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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

Ending the War at Home

June 24, 2014 By Don Ka'imi Pilipovich

What if there was a war overseas and you signed up to serve your country and then you got there you were told you could never go home from the war? That would be cruel, inhuman, unjust and unfair. For many veterans, that is exactly what happens. Their body comes home, but their nervous system stays at war. It’s like never really coming home. It’s hard to re-adapt to normal life, to come out of fight or flight mode, to feel safe, secure and able to focus on relationships, getting a job, and building a life when your nervous system believes you are still at war. For some the journey back home is only terrifically hard. Unfortunately, for too many it seems impossible and they give up on life when everything they try fails.

The need to help veterans make this transition is huge, and I’m very honored to have been invited to present Accunect Connect for the veterans community. Accunect is a very powerful tool for releasing deep emotional trauma and balancing the bodymind on all levels to come back to stability and health and the potential to help veterans with Accunect is exciting.  The course is being organized by Pathways for Veterans, a national organization that helps veterans to heal and to reconstruct their lives. They have a powerful vision of hope for veterans by helping them find their path to health and wholeness through creative programs in many areas.

I’ve worked with some veterans in the past and I know this work can help. Accunect was developed to address the root causes of disease – which in traditional Chinese Medicine is mostly emotional trauma. Over my many years in practice I’ve really seen that underneath the most difficult physical and psychological problems is deeply held trauma. Often this is in the form of abuse or other severe emotional trauma from childhood. Since children don’t have the tools and maturity to deal with these traumas, they just become imprinted on the nervous system. The patterns of stress underlying disease aren’t conscious choices, they are reactions coming from deep within the nervous system.  For veterans, the stress and trauma comes in adulthood, but it is so intense and so unrelenting that it makes a deep and lasting impact on their psyche and their nervous system.

These kinds of stress are difficult to address using talk therapy for that reason. To get powerful shifts in these patterned responses you need to balance the whole bodymind to change the automatic responses – no one decides to jump at a sudden noise, it’s a nervous system reaction. You have to balance the nervous system, as well as the acupuncture meridian system in order to break the cycle.

It’s not just me that gets results with mental and emotional issues – the system works for everyone. Here’s a testimonial from Accunect student Gary Niki about his results using Accunect shortly after taking the class to help a client battling depression:

“Recently, during a bout of depression, I met with Gary Niki, who performed a procedure called Accunect Connect on me, a process in which one identifies “what is ready to shift” and then, through simple movements, helps that shift occur. Gary then showed me how to perform the procedure on myself. The results were amazing. Within about a minute of performing the movements, I felt something ripple free from my heart center. I continued to perform the movements and, as I did so, laughter repeatedly bubbled up. What an amazing shift from the feelings of despair and irritability I had been experiencing before beginning this process–and so fast. In just minutes I felt much lighter and happier. I can’t thank Gary enough to introducing me to this incredibly simple yet profoundly effective technology.”
–Marlis McCollum

Here’s the details about the class:

Where it will be:

Pathways for Veterans
5932 Beech Ave
Orangevale, CA 95662

Who is it for:

  • Veterans
  • Family members of veterans
  • People who work with veterans
  • People who want to help and serve veterans

How to register:

Pay at Pathways for Veterans Events Page
Email Ramona Rivers to confirm registration

The class is coming up soon, so sign up and be part of it. Or if you know someone who might be interested, please forward this email to let them know about this great opportunity.

Theodore-Roosevelt-Quotes-5

Filed Under: Blogpost

Why Ancient Wisdom?

June 4, 2014 By Don Ka'imi Pilipovich

I’ve been teaching my short course in Chinese Medicine for almost seven years now. First as Chinese Medicine for Bodytalk Practitioners, and then redesigned for everyone as Accunect Ancient Wisdom.  With the redesign, the material is even simpler to apply in practice. More importantly, I made much more practice time so that people could experience a balancing  on each meridian by the end of the course – we end up balancing everything from head to toes during the course.  This makes it more transformational than before.

I originally thought of it as a really powerful tool for practitioners – you gain enough understanding in three days to be able to use the extensive handout pages using muscle checking. The results are pretty cool – I get tons of feedback from students with no prior training in Chinese Medicine that their clients really relate to the balancings that come up. And I get professional acupuncturists taking the course who tell me that it helps them to think outside the box and adds ease and power to their sessions.

I’m pretty proud of how well the course works as a professional development tool. But it’s not the most important aspect of the course.

The most important reason I teach the course is that it brings hope. Once you have a basic understanding of Chinese Medicine a lot of things seem more possible. Lots of conditions that are considered difficult or incurable in western medicine are simple energy imbalances in Chinese Medicine.

For example, asthma is a difficult condition in western medicine, relatively simple in Chinese Medicine. In fact, to get acupuncture needles as medical devices, the acupuncture association decided to pick asthma as a test case – because asthma is easy: you can get much better results with asthma using Chinese Medicine than with western medicine.

Atrial fibrillation is a difficult heart condition with no good treatment in western medicine.  In Chinese Medicine it isn’t a heart condition – rather it is an imbalance between the Kidney meridian and the Heart meridian. This shift in perspective makes it treatable.

For practitioners, having a deeper understanding of what is possible increases confidence and enthusiasm, which is then shared with the client energetically, thereby increasing results. For everyone, gaining insight into what is possible helps give hope – for yourself or for a family member or loved one. This is invaluable.

The course also really helps to explain the mind-body-spirit connections in a very tangible way.  And experiencing those connections during the practice sessions during the course makes it a felt experience.

I hope you can join me sometime for this weekend of transformation, inspiration, with a lot of effortless learning and balancing thrown in for good measure.

Filed Under: Blogpost

New Blog

May 29, 2014 By Don Ka'imi Pilipovich

Welcome to the Accunect Blog!

It’s been a crazy year.  I had a lot of personal challenges this year that took up way too much of my time.

Plus, I’ve been trying to develop the new website, the practitioner directory, a new certification course, and preparing the Connect instructor training program.  Bottom line is something had to give in that whole process and it ended up being the email newsletter that I used to send out.

I could moan about how busy I am, and that it’s not fair, but that’s life.There’s probably at least one of you who has too much to do as well. The trick to a healthy, balanced life is being able to adapt. That’s what I teach anyways. Accunect helps a person recover from stress and come back into their “adaptive range.” When we are in a place where our body is able to adapt to stress, we stay healthy. Sometimes you end up teaching what you have to learn.

A lot of people have written to ask us to please make sure we have their email correct as they haven’t received a newsletter. It’s nice to know that people find what I write interesting and want to stay connected.

So I’m adapting by changing my strategy: we’re discontinuing the old newsletter format in favor of more frequent blog posts – you’ll get more frequent, shorter emails with a link to the latest blog post, plus a little additional info about upcoming courses and other news. The old newsletter was daunting to prepare, and many people said they didn’t have time to read such a lengthy email. So this will be a win-win for everyone.

Perfect is the enemy of good. Voltaire said something close to that, and I repeat it often. Now I’m listening. I think of something interesting to say at least once a week, and I’m just going to say it when I think it – instead of waiting for it to fit into the next newsletter, or my next book.

DKP

Filed Under: Blogpost

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