Today I primarily use nutritional medicine, cognitive hypnotherapy, NLP and Bicom therapy to treat mental, digestive and functional health problems like chronic fatigue and IBS.

 

I have extensive experience (both professional and personal) and a forthcoming book (2013) on nutritional and natural therapies to balancing brain chemistry to treating depression, bipolar syndrome and anxiety.

 

 

OCD, ADHD, Addiction using balancing brain chemistry and cognitive hypnotherapy.

 

After balancing brain chemistry digestive health has been a large part of my on-going practice.  I had and cured myself of IBS and damaging parasitic infections.  

 

The focus on IBS in conventional medical treatment has almost completely moved away from psychological causes to purely physical approaches with the new FODMAP diet treatment.  The conventional medical view that IBS must be either psychological or physical is a mistake.  The way conventional medicine separates and compartmentalises physical health from the mind means it is unable to develop a balanced holistic treatment for IBS.  My observation has been that in all cases of IBS the condition has both a physical and mental (stress response) component and therefore complete cure is only obtained by simultaneously removing both the physical component (bacteria, yeast, food sensitivities) and the mental component (stress responses affecting the digestive muscles).  Conventional medicine has yet to include in its toolbox techniques that people can use to train their own nervous systems how to stop sending prolonged and unhealthy stress responses into the body. These stress responses can contribute to IBS, hypertension, weaken our immune system, cause insomnia and contribute to weight gain (by overproducing the stress hormone cortisol).  Contrary to conventional medical understanding it is absolutely possible to control and re-educate the automatic stress responses produced by training your system how to switch on the relaxation response and reprogramming the amygdala, our stress memory centre.  The FODMAP diet does further our understanding of IBS but it is also a system of retreat and avoidance form upsetting foods rather than a proactive approach which builds up the body’s ability to eat anything by correcting the underlying causes so that the problem foods become edible again.

 

Using a combination of all my training I focus on repairing and rebuilding the immune system, correcting inappropriate stress responses (the HPA-axis and parasympathetic responses can be out of balance and excessive in M.E.) repairing adrenal exhaustion and attacking viruses with Bicom resonance therapy.

 

Heart health is something I am very passionate about, coronary heart disease is preventable and even reversible; something previously thought to be impossible sing the dietary systems developed by Dr Dean Ornish and Esselstyn .  For more on this bold claim see www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4hbV4RgzI8  

 

Hypothyroid.

This must be differentiated form chronic fatigue syndrome and depression. 

 

I have an insomnia program (forthcoming book 2013) combining both physical treatments (boosting deficient sleep inducing neurotransmitters, reducing excess cortisol which blocks sleep, controlling and resetting the brains internal biological clock), along with the proven cognitive and sleep scheduling techniques, finally I added hypnotict techniques.  

 

 

I have been developing clinical techniques to change/prevent stress form contributing to a physical health problem for over 20 years.  Whether unnecessary and unwanted stress responses are the product of your inbuilt physical anatomy or acquired through past mental conditioning and experiences it is possible to train the nervous system to quickly and efficiently switch from a stress response (sympathetic) state to a relaxation (parasympathetic) response state thereby ending the ongoing harm that unnecessary stress responses can cause.  

 

The subconscious brain primarily the amygdala learns and stores memories of danger, fear and psychological trauma, whenever it perceives our current situation matches or is even just similar to some previous threatening scenario stored in our memory it produces a physical stress response.  The physical stress responses these subconsciously stored memories create are occasionally just what is needed to save your life from real danger; on the one hand the stress response can be completely inappropriate and produce a fight-or-flight response while we were sitting safely at work desk for example.  These unnecessary stress responses rather than preserving our life may actually be shortening it, they evolved to keep is safe when we were cavemen and have yet to evolve and adapt to the many stresses and strains of modern day life which may be important but are often not life-threatening.  It is possible using hypnotic and NLP techniques to remodel memories of danger, fear and trauma, and reprogram our conscious and subconscious brain to no longer produce unhealthy stress responses.  I have a forthcoming book tentatively called Beyond the Relaxation Response planned for 2014 on this subject.

 

I do not treat hereditary diabetes, however for acquired type II diabetes that has been diagnosed with in the past 3 years I use the 3 month extreme calorie restriction technique developed at Newcastle University which I enhance with individualised nutritional supplements.

 

I use cognitive-hypnotherapy to break the habit and hold smoking has on a person's psychology and Bicom treatment to quickly break the physical cravings. 

