Comprehensive Study Notes on Medical Intuition and Biofeedback

The Encounter with Robert Lightman: Early Developments in Intuitive Diagnosis

• In $1973$, the speaker was referred to a physician named Robert Lightman, who was based in Sausalito, California.

• The speaker provided Lightman with only his name and birth date for an evaluation.

• Lightman produced a phenomenal three-page personality analysis. The speaker notes this was superior to any analysis he had seen from clinical psychologists, identifying personal traits (described as "warts") with extreme precision.

Professional Background and Transition of Robert Lightman

• Robert Lightman was classically trained in medical school as an internist and held boards in internal medicine.

• Through his medical practice, Lightman concluded that some patients were suffering from "psychic attacks" by family members.

• This realization led him to hypothesize the existence of other psychic phenomena. Being unmarried and independent, he left his medical practice to study these phenomena.

• Lightman moved to Sausalito and began a three-year apprenticeship working with a psychiatrist.

• The Apprenticeship Methodology:

  • He worked $5$ days a week, $8$ hours a day, for $3$ years.

  • The psychiatrist provided minimal information for each patient scheduled that day: just the name, address, or birth date.

  • Lightman would then record what he perceived intuitively regarding each individual.

Statistical Accuracy of Lightman’s Diagnoses

• By the end of his apprenticeship, Lightman demonstrated high levels of accuracy:

  • Physical Diagnosis: $80\%$ accuracy.

  • Psychological Diagnosis: $96\%$ accuracy.

• When asked why his physical accuracy was lower than his psychological accuracy, Lightman explained, "I trained myself to visit the mind, and they don't always know what's wrong with them physically."

Case Study: The Assessment of an "Evil Mind"

• In approximately $1975$, Lightman performed a reading on an individual, describing him as possessing "the most evil mind I have ever visited," comparing the person to Himmler.

• Lightman predicted the individual would end in infamy before his death.

• The individual died in November, roughly $25$ years after the reading.

• In the final two years of his life, the person was investigated by a federal grand jury and found guilty of multiple acts of malpractice and the destruction of human life, fulfilling Lightman's long-term prediction.

Elmer Green and the Birth of Biofeedback

• The speaker met Elmer Green in $1971$. Elmer and his wife, Elise, are credited with creating the first clinically useful biofeedback training.

• Elmer Green's early research focused on migraine headaches, demonstrating that patients could control their headaches by learning to regulate the temperature of their fingers.

• The speaker inquired if biofeedback could help with back pain. Green, having no experience with it, encouraged the speaker to experiment with the equipment.

• The speaker acquired various biofeedback tools, including:

  • Electromyography (EMG) for measuring muscle tension.

  • Electroencephalography (EEG) for measuring brain activity.

  • Temperature sensors for thermal feedback.

Physiological Control and the "Brain Switch" Example

• The speaker treated a patient who was paralyzed from the nipples down due to a fall from a roof seven years prior. The patient's spinal cord was destroyed.

• The patient suffered from severe pain in the buttocks that prevented him from sitting up for more than $15$ minutes, despite a lack of normal sensation in that area.

• The patient was placed on EEG biofeedback. Two days later, he was able to sit up for $4$ hours at a time without pain.

• The patient described the process as "flipping a switch in the brain" after $15$ minutes on the machine, which then deactivated the pain for several hours. He was unable to explain how he "threw the switch," highlighting the unconscious nature of intuitive physical control.

The Scientific and Intuitive Foundations of Biofeedback

• The speaker views biofeedback as a bridge providing physiological, electrical, and mechanical readings of one's thoughts.

• This early work preceded the formal field of psychoneuroimmunology.

• Elmer Green’s Background:

  • Originally a physicist with a Master’s degree in Physics.

  • A longtime meditator since the age of $18$.

  • He intuitively perceived the principle of controlling body physiology through imagery $40$ years before finalizing the science of biofeedback.

Creativity and the Cosmos as an Information Source

• The speaker posits that all significant creations across writing, art, music, and science (citing Newton and Einstein) originate from intuition.

• He defines intuition as receiving information that is "not already on the books."

• He views his own ideas as reception from a "global computer in the sky" or the cosmos, suggesting that humans are like television sets tuned to specific channels of information.

