Naomi, thank you so much for having me.

Transcription

1 I d like to introduce Dr. Karen Kan, author of The Guide to Healing Chronic Pain: A Holistic Approach. Karen is a medical doctor in New York, who specializes in helping patients with fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue. So welcome, Karen. Naomi, thank you so much for having me. Do you think we could start off with just a little bit about you and how you came to this field of treating chronic pain? Well, thanks. I think that a lot of people have *** (00:29) and I think my parents, very traditional, Chinese, came to Canada, worked very, very hard and my mother ended up with a diagnosis called fibromyalgia, which is basically really bad chronic body all over your pain. And I used to feel really sorry for her, because she was in pain all the time and it was very sad and she was depressed, she was on anti-depressants. And I thought to myself, When I become a doctor, I am never getting this. Yeah right. What happened was, I kind of did the same thing my parents did, which was just work and work and work really hard, and I burnt myself out in my mid 30s, ended up being in a marriage that wasn t the greatest and I was building his house and being the only breadwinner and stress upon stress, basically broke my body down and I woke up one morning and couldn t move my head. I went to the chiropractor, nothing helped. I went to my doctor, and when I was researching fibromyalgia for another patient of mine, I realized that I had almost all the symptoms. Sometimes it s hard to see yourself. So I thought to myself, This is not good, because I wasn t getting better, I got more and more tired, I became very depressed and decided I was going to try some Western medicines, anti-depressants, because that can sometimes help with pain. But I couldn t sleep, I had side effects and I basically had to stop them, and I knew that there were very clear limits to what medications could do. I knew it wasn t going to cure me, and I was just bound and determined that I was not going to live my life disabled, like my mother ended up, and I m only in my 30s. So that s kind of how I got started in holistic medicine, and I was always interested in acupuncture. So I found an acupuncturist about an hour away from me, started going to her and started going to spiritual healing classes, Reiki, started looking at my personal growth and spirituality. Ended up getting a divorce, which is really what I needed to do, my body was telling me that I needed to change and I just wouldn t listen until I finally got the angelic two-byfour, I call it, to tell me that I needed to change, and that really just jumpstarted everything.

2 I m really grateful actually, to have the fibromyalgia, having had suffered that, so I really know what people feel like, that hit by a truck sensation, the depression, I understand when they say, Doc, I m not depressed. I m just in pain, and I get that. And it s so frustrating for patients to not feel like they re being heard by their doctor and being handed a prescription. And so after all these years, going through what I went through and using a holistic, mind/body/spirit approach to healing myself, I really wanted to share that with other people, because I think not everybody has a holistic doctor in their back pocket or their backyard, like some people do. So it would be really helpful for people to have the information. So what did that look like for you, that journey out of chronic pain, out of fibromyalgia? How did that progress for you? The thing that helped me the most initially, that huge jumpstart, was the understanding that I had a choice. I remember that I went to a workshop called Living From a Full Cup, with *** (03:38), who is a spiritual teacher here in America, and it was a lovely weekend workshop. And in fact, I was in tears almost the entire weekend because it was so emotional, there was so much healing that I needed to do and I basically went there on a Thursday night completely depressed and left on a Sunday not depressed. Clearly, there were a lot of spiritual issues causing my depression. Of course my pain was still there, but I came home and then I had to make some difficult decisions, and that s, I think, I how I decided, Well, I really need to change my life, I can t pretend that I m happy in this marriage anymore, and started being truthful and honest for the first time probably, with my husband. So that really jumpstarted things, and I began to learn more about energy and the chakras and some of the ancient teachings about spiritual healing, mindfulness and it was really, really foreign, yet I was very open to it. But we didn t really learn too much in medical school, except for maybe relaxation breathing, that was about it. Nutrition was a huge piece that came into play, because we got probably about two days worth of nutritional education in my medical school. I don t remember any of it, to be honest. It was so biochemical. It was not really practical. We just told our patients to eat right. We just figured, Just eat lots of fruits and vegetables, and you should be fine. But there s a lot of issues with stress and nutritional deficiencies and gut imbalances and what we call pathogenic organisms, like fungus and mold, that can take over our guts and actually cause depression and cause pain and we didn t know any of that in medical school, and it s still not taught in medical school. I had to learn all of that firsthand, and it was fascinating, and I m still learning from all these wonderful holistic nutritionists I now have friendships with.

