Diagnosis

By Dr John Brazier

1. Name title qualifications 2. Please describe the future of Diagnosis in the spa – or at least the potential of where diagnosis can go. I.e. can each of us learn to diagnose our own body etc? 3. What are the common forms of diagnosis performed by healers? Ie. 4. You mentioned that in actual fact, a healer such as yourself can ‘fix’ clients within a few minutes and not need to even take an hour...can you explain this further. 5. What are some of the myths in diagnosis and what are some of the challenges 6. Why do you think TOUCH is more powerful than MACHINESE? Please explain and if you can list some of the natural diagnostic methods both past and present..ie. Kinesiology. 1. John Brazier, Doctor of Traditional Chinese Medicine, MSc. Oriental Medicine, NLP practitioner, Amatsu practitioner, Kinesiology practitioner, Founder of the Oriental Body Balance system. 2. Diagnosis is based on understanding, awareness and education. Every human has an innate ability to diagnose through sight (body language), smell (body aroma), touch (body tension, joint grinding, heat or cold, emptiness or excess, torsion), and energy (stagnation, frustration, perversion, pushing out or pulling in). Our diagnostic skills are based on a real survival mechanism to be able to read people before they come to close. Through experience, therapists enhance their own diagnostic skills often talking about ‘feeling’ problems both physically and spiritually. The future of Spa diagnosis will follow two primary routes, physical (Including mental) and mechanical. Generally the physical is seen as an Eastern system and the mechanical as a Western system. The physical diagnoses cover systems from both traditional Chinese & India (questions on symptoms, pulse & tongue, palpation, etc.) and modern Western systems (muscle testing and bone position evaluation) The potential of spa’s becoming places of diagnosis is substantial, with some simple training, guidance and experience each therapist has the opportunity to both diagnose to some degree and then more importantly offer the type of treatment necessary to achieve a quick and permanent recovery. Diagnosing your own body has its limitation but generally it is based on feeling areas of pain and discomfort, like the neck & shoulders, by having a better understanding of internal organ imbalance we can palpate the bowel region and discover torsions, gas and sensitivity. With practice you can muscle test yourself to discover many different issues including food intolerances and physical problems but again this can be quite difficult. It is usually best to get others to diagnose your problems. 3. Generally masters and healers have such a range of experience that enables them to diagnosis primarily from a gut or spiritual feeling. However this gut feeling must come from a strong grounding in education to give the healer a foundation of comparison and understanding in real medical terms. As I’ve mentioned before diagnosis is based on many different levels of communication, most of these are unable to be describe as they are related to sensation. This sensation can be a feeling of energy emanating from the body in the form of heat, pushing, pulling or stagnant. A reflexologist will find grains, crystals or a sensation in an area of the feet that will give a form of diagnosis relating to a part of the body higher up. As a master of the Oriental Body Balance system (OBB) I watch for body language movements, tone of voice, structural torsions of the spine, pelvis and head, I read the tongue for internal disturbance, feel the pulse and generally ask questions that lead me to a full diagnosis. However in all my experience of physical & psychological conditions I have recognised that muscle testing is by far one of the most effective diagnosis systems, as it shows both the therapist and the client that there is an issue, and dramatically shows that it has gone after the treatment, proving the intervention/treatment worked! 4. Diagnosis is everything, without it what are we treating? The reason I ask this question is to differentiate between focused appropriate treatments and a general massage. In other words the stronger the diagnosis the quicker the treatment due to the knowledge of exactly what the client needs. For example if a client attends my clinic with lower back problems, the cause of this can be a number of different things: 1. A general muscle strain or injury 2. A Kidney deficiency (TCM) 3. An Illio-cycle valve & bowel problem 4. Psychological stress 5. An Occiput C1 fixation or C1/C2 fixation 6. A subluxation of lumbar vertebrae The list above is not extensive, it is there to give you an idea of the complications that exist. The biggest thing for all therapists to understand is ‘What is the route cause of all this clients problems’ If we know that and change it, everything else will collapse back to good health. Through utilising the OBB muscle tests diagnostics I can find the answer in minutes and once we know the route cause and its manifestation, we can go direct to it to make the change. For example research tells us that a fixation around C1 will cause the Gluteus maximus muscles on both sides of the body to drastically weaken. As these muscles are 2.5 times stronger than any other muscle in the body this puts a tremendous pressure on lower back and hamstring muscles to compensate and keep you moving (this usually causes all the pain!). Using very gentle release work on the neck for 30 seconds, releases the pressure on the nervous system and brings the Gmax muscle up to its full potential, releasing the pressure on the supporting muscles and you have harmony. As the muscles relax the pain disappears. Send your client for a good massage to clear all the toxins and you have your complementary magic bullet recovery. 5. I strongly believe that the myths of diagnosis are that it takes a lot of time and effort to gain any trustworthy diagnostic ability. This is wrong, I could teach anyone simple muscle testing diagnosis techniques in one day. From that day forward your ability to find disharmony anywhere in the body will be greatly enhanced. For example we can utilise a strong indicator muscle, once we have accessed its strength we can get the client to place their other hand on different areas of the body and retest the strong muscle. If it weakens it shows a problem exists in that area. Further checks can then be performed to get a more accurate reading of the problem. If we made a quick comparison of the Chinese pulse and tongue diagnosis: The tongue is a fairly simple system to read in its full capacity and apart from any unusual mixtures the system can be learned fairy quickly. On the other hand the pulse reading can be so intricate it can take a lifetime to master. Unless you break it down into its most useful elements and keep it simple. The real challenge is to offer diagnostic training to therapists to a level that is going to enhance their practice, give them time to grow through experience, challenge them a little, and then offer some more training to advance them once again. To reach the level of (real) master of a system takes knowledge & experience. Too much knowledge creates an academic, too little creates poor quality therapy. So the two systems of theory & practice need to be balanced. The only other trouble we have is that a lot of energy medicine cannot really be measured, and because of this it can mean certain people can make great claims about diagnosis without either knowledge or experience. I was always taught that as medical Qi needs a direction, a strong understanding of Anatomy & Physiology is necessary to give the Qi the intension it needs to work. 6. All mammals are made up of a mixture of resonating frequencies and energies. In simple terms this means the cycle of the heart beat, the cycle of the breathing pattern, the cycle of the cranial-sacral wave pumping cerebral fluid up and down the spine, the cycle of Qi moving through the meridian system, etc. A master should be able to sense most of these systems or a disharmony of these systems through the air, by just being in a room with someone can tell you a great deal about their problem. Touch allows our resonating energies to mix with our clients, plus we feel the movement of these systems through sensitive fingers, this enables us to read imbalance through touch. Man can only produce machines that diagnose on our present level of understanding, for example it may tell us we are wheat intolerant. But does that mean we are intolerant because we haven’t performed our yoga exercises this week, or that cold has entered the bowel, or that we have a spinal torsion. Not yet, so touch is essential and it always will be because it is an ancient & modern form of communication. Often we can’t describe what we feel but we are driven to work with an area of the body to clear the condition. It could be tense or tight or just not right. Its important for therapists to trust their gut feeling, remember most of the time the cause of the pain is often in a different place from the pain! So close your eyes and trust your touch, it will lead you to where you need to concentrate some therapy. The challenge in Asia is to get therapists to trust their natural feedback mechanism, to think outside of the box, to adapt their therapy to the needs of the client and not just follow the same routine over and over again, and I think the best way to achieve this is through continual training to experience the differences, qualities and even negatives of each system.