everybody else’s but it’s simple, it’s got to be simple. It’s going to be easy and it’s got to be something that people can learn, so we use guided meditation to reinforce learning. It’s an accelerated learning technique so we can help people reprogram their own subconscious mind the way they want to, to get the result they want.

We give the people guided meditation tracks or hypnotherapy tracks and we say, “Listen to this like you’re listening to a lecture, wide awake, take notes and write down any questions. Make sure you can agree with every word in it because if you don’t agree with something, don’t listen to it anymore. Contact us, tell us what’s bugging you. We’ll work it out.” Maybe 10,000 people we’ve given tracks to and we’ve never had anybody get back to us because we’ve developed a material that they want to use, and they know it’s good for them but it’s just like television advertising. That’s why I mute or turn them off as much as I can with my kids and me. I don’t want to listen to that stuff over and over again.

I still like my TV once in a while. That’s how we handle hypnotherapy and guided meditation. People think hypnosis is something where you’re giving control over to somebody else. That perception is absolutely 180 degrees backward. When somebody does hypnotherapy session, that hypnosis is allowing them to gain control of their mind because hypnosis is designed to allow people to access their subconscious mind and the subconscious mind drives life. If you want to change your direction in life, you’ve got to reprogram your subconscious. All the automatic patterns reside in the subconscious mind. If they were conscious, people will just say, “Time to change. There’s the pattern, we’ll change it.” We wouldn’t have any suffering going on. Ill-health is due to the subconscious mind.

How do you snap somebody out of these repetitious patterns? A lot of people don’t even realize they’re doing it and are satisfied with the life they’re living. You’ll talk to this person and you’re like, “Why the hell is this person like that? They have no idea that they’re doing this?”

Everybody has to become somehow satisfied with whatever life they have because it’s safe, it’s comfortable and they have no way out anyway. That you have to justify in their mind why their life is okay, “My life is okay.” It’s BS. You know it’s not okay, you want it to be different. When somebody says to me, “My life is okay,” I say, “If you could have anything you want, how would you want it to be different?” They always have something unless they’re just totally deluding themselves or they don’t want to engage in the conversation. Then, “You like your life. It’s great that you like your life. That’s fantastic.” That’s the first step in change is you’ve got to be okay with it. You may not have to like it, but you’ve got to accept of wherever you are. Most people are not. They’re resisting of where they are because they have ABC and they don’t want ABC, they want XYZ. They don’t like it.

We teach a concept called being accepting, which is vital. It’s like being open to what’s happening around you, being okay with it, whether you like it or not or whether you agree with. Being accepting allows you to let go resistance and that’s vital. We go into a whole thing about being accepting. We teach about being accepting. We teach about being forgiving. One of our key principles is teaching the art and science of the way of being, what you express.

What is that?

Nobody teaches it like we teach it and to the extent that we teach it. Every action somebody takes is driven by the way of being they express. If there is abuse going on in the household and one spouse hits another, that’s driven by a way called being angry. With the action taken it’s always consistent with the way of being. The ways of being that are generated are usually automatic and part of the automatic pattern, which is why everything is persisting if the people don’t want.

EM 70 | Automatic Pattern Interruption Automatic Pattern Interruption: Every action somebody takes is driven by the way of being they express.

If somebody is hugging someone gently and in a nurturing way, that would be driven by not the way of being, but the way of being loving. The action is always consistent with the way of being expressed. Everybody’s expressing a way of being every moment of every day. The actions that are being taken are consistent with the ways of being that are expressed in each moment every day. If the way of being is in a corrupt way, it’s an unwanted undesirable way of being, people are going to take actions that they don’t want. They’re going to produce results they don’t want. That’s why everybody’s stuck with results they don’t want because they keep trying to change actions without understanding that the being is driving the action. You can’t stop eating the chocolate cake until you shift your way of being and you shift your future vision about yourself.

Do you think the subconscious is driven mostly by learned behavior and environment, genetics, a little bit of both?

The subconscious mind doesn’t have too much to do with genetics. I used to be a big fan of genetics and I’m not such a big fan of anymore. When I finally have enough resources, I’m going to do a clinical trial and I’m going to take the most genetically linked condition that has symptoms that I know I can easily relieve. I’m going to do a clinical trial showing that I can take this highly genetically linked condition with these symptoms and everybody says, “These diseases are definitely genetically driven.” I’m going to wipe out the symptoms and then I’m going to say, “Tell me about your genetics now.” In one month or two months I’m going to completely eliminate the symptoms and do it in a group setting. I won’t touch anybody and I’ll do it with 100, 200, 500 people. If somebody’s got to blow a hole in this genetic research that’s going on. I’m probably going to piss off a lot of genetic researchers. I have a strong background that’s included genetic research.

The problem is that I’ve seen it with people. Parkinson’s disease is a challenging condition. In research, we say that the person who ultimately expresses the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease loses either 95% or more of their dopamine neurons in the area of the brain called the substantia nigra. Once these dopamine neurons die off, then the person starts getting the symptoms of Parkinson’s, the shaking, the rigidity and everything that goes along with it, the shuffling walking and steps. L-DOPA which is the precursors, L-DOPA is converted to dopamine in the brain. That was a miracle drug back in the ‘60s. I wasn’t doing research back then. I was born in 1954. They started doing work with the dopamine system. Tyrosine gets converted to L-DOPA. L-DOPA gets converted to dopamine in the dopamine nerve cells. Then the dopamine gets released. It stimulates the receptors on the downstream cell and everything works normally.

When those cells die, they discovered that you could give L-DOPA to patients orally and it would cross the blood brain barrier because of its chemical nature. It will get into a lot of different cells and get converted to dopamine by an enzyme called DOPA decarboxylase. All the shakes went away and the tremors went away. That was the miracle drug. To me, that was a reinforcer of pharmacology because we already had all the vaccine stuff and antibiotics stuff but now we had something in the brain. The brain is the ultimate black box. What we didn’t focus on, which as a PhD non-clinician I didn’t know, and clinicians weren’t really talking about this with anybody. The L-DOPA duration of action that helped the patient was about four years on average and then it was over.