3 What would a daily diet look like for you? That s a great question. Thanks for asking, because this is so much fun. Right now I m on a parasite cleanse, so I m not eating beef or pork, but normally I would, although the pork would normally be just bacon and it would be pasture raised, humanely treated pork, local if we can get it. And I would typically have some bacon in the morning, with plenty of bacon fat, would actually fry up local pastured eggs, a couple eggs, few slices of bacon, that would be breakfast. I d also have a greens kind of a shake, it s chocolate, it s called Amazing Grass. It s this chocolate shake that I have. And I have a little rice protein shake that I used to take for my fibromyalgia pain. And so I still take that, I kind of like it, so I take that supplement. It s kind of like a daily vitamin. I used to have to eat every two hours because my adrenals, my stress handling system was so broken. I had to eat all the time. But now when I eat this way, I don t have to do that. So for lunch, I ll have some sort of animal protein and I ll have some sort of vegetable, so I actually get these meals from a chef in Atlanta, he ships them to me. It s called the Paleo Diet. He ll, for example, make some sort of chicken dish or turkey dish or beef dish, if I m not on the parasite dish, and then there will be like *** (06:41) slaw or sweet potato salad or something like that. For dinner, it s pretty much similar. It might be fish. We make fish and some vegetable, local greens or local salad. During the summer, we ll have salad, that kind of thing. I pretty much don t eat any carbohydrates. Rarely I ll eat rice. If we go to the sushi place, I might eat rice once in like two weeks or three weeks. We don t make it at home, and I don t eat crackers, gluten, corn, generally I don t eat corn. I don t eat any legumes, because I knew a long time ago they didn t do well with my chemistry and they would make me hungry to eat them, so I don t eat any *** (07:19) modified in this country, with the exception of when I go visit my parents. We go to the Chinese restaurant and then they just bless the food, you know? But that s pretty much it. I m pretty Paleo. I m pretty much a Paleo girl, because that works for my body. Some people need some carbohydrates, so as long as they re not intolerant to it I don t do any dairy as well, it just doesn t work with my body and it used to cause pain, so I ve just gotten out of the habit of doing that. And it s very damp here, in the Adirondack Mountains, at least the summer has been really damp. So things like dairy cause dampness, and it causes pain and muscle pain in many people, so I try to avoid that. So that s my typical meal. Some fruit in there, but not a lot. Nutrition is so often ignored, with people who have chronic pain. The more popular solutions are quite extreme, like surgery or pain medications. Whereas nutrition, from different people s accounts, can make a huge difference, definitely.

4 Absolutely. I can t tell you how many times that bad nutrition, how many times somebody might be intolerant to a healthy food, like cauliflower or lettuce and we would discover that either on lab testing or in the office through what we call muscle testing, or *** (08:31). And then we d have to desensitize them of that food, because they will gain weight and have pain and it s a perfectly healthy food that unfortunately their body has learned to reject it, because of all the inflammation or parasites or gut imbalances that have happened over the months and years that caused this food allergy or intolerance. Could you talk a little bit to the emotional aspects of pain? Because I think, again, this is another huge area that is often overlooked and can be very powerful to address it. Yeah, you got it. It is very, very powerful. If somebody would ask me what are the spiritual/mental/physical aspects that cause someone to end up getting Fibromyalgia, one of the things I tell them is that these people, including myself, generally have repressed anger or fear, usually a little bit of both. And it ends up literally in our tissues. So this is a little bit like quantum physics or ancient Chinese theories, that we believe in Chinese medicine that all matter formed is proceeded by an energy. So if the energy is healthy, for example, the energy of the liver is healthy, then you grow healthy liver cells. But if the energy is distorted around the liver, eventually your liver will become ill and not function properly. So before there is actual physical dysfunction in the body, there s an energetic disruption of balance, and that s where we can make the difference. And one of the top, top reasons of having this energetic imbalance in the organs and tissues is trapped emotions. We don t really handle emotions really well, in general as humans. We tend to repress them, suppress them, ignore them, pretend they re not there, we don t want to feel them. And a lot of spiritual practices have to do with honoring our emotions and not taking them seriously but just kind of honoring their place and feeling them and letting them go, but we don t really know how to let go in our society. And so we have several different techniques now, in energy psychology, that really help us let go of these emotions. You may have heard of some of them, your listeners might have heard of some of them. EFT, which is emotional freedom technique; TAT, which is tapas acupressure technique I talk about in the book; and my favorite now that I m using a lot in the office is the emotion code, which was created by a chiropractor, Bradley Nelson. And what s really neat about the emotion code is we can actually determine the underlying trapped emotions that are actually causing the pain, like specifically causing that pain or specifically in that organ and we can ask the body to tell us what the emotion is. And there s a chart that we use, and we can release that emotion.

