Finding My Own Medical Home
By Jean Bokelmann, M.D.
The day I was introduced to Endobiogeny was the day I finally found a
psychological home in medicine. It was happenstance that led me to the
seminar Dr. Jean Claude Lapraz was presenting in the fall of 2004, his
first seminar in Pocatello, Idaho after many years of seminars
elsewhere in the United States. The stage had been set well for
that fateful day. It was two weeks previously that I had been given the
green light to develop an integrative medicine track for the Idaho
State University Family Medicine Residency Program. This included
building an integrative medicine practice, a means of introducing
medical doctors in training to options for healing beyond drugs and
surgery. The preceding three years I had been updating my 30-year
outdated knowledge in the basic sciences through ongoing coursework at
ISU. My head was filled with new and exciting scientific
understandings, particularly on the heels of the human genome project
completion. Concurrently, medical research was beginning to report
positive findings on a handful of herbs. Having felt limited and often
ineffective with the medical tools I had been trying to apply for 25
years, I had begun using herbs in select patients and had been quite
impressed by the results. All the while, I had felt frustrated by not
being able to find satisfactory answers for how the herbs worked.
Healing paradigms that utilized herbs extensively, such as Oriental
Medicine and Ayervedic Medicine, spoke an entirely different language
that made no sense from the perspective of western scientific
understanding. Thus utilizing herbs required a leap of faith,
something that made me uncomfortable.
Thus, on that fateful day when I listened to Dr. Lapraz explain human
physiology and disease based on an understanding of the endocrine
system at the cellular, tissular and organ levels, I watched all the
loose ends of my years of experience in medicine and my updated
scientific knowledge begin to fall into place. When Dr. Lapraz
described cellular membranes, membrane receptors and signal
transduction, my confidence in his legitimacy found firm ground. When
he showed how a particular herb could have influence on the human
organism at several levels through several different mechanisms, I felt
the lights to herbalism had finally been turned on for me.
Concurrently, two new peer-reviewed extensively referenced books for
physicians were published and corroborated much of what Dr. Lapraz was
teaching with respect to the activities of several herbs. This also
bolstered my confidence that there was sound science behind what Dr.
Lapraz was presenting.
Opening an Endobiogenic Practice
At this point in time it happened that Dr. Lapraz had been looking for
a way to see American Endobiogeny patients in the United States. He
already had a number of American patients, mostly with cancer, who were
traveling to Paris, France for an Endobiogenic evaluation and
prescription. There were even more patients in the wings. Dr.
Lapraz recognized that this created a hardship for these often ill and
unstable patients, so a state-side clinic would be preferable.
Simultaneously, my faculty role as integrative medicine coordinator
left me in search of an integrative clinical practice. With the
help and support of Annemarie Buhler, the founder of Time Laboratories,
and Dr. Jonathan Cree, the director of the ISU Family Medicine
Residency, I was able to begin an integrative practice alongside Dr.
Lapraz as a new entity: the Endobiogenic Integrative Medical Center. It
was to my great fortune that Annemarie’s granddaughter Annette Davis, a
clinical nutritionist, had been attending Dr. Lapraz’ seminars since
1989 and was already well versed in herbs and aromatherapy through the
family business. Annette and her husband Eric assisted me as I
tried to learn the basics of Endobiogeny and phyto-aromatherapy.
They produced charts from past seminar syllabi to help me systematize
the history and physical exam. They also taught me how to apply
aromatherapy. Until then, I had thought essential oils were something
you put in a diffuser. While I understood that essential oils were
supposed to have medicinal effects when inhaled, I knew nothing about
topical or enteric absorption. I was also unfamiliar with the
controversy as to whether essential oils should be ingested and learned
how this could be done safely. Since the Biology of Functions was a new
tool in Endobiogeny, the Davis’ and I studied the indexes together and
tried to make sense of them through their definitions and through
extensive outside reading on the endocrine system and physiology.
Although Dr. Lapraz’ time was in high demand, I was also able to have
limited email communication with him to answer key questions. Through
this team effort and support I was able to build on my understanding of
Endobiogeny and phyto-aromatherapy and take the leap into an
endobiogenic integrative practice.
Quite wet behind the ears, I began seeing patients in the new clinic
with Annette Davis frequently at my side. The typical patient who would
come to see me would have one of the many medical mystery diseases for
which no satisfactory diagnosis had been made and no effective
treatment had been rendered despite numerous medical evaluations by a
variety of specialists. These patients figured they had nothing to
lose, and I have always enjoyed a good challenge, so it was a natural
patient-physician partnership. As a U.S. trained family physician, I
had to make several adjustments in order to practice Endobiogeny.