What’s going on there that it stops?

I don’t think anybody really understands. I think that the body comes to an equilibrium. To me, the body is always going back to the dysfunctional pattern it had. Parkinson’s disease could be a dysfunctional pattern. I view everything as a dysfunctional automatic pattern. This story addresses this unique case. It’s an N of 1, in medicine we call that an anecdote. Somebody spontaneously heals from cancer, it’s an anecdote. I like to study anecdotes. I want to find out why 97% of the people died and 3% lived. What is it about the 3% who lived? What’s the difference between them? That’s not the way it’s been working in conventional medicine for the longest time. We dismiss it as an anecdote and it’s not worth considering because it’s so rare so we can’t focus on that. My thing is you’ve got to focus on that to find out how to make it not rare.

That was the work we did with the depressed patient in Zurich. They were trying to elevate catecholamine and serotonin synthesis. The catecholamines are dopamine, adrenaline, noradrenaline. Serotonin is a biogenic amine too. I was doing work in Henry Ford Health System, but my basic research lab was still working with this compound, tetrahydrobiopterin and looking at how that whole system interacted with dopamine synthesis. That was to see how we could raise dopamine levels in the brain for Parkinson patients. Also, to find out what aspect of the system was breaking down.

Here’s the sad part about how we got into this paradigm of conventional research. We started to focus on the fact that all ill-health was related to dysfunction at the cellular level. I understand it because I’ve worked there for 30 plus years. I was looking for how we can solve a disease at the cellular level. If the disease is not related to a cellular dysfunction, when it’s related to a whole being imbalance, we could say a dysfunctional automatic pattern. It encompasses everything. Automatic pattern is how we eat, how we think, how we speak, how we listen, how we move in three-dimensional space, our view of ourselves or view of others, our view of the future, our belief system. The automatic pattern encompasses everything. Which is why when we do our group programs, we have to take a broad approach. We have so many different unique people with their own unique, dysfunctional automatic patterns. You have to make sure that we can help everybody or as many people as possible under the umbrella of automatic pattern interruption.

I was doing this research and one of the things we do as scientists is we go to national and international meetings to present our results. I was going to a meeting. I’m a pilot. I flew the airplane I had at that time from Michigan to Princeton, New Jersey to go to this international meeting on Parkinson’s disease. Hundreds of basic research scientists like myself and neurologists who were some of the best in the world of treating Parkinson’s patients and other conditions. While I was there, on the first day I noticed that there were all these clinician scientists and four patient representatives who had Parkinson’s disease and I got to meet all four of them. I noticed one gentleman sitting in the front of the room and he was shaking. He was writing, taking notes but his whole body was moving. He looked like a worm on steroids out on the sidewalk squirming all over the place in the same position.

This was when I had started my training. I’ve been training for a long time in my different therapies. I had done movement education, soft tissue manipulation and hypnotherapy training. I had taken a lot of Landmark Education Programs which is all about being freed up from automatic patterns in their language, acupuncture and host of other things that I’m trained in. I’m watching this gentleman while listening to the talks and thinking about, “How can I help this gentleman? What do I know that I could provide this guy? What’s going on with this guy?” I was in the inquiry the whole time. The first two talks were made by some of the world-leading neurologists. Their main message was, “We thought for decades Parkinson’s disease was a dopamine nerve cell deficiency in the brain and we used L-DOPA and we use all this other stuff to help the patient to a limiting degree. There must be a lot of other things going on neurochemically in the brain that we don’t know about yet or haven’t studied yet. There’s some new research with this neurotransmitter system like GABA. GABA is another neurotransmitter, gamma-aminobutyric acid, acetylcholine, substance P and other neurotransmitters in that dopamine nerve system.”

Those first two talks were trying to open people’s minds so we got to do more than just the dopamine system. 90% of the remainder of the talks and posters were on dopamine system because that’s where all the funding is. The funding is all there because the people who were working in the dopamine system like me were on review committees. I was on some review committees. Those are our paradigms, our bias. We want other people to fund our research on the dopamine systems. We were funding other people’s research on the dopamine system. It’s just a crazy network. It’s a paradigm. We’re all stuck in it.

That’s where all the money is going from donated to Parkinson’s research. Is it in the wrong area you think?

I’m not going to say right or wrong, but let’s talk about the effectiveness or ineffectiveness. Was the money spent effectively or was the money spent ineffectively or less effective or far less effective? If you believe that the disease is caused by cellular dysfunction, then you want to do research like it’s going now. We’re looking at every minute aspect of cellular function to find out what’s the normal way the cell works and what’s an abnormal way the cell works. If we can find out what the abnormal way is, we can then make a drug correction or a genetic correction with gene therapy which hasn’t really worked out too well so far. We’ll figure out a way because we pinpointed exactly the one thing that is going on.

EM 70 | Automatic Pattern Interruption Automatic Pattern Interruption: We’re looking at every minute aspect of cellular function to find out what’s the normal way the cell works and what’s an abnormal way the cell works.

We’re going to fix that and solve the problem. If you like that philosophy, you want to be in our conventional medical research and clinical system. The NIH budget is, I’m going to guess because I haven’t looked at it for a couple of years is around $40 billion. The majority of that, the lion’s share of that, 98% is going towards that cellular dysfunction work. That money is controlled by the people who are funded and our review committees. You have to know somebody to get money, in my opinion, that’s just how it works. You have to have an advocate on the review committee. If you have an advocate who likes your work, you’re going to get the money.

If you’re competing with somebody who’s not on the review committee and they don’t want the competition, they’re going to figure out a way to squash your application. The funding level is ridiculous anyway. When I was writing, it was 10% on average. It was a tight budget period for many years at National Institutes of Health. They were funding one in ten. That tells you that if you don’t know somebody, you’ve got to write one in ten to get funded. I had spent 90% of my time writing grant proposals. The rest of the time was overseeing other people conducting research in my lab. It was such a waste of time it was incredible. Staying up late at night, getting up early and reviewing applications, reading over. Every line, every word got scrutinized because you never knew what was going to make the difference.