5 And the other cool thing about the emotion code is that we can discover inherited emotions. So for the first three weeks, I was doing the emotion code on myself. I must have discovered 90 percent of those TAT emotions were not mine. They were my parents, my mother s and my father s. It was amazing. Unsupported was a really common one, and I thought, Oh my gosh, have I felt unsupported in my life? Oh yeah. And come to find out, a lot of those instances actually came from my great, great, great, great, great, great grandparents and was passed down, this energetic distortion of the trapped emotion, was actually inherited and passed down all those 40-whatever generations to me. That was amazing to now be able to consciously be able to figure out what that is and then release it so that no generation past me is ever going to suffer that particular emotion. So emotions are huge, when it comes to dealing with chronic pain. That s interesting, the field of epigenetics. In new research, they re looking at how your nutrition and the emotional content of your life will actually strongly affect both which genetic characteristics come to the fore in your DNA and then which ones are more likely to be passed down, sort of active ingredients. It s so interesting, looking at health and emotional health through different lenses. I feel like there s a Western lens, but then there s also, say, the traditional Chinese lens and then new research is done. There s different ways of looking at it, that often bring elements from the ancient or traditional ways of healing the body. In some ways, it validates them in the research, evidence-based lens as well. It s very fascinating. I was reading how children laugh hundreds of times a day, most adults, maybe 5 or 10 times a day, if that, in general. There s certainly some stuff that happens as we grow up, that tends to I m not sure what it is for different people, but we take on more things that maybe we need to let go of, and that affects our health. Yes, absolutely. And I love what you said about what we named kind of like the bridging of the ancient teachings and modern science, and we re seeing that bridge really being strengthened. For example, I recently interviewed Bruce Lipton, who is one of my favorite guys. He s my hero. He s a cell biologist, who basically got into the field of spirituality through his cell biology. What he proved was that it s not the DNA that tells our cells what to do. It s the environment that tells the DNA what to do, to make certain proteins and to make the cell either turn off or on certain genes. So our joy and our happiness turns on certain genes, and when we have negative emotions or beliefs that do not serve us, they actually turn on different genes or turn off genes, and that can actually cause cancer and cause us to be sick. So our emotions literally have a real molecular signaling that changes our cells, on a cellular and molecular basis. It s fascinating, the research.

6 Yes, absolutely. Also, back to what you were saying previously, that sometimes if there s something in our emotional life that we re not addressing or we re suppressing or simply just trying to pretend it s not there. Sometimes the only way that perhaps our subconscious or our deeper emotional self can try and get the message through, is by almost creating an illness so that we have to stop and take stock of what s actually going on in our life. It s not the preferable of going about these things, but it s a very powerful connection between emotions and sickness. Absolutely. The body is our intuition, and if we don t get, like you said, those signals to pay attention, to change our lives, just like what happened to me, then, well I talk about it in my book, people get what I call the spiritual two-by-four. They get that boom, okay, they tried to knock on the door at the beginning, Pay attention, pay attention. Oh, she s not listening, okay, knock louder, everybody. Spirit s knocking at your door louder, louder, Okay, things aren t going well, this isn t going well for you. Still not listening. Finally, they ram through that door with a big two-by-four and knock you upside the head. And then you have to pay attention. You re right. Sometimes we have to literally be physically immobilized, before we will pay attention to our spiritual selves and go, Wow, this is not working. Can you give me an example of an exercise that somebody who has chronic pain could do, to maybe get an idea of what emotions might need to be addressed and then a way that they could let go of them? I mentioned before some energy techniques, of course those are a little hard to do on audio. There s a visual that s required. There s some tapping, for EFT that you need to do, a hand position for TAT and then you have to be able to muscle test for the emotion code. But one of the things that I have in the book, as a meditation, where people can go into what I call re-inhabiting their bodies. So a lot of times, our attention is out there, outside of ourselves, so when we can just kind of sit or be in a comfortable position and really tune inwards, inside, and start feeling the body s vibration and start feeling the clothes, how it feels on our bodies, trying to pay attention to our breath and how that feels in our body and notice, Wow, what s different about the different sides of the body? For example, there might be an area of your body that feels cold or uncomfortable. So one of the things we can do is just pay attention. That s called mindfulness. We can actually pay attention, and not judge it, not go, Oh, that s horrible, this is horrible pain, but we can just be present with it and go, Wow, isn t that curious? and we can actually just feel it, just be in that place. What s really interesting, and this is some of the stuff through Lion Goodman s work who helped with chapter 26, called Body Wisdom, you can actually ask those areas of discomfort questions. We can actually ask what it needs, once we really, really