First, performing the physical exam took retraining. All of the subtle
signs of endocrine and autonomic imbalance I had previously overlooked
had to become a critical part of my instinctive assessment. It was also
a challenge for me to accept the lack of conventional medical diagnosis
and instead characterize the disorder according to the Endobiogenic
imbalances. Yet this was necessary in order to design the highly
individualized therapy we prescribed. Maintaining a cautious
amount of skepticism, I did find some impressive surprises along the
way. First, many of these challenging patients returned for follow-up
with reports of dramatic improvements. Second in seeing a
patient at follow-up, I would note that the changes in the Biology of
Functions were consistently for the better. While the
patient might
have reported feeling better through placebo effect alone, I knew there
was no way for the placebo effect to have an impact on mathematical
formulas based on standard lab tests. Third, I occasionally
encountered unintentional healings of secondary conditions not
addressed by the patient. For example, I had 30 year old patient who
came in to get help with her premenstrual syndrome. The standard
Endobiogenic assessment was performed and the appropriate treatment was
initiated. The patient returned five months later stating the therapy
had worked very well for three months, but for the past two months she
had been experiencing fatigue and nausea. I asked if she had checked a
pregnancy test and she said it had never occurred to her because she
and her husband had been trying to get pregnant for eight years without
any luck. So I ran a pregnancy test on her and to her delight it was
positive and she subsequently delivered a healthy full-term baby
boy.
Treating cancer through Endobiogeny was something I preferred to leave
up to Dr. Lapraz. However, I did become involved with their care
through some degree of collaboration. One of my first Endobiogeny
patients was a 42 year old woman who had been diagnosed with Stage 2
breast cancer, BRCA-1 positive. Her older sister had just died from the
disease. She and her very devoted husband were interested in doing
everything possible to prevent metastatic spread or recurrence. She had
undergone the standard therapy with lumpectomy, radiation, and
chemotherapy. Her good friend had been seeing Dr. Lapraz in Paris and
had been cured of metastatic cervical cancer, so this woman was eager
to meet with Dr. Lapraz. She and her husband were informed that Dr.
Lapraz was no longer receiving new American patients in Paris and that
an appointment with him could be scheduled in Pocatello three months
down the road. She was also offered an earlier appointment with me to
gather the data and send it to Paris for Endiobigenic interpretation.
At the time, I had an upcoming trip to Las Vegas, Nevada to visit my
family. Since this patient lived in Southern California, she and her
husband decided to meet me in Las Vegas so that I could gather the
necessary data as quickly as possible. Our first meeting occurred in
their hotel room which was quite poetically at the Paris Hotel.
There I proceeded to gather all of the historical and physical findings
necessary for a comprehensive endobiogenic assessment. I entered the
data into a form I had created to help quantify the magnitude of
various physical findings, and sent my findings off to Dr. Lapraz in
France. At the time, Dr. Lapraz was still working closely with Dr.
Duraffourd. He presented my report to Dr. Duraffourd who, based
on my report , proceeded to predict what would be found on the Biology
of Functions. I was told that the French colleagues
present at
that meeting were quite impressed at the correlation between Dr.
Duraffourd’s predictions and the actual Biology of
Functions. It
appeared to validate some internal consistency in the Endobiogenic
system, and, more importantly to me, it confirmed my ability to gather
the important endobiogenic details.
Endobiogeny and My Medical Peers
Although I had been supported by the director and the faculty of the
family medicine residency to develop an integrative curriculum and
practice, my hopes of sharing the profound wisdom of Endobiogeny were
soon tempered by the reactions of my medical peer group. While some of
my colleagues were intrigued and a couple even came to the clinic for
endobiogenic evaluations, most were either disinterested or outright
antagonistic. There were suggestions by some that I had lost my
marbles. A local oncologist blamed the herbal regimen taken by a
patient with stage 3 rectal cancer for the failure of her
chemotherapeutic regimen. In the latter case, while I understood the
plausibility of this conclusion, I was struck by the haste with which
the oncologist laid blame for the patient’s treatment failure given the
low statistical likelihood for chemotherapeutic success in this
situation. After spending an afternoon introducing Endobiogeny to
the family medicine faculty and residents, I realized this was too big
of a paradigm shift for most physicians and particularly for physicians
in training who were too preoccupied learning the basics of
conventional medicine. In an era where physicians were expected to see
increasingly larger volumes of patients in a day, Endobiogeny simply
took too much time and too much contemplation to become an easy fit in
the American medical system. I realized that Endobiogeny could
not become part of the residency curriculum, but that my practice of it
might create intrigue for the more inquisitive residents looking for
additional answers to the healing mystery.