We’ll get back to the Parkinson’s patient. The cellular basis of disease and you’ve got to work at the cellular level or you could say, “What if there are at least some percentage of conditions that are related to imbalance in the whole human being? Could there be some? Could it be that it’s outside of the cellular domain?” For instance, somebody gets stressed out and gets heartburn, could that be because of the way they interact in their world when they have stress?

There’s so much evidence now. The CDC has published information that more than 90% of all physician business are related to stress. People are looking at the cellular basis of stress. I can take somebody and I can distress them in probably 30 seconds, temporarily anyway, maybe a minute, maybe somebody who’s really hardcore, three minutes. They’re de-stressed and they’re free of it for the moment. The long part is teaching them how to stay free, then interrupt the stress when it comes out and recognize it as part of their automatic pattern and then release it. There’s not a person on the planet probably who would disagree with me that at least some small number of conditions are related to imbalances in the whole being where there’s an automatic dysfunctional pattern that’s driving the person.

If the whole being is imbalanced, there’s a problem somewhere. It’s going to have to show up in certain places. One, in the way the person is speaking. Two, in the way the person is acting, what actions they are taking. Three, is what results are they producing if they don’t want. Four, if that’s in the sociopsychological range. The next ones are important, it has to show up in the cells of the body. It has to show up in the fluids in the body and in the neuroanatomical aspects of the body. What if neuronal cell death is related to whole being imbalances? Anyway, so that’s my point. You can believe the cellular basis where 98% of the funding is going or you can believe in that there’s a big place for an imbalance in the whole human being that creates this cellular abnormality that people are detecting and working on. We know now that the environment can impact gene expression. If we pick down somebody, that can change the expression.

It can reverse it all the way back to the cellular level.

We’re in a little crazy time right now and things are changing. A little slow or it hasn’t been slow up to this point. Let’s have a future vision that’s going to be rapid from now on. It happened really quickly and that’s going to take us harnessing the financial power of conventional medicine. I like to think I’m one of the people who is bridging the gap. We’ve got to bridge the gap, we’ve got to harness the resources.

You definitely are because you’ve been on both sides of the coin. You’ve started in one field and then you still can go back to that field. You are bridging that gap between both worlds.

I’m going to do a clinical trial hopefully soon. It’s going to show that the genetic basis of certain conditions is off base. First of all, it was a single-gene hypothesis. This was many years ago. We know the whole human genome right now. We’ve found out what the gene for Huntington’s disease was decades ago. What good has that done? It is nothing. We couldn’t get the single-gene hypothesis as a method of correcting conditions. Multiple genes are involved. Now, we have to fund people to study the multiple genetic interactions.

I guarantee you most of those people are not looking at how the environment is going to affect gene expression. They’re looking at the difference between gene expression of this person who has the condition versus this other person who doesn’t. They’re going to say, “These genes are up, these genes are down so we’re going to try and rebalance those genes.” How about let’s see if we can eliminate the symptoms of the condition and then let’s see what happens to the gene expression. My first step is doing the clinical trial where we can eliminate the symptoms of the condition. Let’s do the second phase of the clinical trial where we do just that. We take two groups of people and we don’t do the input to remove symptoms on one and we check their gene expression. We provide the input that will eliminate the symptoms and the other, we compare the gene expression and we change the gene expression that we normalize the gene expression.

I don’t know the answer to that, but my prediction would be that it would change the gene expression. You have to take a totally different view on how we are really working to resolve ill-health. I don’t think we are going totally the right way right now with the way that resources are spent. Going back to the Parkinson’s thing. I’m watching this gentleman and we went to lunch. It was a panel discussion at lunch. There were a couple of hundred people in the room and a panel of experts. They were taking questions and comments from the audience. I raised my hand, stood up and said, “Dr. Levine from the Henry Ford Health System. I just want you to know that in addition to my basic research, looking at the dopamine system in Parkinson’s disease, I also am the Director of the Center for Integrative Wellness. We’re doing a lot with movement disorders in the alternative realm. If any of you have an interest in talking about what we’re doing, I’d love to speak with you.”

I sat down. Then the next person who stood up was one of those expert neurologists from Emory University, Mahlon DeLong. He stood up and said, “Hi, I’m Dr. DeLong. I just want to say that I want to echo what Dr. Levine is saying because we were doing stuff too at our institution in Emory. We believe there is more to it than this one system and we need to address it in many different ways including addressing the human condition.” That was really nice. At the end of lunch, the only people who came up to me were the four patient representatives with Parkinson’s disease. Obviously, the extent to which their treatments were effective for them wasn’t enough for them. They came to me, “What are you doing?” They wanted to know.

I said, “Let’s have dinner together.” Two of them joined me for dinner along with these other scientists who I am not sure how he got to our table because he didn’t know he was sitting with this group. There were four of us and he was sitting next to me. One woman had a deep brain stimulator and that was where the shaking and trembling is reduced by about 90%. She’s still got some shaking, trembling and abnormal movements. At least she’s not flopping all over the place. Deep brain stimulation is where they implant a stimulator in your brain, in the area of the dopamine deficiency. It works for about 5% of patients. It’s clearly not the answer and it’s not a complete answer anyway. It’s like a drug, it’s a Band-Aid. If she turns off her stimulator, she starts getting all crazy movements.

Did the guy who was squirming a lot on the front row join you?

I made sure I had dinner with him because I wanted to figure this guy out. He was the first guy I saw and he’s the one I could see, so I focused on him. In the afternoon, I was just being my scientific self, observing and observing. We were having dinner together. When this guy walked down the hallway, there was nobody within three feet of him in any direction because he was so flailing everywhere. This guy was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease at 50. He’s probably in the neighborhood at 55 years old or 60 years old. He’s been medicating for the last fifteen years. We’ve got this guy who had continuous flailing and everything. I kept watching him in the afternoon. We’ve got to dinner and we sat down. He sat at the table right next to me. He was wiggling, riding and doing all this stuff. I was sitting next to him. I just kept being aggravated. I noticed I would be aggravated, which is definitely not how I want to be in life, from having to sit next to this guy and watch him and listen to him. I would let go of that and I’d go back to my question, “How can I help this man?” I’d find myself being aggravated again, I’d go, “Let it go.” We teach people how to shift their way of being for being aggravated, to being any other way. Being accepting, being forgiving, being loving, being compassionate, being nurturing and being curious and being observant.

