Dr. Norm Easley

I was very excited to start my practice in natural medicine. I was confident that with the treatments filling my armory, there was no illness or disease capable of surviving the onslaught of my clinic. Diet therapy, fasting, spinal adjustments, vitamins/minerals, enzymes, cleansing therapies, herbs, protomorphogens, homeopathics, even physiotherapy and a few fringe treatments could dispose of any physical anarchy. I also practiced acupuncture, electric acupuncture and used some Chinese patent formulas and herbal soups. I was extremely well fortified, ready to assist any patient in their mission to restoring peace to their bodies. It did not take long, however, before I recognized the treatment protocols I learned were not as effective as I had been lead to believe.

Patients were not getting well the way I expected. Most were struggles that required multiple treatments with only meager results. Nearly everyone experienced varying degrees of improvement and was content with my enthusiastic efforts, but it was not enough. I wanted faster results that were lasting and results that did not require regular updates to maintain. After several years of struggling with thirty-five to fifty patients a day six days a week, I soon realized, the treatments were not the culprit; it was my process of prescribing them that was the problem. I needed to understand priorities, sequences, timing, and I needed to develop an ability to allow the body to tell me what it wanted. I needed to understand the body’s flow of energy in the process of developing dysfunction and in healing. At the time, however, this task seemed impossible primarily because of my conditioning.

I grew up in a medically oriented society. I was educated and trained with medical textbooks. I learned pathology and the etiology of disease, and I learned to make a diagnosis. I was trained to identify a condition and apply a prescribed protocol of treatment with an intensity sufficient enough to drive the condition away, to pound it with therapeutic weapons into complete submission. Medicine was much like battling an enemy with the appropriate artillery. Even though I used all natural therapies, I still prescribed them in a western, medical fashion. I had essentially become a naturally oriented allopath.

I named this process “Cookbook Medicine.” I even had an instructor who claimed all we require as physicians is the ability to diagnose and a big “bag of tricks” containing all the necessary treatments. I was also taught the Law of Spontaneous Remission, which states in most cases if you palliate long enough the condition might resolve it self! Well, I had my magic (?) bag of tricks and my diagnostic procedures, but they were not serving my patients or me. I was desperate for a different process. To accomplish this I needed to change the way I think.

I realized, from my training in the Chinese Five-Element Theory, the body does not think in terms of a diagnosis. All conditions result from a complex sequence of energetic disturbances and compensations. To make matters more difficult, there can be numerous sequences creating the same condition. In Chinese medicine, diagnosis is the process of identifying the sequence back to the original insult or disturbance. Treatments then re-establish a normal flow of energy thereby eliminating the symptoms caused by the condition. An illness does not result from a deficiency of antibiotics or herbal alkaloids. Mega-doses of vitamins and minerals, fasting, natural antibiotics, stimulating herbs and disciplined lifestyle are not the final resolution for illness. Instead, healing requires the accurate prescribing of a series of progressive treatments designed to advance the body towards health by normalizing each level of energetic disturbance. This is the correct method for helping a patient and I needed to learn it.

For five years, I struggled to re-condition myself to think in terms of energy and not cookbook medicine even when I needed to move quickly on to the next patient. It was stressful, arduous, and frustrating. Even my office manager stressed as she struggled to maintain the patient schedule. It was common for me to be an hour behind, but I persisted. I had no choice. Then suddenly within the span of a few days, it happened. I got it. Somehow, my mind switched over to thinking in terms of the energy of disease. With each patient, I was able to understand the origins and sequences of energetic disturbances and the compensations producing their symptoms. I could see how causes and origins flowed from one body system to the next in an orderly progression to produce the present symptoms and I could see how the correct treatment allowed a progressive elimination in the symptoms. Most importantly, I began to recognize patterns of symptom response that consistently formed reliable identification of specific conditions. It was another twenty-five years before I identified the majority of these patterns, causes, and the necessary treatments by steadily improving my evaluation procedures.