 

I use NLP and cognitive hypnotherapy techniques to remodel the thought processes and memories underlying these conditions. Low self-esteem and post-traumatic stress disorder often coexist with depressed states. 

 

If you would like to find out more about how I would approach treating your health problems please call/email me.   

Please enquire about other conditions

 

I do not treat AIDS, cancer, terminal illness, and non-allergic asthma.

 

 

I first discovered alternative medical treatments while at university studying Human Sciences. I took a year off to travel to India and do voluntary work in Calcutta.  While there I had dysentery several times and contracted malaria.  Back in England conventional medicine was unable to restore my previously good health, I had regular malarial fevers and irritable bowel syndrome, which I was told by the registrar at the hospital for tropical diseases would "clear up in a matter of weeks, months or years and if we discover a cure we will contact you". This was in 1983 and I haven’t heard from them yet.  

 

Two years later in 1985 I was gifted a course of herbs to cleanse my colon.  Despite being completely sceptical I tried them as I had nothing to lose, and to my surprise they worked exactly as they were described in the accompanying booklet. The naturopathic theory behind these herbs was that at the time of the dysentery my bowels would have become very toxic and may have not fully expelled accumulations of toxic mucous etc, and that this toxic mucous would be causing the periodic irritable bowel I had several days a week. By completely cleansing the intestines we could remove the source of this irritation. The herbs worked, over several months they dropped the IBS attacks from 3 to 4 days per week to about six days a year and fully restored my mental sharpness.  This was how I was introduced to what became my vocation or work.  From then on I knew that there were systems of medicine which were effective and had their own logical or rational explanation of how they worked.  

I subsequently learnt about and developed relaxation techniques that removed the psychological or stress response component of my irritable bowel syndrome and never saw the condition again in my life. In adapting and updating my approach to IBS to suit the individual needs of my patients since then.

 

Having found alternative therapies to be effective for IBS I then embarked on treating another more complex condition that I have lived with since my early teens, and that is bipolar syndrome.  I tried everything acupuncture to shamanistic sweat-lodges to see what would help; of all the things I tried two therapies stood out head and shoulders above everything else is being affected in the treatment of mental health disorders, and these are nutritional medicine to manipulate brain chemistry and psychotherapies to change mental processes. 

 

This led to me training in nutritional medicine and psychotherapy amongst other things which I have been using both personally and professionally for over 25 years to treat mental health problems. I'm currently writing a book on balancing brain chemistry for depression, bipolar, anxiety and addiction.  See the link on the home page for a mind map of the book content.

 

The biochemistry bipolar syndrome is not fully understood however central to it is an inability to regulate the levels of the neurotransmitter dopamine, too little dopamine leads to a under energised depressive state, too much dopamine causes over energetic hypo-manic state.  Serotonin deficiency may play a secondary role in contributing to bipolar depression. Today I regulate my own brain chemistry, up regulating or down regulating dopamine levels with natural therapies to prevent bipolar mania or bipolar depression which before it was properly medicated nearly killed me on numerous occasions. Most of this site is about balancing brain can however I do not wish to underestimate the value of psychological approaches. A brain with a lack of serotonin or dopamine will tend to dwell on negative thoughts and memories, psychotherapy can remodel negative memories lessening the negative psychological material and believes you have to dwell on; psychotherapy can also program into the subconscious brain techniques that interrupt and challenge negative thinking processes a gain lessening the impact depression can have on the one. For bipolar mania psychotherapy can develop self-awareness of the signs of the condition enabling one to get herself medicate and to some extent psychotherapy can enable one to a “ground” or undermine manic ways of thinking.

 

I'll just mention in passing that for several years after returning from India I would have mild but regular recurrent malarial fevers I tried dozens of alternative therapies including homeopathy which immediately brought on an unusually intense attack of malarial fever and then banished it never to be seen again.  Today homoeopathy is so ridiculed by conventional science as being nothing more than a placebo; powerful as placebos can be curing recurrent malaria is pretty impressive and why couldn't conventional medicine conjure up such a powerful placebo? 

 

 

I first studied nutritional medicine and the naturopathic approach to healing.  This laid down the foundations of natural medicine:-

 

First do no harm, I don't use medicines with toxic side effects. The naturopathic view of medicine is that the body is always trying to heal itself, to eliminate toxins, to repair faulty systems and to re-establish health, and that the job of the naturopathic practitioner is to carefully observe how the body is trying to restore health, and to assist the natural healing processes that are struggling, i.e. to work in cooperation with the body's natural healing systems.  In practice one ends up assisting the liver, the kidneys, the lymphatics, the bowels, the immune system etc complete a job there struggling with.  