I kept shifting myself and I didn’t understand why it was congenitally being aggravating in this guy’s presence. I surmised later that this guy, it was part of his automatic pattern was to have other people stay away from him, keep himself isolated. That’s what I surmised later but I’m jumping the gun here. We’re sitting there and I was like, “How can I help this guy?” We had to be sitting there for fifteen to twenty minutes and in an instant, I did something that I didn’t even consciously think about for more than a microsecond. I raised my hand up and gently rested it on his shoulder. I didn’t ask for permission, I just did it. My command to his subconscious was stopped.

You didn’t say that? You just did that with the gesture?

He almost didn’t even know I had done it until I put my hand there. I just raised my hand up and lightly rested it on his shoulder. I’m not even sure where that came from me because it’s one of those religious people who would call it a divine intervention, the Universe delivered the answer to me, if you’re not religious. Anybody in the world could align with this because it’s something that happened instantaneously. It was not premeditated, not thought out. I put my hand on his shoulder and he stopped all movements.

I just left my hand there gently. We were there for two minutes. He was telling a story and he just kept telling his story. My arms started to get a little tired. I wanted to engage with him so I said, “How does it feel to have your body quiet? How’s that for you?” By the way, I had no idea where this is going. It’s just you’re in the middle of the exploration. You’ve got to go with it. You’ve got to create the future vision. You’ve got to create the scenario of how it was going to go. I was creating a thing like this hand on shoulder shall stop him, shall stop all movements and it did. For whatever reason, I have theories about it and it worked. He answered me. He said, “I know you’ve got your hand on my shoulder.” He became aware of that and he says, “I know that I’m not moving anymore.” Still he became aware of that. He says, “I’m scared.” I didn’t expect that. I would have expected, “This is fantastic. What did you do?” He relates to that for sure, Kevin. I said, “That’s okay.” I wanted to say, “You’re scared? Are you an idiot?” You wouldn’t want to say something like that. You have to say, “That’s okay. Please tell me why you’re scared.” He says, “I’m scared that you’re going to take your hand away and it’s all going to come back,” which makes total sense.

EM 70 | Automatic Pattern Interruption Automatic Pattern Interruption: You’ve got to create the future vision. You’ve got to create the scenario of how it’s going to go.

My training is I’ve got to let this guy know exactly how it’s going to go, there is no doubt. That’s the way I’ve trained people. You’re going to get better and there is no doubt. You may not get better later now, you may not get better tomorrow, what if it took you 30 days of practicing something repetitively twice a day for fifteen minutes, morning and night and you woke up after 30 days and you were better, symptoms were gone, would that be okay with you? Most people will fail a few times and they’re done. I needed to make sure that I told this guy exactly how it’s going to go the way I wanted it to go and get his subconscious mind to align with me. I said, “That’s okay. Listen, Jim.”

When I say, “Listen, Jim,” the word listen is really important because it means, “Listen, Jim conscious and subconscious.” “I’m going to take my hand away. When I take my hand away, you’re going to remain still and it’s going to stay with you. The stillness will stay with you and you’ll appreciate that.” I don’t think I said that then, but I would have said it then if I had thought of it now. You’ve got to keep building in like, “What do I want from this guy?” You’re going to appreciate it. It’s going to be wonderful. You’re going to love it. You’re going to be free of all these movements and it’s going to last a while.

You’ve got to keep building how it’s going to go. I said, “That’s how it’s going to go, Jim. Are you ready? I’m going to take my hand away.” He goes, “Yes,” because he has no choice. I took my hand away and he stayed still. Further, my training is in distinction and I’ve got this from Landmark Education. They train a lot of people in distinction. When you’re looking at a fist and there’s one fist hidden behind the other fist, you see one fist. You can’t distinguish that there are two there. Without knowing that there are two there and having a way to prove or affirm that there are two fists there, the world occurs as there’s one fist there and anybody that tells you there’s two, they’re crazy.

When you move one fist to the side, all of a sudden two fists appear. That movement, that change allowed you to see that there were in fact two fists. That’s the distinction of one versus two. I want everybody to know that they have something to do with the symptoms that they’re creating. When it’s possible, I want them to bring the symptomology back knowing that we interrupted it once, but they’re the ones who responded to the interruption. They can interrupt it again. Once they bring it back, they know that, “I brought it back. I do have something to do with this. I have something to do with this. What would be their conclusion? I have power. I interrupted it. I brought it back. I’m going to interrupt it again. I’ve got the power.” In this case, I knew it was important. I knew I needed to have this guy understand that because he interrupted, he had something to do with it. He had something to do with all that wild flailing and that he couldn’t help. Automatic pattern expressing itself and he couldn’t help it. I said, “Jim, here’s what I want you to do. You’ve got the symptoms and that got away, you’re quiet now.”

Hands off?

My hands are off. He was sitting there quiet. This whole weird space of, “This is just weird.” I said, “I want you to bring the symptoms back, I want you to generate it and then we’ll take care of that.”

I feel like a lot of people wouldn’t want to do that. You just finally got everything to settle down and you’re like, “Bring it back.” Why did you do that?

It’s like, “Are you crazy? I’m risking having another fifteen years of being medicated and shaking all around. Do you want me to bring this back? You’ve got to be out of your mind.” It’s so important for people to understand that they have power, they have a responsibility, that they can do it, they can harness that power. So much of what we teach in these large group programs is, “You’ve got the power and you don’t know it. You think you know and we’re going to teach you how to harness that power and exactly how to apply it to getting yourself or whatever condition you’ve got and it’s going to work.”

What happened next? You told him to bring it back.

He was sitting there for several minutes and I said, “Jim, what’s going on? I want you to bring it back, bring the symptoms back.” He says, “I’m trying to but I can’t.” That was driven by the fear of what we talked about. “It’s going to come back. I’m never going to get rid of it again. I’ll be stuck here for another fifteen years before I die. All this crap and the like that doesn’t.” I said, “Jim, I’m going to go to the buffet and I’m going to get my food. When I come back, I’d like you to have the symptoms back. That’s what I’m looking for and then we’ll take care of it when I get back.”