Olga Warrell and Distant Healing Research

• Met Olga Warrell in $1972$, described as the most-studied spiritual healer in history.

• A $1977$ Study on Distant Healing:

  • Olga was monitored while attempting to "send healing" to $12$ patients located five rooms away down a hallway.

  • The setup included two empty rooms between the healer and the patients to ensure isolation.

  • Raw EEG data showed significant changes in $4$ out of the $12$ patients during the transmission of healing.

  • One patient described the sensation as "the aurora borealis going off in my head" and claimed to be cured instantly.

Nonlocality of the Human Mind

• The speaker has collected $115$ computerized electroencephalograms (EEGs) demonstrating distant healing effects.

• Healers have successfully affected the EEG patterns of subjects at various distances:

  • $100$ feet away in a separate building.

  • $160$ miles away (from Kansas City).

  • Over a thousand miles (from Ottawa, Canada, to Springfield, Missouri).

• These findings are presented as evidence for the nonlocality of the human mind, transcending standard space and time constraints.

The Collaboration with Carolyn: Formalizing Medical Intuition

• The speaker met Carolyn in $1984$ at a consciousness meeting in Council Grove, Kansas, an annual event established in $1969$.

• Carolyn claimed the ability to make medical diagnoses and agreed to be tested by the speaker.

• Carolyn’s Intuitive Requirements:

  • She required only the name and age of the patient.

  • She did not need to be physically near the patient.

• Accuracy Results:

  • They discovered her performance peaked at $4$ diagnoses per day; any more caused a drop in accuracy.

  • Under these conditions, she was $93\%$ accurate in physical diagnoses and $93\%$ accurate in psychological diagnoses.

• In comparison, another intuitive named Henry was $70\%$ accurate but lacked the medical vocabulary to describe findings precisely (e.g., could only identify "abnormality in the liver").

Evolution of the Term "Medical Intuition"

• In $1988$ or $1989$, the speaker and Carolyn co-authored "The Creation of Health."

• This book officially introduced the term "medical intuition," replacing labels like "clairvoyant" or "psychic" to make the concept more acceptable to the public and the medical community.

• Prior to this, the speaker published "Occult Medicine Can Save Your Life" in $1975$ (original title "Unconventional Medicine"), which sold only $16,000$ copies due to its polarizing title.

Ethics and "Psychic Malpractice"

• The speaker warns against the dangers of unskilled or unethical intuitives.

• Examples of Incompetence and Malpractice:

  • One woman provided a three-page analysis of the speaker with zero accuracy, including a claim of a "weeping" area on his calf that did not exist.

  • A woman from Canada incorrectly told the speaker he had leukemia. He verified through blood tests that he did not and labeled her action "psychic malpractice."

  • The former executive secretary of the American Holistic Medical Association (AHMA) told the speaker's daughter she would die by age $18$ and told actress Lindsey Wagner she had a stomach tumor; both claims were false.

• The speaker explicitly forbids students from using his or Carolyn’s names to practice professionally unless they have achieved genuine mastery, threatening to "haunt" those who practice unethically.

The Imperative of Self-Intuition and Emotional Resolution

• The primary goal of the training is for individuals to read themselves perfectly before attempting to read others.

• Untrained intuition is often clouded by fear, which manifests as anger, guilt, anxiety, and depression.

• Failure to resolve these "unfinished businesses" leads to psychological projection, where an individual projects their own dissatisfaction onto others.

Strategies for Dealing with Unfinished Business

• The speaker outlines three paths for handling intolerable situations or abuse:

  1. Flight: Running away from abuse (e.g., divorce). He notes that the death rate in the year following a divorce is $12$ times higher than for those who remain married. By comparison, after a spouse's death, the death rate is $10$ times higher. This suggests the high cost of unresolved anger.

  2. Fight: Confronting the source of abuse through physical, legal, or verbal means.

  3. Sainthood: Forgiving and accepting what cannot be changed. This requires letting go of grudges and recognizing that one has no responsibility to reform others, only to reform oneself.

• Ultimately, the speaker emphasizes the responsibility to live in harmony with the soul, spirit, and the divine.