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Archives for September 2014

There’s a pill for that I think – Updated

September 15, 2014 By Don Ka'imi Pilipovich

Thanks for all the feedback on this post – see notes at the bottom of post.

I’m passionate about getting what I do and teach accepted by a wider public including the medical community. So I’m pretty strong about saying intuition is great, but not perfect – so let’s be careful what we use it for. Recently I encountered some noticeable resistance and anger to my lecture on muscle checking for supplements and I realized that my short version is easily misunderstood. Thank goodness for people who have the courage to come up to me and say they disagree, because now I’m thinking there might be other students who have misunderstood what I really mean on this subject – hence a blog post because this is a really important topic.

For Accunect to be the future of medicine it needs to integrated into all levels of healthcare. One of the things that means is encouraging people to be responsible about muscle-checking. I’ll admit, one of my pet peeves is people using muscle checking to prescribe herbs and supplements for themselves and others without proper training. But I realize that some people think I am against all supplements. Not true!

I have four years of training in Chinese herbs and I take a few vitamins, minerals, and herbal preparations as a part of my health maintenance.  I don’t take a lot of supplements, but I do like to take some. Properly used they can be a great tool for improving health.

So how did I get so misunderstood? I merged too many topics at once.  The whole discussion of or not supplements  are useful or harmful in a given situation is a topic all by itself. I mixed it up with the ethics of how they are prescribed, and the ethics of intuition and muscle-checking. Let me try to address the subject by answering some basic questions:

Can supplements be super, incredibly useful and healthy?

You bet. We all know someone, maybe ourselves who have been really helped by herbs, vitamins, minerals, or other supplements. Sometimes it can seem like a miracle.

Can supplements be harmful and counterproductive?

Absolutely.  Take too much colloidal silver for too long and your skin will turn blue for the rest of your life. Your brain and liver will also turn blue for the rest of your life. I’ve also seen people taking literally handfuls of supplements in terrible health – they started to get better once they scaled back on the number of pills they were taking.

Media and marketing leads us towards the idea that there’s a pill for everything. We get bombarded by ads for drugs and supplements constantly. It’s a huge industry and a lot of “health food stores” devote most of their floor space to supplements. But our digestive system is designed to process food, not pills, and at some point you just overstress the digestion by adding more pills. Just because a little might be good doesn’t mean that more is better. Interestingly, in some countries the people working the counter in a shop that sells supplements are trained naturopaths, a far different standard than what we have in the US.

 So how do you know when they are helpful or harmful?

You could go to school and get a degree as a Naturopathic Doctor.  Or you could study to become a certified nutritionist. That would be respecting that tinkering with the chemical balance of the body should not be taken lightly. I know other practitioners who don’t have license level training in supplements, but have taken professional training courses in using supplements or supplement ranges – that’s a commitment. To think that all we need to do is muscle check to see if something is good or not is not an acceptable alternative. Look, I do realize that some people use muscle checking for selecting vitamins and herbs for themselves and do it fairly well – they are pretty conservative. But I see way too many people self-prescribing supplements that end up taking way too many pills and stressing their digestion as a result. I also understand that when people don’t feel well, they are desperate for something to make them feel better – and this makes them get “yes” answers to too many supplements.  But that doesn’t mean I approve of or encourage self-diagnosis using muscle checking. And if I am to work towards more acceptance of Accunect, and more acceptance of intuition in health care, I’ve got to stand for proper standards.

Muscle checking is not a test. It’s a way of checking intuition. Intuition is cool. Intuition is useful. Often intuition is amazing. But it is not perfect. We will never gain acceptance widely as long we imply that our intuition is perfect. But intuition is useful, so this is not a black and white thing. At the risk of making the discussion more complicated, here’s some thoughts on specific questions:

Have I ever used muscle checking when prescribing herbs?

Partially. I have used it to get an intuitive answer about which of several formulas might be better for someone. But this is intuition adding to and refining my professional training. I’ve never given a formula solely on muscle-checking – I’ve made sure that I can justify the prescription based on symptoms, pulse diagnosis, etc. And after the patient has left, I’ve studied the formulas in more depth to understand if and why the “intuitive choice” was actually the best.  Often, the “intuitive” formula really was best. Sometimes, the intuitive choice wasn’t actually right, but it gave me an insight that helped lead me to selecting a different formula altogether that was a better fit. It’s just not as simple as right or wrong.

Have I ever used muscle checking to self-prescribe anything?

Another partial yes. I sometimes use muscle checking to decide to take a supplement or herb on a particular day. But the vitamins and other supplements that are in my cupboard have all been recommended by my naturopathic doctor or by my medical doctor. That’s different than going to the health food store and testing lots of different supplements that I have heard about or read about.