I went to the buffet and loaded my plate up. In the corner of my eye, I saw Jim walking to the buffet. He was walking the way he used to walk with all the flailing going on. I said, “Jim, I see you’ve got the movement back.” He goes, “Yes.” I said, “That’s great. Just get your food when you come back to the table and we’ll take care of it.” I had no idea how that was going to happen. I had no clue because I was pretty clear that to put my hand on his shoulder wasn’t going to work again. That was my default corrupt future vision. I probably would have tried it but instead of having a true future vision, instead of letting go of the corrupt future vision like, “I can’t put my hand on his shoulder, I have to come up with some other method.” I could let that go and have the true future vision of, “I’m going to put my hand on his shoulder and it’s going to work. It’s going to be perfect. It’s going to be beautiful. He’s going to sit down. I’m going to put my hand on his shoulder and it’s going to work. That’s how the mind works. Until the mind is highly trained, it forgets how to think about the true future vision and what we really want. This is my true future vision for you. When somebody is thinking, are their thoughts actions? Don’t answer impulsively. Think about it.

Yes.

Why?

Thought leads to action or what you’re subconsciously thinking you end up doing.

Would thoughts be action if the thoughts lead to actions?

No. I said that wrong.

Nobody ever gets this right. Let me shortcut it for you. Your first answer was correct, thoughts are actions. When you said thoughts lead to action then you changed your answer to thoughts are not actions because thoughts lead to action. The hint I gave you was when someone is thinking, so thinking occurs over what?

Time.

Anything is an action that occurs over time. That’s what people don’t understand the thoughts are actions and if the way of being is driving the act of thinking, if you have a thought that you don’t want to have, you can shift your way of being and you’ll instantly have a different thought. That is like revolutionary.

Do you need cues to help yourself snap out of that?

Self-awareness of what’s going on. You need to be able to check in with yourself at the level of being actions and results. Being is immediate. The shift in the way of being happens immediately and that drives new actions and that produces new results. You have to be able to shift yourself at the level of being. I would say 99.99% of the plan does not do that. That’s the missing gap in everything from ill-health to war. Shifting the way of being which is fundamental to our training. That’s why we got to get this really widespread out there in the world.

EM 70 | Automatic Pattern Interruption Automatic Pattern Interruption: You have to be able to shift yourself at the level of being because the shift drives new actions and that produces new results.

I want to come back to what I was thinking. I thought, “What am I going to do with this guy?” That is a thought driven by being afraid that I can’t help him, being concerned that I can’t help him. At that moment, if I had recognized that, I would have said, “What am I going to do now?” I would have shifted my way of being to one of being confident and saying, “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” and it’s going to happen. I knew that anyway. The way of being afraid happens like that and then you shifted because I knew that I was going to come up with something, so I had shifted in instant. I just wanted to point that out, that is the way of being drives the act of thinking. If I had continued to be afraid that I couldn’t help him, I wouldn’t have been able to help him. He wouldn’t come back there and I said, “I’ll put my hand on the shoulder, it doesn’t work. I’ll talk to him, it doesn’t work. I’ll try this and then it doesn’t work I won’t be able to do anything because I’ll be so focused on what’s not going to work, I can’t help it.”

What did you end up doing?

I was confident. I know I can help this guy. I don’t know how but I’m going to help this guy. I would figure it out. Here’s the power of the language of the future vision and we teach people what is the specific language in the future vision. We have specific definitions. I said to him, “Just come back to the table, sit down and we’re going to take care of it.” In his subconscious mind it’s like, “I’ll go back to the table, I’ll sit down and we’ll take care of it.” That’s what I told him it was going to happen. The guy was walking back with his plate, one hand on each side of the plate and he’s flailing everywhere, the rest of his body except his hands and arm, which is balancing the plate. I didn’t realize how significant it was at that time. I was watching him come back and I was like, “He’s still flailing.” What am I going to do next? How’s it going to go?

I was smiling because that’s the way I looked at it. It’s like, “I’m going to figure this out.” That was my true future vision. That is distinct from a corrupt future vision like, “I’m in trouble. I don’t know what to do.” That will be driven by being afraid and concerned. I’m going to get this done. I’m going to figure it out. That’s driven by being confident. You’re getting an exquisite training in the land of being, future visioning. The guy was shaking around. He came back, he placed his plate at the table, he shook and sat down in his chair. As soon as he sat down, he stopped all movement again. That became his new safe space, the chair. That’s my interpretation of it. I told him, “Jim, I told you when you came back to the table we would take care of this.” I reinforced what I said, even though I had no idea that would happen. He sat there. I was talking to him about what I thought went on and what happened. I noticed that his hands clasped and minutes after minutes, he started gripping them tightly. I put my hand gently on his hands and said, “You can relax your hands now.”

He was doing that to hold on because he was being afraid that the movement would all come back. He relaxed his hands and took them apart. I also noticed that he would not make eye contact with me ever. He wouldn’t make eye contact with anybody. I did an eye contact exercise with him. He could not hold eye contact without training with me, so I trained him on eye contact because this is terrible. I don’t like this at all. He used no eye contact to keep people away from him, to protect himself from being hurt and all the other stuff that goes along with that, which is no big deal, but it’s a big deal to understand it. We work on a bunch of things.

Thirty minutes later, he was still quiet. I said, “Jim, you’re ready now. I want you to take a walk down the hallway. When you walk down the hallway you’re going to recognize and it’s easy to walk a straight line through your body and you will be quiet. You’ll have a rhythmic walk, just proper walking with slight arm swing next to your body.” I described to him a portion of the walking training.

You’re almost implanting it in his brain his new walk.

On his subconscious mind, not his brain, the brain is the implementer. The mind is going to direct the brain to do whatever it does. If the mind and the brain are disconnected, the brain is going to do whatever reflexively it has been doing. Subconsciously this other brain is reflectivity doing all this and the mind is trying to control the movements like, “My arm was going up to this guy, grab it, pull it back down.” Now the other arm is going to this guy. He was totally trying to compensate in a way that he can’t.

