Clive Lindley-Jones own unique approach to helping his patients - Helix House Natural Health Centre, Oxford, UK

My approach to treatment

by Clive Lindley-Jones

For almost thirty years I have worked intensively with people who pose diagnostic dilemmas or are considered to be treatment failures. Sometimes they have seen numerous medical specialists and many have consulted a variety of alternative health practitioners.

The key things that stand out as a common theme are the aspects of the patient's lives which had previously either been ignored or inadequately unraveled. These are:

Biomechanical

Most people have little grasp of the importance of the biomechanical in their health or well being, only considering it, if at all, when struck down with something like acute lower back pain. Many years ago I was exposed to the wonders of the Alexander Technique, (see links) which was influential in redirecting my career away from the sociology teaching of the time, to re-training as an Osteopath.

Osteopathy and the wonderful insights gained from Applied Kinesiology are able to give me far greater insight into the ways in which the body can fail to work to its fullest extent and, in so failing, can cause pain and suffering. However, often such dysfunction is not immediately obvious to those untrained in such subtle diagnostic approaches.

Osteopathy�s basic principle is that abnormal musculoskeletal function, so called somatic dysfunction, may in itself be a source of symptoms quite independently of any structural pathology. Yet dysfunction of somatic structures in the absence of anatomical changes such as inflammation, degeneration or traumatic damage is not thought, by many doctors, to be likely, let alone an important, source of pain and disability. This is one of the reasons such problems too often get over looked by G.P�s and remain untreated for long periods.

As an osteopath trained in the advanced approach of Applied Kinesiology I am privileges to have added advantages. This is a diagnostic approach which, in skilled hands, can be such a magnificent tool to uncover numerous biomechanical, environmental and even, at times, emotional causes of ill health. While not necessarily distinct diseases, these common functional disorders never-the-less cause untold misery and suffering to millions, who are often left taking vast amount of suppressive medicine that, at best, mask the symptoms.

Dietary

Ever since being a teenager struggling to understand why school food was so disgusting and of seemingly poor nutritious value, (no chips, less fat and sugar but boiled dry and tasteless in those far off 1950�s-�60�s!) I have had an interest in the central role of good food in Health and disease.

Science has moved on a lot over the intervening decades and, while a lot it yet to be learnt, we know much, much more from observing what the healthiest people round the world eat, or used to eat, before they too succumbed to our own western food disasters.

The explosion of research is beginning to uncover the science behind traditional food wisdom and how and why super foods, such as many fruits and vegetables, act to protect us from just the kind of diseases we now find are such a scourge today.

Environmental

Very often over-looked is the importance of the inner environment, the microbial ecology of the intestinal tract, in supporting or undermining health. Partly as a result of our high sugar, antibiotic burdened food, far more of us, than is generally realized, are plagued by fungal and parasitic burdens that upset the delicate balance of our vital internal ecosystem.

Hardly a week goes by at Helix House without someone needed help to sort out their digestive system. Too often the painful, embarrassing and disruptive disturbances in this area, if diagnosed at all, are most often lumped together, and rather left, under the portmanteau title, Irritable Bowel Syndrome. Often we find that such problems can be greatly helped, or completely resolved, by rebalancing the internal ecosystem of the gut. Such dysbiosis, due to its tendency to make the gut more permeable to food proteins, is often the precursor of the drastic rise in allergies and food intolerances and other debilitating, but difficult to diagnose symptoms, which plague the lives of many today.

Support to organs such as the liver to aid in detoxification of the gut, a change of diet, herbs, nutrition, probiotics and complex homeopathic desensitization can often address many of these chronic problems, quickly, safely and permanently.

The life of the Emotions: Interpersonal & Intrapersonal

Even though they take up so much of our bodies resources, life is not run just be our digestion and our biomechanics. What drive all behaviour are our emotions. Seeing this in myself and others has always fascinated me. This took me, over more than thirty years, plus previous early studies in social science, to study and train, all round the world, with some of the leading experts in personal change work. This has led me to do extensive training in a number of psychotherapeutic approaches particularly, Transpersonal Psychology, Neuro Linguistic Programming and Coaching. Learning and working with myself and others on how we communicate effectively, first with ourselves, intrapersonal, then with others, interpersonal, has been a never-ending life long fascination and journey.

Integrative Medicine

So how can you put all this together? One way to look at things is to see it like a triangle of health or three legged stool where balance depends on each leg, structural, biochemical and emotional/spiritual supporting the whole.

The shear weight of ever-expanding knowledge means that one individual can never possibly manage to master a fraction of the available knowledge, which inevitably leads to specialization. This has many advantages and yet there remains an important place for general practice where the focus is the whole person. I have every respect for the particular skills of the National Health Service G.P. Because of its allopathic hospital roots, it is normally primarily built around drugs, surgery and immunisation, with great pressure on the clinicians. This can lead to little time to listen or uncover fundamental causes. What I find has evolved in my own work is a general practice based around optimum health, focused on the body structure, naturopathic interventions in functional health problems and state of the art psychological coaching models for assisting people to become the best they can be.

All this in part explains the way I like to work. To get some feel of the diversity of presenting symptoms that I see click here. It may be that what you are seeking help with is not here. This however is just a random sample of a consecutive hundred patients seen by me. It also only shows one symptom per person.

What is more common is that someone comes with a collection of problems such as Headache, brain-fog, fatigue , an inability to get ride of a cough, pain in the shoulder and confusion about where they are going in life. My job is to make sense of this and come up with a treatment plan that is based on their needs and individual situation.

In such a case I might start with an assessment of their shoulder. It could take me to look at their liver, one of the shoulder muscles can, at times, weaken when the liver is poorly functioning. One of the liver�s jobs is to detoxify the body. If this ability to detoxify is stressed, it might lead me to look at their digestive system and their nervous system, (often if the gut is not functioning well it can over-load the detoxification pathways of the liver and toxins are not cleared from the body but start to recirculate throughout the body and are stored in the fat tissue). The brain is 60% fat, dry weight, so often the nervous system suffers from the toxins that are not being excreted from the body. Our task is the balance all aspects of the patient to that their body can start to function again free of the underlying causes of these symptoms.

A typical example of the unified way I work is with my work with children with learning difficulties through the sunflower therapy.

What we find here is that a health, balanced child whose body is well tuned so that their subtle biomechanical balance is aligned, who is free from over burdening toxins from food additives and sub optimal nutritional input and who has had a chance to clear disempowering habitual patterns of thought and belief about themselves and their abilities, will then blossom and flower at home and school in a way that they never did before. There is really no reason why the rest of us cannot gain from something of this approach too.