7 pay attention to it. We can describe it sometimes in a visual, like does it look like a hot poker or does it feel like it s a big elephant foot standing on your shoulder blade? What does it really look like? What does it feel like? And then sometimes as we pay attention to it, we don t guarantee it, but a lot of times what happens, as you really, really focus on the discomfort it starts to change, because nothing really stays still. The only reason the pain rephrased itself is because we have the same thoughts over and over again, and we don t pay attention to it. So we can really pay attention to what it physically feels like in our bodies, without judgment. A lot of times it will start shifting within a few minutes, and then we can describe it again, and again, not wanting it to go away, your job is just to be there and to feel it, be present with it, and a lot of times that pain will shift, just from you being mindful and paying attention to it. In fact, I did have someone write me a testimonial for my book, and he says, Wow, it s amazing. He said, This meditation in your book *** (17:56), he was really shocked. He s like, Wow, it s amazing the power of the mind, but it s true. It takes patience, of course, and persistence, and you ll realize how difficult it is to pay that much attention. The reason I wrote that meditation in there is because I need to do it more often than I do, but it does make a huge difference, because we don t train our minds, on a daily basis, to focus to that extent. I m just trying to get through a meal mindfully, and I get through about a quarter of it. I m working on it. It s a work in progress. I imagine that when you practice mindfulness it can be very helpful to help manage chronic pain and hopefully eventually heal it, but also just in terms of living a richer life, valuable, valuable exercise. Oh, absolutely. I m so glad you mentioned that, Naomi, because I noticed that since doing more mindfulness, although like I said I still have a lot of work to do in that area, but just the relationships are richer, because I realized in the past that, just for example, I would have people over for a dinner party and I d be running around getting the food ready, cleaning the dishes. I d be a little stressed out and I really wouldn t be present with my guests, whereas my husband at the time, now ex, he d be sitting there just laughing and playing around and doing stuff, of course he would cook, too, but he would just sit there and just enjoy himself, and I just realized, What s wrong with this picture? And so now when I have people over, I really focus on that presence and just really making the intention and I m going to enjoy these people and really listen to what they re saying and make eye contact and feel the relationship and the laughing and the enjoyment, and okay who cares if there s a pile of dishes that is then left over. It doesn t really matter. I can do those later. But it s the relationships that are so rich. And I so much enjoy socializing now, because I m not doing 10,000 things and multitasking. I m just paying attention to that person, and it s just absolutely wonderful and it s joyful.

8 Power of the present moment. And I guess in terms of pain, if you are able to be with that pain, as you said, without judging it, then you can perhaps start to detach, because there s a pain and then there s emotions associated with the pain and they kind of feed off each other, if you have an anxious or worried or fearful feeling, or angry feeling associated when you feel the pain. Then that will tend to amplify or make the pain worse, and if you can start to decouple those two reactions. Absolutely. That s a really good point. It s like this unending cycle, and if you can break the cycle and observe the pains, the curiosity, it can take some doing to do that. If we re in a lot of pain, we just want it gone and we re sad, we re fed up. So it s hard to separate those two things, but if we can kind of say, Okay, the pain is just what it is, it s not good or bad it just is, and we can experience it without the judgment. And then also honor, Wow, look at that. I ve been really upset. I ve been really angry about this. I wish it would go away. I m saying to myself, What did I do to deserve this? And then if we can honor all those little bits of self-talk and not say, Oh, I shouldn t be feeling this way, but instead go, Wow, this is just what I m feeling in the moment, okay, and just honor it and be able to go, Wow, I m really feeling sorry for myself. Isn t that interesting? Yeah, sometimes I ll look at my watch and go, Okay, I m angry right now at so-and-so, and I m going to be really angry for five minutes, and then I ll just do that. I ll just go, Okay, this is me being angry. So I ll be in my car, usually alone, ranting and raving, sometimes doing EFT, sometimes not, but I ll be ranting and raving for five minutes and then I kind of lose my gas after a while, especially if I m talking. If I m doing EFT and I m tapping the acupuncture points while I m basically venting, it s great because I can say whatever I want, I can even swear in the car, and I can do the EFT. And then after about two minutes, three minutes, I m realizing that I m running out of gas here, like I just can t bring up the emotion anymore because it works its way through me, rather than it being locked. So it s good for people to know, that to honor what they feel is what they feel and it s just energy and they don t have to take it seriously like, Oh my gosh, I shouldn t be feeling angry. That makes it worse. That s judgment. Yeah, and again, thinking about my niece, who is not quite three years old right now, whatever she s feeling in the moment, she just absolutely expresses it. And it s like a cloud passing. It s like the weather. Then it s gone, and then she s running around happy again, and then something else will happen and she ll be upset and then she ll be happy. You see her sleep, and she s just absolutely at rest. It s a beautiful thing. Right, that s an example that I use in my book. Very young children just know how to let go of their emotions, until we teach them not to.