A lot of N equals ones that help guide me as to what I should be investigating, what the kind of people I should be treating and how I should be thinking about treating people in general. I haven’t had a run where I treated tons of Parkinson patients, but I learned so much from that session. That wasn’t even a session. It was like a dinner. This quarter was probably about 40 yards long. It’s a long quarter. This guy walks perfectly down and perfectly back, with a little hitch in his hip, which we need to be corrected through soft tissue manipulation and training the proper walk.

All the other people at this table, have their minds blown?

When I came by my hand on the guy’s shoulder, the woman across with the brain stimulator, her eyes got that big. She stopped moving. She freaked out. The other scientist, he left shortly thereafter. I don’t think he could take it. He was gone. He disappeared. When he saw what was going on he’s like, “I can’t be around.” That’s the paradigm, that’s the way of thinking. He walked his perfect line and then I did a little bit more work with him. We were at dinner for about maybe an hour and fifteen minutes. For the next two days of the meeting, he was perfect. Not one person, not one scientist, not one clinician came up to me and said, “What did you do with him?” I’m scary. If I can do that with Parkinson’s patients, I can destroy their funding. They don’t want to know. He asked me, “Can you recommend somebody that I could see in Boston?” He was in Boston. I was in Michigan. My problem is that I don’t know people who are trained like me.

You don’t know what you’re throwing them into.

I said, “You need deep tissue manipulation. You need hypnotherapy or guided imagery if somebody does that. You should see somebody who does future visioning. I can set you up with some people and I’ll be willing to talk to them and tell them how I think they need to work with you if you want.” I don’t know intuitively how to figure out what is there to do with this person or what is there to do with that person. Somehow, I figured it out. It’s based on all the life experiences and training, maybe some help from divine intervention too. If you’re a believer, you can say, “Yes, it’s life experiences plus divine intervention.” If you’re not a religious believer, you can say, “It’s your life experiences plus universal energy,” and if you don’t believe in any of that, “It’s like experiences, intellect and smartness.” I’m open to any one of those options, whatever it is.

As soon after towards the end of the dinner, sitting with him alone and he started telling me about his life. He built up a trust with me. I helped him and he wanted help in a lot of areas. He told me he’s an excessive gambler. He’s this, he’s that. He’s got this addiction. He’s got this going on. He just spilled his beans. Instead of going, “You’ve got a lot of crap going on.” It’s like, “Sure.” As you can imagine, I’ve heard just about everything there is to hear from people and I said, “All that can be worked with. There’s no issue that all of that can be helped.” There’s no question even if I don’t know how to do it, I didn’t say that. I have to keep building his subconscious mind to the idea to open up to what’s out there to see what we can help.

At the end of the meeting, I went my way back to Michigan. I flew back to Michigan and he went back to Boston. I told him to call me. I didn’t hear from him for about a week, so I called him, “Jim, how are you doing? What’s going on?” He says, “I got back home and I was free of the movements for another day or two. After that, they came back.” He got back in his environment. He got back in his repetitive motion thing. He got back in the same relationship with his wife. His wife is a nurse ironically enough. He didn’t have the funds to invest in flying me out there because at that time I wasn’t doing any internet-based action because I still did a lot of hands-on at that time. I thought I needed to do that. I didn’t figure out how to do hands-off stuff until I started my clinical trial experience with alternative therapies and I proved that the less effectiveness of one-on-one alternative therapies compared to a truly integrative seamless approach with patients. I did a clinical trial with chronic migraine headaches with Paul St. John. He had had in his practice great success with treating migraine headaches.

I said that because of the anecdotes and stories, we all tend to focus on what happened was really great. If I treated ten Parkinson’s patients and one of them reacted like this guy and nine of them didn’t, I wouldn’t be telling you about the nine who didn’t. I will tell you about the one who did because it was just amazing that my technique, hand on shoulder lightly, could be effective. I was working in the neurology department and we had a lot of clinicians. We had a migraine center so we had a lot of migraine patients. I’ve had good luck with migraine patients. I said, “Good luck with migraine patients.” I said, “Let’s do that, let’s do migraine.” He was great. I flew him up from Florida, three patients he came up on a Friday morning and he treated all day Friday, stayed over Friday night and treated part of Saturday and flew back home.

He did that for a long time. I can tell you, that guy’s amazing. He was fantastic. What I realize was I had no idea. It took six months for me to get clinicians. I finally had to go to the Chair of the department and say, “None of these clinicians are working. The only one to do is refer some patients and you think they have some patients that have migraines and need help?” We had hundreds of migraine patients running around. I had to go to the CEO, the CFO and the Chief Medical Officer of Henry Ford Health System to ask for money to run this trial and he gave it to me. They just gave it to me.

Nobody gets money that way generally speaking. They didn’t give it to me, I had to write a two-page proposal or something, but I went and had a conversation with them and said, “We have to get in the game. If you want to get into the game and our health system be a player, it doesn’t even have to work. We just got our play and I think it can work.” I told them my story about how to heal. I really think it will work but if it doesn’t work, we’re in the game playing, we’re on the map. He went, “How much do you need?” I said, “$75,000.” He said, “Okay, you got it.” They ended up giving me another $75,000 later, so we had $150,000 to work with, which is what we really needed to get.

I said, “I’ve got money to do the study.” “Where did you get the money from?” “The senior leadership, CEO, CFO, CMO.” They said, “They’re not going to give you the money. You think they’re going to give you money?” I said, “Have you ever had conversations with either a CEO, CFO or Chief Medical Officer where you asked for something and they said they would give it to you and they never gave it to you?” The answer was no. I said, “I’ve got the money and it’s going into an account.” They just don’t want anything to do with me. I said I was testing a soft tissue manipulation for migraine. They’re thinking, “How can that possibly work? There’s no way that’s going to work. This is a brain problem. This is a cellular brain problem. We had drugs that go in there and address that. How is soft tissue manipulation over the whole body going to do anything at all? Are you kidding me, Bob? You must be silly.”