 

Using naturopathic techniques, diets and supplements one can fire up so to speak the self-healing systems of the body.  For example if you can't throw off a cold or the flu you had, you could temporarily enhance the activity of the immune system with natural therapies to finish the job. Alternatively you could use natural therapies to detoxify the body of heavy-metal toxins are compromising the immune system in the first place; or use yoga and meditation techniques to teach the nervous system to stop overproducing the stress hormone cortisol which can weaken the immune system. A lot of naturopathic medicine is simple effective common sense.

 

What was interesting was when I subsequently studied psychotherapy I saw that the mind behaved like the body and was constantly trying to either contain or eliminate toxic material and that the same principles of supporting the self-healing systems of the body also apply to the mind.  

 

After studying nutrition to work on the biochemistry of the body and psychotherapy to work on the processes of the mind I became interested in the eastern medical approaches which embraces the concept of a the subtle energy or vitality in the body. However unrecognised or understood by conventional medical science Chinese medicine does something beyond mere placebo effects. I trained in Chinese herbal medicine then acupuncture and practised these disciplines for several enjoyable years, I no longer take on patients were acupuncture, as I feel that this medical skill requires more time to perfect and I have time to dedicate to it. Today I practice Bicom resonance therapy which one could more or less describe as an offshoot of electro acupuncture.  

 

Bicom therapy has some invaluable features:  it has a special ability to resolve allergies and sensitivities which do not clear with traditional methods, and has abilities in resolving post viral fatigue syndrome.

 

Over the years I've observed how people’s psychology could make or break the success of treatment. For example I worked with someone whose dream was to become a singer, she came to my practice for constant throat infections.  After some initial progress we seem to hit a wall with a little introspective digging she found that a large part of her did not want to get well, if her throat was well she would no longer have the excuse of not being able to audition because of a throat problem and would have to face the terrifying possibility that she might not be good enough to give up the day job. Maintaining the physical illness provided her with a safe sanctuary in which she never had to face her fear of failure. It seems that the mind is able to maintain and perpetuate a physical condition to fulfil a secondary emotional gain, i.e. they can be some positive psychological gains to staying ill.  Tragically I've seen people spend years stuck with subconscious processes preventing them from getting well and moving on to secondary emotional games. Another example I've seen is people who have one part of them trying to lose weight and another part of the sabotaging their weight loss for some secondary emotional gain. I've worked with women who could lose weight but then felt uncomfortable with all the sexual attention they got when they did, always secretly afraid of trying the things they said they would do when they lost the weight, or were fulfilling some personal self-loathing by making themselves as they saw it fat and unattractive.

 

The good news is that the body and the mind are always striving for health and wellness; I used to find in many cases that simply directing the person's mind to introspect and expose the subconscious process would allow them to slowly break free, today however today I use NLP and cognitive hypnotherapy to achieve this goal. With these techniques it is possible to quickly and efficiently redirect the self-limiting intentions of the subconscious within just a few sessions. This short-term solution orientated psychotherapy enables the healing process to progress rather than long-term psychotherapy exploring deep meaning and feelings.

 

I have now been in practice since 1988 and at the www.haleclinic.com since 97.  Today I combine all the therapies I studied over eleven years.  All new patients begin with a two hour assessment from which an individual treatment program can be worked out.

 

 

I'm currently writing a book due out in 2013 on insomnia and sleep problems and another book on balancing brain chemistry for the treatment of depression and bipolar syndrome. For a preview of the contents follow link top left corner of the home page and on the sleep clinic page.

 

Following that will be a book on the latest dramatic improvements in preventing, treating and reversing coronary heart disease.

 

A long-term goal is to work more extensively with balancing brain chemistry and psychotherapy for addiction, including group work using the anti-addiction therapeutic effects of the herb Eboga . I welcome people contacting me who wish to collaborate in such a project.

 

 

© Peter Smith –Holistic Medicine Consultant-

© Please feel free to download or print my work for personal use, I wrote it to help people. You can copy and distribute my work on web pages and in literature but please give me credit for the fruits of my labour. Mark my work as a quote and reference/link the source to my name and the website or book you copied it from.

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