9 Yeah, certain social etiquettes to do with expressing every single emotion, as it happens. As you said, in the car, you ve got a time, you re like, Right, I m going to be angry, and maybe some people driving next to you will be looking at you going, Wow, what s going on here? but that s all right, that s fine. Yeah, sometimes I do the emotion code in the car. I actually have the chart of emotions in my car, and also the magnet which you need to get rid of the trapped emotions, so I literally am muscle testing myself in the car, figuring out the trapped emotion and doing the swipes of the magnet on my head. So it s funny when I m stopped at a light, because I m doing this thing that looks like I m preening my hair over and over again but I m actually erasing trapped emotions. Interesting. Could we talk about fibromyalgia? Because I think it s quite a mysterious condition. It s certainly relatively recently that it s been acknowledged as a legitimate source of pain. Some people have had undiagnosed fibromyalgia for years. So could we just talk a little bit about what it is, how it works and what kind of things people can do if they have it or they suspect that they have it? Sure, absolutely. Well, symptom-wise, just for people that don t know what it is, I kind of simplified it to three main, major symptoms. Number one, you have chronic pain in more than one area of your body and often it s everywhere, at least two or three places. Often, like I said, it s everywhere. And when fibromyalgia is at the more severe stage, I call it the hit by a truck pain. So it s what you imagine it would feel like to be hit by a truck, or if you ve ever had the flu, which many people have, that s the kind of pain that it feels like, like every bone and muscle in your body aches. So chronic pain is usually fairly severe, especially in the late stages of fibromyalgia. The second symptom that they all have in common is that these people do not sleep properly. So what happens is they either sleep a lot, which is what I used to do when I first got sick, like 12, 14 hours a day. They ll sleep, but they will not be able to dream and/or they will not wake up refreshed. So they wake up and feel like they have not slept at all. So that s a typical thing that we hear. Or, they wake up every hour, on the hour, they can t get a decent night s sleep, and so these people, like I said, generally do not dream and they don t get into the deeper stages of sleep, which we call delta, which I talk about in the book, the different stages of sleep. So that causes a lot of problems, them not being able to settle down into real sleep, because that s when we rejuvenate our bodies, is in the sleep state. If you re not getting those deeper delta brainwave states, where you re actually physically rejuvenating, you re always on the go. You re literally turned on the whole time, and you re not resting.

10 The next thing that these people mostly have is chronic fatigue, meaning that they poop out very, very easily. So physically, they can t do what they used to do, they can t go up the stairs without huffing or puffing or their legs hurting. If they exercise, sometimes they can exercise, and then the next day they re wiped out. So that s kind of your typical scenario for fibromyalgia. In the late stages, they can t do anything. So that s why they become disabled or partially disabled. So that s like the triad of the three major symptoms. And then as far as why they have it, I m going to put my Western medical hat back on here. I m actually going to integrate both traditional and Western, but if I describe it in the Western way, all these people have what we call autonomic nervous system dysregulation. That was a big medical term, but what it means is that their stress-handling system, the one that either chooses fight or flight or relaxation mode, that s like an on and off button that s called your sympathetic, which is your fight or flight or parasympathetic, which is your relaxation mode, that regulation system is broken. So their stress-handling system is burnt out. Think about a circuit breaker that s basically fried. So they re kind of locked in this fight or flight. Now they may not feel anxious, some of them often do, but they may not feel anxious because they re so fried they don t even have any energy to feel anxious. So they re locked in this physical fight or flight, and what happens is their nervous system now is not communicating properly, and that s the underlying issue for both the sleep issue, the chronic fatigue and the pain. So one of the things we want to get these people back up to is to get their autonomic nervous system regulating, get them off that fast-moving train, get them back into relaxation mode, which is where they can actually heal. Because if you stay in that stress mode and get stuck there, then we re talking your immune system gets shot, you start having all sorts of infections that the doctors may or may not discover, chronic viral infections, chronic bacterial infections, chronic mold, fungus, parasite infections, because you re a wonderful host for these bugs because your immune system can t handle itself because your nervous system is offline. The digestion goes down, you can t absorb your food properly, you can t even absorb your supplements very well either, for that matter, when you have this problem, and the gut lining gets very thin and full of holes and then you start having food allergies and all sorts of intolerances and a lot of people have stuffy nose, chronic cough, that kind of thing as well because of these intolerances. So there s a whole cascade of problems that happen when the nervous system is offline. So the primary thing that we need to do is get these peoples nervous system back online, and there s many different ways of doing it, but you have to do it energetically to be really effective.

11 One of the things we do is we want them to avoid things, or at least minimize those things that actually make the stress-handling system worse, and one of those things that most people don t even talk about, which I talk a lot about in the book, is electromagnetic stress. So these people already are super, super sensitive to electromagnetic energy because their autonomic nervous system is shot, so they can t be near cell phones, computers, florescent lights, compact florescent bulbs, wireless modems. All of these things we take for granted in our modern world are really toxic. They re toxic to everyone, but in particular to those people with a broken stress-handling system, because they don t have any energy left in that system to buffer that stress. So they will get damaged very quickly in relationship to being near these things. So for those people, if they have to use these devices, we have them use some protection devices, either for their home or their cell phones. There s stuff I mention in the book that I use myself that helped me immensely, especially with airplane travel, and even travelling in the car I used to fall asleep all the time. If it was over an hour I d fall asleep, but now I don t. I can go on an eight-hour trip and stay awake. We need them to avoid these things. And the second thing we need them to do, just to support the stress-handling system, is find some way of not reactivating that stress-handling system. So there s several different methods we can use to kind of reset the autonomic nervous system. Aside from finding out the underlying reason for the problem, which we can t really go into because it s sort of like giving a haircut over the phone, it s complicated, but the tool that I use to reset the nervous system there s ancient tools, and there s modern tools. So I ll talk about the ancient tools. The ancient tools, like yoga, although I have to say if somebody s really, really badly off, yoga is not going to work, unfortunately. Deep nostril breathing, for example, is an example of a type of yogic breathing that helps to balance those brain hemispheres, but people, again, would have to do it quite often, every single day, to really reset that part of the nervous system. But some of the modern tools that I use includes acupuncture patches. The acupuncture patches have nano-sized crystals in them that resonate an infrared frequency. Like I was telling you before about Bruce Lipton and vibrations in the environment change your DNA, well this is how this works. So these patches resonate a frequency and your body responds to that frequency by doing a particular job. And in this case, there s a particular patch called the Y-Age Aeon, and it literally decreases the stress response. So I use this patch on specific acupuncture points, to help kind of rebalance that nervous system and it s one of the few tools that works as quickly as it does. We re talking within seconds. So it starts to rebalance the nervous system.