Finally, I went to the Chair of the department. He called a couple of neurologists, “Cut it out. Just work with him. Give him some patients. No big deal. He’s got money. We are going to have him go back to the CEO and the CFO and the Chief Medical Officer and say, ‘I can’t get patients because the neurologists and neurology department won’t give them to me.’” He says, “You’ve got to get over this and give them patients.” They did. I thought you might be interested in hearing this. This was the stuff I was dealing with. The key takeaway from that was we were doing a single intervention.

It’s not that likely to be effective across the board because people go back into their lives, they get back in their patterns. What I realized was that this unimodal or one mode of therapy was going to have a problem because these patients were all over the board. Some of them do have variable nutritional deficiencies and ways of eating that were terrible. They had different levels of stress and different sources of stress, different ways of walking, different ways of living, different postural misalignment problems. They had everything going on. I realized that a unimodal therapy is not that likely to be effective across the board in a high percentage of cases. It had to be multimodal. It had to be a lot of different therapies working together because I also learned a sequential unimodal in my case was not that effective because I did chiropractor first, I did acupuncture, I did supplements, I did stress management and I did Feldenkrais Movement education.

EM 70 | Automatic Pattern Interruption Automatic Pattern Interruption: Unimodal therapy is not that likely to be effective across the board in a high percentage of cases. It had to be multimodal. It had to be a lot of different therapies working together.

I realized that in my case, sequential multimodal was inefficient at best. I designed a clinical trial with low back pain. We had three groups of patients. We had one group with alternative therapies at the multimodal combination. People got ten acupuncture visits, ten chiropractic visits, ten deep tissue manipulation visits, five Feldenkrais Movement education visits and three hypnotherapy sessions, 38 visits, 34 contact hours. That was my gold group. There are no way people can hold back in the presence of that. We’re dealing with serious back pain. They’re being referred in by neurologists. They’d been through orthopedics. They had been through everything already. They were looking for answers and they all wanted to participate.

The second group was conventional physical therapy. The third group was different alternative therapy, which I ultimately adapted to doing in groups later on. It was done by a practitioner who’s not me, I didn’t participate in this. They read hypnotherapy script. They did a little bit of soft tissue manipulation and they did an acupressure-type treatment. We did this study and in the end, it was incredible. We had a hard time getting people to commit to the study because they were going to be randomized to one of three groups. Two of them were alternative and one was physical therapy. They had already had multiple rounds of physical therapy. A lot of them said, “If I get a randomized physical therapy, I’m not doing the study, so I’m backing out. I don’t want to do that again.” A lot of people who had prior physical therapy said, “I’ll accept randomizations at any one of those three groups. I get physical therapy, I’ll still be in the study.”

One dropped who didn’t want needling acupuncture. We had so many people dropped because they got assigned to physical therapy, which is incredible. That’s an indication there’s a problem with physical therapy. People don’t really want it. I’m not saying it doesn’t work across the board, I’m saying that for a certain percentage of people it didn’t work and they don’t want it anymore. Physical therapy is the first line of intervention for chronic pain, back pain, neck, hip, shoulder, knee. We did the study. We’ve got to get enough people in the study. We randomized everybody. It’s interesting because when we looked at pain reduction, pain management and what I would hope is that people would move away from the words pain management.

We look at pain management and the physical therapy group produced a nice reduction, probably about 50% reduction in the pain levels on average. That’s what they get and that’s why they’re still around. The multimodal alternative group with chiropractic, acupuncture, soft tissue manipulation for structural balancing, the St. John Neuromuscular Therapy technique, Feldenkrais Movement Education, hypnotherapy. My group that I thought would be gold produced somewhat better reduction in pain across on average, but not significantly different from PT. It was clearly lower, but we have not enough people in the study to determine statistical significance.

I said, “Let’s look at this a different way.” The way we measured chronic pain, “What was your average pain in the last week?” If the answer is zero, we called it pain elimination. I said, “Let’s go back and look at how many people answered zero at the end of the study.” We did that. Conventional physical therapy, 5% of the people reported zero. Only 5% eliminated pain. 95% needed further work. What would be your prediction of that big multimodal alternative therapy, ten chiropractic, ten acupuncture, etc.? What would be your prediction in terms of a percentage?

A lot higher than just doing one physical therapy. I would do 30% to 40%.

I was anticipating 50% to 70% and 35% and 40%, that would be a great number. It’s a conservative prediction. Based on what you know about therapy and all those therapies you’d say, “30% to 40% would be really great elimination rate.” When we analyze data, we’ve got 16%. That blew my mind. I said, “These are great people, great chiropractor, great Neuromuscular therapist, great acupuncturist, a certified hypnotherapist, PhD Feldenkrais Movement Educator, great practitioners. We didn’t have any meetings, we didn’t talk about integration and nothing. They all did their thing and we mixed up the treatment so they were all mixed in one week they get this. The other week they’ve got that. When I treat people for chronic back pain, I’m probably conservatively 90% effective at eliminating pain, helping them.

You’re not staying in business too long if you’re getting 16% to 30% better.

30% would be pretty good when you had three rounds of physical therapy. Also you’ve got to take into account we can’t minimize the fact that there was pain reduction and people were feeling better. For the PT and from the multimodal alternative group, you can’t minimize that. They felt better and that’s why they’re all around. I said to myself, “I’m greater than 90% effective in eliminating chronic back pain when I treat people one-on-one. I could take a group of people and teach them what they need to learn and demonstrate with they need to do to get themselves out of pain,” which is how it has to happen anyway. People have to become their own healers. We have to guide them in how to heal. That’s when I got the idea, at least we should go into one of our corporate clients.

We went into Chrysler and we did a pilot program with them. We took 100 people. We did a randomized controlled study, which is great. We recruited, we used Chrysler’s email system, we sent an email, “If you’ve got chronic back pain, fill out this eligibility survey.” In three weeks, we had over 650 applicants and of that about 298 were eligible. We randomize this 298 and 100 came into the program, the rest were non-treated controls to get out pain. In our program, which was a multi-session in-person program, hands-off over the course of about six months. We met two hours every other week. We gave them guided meditation audio tracks to listen to, videos to watch, instruction manuals, everything we needed to demonstrate it from the stage what they need to do when they went home.