One of the greatest barriers to a more generalized appreciation of
Endobiogeny within the medical community was the lack of clinically
based research. The expectation was for evidence derived from larger
and larger studies and meta-analyses , usually funded by pharmaceutical
companies or the government. These studies required homogenization as
well as randomization of patient cohorts. Applying the modern
clinical research model to the highly individualized approach of
Endobiogeny would therefore be impossible. Thus, physicians who
based their medical decisions firmly and confidently on clinical
research had no interest whatsoever in discussing something so
“unproven” as Endobiogeny. Occasionally the more seasoned physicians
understood the limitations of randomized clinical trials and the
statistical extrapolations, but even these more analytical physicians
were reluctant to take such a large paradigm leap or to slow down their
productivity.
Teaching Endobiogeny
No sooner had I shown an interest in learning Endobiogeny and starting
an endobiogenic practice then I found myself in the position of
presenting portions of subsequent seminars. As much as I enjoy standing
in front of people and presenting interesting concepts, I found this
position quite uncomfortable because I did not yet fully grasp the
material I was presenting. No doubt this was an excellent way to learn
the material and it provided me with some one-on-one time with Dr.
Lapraz to review the slides beforehand and clarify any points of
confusion. The slide presentations had been written for the most part
by Dr. Duraffourd whose complexity of thought magnified the language
barrier. Eventually I began preparing my own power point presentations
as my confidence and knowledge grew.
The seminar attendees comprised a diverse group of healing
practitioners, mostly naturopaths, acupuncturists, chiropractors, and
nutritionists. There were very few medical doctors in attendance
despite active solicitation within the medical community. I attributed
this lack to our inability to procure and offer CME credits through the
local accrediting body in addition to general disinterest among
physicians in learning something outside the mainstream medical pabulum
. Thus, while Dr. Lapraz had set his sights on promoting Endobiogeny
throughout the American medical community, it appeared to me that this
paradigm in healing would best suit naturopaths and other disciplines
more naturally and holistically inclined. It was an exceptional
situation when one of the seminars in Pocatello was attended by a
pediatric intensivist, Dr. Kamyar Hedeyat. He already had a good grasp
of aromatherapy and general use of herbs. He was fluent in
French. His intensive care background made him a quick study in
the physiological aspects of Endobiogeny. By the end of the seminar, as
I watched Dr. Hedeyat’s enthusiasm take root, I was delighted to see
that we had another American endobiogenist in the making. With a
seemingly endless source of energy, Dr. Hedeyat has since then poured
himself into study, research, and collaboration to help define
and promote Endobiogeny in America.
About the same time that I met Dr. Hedeyat, I also began working with a
resident in the ISU Family Medicine Residency who had a clear
predilection for alternative medicine. While just as consumed
with learning the nuts and bolts of conventional medicine as the other
residents in the program, Dr. Laramie Wheeler showed a preference for
reading about herbs and nutritional supplements. I enjoyed many
discussions with her about alternatives in healing and eventually
introduced her to Endobiogeny. After several years of facing the
familiar glazed-over facial expression when talking about Endobiogeny
with the family medicine residents, I was cautiously ecstatic to
finally find a resident who got it. Dr. Wheeler completed her residency
and began a conventional practice, maintaining a small endobiogenic
practice on the side. In 2010 she decided to stop her conventional
practice and focus on Endobiogeny.
I myself took a hiatus from EIMC January 2010 to July 2011 as I retired
from my teaching position in the residency program. This relatively
early retirement was a professional maneuver I chose, with
difficulty, in order to end my hospital duty, the portion of my
work that had always cast a dark shadow over the practice of medicine
for me. I started working at the VA outpatient clinic in
Pocatello, where I was pleased to learn that many of my patients
preferred natural options over drugs when feasible. Nevertheless, being
limited by the VA system to “evidence-based medicine” and FDA-approved
drugs was like opening up an old cookbook where the ingredients at hand
were limited and were applied in a repetitive and mindless formula with
uninspiring results. In short, I missed the richness and intuitive
creativity of Endobiogeny. I found a way to re-open my practice
at EIMC through the support, once again, of Annemarie Buhler and Dr.
Jonathan Cree. With my return to EIMC I was no longer a sole American
physician practicing Endobiogeny. There were now three other American
physicians who shared the vision and courage to practice
Endobiogeny. It appears that Dr. Lapraz’ vision for American
Endobiogeny was beginning to break through the walls of medical
entrenchment and would eventually, with patience, come to fruition.
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