12 The other tool that I use is by a company called Energy Tools International, and they have what s called Subtle Energy Formulas. They can take the imprint of positive substances that are good *** (31:20), for example, essential oils, gems, herbs, crystals, that kind of thing, and they can actually imprint those into a formula to help us. And they have a formula called Stress Relief, which actually helps to regulate the autonomic nervous system, and again, very, very quick action. It pretty much works right away, as soon as you take the drops in your water. But that s two of the tools that I use the most commonly. And what I like about them is that they are easy to use, they work quickly and they make a big difference in a short period of time. Some of the herbal remedies we used to use, people still do use them, to help the adrenal system, to help the stress-handling system, are helpful but the nervous system is an electronic system. It s actually electrical signals. If you don t give an energy therapy, the biophysical modalities, such as herbs and vitamins and stuff like that, oftentimes the body can t recognize them as beneficial. You ll literally be wasting them. So that s why I have a whole chapter in my book called Brain Balancing, which is the short way of saying autonomic nervous system rebalancing. Yeah, so every patient that comes into my office gets a brain balance test, which I have on YouTube by the way, it s on my YouTube channel. It s very quick, you can even learn yourself how to do yourself and do it on somebody else. But you can learn how to test yourself, and if you re not brain balanced that means you re not in a healing mode and then you need to do some other treatment or avoid, for example, cell phone radiation, to prevent the brain balance from going off again. Head injuries sometimes will do that as well. Toxins, mercury, that kind of thing, there s a really huge list of what causes brain balance issues, but stress is the main thing. Who doesn t have stress? That s interesting, because I sometimes think, for example, back 2,000 years ago, the Roman Empire, they had lead pipes and all these people were getting lead poisoning and they didn t have the technology at the time to say, Okay, well this is the cause for it. We are putting these lead toxins into our bodies. Now they actually know about that, but we have all these new things, like you said for instance, a lot of electromagnetic radiation, internet, cell phone usage, people spending eight hours in front of computers. And we haven t had time to research properly what the more wide-ranging affects of that constant exposure can be. That s very interesting. You said as you take one of these remedies, you would feel almost immediately a difference. What kind of change would you feel? Sure, I d be happy to answer that, and I wanted to add to what you were saying about the research, the electromagnetic radiation, for example, there s actually a lot of research that has been done on the harmfulness of EMS, and there s a

13 couple of pioneers that have made this more public, Camilla Rees and Magda Havas, they ve done a book called Public Health SOS and tried to get it out there. They have YouTube videos that I encourage people to watch, and there s many new filmmakers talking about it because the research is there. It s just that no one s listening, and no one knows about it. It s not public because there s no vested interest for even the newspapers or any sort of news media that depends on sponsorship, there s no incentive for them to share this information with the average person until it becomes so undeniably, crazily horrible that somebody finally decides, Well, we better not get scooped and we better tell the public about it. So it s still kind of in the shadows. But let s go back to your question about these energy tools. I ll give you an example. I have a psychologist colleague of mine, who sees a lot of anxiety, depression, a lot of people in her practice with mood issues. She started using this acupuncture patch, the Y-Age Aeon on patients with the brain balance protocol that I teach in the book. And so she would just put a little piece of tape on the back of the patch, and she would just place it on the acupuncture point. And she would observe the patient before and after and also ask them questions, and what she said to me was if the patient was anxious, they would immediately calm down. Sometimes if people were not always, but sometimes if people were feeling kind of brain foggy and down, sometimes they would start kind of opening up. They would start actually brightening up. They would start actually being here. I have a wonderful example in my book, of a young man who was having trouble with alcohol and he almost missed his appointment, but I think his family members basically pushed him to come and he literally was drunk in the office. He was so embarrassed. He was crying and he was so upset with himself, and I literally said, Okay, you can keep talking, but do you mind if I put these patches on you while you talk? and he s like, No, no. So he s talking while I put that patch on him, just comforting him, listening to him talk and he s talking about how awful he is and blah, blah. After about 5, 10 minutes, you could see he started to sit straighter. He started to speak less slurred. He stopped crying, and he goes, You know, I feel a lot better. I said, You look a lot better, and he literally left my office not drunk. It was unbelievable, night and day. I couldn t imagine the old way. There was nothing we could have done in Western medicine to help somebody like that, that quickly in the office, except just listen and give them a hug and that s about it. Same thing with the energy tools from the Energy Tools International, the Vital Force Formulas. It s very, very quick. You can put it on acupuncture points. I ve put a dot of the stress relief on peoples head acupuncture points, and they literally fall asleep on the table, sometimes even before I put the acupuncture needles in, very, very interesting.