At the end of that program, in the control group where they can do whatever they want, PT, acupuncture, chiropractic, massage, injections, whatever, 0% eliminated their chronic back pain. Nobody got any better in that group. In our group where we did the program, 55% eliminated their back pain. We did some demos. We’d bring one person up and we do a demo with the person. We found out how people were doing things incorrectly, so we bring them up and they would do it with the group, see how they did it incorrectly and we correct them and it served as a correction to the whole group. Those were dramatic results. It’s never been done. Nobody’s ever reported data like that.

That’s the beginning of running group programs. I ran group programs for six years at Chrysler, Dow Chemical, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan, Henry Ford Health System. We even did New Hope Missionary Baptist Church. My boss at that time was Dr. Kimberlydawn Wisdom, a fabulous person. She’s just so supportive of me and my efforts. She had the idea to take it into a church. We did a study at New Hope Missionary Baptist Church and that was very fascinating because it was a pure African-American population compared to, let’s say Dow Chemical which was mostly Caucasian. Same with Chrysler so we can actually compare how the two groups did against each other. We had to use paper surveys because there was not enough computer expertise to do the computer surveys like we were doing with the other groups.

We did the paper surveys and what was fascinating was that group is so good. The African-Americans at New Hope Missionary Baptist Church, they did equally as well as the other groups at Dow and Chrysler. It showed us that what we are teaching is applicable across all ethnic backgrounds, socioeconomic, gender. Job type too and all kinds of different people with different jobs. The interesting thing about the New Hope Missionary Baptist Church group was that they had a bigger percentage improvement in stress reduction and elimination because they started higher, they had more stress to begin with. They get to the same floor as the others. That was great on average.

The higher stress levels because of their socioeconomic status and things going on in their lives and yet they were still able to achieve the same level of reduced and eliminated stress as the other group. I loved that result because it’s so important to know that. I did all these groups. We collected data on pain reduction and elimination, anxiety reduction elimination. We always do reduction elimination now and everything. Stress, sleep disturbance, fatigue and of course we did a pharmaceutical so we knew who are taking opioids and who was reducing their medicine usage. There’s a lot of the elimination of pharmaceuticals in our studies. That’s really relevant now because of the opioid crisis.

EM 70 | Automatic Pattern Interruption Automatic Pattern Interruption: There’s a lot of elimination of pharmaceuticals in our studies. That’s really relevant today because of the opioid crisis.

I moved from Michigan to Florida. I had the hip breakdown and was out of commission for about two years. My wife, Charlene, and I realized that if I clone myself and I have a thousand of me running around training a thousand people running all over the country delivering in-person group programs, in five years maybe, we can help one million people. That’s not enough. For me to train a thousand people is a lot, to do that would take a lot. We said, “Let’s figure out how to go online with the chronic pain relief program.”

When I retired from Henry Ford Health System in 2012, they were building online programs and testing them with people. We’ve got the idea that we can do this, this is going to work. After we moved to Florida, we started building our next level program based on all the improvements that we made in our approaches that we used in the in-person programs. We changed them around and improved upon them, also new approaches, new ways of looking at the whole game of pain relief. We have a program which we call Pain-Free Made Easy and we’re building it. We have a team of people together, a great team.

We may have funding from a private philanthropy organization, which is going to move this thing forward fast. Our goal is to spread it out there. Our first targets are large self-funding companies that pay for all the healthcare of their employees, they pay for every visit. They’re at risk. They’re not paying a premium to the insurance company, you’re at risk for payments. It’s like somebody who has a high deductible plan and pays about $8,000 deductible plan, they’re at risk for the first $8,000. They’re the payer for the first $8,000. Either way, individuals have become payers. It used to be payers were employers or even individuals years ago with deductibles of $500, that’s not the payer, “Here’s my $500, let me go to the document.”

It’s a whole issue in itself right there.

Individuals have now become big-time payers. I had a $12,500 deductible plan for a while and I was paying $1,100 a month in premiums. I was at risk for $24,000 before my insurance company paid me a dime for anything. It was terrible. I found a company called Liberty HealthShare. I just want to put that out there so people can look it up if they want to. I highly recommend they do or any organization like that, like Medi-Share and there are others which they are biblical sharing. It is for people who have a certain lifestyle, a certain way of doing things. If you’re paying for your healthcare, you had some high deductible, check that out, LibertyHealthShare.org.

Dr. Bob, where can people find you? Where are you located? What’s your website and other ways people can find out more about you?

If somebody wants to get a treatment from me and they’re not in Florida, they’re not in West Palm Beach area in Florida, and they want to do it over the internet, I have a very effective way of delivering that. They can either text me or email. I’m going to give my cell phone number for texting for information, that would be 248342-7555. They can email me at DrBob@CWRNow.com. They can also go to our website at www.StressAndPainFreeLiving.com.

I do one-on-one treatment over the internet. I do free consultations for somebody who wants to see if I can help them or if they just want some consultation for what they should be looking to do. They can text me and ask me if I’ll give them a consult. I’ll answer them and we’ll set up a time to do that. We also are still doing in-person programs for the payers and healthcare, whether it’s a large company or whether it’s a health insurance company or a government agency who are paying for all the care that their employees are getting. We were doing in-person group programs that Charlene and I, and our team lead. We’ve got that down very refined, very shorter timeframe, fewer contact hours. It’s quite effective and affordable and we can do that anywhere in the country.

The other thing we’re looking for is we want large companies or large institutions who are self-funding payers of healthcare to participate. We’re offering one free online program, Pain-Free Made Easy, for up to 300 of their employees. If there’s anybody listening to this who is part of a large institution that self-funds for healthcare and they want to get this free pilot program of Pain-Free Made Easy for 300 of employees, please contact me. I’d love to discuss that with them.

Dr. Bob, thank you so much for coming on. That was a really amazing episode. I really appreciate you sharing everything. That was great.

It was great to be here with you, Kevin. Thank you for the opportunity.

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