The bottom line:

Intuition can only be used carefully if at all in prescribing anything. Intuition has to be supported by professional training and knowledge. Intuition may provide insight, but the decision to actually prescribe anything should be supported by professional training and knowledge.  If you aren’t someone who is trained to prescribe supplements, you shouldn’t start doing so just because you know how to muscle-check to access intuition. If you are trained to give out supplements, make sure you are using muscle-checking to generate insight, not to replace your professional assessment skills and judgement.

 Comments?

Did this discussion help you? Was it too long? Let us know your thoughts at office@futuremedicinetoday.com

Update 14 October 2014

Thanks for all of your emails in reply to this post. We don’t have comments turned on, because of all the spam posts that come in if comments are on.

A lot of you really liked the clarity of the explanation and how it gave you a professional way to say no to requests to “check” supplements. A LOT of people reported that they felt like they had been given wrong supplements through muscle checking and thought this was a balanced discussion.

Only one person said that they thought muscle-checking was valid, but qualified that support with the idea that the more “clear” you are, the better your answers. That’s kind of true. Some people get reasonably neutral answers much of the time. But since it is always intuition, there’s always a chance that you are wrong. The real question is: how do you know when you are being “clear” enough. Even if your answer is “right” there may be other guidelines that you could only know with training. For instance, are there any contraindicated foods, herbs, supplements or medications in combination? If you don’t know, you can’t advise properly.

Intuition is great, but not reliable:

Here something to think about: how com you never see a headline like “Psychic wins lottery!”?

– Jay Leno

Filed Under: Blogpost

We didn’t go away – we just moved

September 4, 2014 By Don Ka'imi Pilipovich

We didn’t go away, we just moved. Across the country.

Our residence and the Future Medicine Today office have moved to Connecticut.

If you’ve been trying to reach the office, please don’t give up. The office has been mostly non-existent for nearly a month, and not very responsive leading up to that. But we are now moved and will be catching up on correspondence over the coming weeks. Hopefully we can get caught up soon, but if you have an urgent request or question, call us at +1 303-442-5222 (the phone actually rings again now) or email us at office@futuremedicinetoday.com.

We’ve had a very difficult year personally, and that has already impacted on office operations. So it’s been an awkward time to move, and our apologies to everyone wondering what happened to Future Medicine Today.

But we really felt for own well-being and for us to continue our work in bringing Accunect to the world we needed to be in a good place for us. Boulder is a great town and on paper a likely place to launch a cutting edge energy medicine system. But we had so many challenges in so many different areas of life and work there we had to accept that it is not a great town for us. After a lot of research and discussion and a bit of intuition we settled on New England and specifically Connecticut.

There’s a never a good time to make a big move, but we really felt like we had to move now. As hard as it has been on continuity, it would be worse later. We are modernizing the website and our systems to support other instructors in the near future, and it will only get harder to move later when we have more people to serve.

It’s been harder than we thought trying to sell our house in Boulder, find a place to live and a place to run the office from in Connecticut. And then actually move home and office across country before school started. But we are here now. Here is Ridgefield, Connecticut – full address at end of post below.

A few words of advice to our community :

Students: If you need information about upcoming courses, or have questions, watch the website for new postings and keep trying to call or email.

E-course students: Check your email for updates today and over the coming weeks.

Coordinators: If you think we are supposed to be finalizing an upcoming course, we probably are and need to talk. I’ve scheduled some of you in for meetings, but reach out and be proactive: email us again.

SelfCare Instructors and Instructor Trainees: We are working on a new website portal for you and there will be some policy updates coming soon.

Patients: A lot of people haven’t been rescheduled because of uncertainty of timing of move. We will contact you soon to reschedule, or email us for a time. New office hours for appointments are Tue, Wed, Thur from 9am to 4pm Eastern time (minus lunch time)

Finally, a big thank you to Christi Stone, who helped us for much of our time in Boulder. Due to our move, she is no longer working in the office and she will be very hard to replace. Until we can find the right person locally here in Connecticut, I (Ka’imi) will be answering the office email account.

Our new mailing address is
Future Medicine Today
54 Danbury Rd #347
Ridgefield, CT 06877

New Office hours: M-F, 9am-4pm Eastern time zone

The rest is still the same:
Phone: 303-442-5222
Fax: 303-993-3065
Primary email: office@futuremedicinetoday.com

“I believe that everything happens for a reason. People change so that you can learn to let go, things go wrong so that you appreciate them when they’re right, you believe lies so you eventually learn to trust no one but yourself, and sometimes good things fall apart so better things can fall together.”  -Marilyn Monroe

Filed Under: Blogpost

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