14 There s very few things, other than energy therapies, that can work that quickly, because you can t take a regular supplement, say ginseng for example, and you couldn t necessarily just take one dose of ginseng and notice a difference in your energy right away. It doesn t work like that. It takes time for your body to absorb it, to assimilate it. Maybe you take it for two or three months, and then maybe you start feeling better. But with energy therapeutics, you can notice often, like I said within a few minutes, or maybe two to three weeks. Some people are not that sensitive, so they can t really feel their body. So sometimes it takes them a good two to three weeks to notice the difference, at its very best. I would like to ask you what your view is on the relationship between myofascial trigger points and acupuncture points and how they relate to chronic pain and fibromyalgia. I learned about myofascial trigger points from a physical therapist. We did not learn this at all in medical school, so most doctors are not aware of it. DOs, the doctors of osteopathy, sometimes are aware of this, especially the modern ones graduating now are aware of it. But the myofascial pain syndrome is not recognized really in Western medicine, and so most of my colleagues, at least my age, in their 40s, 50s, don t really know what it is. But because of my own pain issues, I was taught through these physical therapists that I had these trigger points and this myofascial pain, so I started researching it or reading some of Janet Travell, who s the pioneer in this area, some of her books, and I thought, Wow, this is really fascinating. So when I did the acupuncture, we talk about those points as what are called *** (38:40) points. So that s like the Chinese version of saying the point hurts. They may be acupuncture points, but they may not be, and there s a lot of acupuncture points distal limbs that are there to move energy, and they have very, very specific indications in the body that don t directly, for example, go into a pain point. For example, spleen six, inside of the ankle which is about four finger width up from the ankle bone, in case you want to try to find it, right behind the tibia, and in most women especially, it s sore if you push on that spot. It might be a little swollen, but it s sore. And if the person has this condition called dampness in their body, so it s almost like they re too wet on the inside of their bodies, always look very wet on the outside, like it s raining like cats and dogs like it was here a few days ago, then this dampness can be manifest in the body, can cause pain. But in Chinese medicine, they would acupuncture that point on the ankle, even though the pain might be in the shoulder, for example, and there might be a lot of myofascial trigger points in the shoulder. So we would use the peripheral point, the spleen six, to correct the underlying imbalance causing the trigger points to be there, which is called dampness or

15 stagnation, and we might use other acupuncture points to move the energy, move the stagnant energy out of those trigger points. So we might use triple burner five if we re talking about trapezius trigger points. We might use large intestine four, because that s a big, huge energy mover for the upper body and the face and neck area. And then in acupuncture, we would literally acupuncture the trigger points, which is very, very effective. And I find them really fun, personally, because I have a lot of trigger points and I like needling. I like having my trigger points needled, and so I like needling trigger points. I m not saying all my patients like me needling their trigger points. [Laughter] I find it very effective to needle them, but you can also patch them as well, with that acupressure patch I talked about. That s very effective as well. But needling is great, because you can do a lot of different points at the same time, and it s a heck of a lot less work than necessarily pushing on the point or traditionally releasing it through acupressure. There s another technique. This is more Westernized, but you can actually needle it with a regular hypodermic needle and inject solution into the trigger point, which is what I used to do in the office if their insurance didn t cover acupuncture but they would cover trigger point injections. So we would inject local anesthetic, which I prefer not to do now, just because it s just one extra toxin entering the body. You could also use saline, which is a salt solution, into the trigger points and it kind of mechanically helps to relax the points, but I really like the acupuncture because we kind of generally treat the underlying cause or the underlying imbalance, as well as the actual trigger point itself. Yeah, that s interesting, because I think for something like chronic pain, fibromyalgia, and I totally understand that often people want a magic bullet, like something that will just fix it, but I think usually it s a whole bunch of different things that you have to do to first manage the pain and then to heal yourself and come out from that pain cycle from the autonomic nervous system overreacting and that kind of thing. So it s like a whole bunch of things that you need to do, Treating the underlying cause instead of just treating the symptoms is a big part of that. Absolutely, you re right, and it is really disheartening, sometimes when people think, Oh my gosh, this is not going to be a quick fix, or they ve tried so many things and it doesn t work or doesn t work well. But in my book, I talk about all these different energy tools that can help with pain relief quickly, but then a lot of the book is about some of the mental issues, in terms of what thoughts are we having in our minds, what beliefs do we have. Do they serve us? Trapped emotions, spiritual aspects, so most people don t stop to think, How is this pain situation or how is this illness benefiting me? What am I supposed to get out of this? The thing is, if people are in so much pain, they can t even get to that question. So part of my attention in the book would say, Hey, here are some tools, patches

16 are one of my favorite tools to get rid of pain quickly if they work for you, about 80 percent it works for. So if you could reduce the pain or eliminate the pain, now you can kind of work on some of the other stuff. The spiritual stuff, the stuff that caused some of the pain to be there in the first place, maybe you have more sleep now so now you can work on the nutrition and stop eating the junk food and start eating whole food and maybe you ll have more energy so now you can cook for yourself. And so I want people to get to that place, where they re not just getting rid of the symptom but really going, Why did I manifest this in the first place? Why is this supposed to evolve me? How am I supposed to grow from this experience? That s the key. I know some people just aren t going to go there, they re just going to be like, Great, my pain s gone, I m back to my old life. That s not what I wrote the book for. I want people, yes, to be out of pain quickly or to have some strategies to get rid of the pain quickly, but also really appreciate, Wow, how is this supposed to make me grow? People used to think I was crazy. They d say, What s the worst thing that ever happened to you? and they think I m going to say getting the fibromyalgia and I really have to think really hard what s the worst thing that happened to me, but that s not it. It s because I appreciate what it did for my life. It got me to a place where I can connect with my higher self, my spirit, where I can really now be happy, where I never truly was happy when I was so-called Physically healthy. So I appreciate the fibromyalgia as a gift, and I would love for everyone to get to that place. Not through being false or phony, but really get to that place where they can really appreciate why their illness is a gift to themselves in that particular situation. That would make me very happy. And asking the question, How can I learn from this? it reframes everything and it puts you back as the director of your life and takes you out of victim mode, and that s going to a really deep level of what it means to be human, why are we here sort of things. So that s a very powerful question to ask. I quote different people in the chapter subheadings for my book, but the last one actually is my own quote, which says that the reason that life is imperfect is because we are supposed to seek and find other people to support us in our healing. It s about connection. I used to think that if I was perfect healer, I was really good doctor or healer, I shouldn t have any physical problems at all. I should be completely healthy. I made myself feel really guilty for having any sort of problem or symptoms, and I m still working on stuff. But now I realize that if I could heal myself all by myself with no help, then we would each be an island with ourselves and not have to connect with others, not have to be vulnerable, not have to learn to ask for help, not have to learn to receive help. And that can feel really vulnerable to people. So it s the ability to trust and the whole relationship dance. That s why we re humans. That s why

17 we re not robots or amebas. We re supposed to be in this dance. I m not perfectly, perfectly healthy, but boy am I really, really happy compared to where I was, absolutely. Am I a lot healthier than I was? Absolutely. I can do things now that I couldn t do 10 years ago. I m an ice skater. I started as an adult, and I can do stuff now that would have been impossible for me to do 10 years ago. I didn t have the belief I could do it, I didn t have the stamina. So miracles happen every day, and I think that our imperfections are a way in which we can really connect with each other and be compassionate with each other and seek and receive help. Karen, thank you so much for this hour. We re just coming to the top of the hour now. Thank you so much. You ve been very generous with your time and your knowledge. Where can people find out more about you? Oh, well it s been my pleasure, Naomi. Thank you for having me. I would love to connect with people. I have a Facebook page, Twitter, YouTube, you can get a Pinterest, you can get all that on my main website, which is You can see all the little social media icons. Definitely like my Dr. Karen Kan page, because I often will have little bits of information from other websites that I really enjoy and read, if you re into nutrition and other healthy things. I also have a radio show every Monday at noon Eastern, New York time. It s recorded, so for example, today I had a radio show with the creators of Energy Tools International, the Vital Force Formulas. So you can just go on the archives and listen to any of those radio shows. I also have a link to my book as well of course, which is available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, all of the world, and would love to hear from people if they benefit from the book, would love to hear a testimonial on Amazon. And there s some book bonuses in there, so definitely if you get the book, sign up for the book bonuses right away because there s going to be some free classes and you want to be on that list to get the free classes. Fantastic. And the book is The Guide to Healing Chronic Pain: A Holistic Approach. Great, well thank you so much, Karen, and I wish you all the best. Thank you, Naomi, take care. Appreciate the work that you re doing, it s fabulous. Thank you so much. This has been great I ve learned a lot, and thank you for all your work. It s a difficult field, chronic pain. It s one that I think a lot of medical people tend to actually try and steer clear of, so it s great that there are people like you doing work in that field. Oh, thank you. Well it s definitely fun to see people grow and change and the look on their faces when the pain is gone, it s priceless. And so that s why we do